Bianca February 28th 1989
"Run," The voice croaks again. "Run, child of spring, run away before you share my fate."
I try to get away, but the hand grips me tighter. I couldn't run, Maria won't let me and I was terrified.
More of the arm comes out of the ground, and my heart pounds so fast I'm afraid it'll explode. This was worse than a zombie movie.
The strange thing is the skin isn't rotted or broken. It looks like someone buried themselves underground for a prank, but that's not what this is.
Another hand breaks through the soil, and I scream, but no sound comes. The more I struggle, the tighter the corpse's grip on me until I fall backward, landing on my ass.
With a sob, I kept trying to get away, my ankle throbbing from where the hand kept squeezing.
"Leave," The woman's voice commands, but I hear no anger from it. Rather, it sounds more desperate, like she's forcing me to listen to her. "Before the new moon."
The woman's head and shoulders erupt from her grave, and I'm staring face to face with a beautiful, haunted woman who looks so much like Stephanie. Her hair was covered in dirt, and her eyes looked glassy, but she didn't look like someone who'd been dead for eighteen years.
"Do not stay, rabbit," Maria, because it could only be her orders, and I stopped struggling against her. "Do not stay."
How had she known that name? Although come to think of it, the tongue she was using wasn't English. It was a language I had only spoken at home with my mother and father.
Gell'in.
How did Maria know it?
The body of my best friend's mother stops moving, and she gets a mournful look on her face, a sadness that forces me to stay still.
An owl lands on a tree nearby, and Maria's attention goes to it, moaning miserably at it before she starts to sink back into the earth.
"Run, Bianca, before it's too late," Maria whispers again before her hand lets me go. The owl hoots mournfully, and I watch as it spreads its enormous wings and takes off into what remains of the night.
When I look back at the grave, the ground doesn't look like it was disturbed. Instead, everything seemed like it did before, except that new flowers were resting in front of the tombstone.
A bouquet of poppies.
Lying there, too afraid to move, I try to make sense of what just happened. Was I going crazy? Maybe I'd used too much energy, and I'd started hallucinating. The experience of watching Raidne hatch could have left me unstable, couldn't it?
'No," Raidne whispers, watching through my eyes. 'That was real.'
"How?" I shiver, wrapping my arms around myself. "I can't summon the dead."
'We can,' Raidne argues. 'Mama gave us the gift.'
"Mama?" I murmur, again thinking of what my family hadn't told me. "Our Dej is Entit'a?"
'Yes,' Raidne curls up beside me. 'I want to see mama. I want to go home.'
I don't have the heart to answer her. So how did I tell her that I'd run away and that maybe our parents don't want us anymore?
Slowly getting up, I turn to face the house. Raidne stares at it nervously, cooing like a bird when it's anxious.
"What is it?" I ask her, making my way to the back door. The sun was only starting to break through the darkness, and I knew I needed to get inside as quickly as possible.
'Not a good place,' Raidne tells me quietly. 'Bad things happened here.'
I want to ask her more, but I can wait until I get back to my room. I'm covered in dirt, and there's definitely no way I can explain it.
Besides, if I talk to myself, I'd prefer to do it somewhere private.
'Bianca? I want to go home,' Raidne urges again. 'I want to see mama and papa.'
Honestly, I want the same thing, but I can discuss that with her later. I don't know how much she knows or doesn't.
The lights are still off when I step inside, and I'm grateful the cold isn't touching me anymore. So, as quietly as I can, I try to make it back upstairs without being noticed.
"Bianca?" I jump nearly a foot, yelping as I turn around to find Stephanie's older brother Xavier behind me. How long had he been following me? I hadn't heard him. "Easy, it's just me."
I try to calm my breathing with my hand to my heart again.
"Sorry, Xavier," I swallowed the scream that was trying to escape. "I didn't hear you."
"Why are you up?" Even in the dim light of the streetlights outside, I can see the outline of his scowl. "It's not even six thirty yet."
"I heard something," I quickly lied. "I thought it was a raccoon, but it wasn't."
