"Go! Take Isaac, run and hide, I'll hold him off!" the man said to the woman.
The woman picked up the child and started to turn away from the man.
"Wait!"
The man walked over to the woman and child and pulled them into a hug.
"Trevor, I love you,"
"I love you too, now go," the man named Trevor said as he placed a kiss on the woman's forehead.
The woman turned back around and ran through the open back door of their small suburban home. The man, frozen, stood watching as his wife and young child moved closer to the thick forest that resided behind their yard. His eyes diverted for a moment to look at the large black hawk circling high above in the clouded, dark gray sky. Trevor turned his gaze back to his wife just as she entered the wooded area. The hawk screamed.
The woman ran until she was out of breath, she had small cuts from bushes and branches and her feet ached. She had stopped in a small clearing surrounded by pine trees the size of giants, with trunks the size of cars. Surrounding the base of the trees were large fluffy bushes that looked like dark green cotton candy. Standing in the center was a burned-down cobblestone house. The woman slowly walked to the corner of the charred cobblestone and leaned against one of the walls, carefully sliding down into a sitting position. She hesitated but then placed the child on top of some thick moss growing in the corner. She reached her hands to the back of her neck and slowly removed a glowing blue, flame-shaped pendant, and carefully set it down on top of her child. The woman let out a loud sigh and slowly brought some of the dry leaves on the ground to cover the baby. There was a loud scream that came in the direction of which she had come.
She looked up through the trees and saw a hawk resting on a branch high above the ground. The woman made a hissing noise and the hawk dove off its branch, circling down to the ground until landing on the woman's shoulder. She made another series of hissing sounds and the hawk flew off her shoulder and landed on a nearby branch directly across from the house. The hawk kept its glare glued to the small pile of leaves in the corner.
The woman made one last hissing noise before shifting into a bright orange fox with blue irises, the same colour as the pendant that she had just placed with the child, the woman, now a vixen, started to trot in the direction she had been heading previously. The hawk cried in response to the hiss.
The hawk perched in the same place and the same position it had been for a couple of hours. The sun had just started to set although it was barely visible behind the dark, friction full, thunderclouds. A slow drizzle started just as the hawk caught sight of a skulk running at full speed in the direction the vixen had disappeared in. The hawk spread its large feathered wings and flew after the group.
The hawk trailed the group until they had finally stopped outside the mouth of a cave. Two of the foxes entered the jagged cave. The hawk had found a place to rest on a tree branch that allowed it to view the cave perfectly, it could hear tipping and barks echoing from the cave. The two foxes who had recently entered the cave returned. The fox on the left was slightly larger and more muscular than the one on the right so it seemed fitting that he carried the limp body of the vixen whose child the hawk had been guarding for hours. by now the rain had begun to come down in buckets, so much so that it was getting increasingly hard to see the female fox still breathing. Only visible to the hawk was the pain in each breath. The fox who was carrying her threw her harshly onto the ground, the other foxes began to circle her, nipping her tail and biting her ankles. There was a flash of lightning that blinded the hawk and then a loud boom of thunder that swallowed the pained cry of the vixen.
Isaac woke up screaming. Normally this would sound odd, but for the brown-hair, blue-eyed, 16 years old this was nothing new. The same nightmare had been slipping into Isaac's mind at night. It always began with the couple and the kid and it always ended with both of them being murdered. This recurring dream had been waking Isaac up every night since his sixteenth birthday the previous week. Isaac pulled on the chain to turn on his cream-coloured lamp. He looked at his small black digital clock for the time and saw that it was 4:02 in the morning. Pulling out a small pocket journal from his oak wood dresser he wrote down the number with a black pen slipped in between the pages.
Isaac switched his red and black flannel pyjama pants for some grey sweatpants. He walked slowly over to his door, grabbing his phone and flashlight on the way. He opened it cautiously and crept down the hallway, careful to not wake his parents. Isaac had been adopted by an extremely kind and loving couple. After not being able to have kids the two looked into adoption and according to his parents when they were having trouble with this, Isaac had been left on their doorstep in a woven bassinet, wrapped in a white blanket with a blue flame-shaped necklace sitting on top of him along with a book and a note inside that read "A gift, in hopes it guides you." They had taken him in and a couple of days later they made it official. His dad was a large, bald, muscular man with brown eyes. He worked as a veterinarian at his self-established veterinary clinic. His mother was a short woman who had a kind face and a love for cooking, she had shoulder-length brown hair with blond highlights and light brown eyes. She worked as a history teacher at the local high school.
Isaac grabbed a water bottle and the sandwich he had put in the fridge the night before. He quickly wrote a note to his parents and left it on the maple wood counter. Isaac grabs his hoodie navy blue hoodie and slips on his sneakers. He unlocked the front door and slipped out, locking it again behind him. Isaac pressed the play button on his phone, playing his music through the headphones he had just plugged in. Switching on the flashlight Isaac began to walk.
The sun had just begun to rise as Isaac reached his destination, an old burned-down stone house in the middle of the woods. The stone was all covered in moss and Ivy and there was only the floor and the corner of two walls that were crumbling. A small platform, made from a piece of the second floor that had collapsed, was also left. Isaac came here daily, on the weekends he would sometimes stay for days at a time. During the summertime, Isaac would bring a sleeping bag and stay overnight, climbing up to the second floor to stay away from ground dwellers. In a large waterproof bin, Isaac had brought with him a while ago, was a stack of books and some essential items like a box of matches and a Swiss army knife. Under a tarp next to the bin was some dry firewood for Isaac to use. Isaac sat down in the corner with one of the books he had stored in the bin. Watership Down was Isaac's favourite book, not only for the story but also because this book had been one of the two things that were with him when he had been left on his parent's porch. Isaac had read the book at least a hundred times, hoping to possibly find a clue or hint as to who had written the note inside. Pointing his flashlight at the book, Isaac began to read. After finishing a couple of chapters, Isaac began to feel himself become drowsy, deciding to not fight it Isaac fell asleep.
