idea what had happened to their first set of twins, and were surprised with another.
The last figure, which I hadn’t noticed in the beginning, stood off to the side. She was very pretty, but very strange looking. Her dress was a red flower, with a green stem as a belt. On her eyebrows, the words Nice or Evil were written. Her irises were the same on the bottom and top. Her pupils were red and the whites of her eyes were black.
“Hello, Krystal,” she said. Her voice was soft and sweet, and almost hypnotizing.
Almost.
THIRTEEN
IT’S NOT OVER
“Krystal,” the strange woman spoke. “It’s not over yet.”
Time slowed as I turned to look at her, all of the sounds warping and decreasing in pitch. Her eyes flashed blue and the wind shifted her long red hair. Time quickened again and she smiled.
A ghost appeared behind her, appearing from the ground at her feet. Hexinoide.
I pounced at him, my huge lungs breathing and my spotted fur becoming reality all the way to the tip of my tail.
I passed right through him and stumbled over myself, landing on my side.
“I thought cats always landed on their feet,” Hexinoide laughed, his eyes gleaming with darkness.
I growled. I was mad. Something told me he was pulling me towards him, like he wasn’t really there floating behind the lady.
Cerberus reappeared from the trees, and jumped after a few bounds. Like I had just moments before, he sailed right through his master.
A whisper slithered from the bushes on both sides of the road.
“It’s not over!”
I woke up. Check my hands, my face, my everything. I’m a human. Not a cheetah.
“So it was a dream after all,” I whispered incredulously to the room around me. Then I recalled the first time this ‘dream’ occurred and I woke up in my bed. Or was that a dream too?
“It’s not over!”
“Huh?”
I jumped at the whisper, the one that had been in the last part of my dream. It seemed close yet… far.
A car alarm went off outside my window.
Something crashed into another, as if it’d been thrown.
“Thanks for saving us,” a voice said. It was familiar. Too familiar. A voice only in my dream.
I turned from the open window and back to my room. In the center stood Tigre and Lilaysh, grinning.
“Yeah,” Tigre joined in. He took his sister’s hand. “Thanks a lot.”
I smiled. I had a brother and sister. Fellow twins. My sister—
I heard a jiggle. My doorknob turned and the door swung open.
“We didn’t want to tell you until your birthday but Cerberus chased you anyway,” my dad explains as he and my mother take up the entirety of my door frame, my sister pushing through.
“You know Krystal! You know!” she shouted excitedly.
“So… not a dream?”
My dad smiled and my mom opened her mouth to answer, but a different voice did that for her.
“No.”
The voice had three intertwined, creating one giant booming sound. I turned around, the voice coming from behind me. Drool plopped down onto my shoulder. I grimaced and flinched at what my eyes laid upon.
Cerberus, poking his head through my window.
A scream began to bubble up inside my throat and my breath quickened.
“No, don’t scream, you’ll alert Hexinoide. Now, before you try to destroy me, or run away, he is on his way here. You and your friends are the only ones who can destroy him,” he said.
“Family,” I corrected, wincing at my snappy comment.
“Right.” He cleared his throats. “Did you write down all those poems you saw behind the door?”
I shake my head, still shocked to see him half-way in my room. “But I memorized them.”
“Write them down,” he instructs.
I nod furiously and dart around the people crowding my room to grab a notebook. I scribble the poems as if the paper was on fire and I could only put out the flames with my words.
“I didn’t get the last one,” I admit, feeling a bit ashamed.
“Ah,” he nodded. “Here it is. The town is lonely and full of stones; Yellow fangs will destroy it. And what’s left standing will be bones, enchanted just a bit. Don’t worry, for it will not happen, unless you take control of it.”
I finished scribbling them down. Take control? Of what, the town?
“Speak these words aloud and you will defeat him, but put your soul into it. Otherwise everything you’ve ever known will be destroyed.”
He began to duck out of the window.
“Wait—you aren’t going to help us?” Lola asked, pulling forward.
“No.”
“But—”
“Krystal, we can defeat him,” my sister interrupted. “I know we can. Together.”
She took my hand and smiled at me, the same smile as mine.
I nodded. “You’re right, Megg. We can destroy him.”
