Katie yelled, "To the Barn! Run, Cy! Run!" She leaped off the cedar post beneath the corner of our front porch.
Our eleven-year-old bodies flew across the barnyard in the deathly silence of midnight, sprinting toward the dark maw of the tall, aging building. From inside our house, the banging and rumbling of an unseen beast exploded onto the porch, and the harsh sound of the night-demon's claws shredding the old wood planks brought a new terror to our hearts.
The final, defiant scream of our mother had roused us moments before, telling us to go. A screeching growl in the room below us signaled the demon's triumph and its intention for more.
We'd heard it charge up the narrow stairs of our house as Katie and I had slipped out the window of our bedroom. The shingles of our porch roof were wet with dew; our bare feet slipped on the wood as we scurried to the edge and slid down to the ground.
The heavy barn door was open.
My target was nearly invisible through the gloom: a heavy rope hanging in the center of the barn and tied to the rafters more than twenty feet above us. We both knew it was there, and I jumped as high as I could, grabbing on, frantically climbing with bare hands and feet.
Katie, my twin sister, followed close on my heels as we shimmied upward. It was a feat we'd done many times that summer as we helped our father ready the loft for the upcoming harvest.
I was almost twenty feet up when a scuff sounded on the dirt floor near the doorway. The heavy rope lurched and swayed, but I hung on until it settled, not daring to look down.
An inhuman laugh circled the barn, but I saw nothing, nothing but shadows. My sister was gone. The thick rope had been sheared off more than a dozen feet from the ground.
"Katie!" I sobbed. "Katie!!!"
I hung from the line until my muscles burned and finally failed; I slid down into the night below.
YOU ARE READING
FIREFANGED
Fantasy*I'm using Wattpad as a platform to do a complete make-over of my first novel, Firefanged, first published in 2020. I didn't know demon-slayers were a thing back then. I was more of an inner demon person, but I liked getting them out on the page. T...
