Have you ever seen a demon cry? | Lisa x Female Reader

Chapter 1

As I sit in the passenger seat next to Yena, the familiar beats of our favorite song vibrating through the car, I glance out the window and noticed something odd up ahead: my parents' car, stopped in the middle of the road.

“Yena, pull over," I say, my voice tinged with concern. She furrows her eyebrows but complies, maneuvering the car to a stop in front of my parents' vehicle.

I step out of the car, the gravel crunching beneath my shoes.

A sense of unease washes over me as I approach their car. Peering inside, I find it empty, the engine still running.

Confusion sets in as I survey the scene. "Isn't this your parents' car?" Yena's voice breaks the silence, her worry mirroring mine.

"Yeah," I reply, my heart pounding. "Stay here, I'll be back." With a deep breath, I turn away from Yena and the safety of the road, stepping cautiously into the edge of the forest where faint footprints mark a path leading deeper into the shadows.

As I step deeper into the forest, the air seemed to drop in temperature. I shudder, pulling my jacket around me tightly, and scanned the ground with my flashlight.

It is scattered with coins and pieces of white cloth.

Curious, I bent over to get a closer look, when somewhere in the distance, the leaves began to shift. Then movement; the soft thump of footsteps against earth.

I raise my eyes to the shadowy thicket that surrounds me. It is still except for the wind rustling the branches above. Relieved, I take a step forward, when my foot hit something soft and large.

The muscles in my stomach tighten as I lower my flashlight to the ground. And then I see it. A hand, as pale as porcelain, its delicate fingers curled into the soil.

I follow it to a wrist, an arm, a neck, a face streaked with dirt and shrouded with strands of long chestnut hair.

I gasp and look away. The pungent smell of rotting leaves wafts through the air. Reluctantly, I look back at the body. “Mom,” I whisper, barely audible.

She is lying on her back, her arms limp by her side. Her eyes are closed, and I may have thought she was sleeping if her skin hadn’t been so pale.

Her thin athletic legs, which I had inherited, are now cold and stiff, though they still retain the same girlish shape that she is so proud of.

I lean over and placed my fingers below her jaw. Her skin was freezing. I don’t know why, but I check her pulse even though I know she is already dead.

Lifeless, she looks older than usual, as if she had aged ten years. Her cheeks are unusually sunken in, and her glasses are nowhere to be seen.

Without them, the skin under her eyes looks raw and exposed, drooping down in circles like the rings of a tree.

My father is a few feet away, coins scattered around his body. The flashlight slipped from my fingers and landed softly in the dirt, rolling until its beam shone on my father’s legs.

As I stare at his boots, slumped unnaturally to either side, I feel my breath leave me.

I want to look away, to run back to the road and call for help, but I can’t bring myself to leave because I know that these are the last moments I will ever have with my parents.

“Why?” I choke out. When I was growing up, my parents had always seemed to have an answer to even my hardest questions.

But now, for the first time, they are silent.  Panic claws at my throat as I fumble for my phone, fingers trembling as I dial Yena's number.