HELLO. This plot bunny bit me in the butt unexpectedly whilst watching Worlds Dumbest Criminals. So chapter one is Lily's background, and the next will be from mostly Nico's pov. I try to make them at least 3000 words a chapter, but that doesn't always happen. This one is 5000+. By the way, (#) is how old Lily is. And I know 'death and flame' is a pretty cruddy name, so if anyone has a suggestion, review or PM me!
And yes, I know he is gay. Just pretend for now that he's not.
One more thing: even with my college classes, I will try to keep a steady update schedule of every Thursday. I already have a few chapters done.
DISCLAIMER: I own Lily, because magical people exist bwahaha! But I don't own PJO, because there is no way I'd be able to focus long enough to write that many books.
...
(4)
"Daddy?"
My father paused in the middle of brushing my hair.
"Yes, Lily?"
I could feel his fingers in my hair, braiding it. Since I refused to cut it- it looked like the dancing orange flames in the fireplace- my dad had to find a way to keep it up and out of the way, so now he braided it every morning since I couldn't.
"Isn't my mommy supposed to do this?"
His fingers froze.
"Where'd you hear that, wildfire?" his voice sounded strained and whisper-soft. His fingers caught a knot in my hair and I winced.
"Celia told me at school. She said only mommy's do hair."
Celia wasn't my friend. She was a girl in my kindergarten class that just happened to find out my daddy did my hair, and told me that her mommy did hers. After a bit of asking around, I had realized that she was right: all the little girls mothers did their hair. Most of the daddies didn't even know how to do hair.
"Well, Celia doesn't know everything."
"Oh."
We sat in a comfortable silence for a moment. My hair wasn't really that long yet- just down to my shoulders. So why was daddy braiding it so slowly? I watched the fireplace for a while. We were in the living room, on the couch. It was snowing outside, which was amazing because I loved the cold.
"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"Where's my mommy?"
He stopped again, and I heard weird sounds coming from him, like the kind I made when I fell off the slide and scraped my knee. His fingers dropped my braid and I turned, surprised when I saw tears coming out of his eyes. I touched his wrist in concern and he looked at me with soft eyes.
"Daddy?"
"I... I don't know, honey. Your mommy left a long time ago."
"Why?"
"She had to."
"But why?"
"Lily-"
"No! Where's my mommy?"
"Lily." he said sternly and I froze. "I don't know where you mother is. Now calm down."
"But-"
"Turn around. Your braid is coming undone."
"...Okay."
(7)
"What's happening?" Zeke, my older brother, cried.
Papers and sand flew through the air, stinging our skin and whizzing past our faces. My hair whipped and writhed like a wild thing above my head, catching the last light of the beach. Our attackers stopped and stared at the mess, and I wondered how much it would hurt to get an eyeful of sand when you only had one eye.
I screamed and the twisting mass above my head flew forward, toward the monsters hovering over my brother, battering them like a real sandstorm might. I didn't know what I was doing; I didn't know how I was doing it. The monsters bellowed in pain and swatted at the air around them, stomping around.
"Run!" I shouted to Zeke, who stared at me with wide eyes. The ground cracked and images flickered to life around them. "I can't- control it!"
A day at the beach, helping Zeke study for a biology test. That was all they were supposed to be doing today. I didn't have any tests in second grade, but Zeke had told me sixth was a lot harder, and I was surprisingly good at memorizing facts, so I was helping him study. Then the monsters came.
They attacked me. Zeke's Biology book killed one of them well enough when he swung it- I think it did, anyway, the monster turned into dust- but once that got knocked out of his hands, they swarmed.
Five of them. One was blind from where I had almost accidentally stabbed it in the eye with a pencil, but it still would have stomped me into the ground if Zeke hadn't pulled me out of the way at the last second. They converged on him then. He had thrown me back, and then, I was pretty sure they tried to eat him.
When he screamed, something in me broke. Warmth flushed through my system, and then everything had turned into chaos.
