How her scream hadn’t been heard by her parents, she would never know; especially since others came out to investigate before hiding back inside their homes.
Sudden flickering images flashed every time she blinked, and she fluttered her eyelids in a desperate attempt to fast-forward through them...
There was darkness all around her. A small blaze ignited below her feet as she looked down at Gideon’s scrunched-up face of determination while he climbed her body. His tanned features were fixed on the winged Demon who was slowly taking them higher and higher. With Gideon, their combined weight was too heavy for it to fly off properly.
It released one of its three-toed, clawed feet from her shoulders to kick at him, so Gideon jumped to its leg. The silver glint of his dagger was a cold white in the moonlight, and yet reflected the growing flames below.
She never forgot the way terror had set its fangs in her gut, or how her frantic heart thought it would give out. Nor could she forget Gideon’s grunts, or the Demon’s disgusting snarls, let alone the hair-raising sound of its voice as it demanded Gideon let go.
And when she looked up, the image of its feathery, flapping wings was seared into her mind’s eye to further haunt her every dream. Its red eyes glowed in her nightmares, filled with blood – her blood, as it hungered for every drop. Its white fangs were like a wolf’s, yet somehow bigger, sharper, and more frightening.
Then Gideon had pulled his dagger out, but it didn’t have enough time to stop him from stabbing it in the leg that gripped her.
Her scream rung out like a hollow echo even now, and she cringed and twisted as if that would help rid her of it.
Her breaths turned shallow and sharp, whereas Ingram’s chest had stilled completely, likely to avoid the scent of her fear.
“The Demon dropped me to grab ahold of Gideon, and I fell.” Emerie’s bottom lip trembled. The images, her memories, didn’t stop, and the longer she tried to remove them, the more liquid spilled from her eyes, saturating her long lashes. “When I landed, it was right near where I had dropped my oil lamp.”
Fuck, she gasped with a flinch, her eyes clenching shut.
She still remembered the snap she’d heard from how she landed on her arm when she threw it over her head to protect it. She’d felt the heat of bright flames coming closer until she landed in them on her left side.
After recovering from being momentarily stunned by the fall, the first thing she tried to do was escape it as liquid fire clung to her skin, her clothing, her hair. Her scream was ear-piercing, even to her own eardrums, and the disgusting, charred smell of her own skin singed the inside of her nostrils.
She barely heard the yell from above, but a copious amount of liquid falling on her head snuffed out the worst of the flames covering it before someone threw a blanket over her.
Stop, drop, and roll didn’t register past her agony. No logical thought was able to surface other than her panic and pain. She tried to put out the flames by patting her body erratically, all the while staring at them on her arm, unable to think about how to do that.
In that moment, she’d known nothing but her skin bubbling and boiling. The smell of oil, skin, hair, and clothing burning. All she’d heard was crackling, punctuated by her own cries.
“I didn’t even have time to register that I’d broken my arm when all I felt was fiery agony,” she whispered, her voice quivering.
She needed to finish her story; she’d told it before. She could do this.
Emerie sucked in a large, cooling breath.
“I didn’t even know until later that my home was in flames and that my parents were trapped inside.” She lowered her voice until it was barely comprehensible, as she said, “It wasn’t until later that I was told what saved the worst of my face from being melted away was Gideon’s blood and insides landing on my head.”
Emerie dug her nails into her shirt when her heart ached beyond recognition. She wanted to pull it out, to tell it to stop hurting. She wished her breaths hadn’t turned so shallow and short, or that her skin hadn’t suddenly flared with heat everywhere she was scarred from that night.
With just a small amount of fuel, she feared she’d combust and have to relive those burns.
“In one night, my whole family, my identity, my life, was taken from me. Because of a Demon, because of my own stupidity. I spent months in an infirmary with burns on twenty-five percent of my body. Those first weeks... I remember nothing. Then, when I finally came to, I had to learn that everyone I cared about in this entire world, people I didn’t think I could live without, were gone, and that it was all my fault. It bothers me every day that the last thing I said to Gideon was an insult.”
Learning that half of the left side of her face and neck had third-degree burns had been horrifying to see when she’d first looked in the mirror. She also had them from her thigh all the way to her chest, with the worst being on her shoulder and biceps.
They had been even harder to accept.
She’d lost strength in her arm, and she still sometimes struggled to move it without her scars pulling. They were tight, sunken, and some days itchy if she didn’t air them.
Emerie had to learn to live with all this, plus the insecurity it brought, and didn’t have the people she needed the most there to soothe her through it.
Gideon was gone, and his green eyes would never again shine at her the way they used to, full of brotherly love. She’d never see his light, near-caramel-coloured hair play in the wind, or feel his arms wrap around her, bringing her in for a tight hug.
The world would never hear him mangle a guitar or sing while pissed drunk, tone-deaf and completely unaware of it.
He would have been there for her every single day had he been alive. He would have petted her uninjured hand, spoon fed her soup, and tried everything in his might to make her laugh at his stupid puns and jokes.
And her parents... although they were getting old, they’d been robbed of the last few years of their lives together. They would have done everything in their power to make her comfortable, and never would have tried to make her feel bad for doing this to herself.
These three people would have unconditionally loved her, accepted her, and still thought she was beautiful.
Instead, the world had turned cold, lonely, and unbearable. It had grown dark, even on the brightest of days.
It had become empty.