There is nothing more frightening than to be perfectly helpless in a blinded situation. As the darkness carefully weaves itself around her wrists and her ankles, the single scream of Remi tears itself across the house. Vera's eyes snap open in a single heart's beat, her heart frantic and her mind still foggy with heavy sleep.

Her quickly flings the wool blankets off of her body and gets to her feet. The chilly midnight air bites at her skin, nibbling at her flesh until she if left with small little shivers and large masses fear. But in that moment, Vera could hardly notice the cold, for her blood has gone numb, the feeling of utter despair slowly swallowing her whole.

Vera takes small, hesitant steps across the creaking wooden floorboards. Although her mind screams at her to run, her body refuses to obey, her movements rigid and strained.

The fear covers her legs and coats her arms in slowness, in a way that could be only described as paralyzing. But something wakes her from her state of terror, something that has her heart tearing out of her chest. It is the same taunting sound that had resonated in her ears just hours before.

She hears a hollow singing of shattering glass, all followed by a soft pitter patter as the shards fall onto the wooden floors above her.

And she breaks into a run. The fear that had contained her feet to the ground below her is torn away as she rips her bare feet away from the wood, her heart pounding in her ears as she sprints into down the halls. Vera can taste the salty metallic taste of her blood in her mouth, she could not remember when she had bitten her lip so hard that it started bleeding. Her eyes scan the peeling graying walls around her as she flitted past them, making sure there is nothing that can grab her by surprise.

It has been a very long time since she has felt such a strange surge of energy boiling in her veins. She cannot even hear her the sound of her feet padding against the floorboard, and for a moment, Vera is almost sure that as she is dashing into the kitchen, that she is almost soundless.

Vera catches the sight of the doorway to the kitchen underneath the dim moonlight. She swiftly dashes to the counter to grab the kitchen knife before sprinting up the stairs above her. There is no time for Vera to over compensate over her actions, nor was there any time for her to worry about the loudness of her ragged breathing.

The knife is heavy in her right hand, its weight rather unfamiliar to her, its hilt bulky within her tight grasp. Vera takes a small, shallow breath, her heart no longer beating as her slender fingers naturally adjust to the knife. Her arm is steady in place, poised in a strange yet familiar position, all ready to swing at any moment. A surge of burning flame courses in her chest, the heat of it rather welcoming than frightening. It is as if in a moment's notice, someone one has doused her body in gasoline and lit up her veins with a touch of fire.

With her body ignited by the licks of flame and sharp adrenaline, Vera swiftly reaches the top of the stairs and  searches for her room amidst the darkness, before making out the blurry shape of her bedroom door. Another crash slices through the air from behind it, followed by echoes of falling shards of glass. Tiny pieces of the clear fractures escape past the bottom gaps of her bedroom door, scattering around the wooden floor in front of her. 

In this moment, the girl racing towards the door is not Vera, but a different person entirely. The Vera that is consuming her body is not a human, but rather the tempered rage of a burning wildfire. She does not notice how in that very instant, in the very moments of time that was wearing down, that she was no longer a fearful girl, whom was afraid of shadows and towering heights. 

Vera endures the biting pain of the glass shards burying themselves into the sensitive flesh beneath her bare feet, each of her step sending a million of razor sharp crystals  piercing into her skin. The warmth of blood seeps into her skin and dribbles down her chin in a thin crimson line, the sharp and metallic bitter taste of it stinging her tongue. In the rush of it all, she had bitten down on her lip hard enough to cause it to bleed.

She places her left hand on the rusty copper knob, desperately twisting and yanking it in hopes of getting the door to swing open, however much to her absolute dismay, it does not budge beneath her fingers. The knob only rattles in show of resistance. Without hesitation, Vera moves to her side and musters all of her strength, drinking in all of her adrenaline and courage, before taking a quick breath. Her heart races in her chest and the world has gone quiet. In her raised right hand is the knife, poised and ready to slice into anything that is going to attack her.

In a single kick, her bedroom door flies open, the sound of crackling wood and snapping metal hinges ringing in her ears as she breaks into the room.

Clouds of suffocating dust and splinters of wood covers the air before her, before subsiding into the darkness. Around her lay remnants of what had been her room, where her closet used to be is now a pile of shredded cloth and splinters of lumber, while her bed is mess of broken rusty springs, torn wood, and feathers tipped with splotches of deep, dark red blood. But what causes her blood to go cold is the shadow that resides in front of  the window before her.

A ring of the jagged clear glass and fragmented wooden frame of the window lie around the shadowed figure, with its back turned towards Vera. It towers over the broken window, its crooked figure only visible in areas where the pale graying light graces it. Rows upon rows of obsidian scales cover its twisted and mangled thin humanoid body, its legs clad in the same black, glass-like matter, while the place where the creatures toes should be are long, jagged obsidian talons. 

Vera almost cries out as she realizes that a small, frail arm lies dangling from the side of the obsidian creature, in its grasp a torn and battered brown teddy bear, cotton spilling from its stomach.

Remi.