Zeke scuttled out from behind them just as the sand began to vibrate as it spun, heating up as I thrust out my hand on instinct. Right away it began to melt, dripping hot glass into eyes and skin and loincloths. The monsters screamed and my face turned frightened when it started splattering everywhere and the sand flew out of my control and I couldn't stop-
"Cyclops!" Zeke gasped. "They're Cyclops!"
"Go get daddy!" I screamed.
"But you-"
Glass and sand splashed at his feet and he stumbled back with a cry. He looked at me with wild eyes before turning and bolting up the dunes to our beach house, where our dad would be either gluing shells together or making lunch. Either way, he couldn't hear us from all the way down at the edge of the water.
"Go away!" I screamed at them when he was gone. There was a cracking noise behind me, but I didn't pay any attention to it.
They didn't.
Almost all the sand was melting and the monsters were steaming and staggering around, but they still roared at me and charged, half-melting. They weren't giving up on their prey so easily. By now, they were all blind from sand and glass, and mostly crippled, but they could smell me, and they were still big enough to crush me flat.
I screamed again, and just as I heard my father shout, "Wildfire!" a tree whizzed over my head and speared two through the chest like pieces of pineapple on a shish-kebob. Before they could evaporate into dust, I splayed my fingers and the tree, which I now saw was splintered at the end like it had been chopped with an ax, swung like a baseball bat at the remaining three. Two exploded into dust on contact, and the last one was knocked into a steaming puddle of glass.
Instantly it caught on fire, and it melted, screeching in pain, and dissolved. Golden dust floated gently to the ground in piles, along with the sand and glass that dropped from the sky. It mixed and blew softly in the quiet, so the sand looked woven with pure gold, and the only evidence of any disturbance was the pool of hardening glass filled with dust, and the tree that fell into the ocean and was bobbing along on the waves.
I was breathing hard and I let my arms drop.
The rest of me followed.
When I woke up again, I was in my room, and my brother was fretting and pacing next to my bed. His face was bandaged along with his wrist and probably a lot more places than I could see. My dad wasn't there. The second my eyes opened he squawked happily, swooping like a bird to check my forehead and the tiny hello kitty bandage on my arm from a bit of melted glass.
"Lily! Oh my god. Are you okay?"
"Yeah..." I muttered groggily. "Are you? Your face is... bigger than normal."
"I'd be dead if it weren't for you." His voice trembled.
"How did I..."
"Whatever you did, it was absolutely brilliant."
"Where's dad?"
"Right here," my dad said, poking his head into the doorway. "Sorry I wasn't here when you woke up, Wildfire."
"That's okay," I said.
"I was making you this," my dad said, holding something out toward me. I reached out a hand curiously, and he dropped it into my hand.
It was a necklace. The string was made with thin lines of white wood, tightly woven with fishing line to make a cord just the same size as any ordinary necklace string. The only other part of it was a pendant, roughly the size of a large seashell. It was made of glass, the inside peppered with golden flecks frozen in time. It looked like a universe with different sized specks and clumps of the dust. The glass was smooth.
"How..."
While you were sleeping, I chipped off some of the glass outside." He gave me a lopsided grin. "You were asleep for almost a day. I had plenty of time to make a proper pendant of it."
"And the... wood?"
"It won't break. It's from the tree."
"The tree. The one I threw?"
"Yeah."
I hurried to put it over my neck and admired the pendant in my palm. My first monster kill. They came and went, but usually we either escaped, or dad and Zeke cornered and managed to kill it. There wasn't usually large groups of them, though. The Cyclops were pretty new, too.
(9)
When I stepped out to breakfast, I wanted to scream.
My powers had gotten much, much stronger. Zeke was helping me learn to control it, but mine were far beyond anything he could do. That included being able to see a misty play-by-play of the death of any person I could see. It drove me nuts, but I could see it. Sometimes I could change it, sometimes I couldn't, depending on how much time I have and the means of death.
Now, I wished I didn't see it.
Monsters.
Monsters were coming, worse than I could stop.
My dad and brother were sitting at the breakfast table in front of the giant beachside window, laughing and munching on toast. When I saw them, I froze, because they both would die so fast.