We all made our way outside as Cerberus disappeared from my window. We transformed, every one of us, as a family. Lola, a panther, Tigre, a tiger, Mom, a spotted leopard, Dad, a clouded leopard, Megg, a lioness, and, finally, me, a cheetah. We were a strange bunch, for sure, but we were family.
“Come out and play, Hexinoide!” I shouted. “We’re ready to face you once and for all.”
FOURTEEN
DONE FORE
“Hello, Krystal.”
Hexinoide came up from the ground, a long smirk on his loose face.
“The girl who thought she was important. Come on, change back, I want to see your pathetic face.”
A chorus of growls lifted from our morphs. I open my mouth to recite the poem Cerberus gave me, but Hexinoide speaks before I can.
“Or not,” he giggled. “Follow me then.”
He darted off, down the road, the same way I’d ran the first day. I caught up to him easily, but I was running out of stamina. Cheetah’s can’t run distance, only sprints.
Luckily, we stopped. I inhaled, the taste of soggy earth filling my lungs as I changed back to myself.
“The town is lonely and full of stones; Yellow fangs will destroy it. And what’s left standing will be bones, enchanted just a bit. Don’t worry, for it will not happen, unless you take control of it,” I shout, hoping I actually did put all of my heart and soul into it.
Hexinoide gasped at my words and grabs ahold of his throat, choking. I tried to turn away, unable to watch, but something kept me watching.
He sunk to the ground, reaching to the sky.
His chokes changed into laughter as he sat up and rose above the ground.
“You really thought you could destroy me that easily? Ha!” He smiled. “You tried to do what that hound told you, but you failed! You’re nothing special. The curse wasn’t even for you, it was for her, your long lost sister. All that you’re good for is memorizing poems, nothing enchanting about—”
The ground rumbled and he fell silent. I looked around us. The graveyard.
The dirt began to rise on top of the graves, bone-hands poking up and reaching for the life they no longer possessed.
“Stones,” Lola whispered. “Headstones. The poem was talking about the graveyard.”
I glanced back at her as the skeletons begin to come from the ground. They were transparent and some are even chipped or incomplete. They staggered with each step, our cat claws protecting us from them. They were endless, still rising from the dirt. I grew exhausted, the cheetah fading away.
My eyes lazily slid over to where Hexinoide was staring me down, smiling. If I wasn’t important then why does he go out of his way to take me down? Why was he in my dreams?
This was a distraction.
I jumped past two skeletons reaching for me.
“Where are you going?” Lola called after me.
I didn’t respond, just kept walking toward Hexinoide, sta
ring him down.
“Well, look what the cat tracked in,” he said, something like fear covering his eyes, but only a thin layer of it. The rest was confidence.
“Look what the dog dragged in,” I counter breathlessly. “If it wasn’t for you—”
“If it wasn’t for me, your life would have been wonderful and you would have lived happy ever after. Your nightmares would eventually fade away and you would die peacefully with ten children… But I just had to come into your life. I had to ruin it.” His wicked smile made me growl. “If I didn’t, what was to come of your brother and sister? Would they have been left in the wild, abandoned by, not just their parents, but you as well? My, well, I thought I didn’t have a heart.”
I leapt, but said right through him. He caught me by the tail and yanked me back, my snarl ripping past my vocal chords. He yanked at it again, laughing in utter enjoyment of himself.
I transformed back to myself, my tail free and gone, and my blonde bangs sticking to my forehead. I was sweating. My breath was too rapid to get a satisfactory amount of oxygen into my lungs. I’m struggling
Suddenly, Hexinoide said something in a different language, anger rising inside of me as the animal pulling itself forward this time and taking over, pouncing before I could process what’s happening. I saw myself tearing him to shreds.
Everything went black.
+++
I wake once again, Lola and Tigre standing above me. I didn’t know that I had changed back to myself.
“W-what happened?” I asked, my heartbeat hitching in my chest. Did I kill him? Or—well he was all ready dead.
A smile spread across the twins’ faces.
“You destroyed Hexinoide!” They shouted. “You did it.”
“I did?”
“Yeah,” they responded. They showered me with hugs.
I felt sick.
Suddenly, we heard a roar. Everyone, my mom,