The hand that holds the knife trembles, however, it still remains tight within her grasp, before sailing through the air almost gracefully, and sinking into the black flesh of the shadow before her. Vera does not take any time to analyze her own actions, and nor does she have any time to fully comprehend the fact that it was physically impossible for any inexperienced swordsman to perfectly throw a blade at a target. All she can render is the sight of the knife sinking into the back of the creature. Vera can almost hear the sound of tiny pieces of glass fracturing as the tip of the blade sinks deeper into its inhuman obsidian flesh, the echo of it sickening and revolting in her ears. 

A substance of pitch black ink drips from where the hilt of the kitchen knife had sunk into and pools at the creatures taloned feet, coating the tips of its claws with the dark blood. A gasp could not help but escape Vera's lips as the shadow turns to show its face to her.

The creature does not have eyes.

All it had was a hair raising smile a row of razor sharp ridged obsidian, the tip of each jagged fang coated in a shiny red substance that manages to twist the insides of Vera's stomach. The corners of its ridged smile stretches from one side from its scaly obsidian face to the other - it bloody grin very much resembling a knife slowly tearing through skin from within a body. 

In its thin, gnarled arms lie the limp body of a fragile little boy, whose mop of familiar curly black hair was knotted in lumps of half dried blood. A patch of pale moonlight falls onto Remi's face, carefully carving into the soft curves of her little cousin's face. From afar, he looks as if he were simply sleeping peacefully, his lips placed in a small line and the space between his eyebrows unmarked by the little lines of stress and anger that he has always worn, even for such a young boy.

But that was what Vera could have only wished the situation to be, for that at a closer look, trickles of shiny red blood can be seen dripping down the corner of his forehead in large droplets. His eyes slowly flutter open, although he can only manage to look at her behind sunken brown eyes, the heaviness of his blood coated lashes causing him to only be able to lift his lids a fraction of the way. His brown eyes, so usually coated with cold hollowness, are now filled with genuine fear.  He mouths to her, I'm scared, Vera.  The torn teddy bear Remi holds in his hand begins to slowly fall from his grasp, before hitting the floor with a barely audible thud, just as the little boy's eyelids start to droop lower.

"Remi! " Vera screams, before ripping herself away from whatever fear had tied her down before. She seizes a large piece of pointed glass that had lay next to her feet, before charging at the creature with reckless determination. The sharp edges of the glass cut into the palms of her hand, but the pain fails to register in her mind. The remnants of fear that had curled at the pit of stomach dissipates, slowly morphing into a pit of curling flames.  "Let. Go. Of. Him." Vera hisses at the creature through bared teeth, before lunging towards it with the blade in hand. 

Her movements are swift and precise, her bleeding bare feet almost dancing towards the monster  until it is only several feet away from her. Her shoulders tense, her arms prepared to raised in front of her, her left hand before the hand holding the piece of glass. Although she has never practiced in knife-throwing, the position feels oddly familiar to her, as she readies herself to fling the glass. With a quick snap of her wrist, the fragment of glass soars towards the creature, the sharp point of it sailing through the air silently, before gracing the creature's blackened heart. 

Everything happens unbearably slowly.

A loud, sickening crack reverberates around the room, before the creature stumbles back, almost surprised,  at the sudden impact of the piece of glass that has now impaled its very chest. Its bloody mouth stretches into an even bigger grin, before it takes a step back. And begins to fall through the window, with her dying cousin in its arms. 

With wide eyes, Vera takes a gasp of air and releases it in a blood-curdling scream. She races towards the window, her arms outstretched to catch the plunging creature as it starts to fall out into the open. As the it tips backwards, the place of where the glass had sunken into its body begins to shatter bit by bit, until the entire creature itself is entirely covered in the thin black cracks that had been eating away at its obsidian flesh.

And then it shatters.

It is a miracle that Vera finds herself promptly shielding her face with her hands and shifting her body so that she is not directly facing the blast. Her sight is covered in obsidian darkness, bits and pieces of glass spraying everywhere around her, slicing into her arms and shoulders. When the sound of the outburst resides, Vera lowers her hands and opens her eyes, before rushing to the window, fearful of the sight that will present itself on the pavement below.

As she bends her head out the window, a faint voice whispers at the back of her mind, so soft and gentle, a voice of bittersweet memories and nightmares only present in her nightly dreams. "You should not have been born. Remember Vera Adelaide, you will only put the ones you love in danger. You bear the life of love and sacrifice. My dear, you are the cursed child who will bring Hell to Heaven's gates."

Her heart has ceased to beat. 

And to her absolute horror and relief, there is nothing there.

- 

Author's Note:

Hello my wonderful readers and fellow friends. I hope you all have enjoyed reading this chapter, because I waited for such a long time to write this! I apologize for leaving you all on such a long cliff-hanger, but hey, now there's another one so... *insert awkward wink* I would like to thank you all for such dedication to this story, and I would also want to point out that despite the non activeness of myself (IM SORRY SCHOOL AND STRESS FRIENDS SCHOO AND STRESS) we've managed to reach 20K READS! And not to mention that you all have earned us back up to #31 in Paranormal. I cannot thank you enough for the support, and now that I'm finally on Spring Break, I can safely say that there will be a lot more updates, so be on the look out my loves <3 Also, please do comment and vote and support, and feel absolutely free to leave your ideas and comments below, because I absolutely do value each and everyone of them. Have a wonderful night/day my lovelies!

-Sophia