Zeke turned, and his expression turned stony when he saw my face. My dad's eyes followed his, and when they saw me they jumped up. Zeke shoved the last bite of toast in his mouth, and my dad tossed their plates into the dishwasher and grabbed the piece meant for me. Handing it to me, he bounded out of the room to find a weapon.
"What is it? When?"
I tried to speak and saw the flash of feathers in the window seconds before a hoof smashed the window.
"Now," I said.
There was an awful screech, like a rooster crow mixed with a horse's scream, before they leapt nimbly through the window. Their hooves- and clawed feet- skittered across the ground for purchase. They squealed in either joy or outrage, I wasn't sure which. The monsters had the bodies of a horse and the hindquarters and back feet of a rooster, and I wasn't sure whether to giggle or scream. The monsters flooded the kitchen, more than we'd ever fought, and soon I was lost in a swarm of feathers and hooves.
"Hippalectryons!" my brother yelled from somewhere in the fray. There was a thud as someone, probably my dad, whacked one of them with something hard. I flung my hands out, and a few of them screamed as they were slammed into the ceiling. One of the three I attacked exploded into dust, and it rained down as two injured ones hit the ground. I fought to find Zeke, following his grunts, because soon, right about-
A pained cry.
... Now.
"Zeke!" I yelled, and filled the throng of them with solid looking doppelgangers of us. Momentarily distracted, the hippalectryons attacked air. I slammed the air with power, pushing them away, forming a path, desperate even though I knew I was too late. I pushed my way through them, stabbing one in its horse neck with a steak knife I found on the counter and killing it, distracting another with my toast and slipping past it.
Zeke was silent.
When I finally reached him, I was flushed, I was breathing hard, and I was too late.
I screamed.
Zeke lay still on the tile, flayed open from neck to hip, probably by a hind leg, the rooster claw. His eyes were already long since glassed over, and his body jerked as the horse-birds ripped him apart like a chicken leg. Their maws were bloody and
bits of meat were flung to the ground as they tore into his stomach. My hand slashed through the air and the air rippled as I brought my knife down on a monster's shoulder.
Blood squirted like a fountain and it dissolved. I screamed in fury as the other monsters looked up, with what might have been shocked expressions, or maybe they were constipated. Blades of magic streaked through the air and stuck into eyes, hearts, and necks, and blood was everywhere and some of it was theirs, some of it was Zeke's, and it was all glittery with dust.
Finally Zeke was left alone, and I gagged when I saw the intestines and bits of skin and bone hanging out of him.
Another yell, and suddenly I remembered that I had foreseen two deaths today.
"Dad!"
I whipped around and saw the spurt of red blood above the creatures' heads. Forcing my way through, I saw him. Not the same death as Zeke's, but somehow, it seemed just as gory. Three puncture wounds stabbed straight through his back and out of his chest, the tips of claws still visible. He saw me. He stared.
He died.
The monster jerked its leg back and I shivered at the squelching noise it made.
My dad slumped to the floor.
Tears came unbidden to my eyes and something cracked in me, another hidden reserve of warm magic that I didn't want. My anger took over and my face turned into death, and with an ear-piercing, furious, painful scream that tore out of my throat the world turned white and the room filled with blistering heat. I heard popping sounds like firecrackers and I felt the burning heat on my skin but I didn't care and I just screamed until every last monster was gone, and for a while after that.
I cried and sobbed and moaned over their bodies, one ripped apart and one almost perfectly whole, both covered in blood and gore and gold dust.
Eventually I buried them outside, under the bird of paradise that we loved so much, and magically carved headstones out of garden stones with a heavy heart. I packed food, clothes, and my kitchen knife, and with one last longing look at the makeshift graves, vanished.
(10)
I don't know how he found me, but when he did, he tried to kill me.
The police ruled me insane. They called it a murder, and named me the murderer. They had dug up the bodies, and speculated that I had attacked them both in their sleep with the kitchen knife missing from the knife block. After that, I had buried them, and run away to avoid being arrested. I had seen the news story on the television of a diner I tried to eat at before it got attacked by Empousai and three bystanders died.
