Still, I can’t just leave my parents. I have to find them. And so, I round the side of the house.
I freeze before our doorless frame.
Panting and shaking, I cross the threshold with my heart solid and wet in my throat.
“Mum?” I whisper, my voice thick and watery. “Pa?”
No matter how soft I try making my steps, my boots sound like hammers against the floorboards. Any second now, the demons outside will finish their meals, but they won’t be satiated, not when there’s a live snack just waiting for them inside this sepulchral home.
I swallow the impulse to call out for my parents again, and instead slink my way into the cooking area.
I nearly slip on the pool of blood waiting for me there. When my eyes fall to my father’s lifeless face, his chest cavity ripped open like a black abyss while a demon feasts on his heart, it takes everything inside me not to wail, not to crumple where I stand.
But I lose my hold when I notice my mother beside him.
The scream swells from deep inside me, scorching me from the bottom up until the fiery thing bursts from my inconsolable lungs. If I had just been here like she’d wanted, instead of wasting my time going into town, I could’ve protected her; I could’ve offered a distraction so that she and my father might’ve escaped. They gave far more to this world than I ever will. My father with his heart of gold and my mother with her sage wisdom.
Instead, now they’re both dead, and all that they’ve left behind is me.
At the sound of my cry, the black creature’s bloodied jaw twists over its shoulder. Its ravenous, red eyes find mine and I sob all the harder. Dying here, like this, it’s what I deserve for never amounting to anything. I couldn’t even master how to dip candles correctly, and my fletching, despite years of practice, is still mediocre at best. Regardless of what I deserve, still, I am afraid. I never wanted this death. I wanted to live a long life, see blue skies again, become more like my gentle parents with hearts as big as oceans.
And maybe it’s the thought of them, dying with disappointment that they’ll never get to see their youngest daughter amount to anything, that has me raising my brother’s shadowsteel dagger in my shaking hand.
The demon snarls, teeth gleaming and dripping.
Then it lunges.
I stagger back, fear consuming every notion of bravery I thought I had mustered. I close my eyes and turn my head away, but I keep my dagger up, hopeful that it will do the work for me. If I’m to understand the legends correctly, all it takes is a single nick of shadowsteel and a demon is doomed. If the creature is to attack me, at least I will take it down with me and it’ll be one less monster to ravage Arcathain.
But as I press myself up against the table, prepared for the hulking beast to crash into me, a new snarl sounds from the doorway. I pry my burning eyes open just to watch the figure slam into the demon before it can reach me.
The two beings blur into a brawl of shadowy limbs and growling maws. I’ve never heard of demons fighting each other, but for creatures who have no humanity, I should’ve known. They are starved in the Shadowthorn. Only human flesh and blood can fill their bellies and quench their hunger, so of course they would fight each other for a meal.
Blinking out of my frozen stupor, I realize this is my chance to run. Once a winner rises between them, it will waste no time in diving for me and finishing the job that the first demon started.
Even knowing that though, I still can’t bring myself to sprint for the door. My gaze returns helplessly to my parents, to the bodies that are still warm because I was just a few seconds too late to—
My mother’s fingers twitch. I blink, trying to force my head to clear. She’s dead, I remind myself. A demon killed her—
She coughs, a splatter of blood frosting her lips.
“Mum?” My voice cracks under the pressure of hope, and I slide through the blood to kneel beside her, cradling her head in my arms. “Mum.”
But as my eyes search hers, I see no recognition. She stares right past me like she doesn’t even see me. Her skin is so cold already, the wounds in her chest and abdomen pulsing red.
“It’s all right,” I say between sniffles, my voice hitching. “I’m going to get you out of here. You just have to hang on.”
She coughs again, a crimson fountain spraying us both, but I swear on her next sputter she mutters something I can’t quite make out. I lean in closer, blood be damned, until her slick lips brush against my ear.
“What was that? What are you trying to say?”
She swallows, the movement taking everything she has left, and with one last dying breath, I hear her clear as any summer day before the Blight’s existence:
“Imryll.”
In my arms, my mother’s head becomes lead, her neck limp.
“No,” I wail, burying my face against her neck. “Please, don’t go.”
The tears flow from me like an autumn rainstorm. With my head pressed against her bloodied skin, I can neither distinguish the wetness of my tears from her blood, nor do I care. My father is gone, as is my mother now, and her last words are nonsense to me. Not confessions of her love, or hopes for my happy and long life, but a jumbled, incoherent word that has no meaning. It’s a mockery of the full life she led, and an omen for the nothingness that will now befall me.
In the distance, a raven calls, reminding me that I’m not entirely alone, even if I might as well be. Kalli has her life at the Capital, and sure, we will always be sisters, but she and I share no life apart from that.
The floorboards creak behind me. I stiffen.
Pulling away from my mother, eyes raw, heart unsteady, I set her lifeless form down onto the cold floor and stand to face my maker. But behind me I find the first demon lying in a heap of oily blood in the corner of the room. The second creature is hunched over it, using its thick arms to rip the other demon’s head clean off its body. I’ve never seen such ferocity, such grotesque rage, but I suppose I should count my blessings that I didn’t walk in to find my parents decapitated and limbless.
The victorious demon must have eyes in the back of its skull because it straightens when my gaze befalls it.
Slowly, the muscled creature stands, carelessly tossing the demon head aside and turning to face me. I almost gasp at the peculiar sight. If I had any emotional stamina left, I would. Because, although I saw some demons as I raced through the Wallows who walked upright like humans, or bore humanistic traits like two arms that extend from their torsos, I’ve never seen one that actually looked human.
The man before me could almost pass as just that: a man, an undefeated warrior whose muscles are as thick as trees, his stomach carved from the hardest stone. Like most demons, he’s not wearing a shirt, but he is, however, in trousers, ones as dark as death itself.
With nothing covering his torso, I’m able to see the demonic thing he has for an arm, the Blight that encompasses every inch of his skin in black tar. His fingers are claws, his biceps scaly and prickly. The darkness continues to wind up and over his chest like ink beating through his veins. It crawls up his neck but stops just below his chiseled jawline. And though there is a demon-like glow behind his russet eyes, they watch me with the sorrow of someone who’s lost family before. Someone human.
But that can’t be right. It must be a ruse, some trick of demons that I’m not privy to, because the black horns tucked amid his midnight hair, and the dark wings stretched down his back show me his true nature. And if that didn’t do it, the way he turned his vicious eyes on me does.