“Behind you!” I shout.
He grins at me, before unsheathing his sword again and turning. Faster than Batman, this winged monster slices and dices the undead, turning them all to dust. I lay there stupefied. He turns back to me cocking his head in way that makes me feel like he doesn’t understand me. He holds out his hand again. I take it this time. It’s rough and completely encapsulates mine. He pulls me up. Pain pulses through my shin when I stand, but I ignore it for the most part.
“Thanks for the warning.” His voice is so deep. A monster’s voice. The corpses around us are all but dead. Two of the monsters finish dispatching them before they all begin walking towards me. I take them all in. So different, so similar, so weirdly familiar. Déjà vu hits me. I’ve been here before, but how could I? I would remember coming across giant winged hero monsters.
“What is happening?” I breathe the question to the monster who saved my life. I’m still holding his hand. It’s a reminder I’m not imagining this. This is real. He loosens his grip, but I tighten mine. If I let go, they might all fade away. He smiles, all teeth, at my panic. Any sane person would be screaming right now at the giant teeth and the face before me. Instead, I feel the edges of my mouth turn up slightly.
An even larger one walks up to me. His eyes are dark and not as friendly. “Violet, we should discuss this in private.” He nods behind me. My friends are huddled together, not at all calmed by the fact the monsters just saved us. Blythe has tears on her face. Fiona’s eyes are empty, but her body is shaking. Aaiden has them behind him slightly, protective even though he’s scared witless.
“I...” I don’t know what to say. The monsters peer at me with anticipation. They want privacy? Somehow, they know me. I look at the big one again; with the darkness around him, it reminds me of the shadow on the Silos. “You’ve been following me...” It’s not a question. He nods. I turn back to my friends. “I think we are safe, guys.”
Aaiden is staring at my hand in the monster’s. It causes me to finally let go. I don’t think they are going anywhere. I feel it. Just like I felt the room earlier. I close my eyes for a moment, just blackness. No room. No door. I look back at my stunned friends again. “What’s happening?”
“We can explain it all to you,” the one that I was holding onto tells me. I must have spoken aloud.
Fiona’s head snaps up and she walks towards us. Blythe wordlessly grabs the arm of her jacket to stop her. Fiona shrugs her off. “Then you will tell all of us.” She looks at me. “We deserve to know.”
I eye the beasts. The biggest one asks me, “Is that what you want?”
“Umm, if it’s up to me, then yes.” I realize as I say it, that on the off chance these things planned to eat me, I’ve just doomed my friends to death as monster chow. I take a deep breath; let’s hope that’s not the case. Behind me, I wave my friends closer. Aaiden and Blythe scoot slowly closer. She does not want to come, but he’s pulling on her. Fiona comes right up next to me; a tremor runs slightly through her though.
A small dark shadow I hadn’t noticed perched on one of the tombstones jumps in my direction. Fiona and I scream simultaneously as the black thing lands on my shoulders. I lean forward instinctively to cover my face. My scream is immediately cut off when I hear a loud purr emitting from it. Leaning over, a cat is climbing across my shoulder blades rubbing its face on me. “What the heck is happening?!” I yell. And what is up with all the animals?
One of the monsters laughs. “You’re scaring her, get off!” The cat hops down on the ground and rubs itself on my dirty calves. I notice something that immediately has me freaked out. More freaked out than when corpses attacked.
“This cat only has three legs!” I stand up staring at the—count them, five—monsters in front of me. The same number of people who approached us earlier tonight. “Why does this cat only have three legs?”
“Well, I’d like to say we ate the other one, but...” One of them laughs. He takes a step forward and from one step to the other, he changes from a beast into the smiley red-headed Phelix from earlier. “Really, he lost it in a battle,” he turns to the cat, “It figures you’d show up after all the real work is done, you coward.” The cat, as if understanding Phelix, stops to hiss at him then hops onto another tombstone to lick his paw idly.
I start to shake. I don’t know why this isn’t any weirder than anything else that’s happening. I can’t think though. I can’t grasp onto why I’m so upset. I was fine until I saw the cat. The three-legged cat. One of the females starts shifting now. She just shrinks before my eyes. Her grey skin turns soft and pale. Her wings seem to fold into her behind her back. Before I can blink, she’s a blonde human with ringlets.
“It’s okay, Violet, we are not here to hurt you,” her voice tinkles. My head pulses. A sudden headache hits me like a freight train.
Aaiden, upon seeing the girl, falls backwards in shock. “Woof!” he exclaims scrambling on the ground to get back up. “You’re the hot girls.”
The blonde giggles.
“Wait... Wait...” I hold out my hand. “Wait.”
My mind is spinning. I can’t get a breath. I grasp the first thing my hand finds which is Fiona’s hand. She squeezes me back as hard as I’m squeezing her. I try to breathe, but it’s like breathing through a straw. My face is hot. I can’t, I can’t. I fall pulling Fiona down with me, and the world turns black.
I’m in the room again. Stars twinkle in the night sky above the walls. The door I unlocked earlier is open. A long tunnel shines behind it swirling with lights. My eyes go to the key in the door. The key with the winged monster on it, just like the ones who saved us. It’s a key I recognize. I’m supposed to be here. I look through the tunnel. I hear strange sounds, as if a large group of somethings are coming this way. Around me other doors appear, shaking and rattling. All around the room they’ve popped up out of the darkness. I pull the key out of the first door and move to another.
“Violetta Teresa Kai, you stop that this instant!” someone scolds from behind me. I jump, tears immediately coming to my eyes. I know that voice. My heart jumps in pain and loss. I turn.
As I regain consciousness, the first thing I notice is something small and rough moving on my cheek.
“I think we broke her,” a tinkling voice chirps.
“She will be fine,” the deep voice of the monster who saved me pipes in.
“Maybe this is too much for her,” the deeper voice of the biggest monster says.
“Are you guys going to just stand there?” Fiona barks at them angrily, then I feel her hand on my head. “Vi, Violet, wake up.”
My eyes open and I’m eye to eye with a cat, a cat with one grey blue eye and one green eye. Just like Achilles. I just lay there and stare at the stars. Unsure of what to do next, the cat purrs and rubs its face on mine. I know I fainted; I know I wasn’t out long. I also know I feel fine now. Did I dream? I feel like I was just told something, told there is a purpose to this insane night, something I need to know. I breathe in. I breathe out. Corpses came out of the ground after I hallucinated a room and unlocked a door. Every time I touched Fiona’s book, sparks came out of it. A three-legged dog that knows me somehow has become a cat and is purring on my face. I feel a hair from the cat itching my lip. The cat is real. This is all real. That means monsters flew out of the sky to kill the corpses and then turned into people. “Did we all hit our heads?” I ask, someone, anyone. Maybe my brain has broken and I’m insane, which is entirely plausible because I can’t think of any other reason I’m currently in a graveyard, surrounded by monsters and three teenagers I basically just met and I feel...fine.