I escaped.
Was I evil? Was it my fault? I wasn't sure, but Mark sure seemed to think so.
Mark had been Zeke's best friend, and he actually used to like me and play games with me when I was younger. Now, though, I was trapped in an alley behind the restaurant I stole some leftover bread and lettuce from, staring down the barrel of a gun. He scowled at me ferociously.
"You killed them," he snarled. "You killed them both!"
"No I didn't!" I whimpered. "I tried to save them!"
"Liar!" he fumed.
The gun went off.
I flung my hand up faster than light and there was a choked scream as the bullet pounded into, and through, flesh.
It drilled a neat hole through Mark's throat.
I screamed. I screamed. I smashed the gun to bits.
I screamed.
(11)
"Kid, please."
"No!" I struggled and jerked against his hands, like iron prison bars.
"Kid!"
"No! I'm not going to the orphanage!"
He scowled and yanked me free of the tree he had caught me sleeping in at three in the morning. My hands came off the bark and I yelped, kicking and thrashing to get away from this ordinary man in a police suit. I saw him die and that scared me, because it was me.
"Easy!"
"No! Get away, before I hurt you!" I yelled. A light came on in the house that owned the tree I was sleeping in. The officer jerked and twisted my arm painfully, and I cried out. I swiped with the kitchen knife I managed to pull out of my makeshift dishrag sheath at my waist, and I had gotten pretty good with that knife, too, but the police officer smacked my wrist and it dropped.
"Is that a threat?"
"Excuse me!" a woman said as the door opened to the house and a woman stepped out. The officer must have looked pretty bad right then: he had a little girl pinned against the harsh tree bark, her arm twisted up her back, his hand raised as though to bat away a weapon- or strike her. "Let that girl go this instant!"
I started to bawl to keep up appearances.
The officer sounded bewildered. "Ma'am, this runaway is dangerous-"
"Well no wonder she'd run away from you! You're downright cruel!" she scolded from her doorway in her pink bathrobe and slippers.
I tried to dash out of his grip as he attempted to reason with the woman, but he lifted me up and I cursed my size. He held me tightly across my ribcage, and I wheezed when I couldn't get enough air. I was starting to panic. His fingers were hard and violating against me, and he was holding me too tight.
I flailed but he carried me toward the police car, ignoring the woman's angry shouts, and my vision started to turn blurry. I wasn't sure whether he realized I was suffocating or not, but I screamed.
He stopped dead.
The woman screamed louder than I did.
My shoulders and neck splattered with warmth, and I was dropped so suddenly I didn't have time to catch myself and I hit the concrete hard. By the time I wheezed enough air back into my body to process my surroundings, the woman was screaming about the military and the FBI. I turned to see what she was so afraid of just as the body toppled on top of me.
I shrieked when the neck landed by my face.
Just the neck.
No head.
It sprayed blood and it got in my mouth and my eyes and I spat and coughed and struggled to get him off me and when I did I sat up, panting, and saw the officer's head still rolling a few feet away. By now the screaming lady had retreated into her home. I scurried to my feet, stifling a sob, and picked up my kitchen knife. I used my old trick: disappearing.
(12)
"Hello," a voice said. "Is this box taken?"
I jolted awake, my head whipping wildly around to see who had spoken. A monster? A policeman? An angry storeowner?
It turned out to be a friendly-looking girl about my age, with grimy blond hair, blue eyes, and holey clothes that looked more like a dirty towel than a dress. I crawled out of the box I'd been sleeping in by the landfill and realized I'd slept in- it was probably noon now. The girl smiled.
"I'm Alicia," she said, "Pickpocket extraordinaire. Who are you?"
"Lily," I said cautiously. "And, well, um... I'm really good with a steak knife."
"Are you? Well that's a helpful skill."
"You steal things?" I asked.
"Yup. When I steal something, usually it's mine for good."
"Oh."
