Chapter 1
The sound of tires screeching on pavement sliced through the silence of Lily Andrew’s house like a high-pitched scream wailing in the wind. Piercing and shrill, the shriek cautioned from beyond her room. Seconds earlier she’d slept, nestled comfortably in her bed, dreaming peacefully. Now, however, she stirred, and concern crawled within her, rousing her from sleep. She lifted her head, rubbed her eyes groggily then opened them briefly. The world appeared fuzzy, as did her thoughts. Slumber summoned her and her eyelids closed several times. Returning to the dream she’d been having seemed like a far more inviting prospect than getting out of bed and inspecting what was likely a neighbor returning from a night of too much partying.
She was about to let her head fall back against her pillow and ignore the skidding sound she’d heard, as well as the faint worry that whispered through her body, when she realized her room was bathed in light. She glanced at her alarm clock. It read 3:30 a.m., too early for the sun to have risen. Yet, white light poured through her curtains like molten steel and blanched everything around her. She sat up immediately, alarmed, and jumped out of bed. The preternatural glow disoriented her, but she managed to cross her room on unsteady legs to her window. Once there and concealed by her curtains, she peeked out beyond the pane into the blinding light. She squinted against it and her eyes watered, but she was able to make out an image. Her breath caught in her chest when she saw that three large black SUVs blocked her driveway and faced her house with their headlights left on. Her mind began to swirl, exhaustion and confusion conspiring against any form of reasoning. What she was seeing did not make any sense. But something prickled inside her, a feeling or sense warned her to get her parents and leave. She did not know what the vehicles were there for, but did not hesitate a second longer to consider it. She ran out of her bedroom down a long, narrow hallway to her parents’ bedroom and pounded on their door twice before rushing in.
“Mom, Dad! Wake up,” she said but they did not move. “Mom, Dad! Come on!” she tried again and tapped their feet.
“What, what is it honey?” her father asked, his voice thick with sleep.
“Are you sick?” her mother asked drowsily.
“There are people here!” she said with urgency. “Get up, now! Three black SUVs are blocking the driveway with the lights on.”
Just as she finished her sentence, the sound of glass shattering was followed by thunderous pounding and wood splintering. It sounded as though the front door had exploded. Both of her parents sat upright. Lily’s body jerked as though she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning, and deep within her, intuition cried out for her to flee.
“What the hell?” her father said and sprang out of bed.
“Call the police!” her mother said and moved to stand beside her.
Her father stood and gripped the phone in his hand. He began to dial and she watched his features transform from worried, to horrified. His complexion paled and his mouth formed a hard line. Her stomach churned and he didn’t need to tell her the line had been cut. His face had said it first. “Damn it! There’s no dial tone!”
Lily felt as though her legs would give way beneath her. The feeling inside her that warned seconds ago screamed now, and demanded that she heed it. Her body began to tremble.
“No dial tone?” she asked and felt tears begin to well.
“No! It’s dead! And my cell phone is downstairs! Shit!”
“Mine’s in my room. I can get it,” she said but did not trust her legs or courage to carry her there.
“There’s no time!” her father said.
“We need to stay together!” her mother ordered and clasped Lily’s hand between her own. She felt calmed by her mother’s touch, but only briefly.
Heavy footsteps stomped decisively through the downstairs hallway and began ascending the staircase.
“Oh my God! What’re we going to do?” she panicked.
“The window!” her father said. “Out the window! It’s our only hope.”
Lily felt a tug at her hand, and her mother pulled her toward the window. She looked out. Her parent’s bedroom overlooked the backyard. The landscape was usually a picturesque scene of lush greenery, of serenity. Normally, she would see a meticulously mowed lawn sprawling and stretching to a verdant tree line that marked what looked like an endless forest beyond. But she did not see any of that now. The rich, vibrant hues of green that usually colored her yard had been paled, faded to a sickly silver-gray shade. Stony moonlight cast a ghostly pallor and allowed her to see that her backyard was not as it had been left hours earlier. And there were people milling about. Her heart thundered in her chest as she saw nearly a half-dozen men moving by the scant ashen light of the Moon, as well as the headlamps of the SUVs, piling branches and brushwood around a tall wooden stake. They moved somberly, but with purpose, in the dusky dimness and lent the perplexing scene gravity and darkness. Lily felt her mother’s hands release hers and watched as they shot up to her mouth. Her mother gasped.
