Shattered

Chapter 1#

In a world where everyone struggles to survive and stay alive, it's hard to find an actual family. A home. A place where children laugh and play and the mother and father smile to themselves at night and wonder, "We made this. We made a family." Today, in a time of technology, you don't find these people nowadays. You don't look through the window and see a mother making dinner for her children, you see a father yelling at his flesh and blood, telling them what they did wrong and pointing out every mistake in their life. You don't see people living in a world that they call "happy."

In my world, I was "happy." Key word: was. I would wake up in the morning and find my mother making breakfast in the kitchen, my father getting ready to leave for work, and my brother Jonathan sitting at the kitchen table texting his friends or playing the latest game on his phone. After a few minutes of chatting while I munched on toast and discussed my after-school plans with my mother, I would head upstairs and get ready for the day, possibly stare at my reflection in the mirror, and then head downstairs in an outfit I had picked out after four tries. A drive to school and eight hours of socializing and schooling later, I would arrive back to my home with a friend or two and we would talk about drama and the latest gossip in my bedroom.

See, I'm talking in past-tense here.

My father passed 12 years ago. Joined the angels. Joined the squad that was assigned to watch over the world and make sure people were good. Whatever your religion or state of being calls for.

A fire started it all. A spark of flame that lit up the night sky with a brilliant amber color. You could see it around our city; from the park, from the café, even from the small library down seven streets away. Everywhere. All that had happened was a flame had begun to spread in a quick fashion at my father's factory. Immediately, it went up in flames and only four people made it out alive. The rest were burnt to a crisp; including a man by the name of Valentine Morgenstern, my father.

It hit us hard. Jonathan, who was almost an exact replica of my father, with his stark white hair and tall build, went berserk. He would hole up in his room for days on end without even a small sound behind the wood of the door. His cheeks had sunken in, making his sharp features even sharper, and his beautiful white electric guitar was found on the grass, shattered, a few weeks after Father's death.

Mom... She was a painter. Before she had my brother and I, she would sell her paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars. You could say my brother ruined that for her. She poured her heart into her paintings after my father passed, and became widely known. Of course, with that being said, she didn't have time for us anymore. She had more time for her new husband, Luke Garroway, than her own blood. She had always been that way, and I am sad to say that it always will be that way.

The nightmares came again tonight.

Then again, I'm not sure why I am still not accustomed to the fact that the same haunting dream has come at midnight for two years. Ever since the night after my father's death. The same man who taught me to survive, and how to defend myself against people who would want to hurt me, people who would want to change me, people who would want to kill me.

I never knew how right he was.