Even if she was dirty, she looked well fed. My own cheeks were hollow and my stomach was a little caved. I mostly survived on dumpster scraps and donations from random stores who didn't guard their food well enough. But, I used my magic to keep me clean, since a lot of times I was covered in gold dust or blood.
"Can I stay here with you?" she asked. "You are homeless, right?"
"Right." I answered, and felt a little homesick for my beach house. I wondered if it belonged to someone else now. Had they moved the bodies to a cemetery? I hoped not. They would have wanted to be buried at their house under the bird of paradise by me, not by strangers in the empty cemetery.
"Okay. I'll teach you how to steal tomorrow. Right now, though..."
The box was easily big enough for the both of us to curl up and sleep in. It might have held a refrigerator at some point, or maybe a dresser. I dreamed of months with this girl who would die of a random mugging, and dreamed of having a friend and staying alive.
...
Alicia, true to her word, taught me to steal the very next morning.
"Okay. So the trick is to get your hand in and out of their pocket without them noticing. Usually they'll notice a beginner sliding their hand in a pocket, but if you bump into them or drop something, you distract them."
She demonstrated. We pretended to be two little girls playing tag.
She 'accidentally' ran headfirst into a man in a suit, who dropped a stack of papers. Apologizing profusely, she helped him pick up his papers, then skipped back over to me. Hidden in her bra was the man's wallet and an old looking gold stopwatch, which Alicia said was a very lucky find. Right afterward we went to a gas station and bought to-go salads and chips, and a hot dog for Alicia.
After breakfast, it was my turn. We drew hopscotch in chalk on the sidewalk, and I played and made bad shots until a man walked by. Then I tripped, yelping, and fell on him, latching onto his jacket to stop myself falling. As he helped me to stand and glanced at Alicia, I slipped the stolen mass of something into my sheath- I had left my knife under and extra pile of clothes in my bag.
"The very first time," Alicia said, impressed, at lunch. I had stolen a wallet with fifty dollars in it. We bought food at McDonalds, chicken nuggets for her and a vegetarian burger for me. Alicia told me, with her mouth stuffed full of food, that we would get clothes money from the watch.
"I haven't got new clothes in months," she said as we strolled into a pawn shop. "How about you?"
"I haven't got new clothes in almost a year," I say honestly. "I patch them with sharp wood and cloth I find."
"We'll get you good clothes," she said. "Time to teach you how to barter."
...
"Twenty bucks." The guy at the counter said as he eyed the watch greedily.
"Nuh-uh. Seven hundred."
"For a piece of junk like that?"
"You kidding? This is eighteen karat gold."
"Two hundred."
"Six seventy."
"Four hundred."
"Six fifty. C'mon, old man, I know my stuff."
I watched them shoot back and forth like one might watch an interesting tennis match. Alicia seemed totally confident, and she probably had done this before. I wondered if I would ever get good enough to be able to recognize eighteen karat gold on sight.
"Five fifty."
"Six twenty five."
"Five seventy five."
"Six hundred."
"Five seventy five," he insisted.
"Six hundred."
"Five seventy five is all I can give you for it."
"Come on, Lily," she said, spinning on her heel. She took my wrist and led me to the door. "This guy's a cheapo. Let's go find an antique store."
"But, Alicia-"
"Shh. Come on."
We got to the threshold of the door and I was beginning to worry we wouldn't get new clothes because there was no antique store anywhere near here, but Alicia just strode through the opening door and towed me along with her.
"Wait!" The store man shouted. Alicia grinned, then cleared her face and turned around.
"What?"
"Six hundred."
...
We strolled through Goodwill for clothes. At the pawn shop we'd managed to sell my backpack, too, for twenty dollars, and so now I was buying a new pack as well.
"What about this one?" I held up a backpack.
"Too flimsy. Try this one."
"Ooh, I like that one." We put it in the cart next to my plastic bag full of stuff.
We used about eighty dollars buying the both of us a slightly-too-large jacket, two t-shirts each, two pairs of cargo shorts and a pair of pants each, gloves and scarves, beanies, one bottle of two-in-one body wash shampoo, socks, underwear, bras, and two pairs of small combat boots that might have belonged to a thirteen year old boy but fit us perfectly. We also ended up buying green packs that were probably used for school, and splurged on two sleeping bags.