“Oh my God,” her mother breathed. “Jim, in the yard; look what they’ve done in the yard!”
But her father never had the opportunity to see what she and her mother had seen. A torrent of black swept into the room, a flurry of blurred shapes that moved in a coordinated but hurried manner. Lily heard the scream escape her lips as she saw them enter. Her father did not have time to turn toward the window or react. They moved too quickly. Men, all large and dressed in dark clothing, descended on them like a tide of blackened ocean. They surged into the room with ski masks pulled over their faces and advanced without breaking stride. The men grabbed both of her parents.
“Mom! Dad!” she cried and felt hands yank at her wrists. She lurched backward and nearly fell.
The world began to spin. Her mind filled with disjointed incomplete thoughts, whirling and revolving faster and faster. She desperately wanted, needed, to anchor herself to a coherent thought, something concrete; something that made sense. But nothing made sense. She heard her parent’s voices shouting. They sounded as if they were calling from the end of a long tunnel.
“Take your hands off my daughter!” her mother shrieked.
“Who are you?” her father demanded. “What do you want from us?”
“Just let our daughter go!” her mother pleaded.
None of the dark figures answered.
“We don’t have any money or valuables!” her father argued.
“We’re not here for either,” a calm voice said from the doorway and sounded far closer and clearer than any other. The spinning in Lily’s mind slowed considerably, albeit inexplicably. But her heart pounded more rapidly, speeding dangerously at the sound of the man’s voice. His voice flowed smoothly in a deep, rich baritone, the cadence as soothing and lulling as floating on a gently rolling river. Yet, it did not make her feel at ease in the least. To the contrary, the feeling inside that warned when she had awoken and continued to warn, though blindsided seconds earlier, began to rage against it, presaging of imminent danger. She and her parents were being held against their will, and something about the man in the doorway, something about his demeanor, terrified her more than the men holding them.
With her mind no longer spinning and her thoughts sharpened, she looked to the entryway, curiosity mingling with terror, to see the person whose serene voice had set off a firestorm of fear and aversion deep within her core. A tall sinewy shape filled the frame. He wore dark clothing like the others, but instead of a mask, a large hood covered his head and obscured his features.
“Is this her?” one of the men that held her asked.
The man with the hood approached her slowly, his gait deliberate. She could not see his eyes, but felt them on her, burning her skin like acid.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” her father yelled, but the man remained unfazed. He kept walking until there were only inches between them. Lily’s heart knocked
dangerously fast against her ribcage and tears streamed from her eyes. Each breath she took was short and shallow; she had never been so afraid in all of her sixteen years. The man did not speak right away. He loomed over her with his body so close to hers she could feel the heat radiating from it. He smelled of pine and musk, and she felt sickened by the scent. He raised his hands and she flinched, certain he was about to strike her. Only he did not. Instead, he lifted his hands to his head and pulled back his hood. She inhaled sharply, involuntarily, at the sight before her. Beneath the hood, he was monstrously disfigured. Deeply pitted flesh in shades of brown, pink, gray and angry red spread out in a horrific network and covered his entire face. His skin was puckered and charred, his features consumed completely by what looked like burns. His lipless mouth remained in a perpetual snarl and his ears seemed to have melted to his skull. He stooped to look at her and she recoiled in fear. He glowered at her with sunken, slate-colored eyes that had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows, yet managed to convey intensity with their stare. The hatred he radiated for her was palpable. But the reason for his hatred of her remained a mystery; she did not know why. She had never seen him before, would have surely remembered his face. And if she survived this encounter with him, she was positive his features would be indelibly etched into her memory, for it was the content of nightmares. With him so close, she struggled to move, to breathe even. Every part of her, including her lungs, had frozen. He looked like a demon, a beast that had risen from the depths of hell.