Xavier stares at me, taking a step closer.
"Was it an owl?" he asks me in a whisper. "A big gray one, with red on its face and a white patch on its throat?"
"Yes," Xavier had described the owl precisely as I'd seen it. But, had he seen it too?
"Don't worry about him," Xavier keeps his voice low. "He lives nearby and wanders around the neighborhood."
"You act like you know him," I try for a smile, but the mood between us doesn't change much.
"I do," he admits. "For a long time now."
"Is he your pet?" I raise an eyebrow. Brian wasn't fond of animals. Stephanie told me it was because her mother used to keep them around. Not your ordinary ones, like dogs and cats. She used to rescue wild animals and let them stay in the yard.
That drove Brian crazy when they tried to move into the house.
"No," Xavier mutters. "Not a pet. A... friend."
Xavier wasn't like his twin brother Corey or Stephanie. He was more withdrawn, and the few times I'd seen him, he was busy listening to music on his headphones.
If I had to choose between the two, I preferred to talk to Xavier rather than Corey.
Both were nice to me, but Corey could be overly friendly, so I felt uncomfortable.
Raidne watched him through my eyes, curious about the first person she'd seen.
'He's Entit'a,' she tells me. 'I can sense him.'
"What?" My voice betrays me before I remember I'm not alone.
"I didn't say anything," Xavier whispers. "Shh, you'll wake everyone upstairs."
"Sorry," I whisper back, feeling my heart hammering again.
"Don't worry, it's just better if we don't wake them up," he suggests. "Especially Stephanie."
He wasn't wrong there. I loved Steph, but she was not a morning person, and if you woke her before her alarm went off, you saw the demon come out in her.
"Then I should go back to bed," I start heading to the steps. "Sorry if I woke you."
"Wait," Xavier rushes over to me. His breath against my face. "It's your birthday today, right?"
"Yes," I nod slowly. "I guess it's hard to ignore when Steph makes such a big deal out of it."
"How old are you?" He asks gently, and I realize no one told him I would be eighteen. But, then again, Xavier didn't seem interested much outside his music or classes.
"Eighteen," I shrug, not thinking much of it. As I said, it was only necessary for humans. "Why?"
"Nothing," Xavier mumbles, looking at the stairs, and in the dim light, I swear I see a worried expression cross his face. "I have a present for you."
"Oh, you didn't have to do that," Honestly, we weren't close or anything. Since I've known Stephanie, I've only seen Xavier a few times, most of that this week.
"You're my sister's best friend," He says it like it's an obligation he has to accomplish. "It's in my room."
"Maybe you can give it to me later," I didn't feel comfortable going to his room, but Raidne perks up, staring more carefully at him.
'Go,' she urges. 'I like presents. Maybe it'll be a ring or a bracelet.'
Part of me wants to laugh at that. It's a stereotype but a good one because I've always liked shiny things like a bird does. So, maybe it wasn't so crazy that Raidne liked the idea of getting a shiny present too.
"I'd rather give it to you now," Xavier mutters, still glancing at the stairs. "Before everyone else gets to you."
The way he said that he made it sound ominous.
This wasn't a good idea. I didn't want Xavier to get the wrong idea about me if I went to his room or took a gift from him in private.
Don't get me wrong, Steph's brothers were, to put it bluntly, hot, and sometimes I thought that I felt a hint of something when I looked at them, but it was faint and quickly went away when Corey got too close. However, my attraction was still toward women, and I wasn't about to change that.
"It'll only take a minute," Xavier insists and walks toward his room.
Against my better judgment, I follow Xavier to his room. Unlike his siblings, his room was on the ground floor. I'd never come in here, even when he was away for school. It was nice but smaller than his brother and sisters. There were old posters of swimsuit models and drawings of birds on the walls. It seemed Xavier liked rock bands. He had an extensive collection on the bookshelf of records and CDs.
"You like guns and roses?" I start to ask, but suddenly Xavier's behind me with his arm around my throat and his other hand over my mouth.