After we bought the stuff, we washed ourselves with the sinks and washed our hair when the bathrooms were deserted. Then we changed into t-shirts and shorts and fresh undergarments, combed our hair out with our fingers, and put everything else in our new bags. I also shoplifted a leather cell phone holder to tie around my waist as a new sheath.
Walking out, we laughed and marveled at how clean we looked. I hadn't felt not-dirty in years.
We also bought vegan jerky and plastic water bottles we could refill.
After everything- including dinner- we had about five hundred dollars left and full stomachs. We split the money fifty-fifty and tucked two hundred and fifty dollars each into two stolen wallets, and kept those in our bras.
"Never leave money in your pockets or your bag," Alicia told me as we settled into our warm sleeping bags behind a dumpster. "That's the first place robbers look."
We slept like royalty that night.
…
Many nights after that we slept like royalty. Sometimes we went to sleep hungry, sometimes several nights in a row we went hungry, but between the two of us and my newfound pickpocket skill, usually we had enough money for dinner.
"When did you become a vegetarian?" Alicia asked conversationally one day as we browsed through the store for vegan jerky. Jerky was a good thing to buy when you had extra money and lived on the streets: it lasted long, it was cheap, and it was filling.
"What?"
"I asked when you became a vegetarian."
"What's a vegetarian?"
She laughed. "Somebody who won't eat meat."
"Oh! Um… I'm not sure."
I fingered my necklace and I was pretty sure it happened then. If I had to kill things, rip them apart to survive, if I'd seen my family eaten like so much cooked hamburger, I was not eating a dead anything. Either way, it's not like there wasn't anything to buy.
"Ah. I just noticed that you always put vegetarian or vegan stuff in the cart."
….
"I have a question," I said as we left the store. The jerky all together cost us about five dollars. "Why do we buy things?"
What do you mean?"
"We steal so that we can buy things. It's kind of… opposite."
"Hmm." She said. "I'd rather not steal if I don't have to."
"Why not?"
"Well, for one thing, if you get caught, it's not fun. Actually, that's the only reason. Besides, pickpocketing is easier to pull off than shoplifting. And what's the point of stealing wallets if we don't use the money?"
"Huh."
That was a good night. We slept with our stomachs full of warm soup and jerky.
…
A few weeks later, we didn't sleep nearly as good, and our stomachs pinched with hunger. We got a little more desperate and a little less cautious.
Alicia got caught.
"Why you little rat!"
"Ah!"
"No!" I cried. "Put her down!"
He sneered at me. "I bet you're a little rat, too! Goddamned street urchins!"
"Put her down."
"Ow!"
"Alicia!" I was afraid for my friend. She'd never been caught before. And this man didn't seem the type to yell and leave. So I did what every cell in my body was singing for me to do. I drew my knife.
"Where'd you get that?" He said, too startled to yell or even look angry. Then the confusion wore off and his face was a mask of anger again. His hands found Alicia's throat.
"Whatcha gonna do, rat?" he taunted. "Can't stab me now!"
Alicia choked and flailed, and the man had severely underestimated me.
With a cry I flung it, and it spun through the air with a speed that any professional would be proud of. Alicia screamed, but the blade just barely missed her eye, slamming into the smug, smug face of her captor.
He didn't scream. He just fell.
Alicia made a guttural moaning sound when blood got in her hair and scrambled upward, tripping and rushing away from the cooling corpse.
I had almost no qualms about what I had just done. The gruesome scene twisted my stomach again, but I knew the man had deserved it. But more, more blood on my hands, more a murderer. I stepped up to the corpse and, bracing myself, yanked my weapon out of his face.
I didn't look, I didn't look.
My knife was covered in blood and something else; some gray chunks of matter that I didn't want to think about.
Alicia stared at me, shaking.
"Sorry," I said. My voice sounded hollow and tired.