“Yes, yes,” the demon man hissed and ran his tongue over his bared teeth. “She is one of them,” he said then he reached a hand into his jacket. Before she knew what was happening, a deafening blast rang out. She saw the muzzle flash, but did not realize a gun had been fired until she saw her father fall to the floor. Her mother opened her mouth to cry out, but the words never formed. She was silenced by bullets to her head. Lily collapsed to the floor, every part of her trembling and teeming with emotion.
“No!” she screamed; her voice shrill and foreign to her own ears as she looked at the image before her. Her parents lay in an expanding pool of blood on their bedroom floor. Her mind began to spiral, plunging headlong deeper and deeper into a blackened abyss from which there was no escape. Dark, velvety oblivion beckoned her with welcoming arms and numbness. She heard a flurry of voices and fought the seductive swell of shock.
“Why did you kill her parents?” a voice questioned. “Was that really necessary?”
She watched blearily as the demon man unsheathed a knife from his belt and slashed at the air with astounding speed. The man whom she presumed had spoken dropped to the floor beside her, his throat slit in a long arc below his jaw.
“Does anyone else wish to question God’s will?” the demon man asked. “He who harbors the devil’s minions will suffer God’s wrath.”
He waited for someone to respond and Lily felt herself fall to the darkness until the man’s voice rang out again. “Grab her and follow me!”
She felt both of her arms being tugged by two separate people. Her eyes scanned the room and landed on her parents. She began to scream and thrash, but the men who held her did not react. They dragged her down the stairs, through the hallway and out the sliding glass door to her backyard. She fought and kicked, but was powerless against them. They were simply too strong. Her mind no longer tried to succumb to the void though. Something else entirely began to happen; something primal and inexplicable began to rise within her. What she saw beyond the glass of the doors sent it coursing through her veins like electricity. She saw a group of men clad in hooded cloaks. They held crudely fashioned crosses made of branches and chanted verses that were unintelligible. They stood and had formed a circle around a tall, wooden rod with brushwood piled beneath it. She recognized what it was immediately and cried out, “No! Please, no! No!” But no one responded to her pleas. They hoisted her up atop the twigs and began tying her to the pole. The circle opened and the chanting silenced briefly as the tall man with the burnt face entered and approached her. The circle closed around him. He held a torch in his hand.
“Please,” she begged. “Please don’t!”
She watched in horror as he pulled a lighter from his pants pocket and lit the combustible end of it. He held it close to the kindling and said, “Where is she? Where is the One, the Sola?”
“Sola?” she managed in a shaky voice.
“Do not play dumb with me, witch! The only one; the one who walks alone!”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she cried.
“Liar! You know exactly who I’m talking about. She is the sole prophet, the darkest one among your people, witch,” he spat. “She has been here; I can feel her.”
Lily had no idea what he was talking about, why he rambled on about such nonsense. All she knew was that he was a murderer, an insane murderer who had killer her parents, tied her to a stake and intended to burn her alive.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I-I’m not a witch! And I don’t know anyone named Sola!”
“Very well, then. Have it your way!” he said and threw the torch at the brushwood.
The dried branches caught fire immediately. She felt her bare feet begin to burn as flames licked at them, writhing and blistering, reaching up her ankles and calves searing her flesh. She heard herself whimper in pain, blinding white-hot pain. The man watched her face and seemed to relish in her agony. She saw her own face reflected in his cold, pale eyes. And rage began to fill her, rage unlike any she had ever felt. A strange sensation crept up the length of her spine and spread out from her core to her extremities. She knew the flames had engulfed her thighs; that the fire had reached her waist, but she no longer felt its heat, or the pain. The unfamiliar sensation had etched away at it. She looked up into the eyes of the demonic looking man, and a glow of red in her irises was mirrored in his. Crimson light blazed from her eyes.
“We all see it now, witch. Evil has shown its true face to us,” he said and attempted a cruel smile.
Lily let his words fall to the flames with her body. The fire engulfed her fully, yet she felt a sense peace overtake her. Death embraced her. Consciousness slipped away, escaped slowly. The sadness and anger she’d felt earlier dissolved into obscurity along with the ethereal scarlet glow of her eyes. Her body had been reduced to ashes, but her spirit had been released. Fear, pain, misery and rage dispersed like cinders into the night sky.