"No, it's… it's okay," she said, ashen-faced. "I've just never seen a dead person before. At least, not a dead person like this…" she trailed off.
"He would have killed you," I said firmly, trying to convince myself as well as her. "So I got him first."
….
After a few days, we were still hungry. On the bright side, after a few days, Alicia stopped giving me those guilty sideways glances, like she was making sure I wouldn't kill her. That hurt a little bit, when she did that, but I couldn't really blame her.
We stole apples from a vendor on the street. Alicia took one and darted off, and when the vendor turned to chase her down, I snatched four of them and ran.
We met back at our little campsite in the dumpster. I think it was abandoned, because it was clean and never got used, and the trucks never came by to get it, so we kept all of our stuff there, with one bag full of clothes and some food. The other bag we kept with us for when we needed to grab something or look normal. Our sleeping bags were laid out, and the only decoration was a thrown out Christmas wreath that we nailed to the inside wall.
We also had a candle that we'd saved up to buy. We lit it with my magic, which Alicia knew a little about, and closed the top of the dumpster each night. It kept out the rain and a lot of noise, but also let enough air in for us to breathe.
"Five apples. That's good," Alicia said hungrily, and I nodded. We bit into the first two, left one in the makeshift camp, and we walked to a park eating them. Alicia laughed at something I'd said, and I realized I really liked this girl.
Then I realized that her due date was coming up soon. In a few minutes, if you want to split hairs.
"Alicia," I said nervously. "If you see a large man with a bat, run away."
"Eh?" she said, raising her eyebrows. "You think I'm going to, what, say hello?"
I laughed it off, but I worried. True to my vision, as soon as I thought to go back to the campsite, I heard it.
"Heyy, little giiirrls, whatcha got there?"
I ducked just in time to avoid the first swing. I had juice on my face from the half eaten apple in my hand. I whipped around. An obviously drunk man with a hard aluminum baseball bat staggered around behind me. How did I not know he was there?
Alicia glanced at me suddenly, shocked.
"Large man with a bat?" she said weakly.
"Large man with a bat," I confirmed. "Run."
"But what about-"
"Run! I'll get him!" I pulled out my knife and made the mistake of looking her way, since the drunk man was having trouble focusing on us. "Just go back to the-"
"Lily!"
CLUNK.
I threw the knife.
Alicia and the nameless man fell at the same time, one with a stabbed heart, one with a dented skull.
She- she jumped in front of me-
"Alicia!" I screamed and threw myself down by her side. Her blue eyes flickered weakly, already glazing over. I didn't know how to help her, so I just touched her cheek and brushed hair away.
"Lily." Her voice was distant.
"Alicia?"
'Lily. L i l y…"
Her eyes dulled.
"Alicia? Alicia? Alicia! Wake up, please!" I screamed.
In the dead of night, I heard that final puff of air leave her lungs and I knew what I had done. I had killed her. Alicia was dead.
"Alicia?" I said weakly.
She didn't answer.
Murderer. The accusation pounded through my skull like a mantra. Murderer. Murderer.
I cried and sobbed and yelled at her to wake up, like that would help.
I flashed her back to our- my- campsite with my magic and gathered my things, her things, although it made me sick I put her clothes in my bag, her money in my bag. I rolled up both our sleeping bags and stuffed them in the extra, slinging both over my shoulders, and picked her up bridal style.
I blinked away.
….
I don't know where I landed, some heavily forested area with tall, pretty trees that cast green light over the two of us as I walked. Alicia's head lolled and hung limp. I heard distant monster roars from somewhere, I didn't really care or notice.
I buried Alicia at the base of the biggest tree I could find, zipped inside her sleeping bag in the nicest pair of clothes we had owned. I carved a headstone out of a jagged rock, and placed it on the base of the tree. I nailed our wreath to the trunk.
I sat at the grave and stared for a while. I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I just stared at the newly dug dirt with mournful eyes and rocked.
It was my thirteenth birthday, I remembered some time later. Me and Alicia were going to celebrate it tonight.
Happy birthday to me.
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