Fairytales

Chapter 1

**authors note**

Thank you so much for reading! So the beginning of this story may be a little slow but I promise it is just to help you fall in love with these characters! Damia and Chase are my absolute favorites and I really hope you will feel the same. Please keep on reading and I promise things will get more intense. This started out as a book I wanted to try publishing but decided against it so now its here. I hope you will enjoy and please comment with any ideas or critiques! Thanks!

**end authors note**

The night my parents died I was asleep in the backseat.

It was cold that night, well below freezing, though no snow had touched the ground yet.

The annual hospital Christmas party, the one I wouldn't even have gone to if it hadn't been for the babysitter that had canceled last minute, had run a little later than planned. We hadn't expected the sleet, or worse, the ice that covered the ground in one glistening sheet, despite Chicago's tendency for harsh winters.

But my parents were elated, the happiest I had seen them since, well, ever.

The current Chief of surgery had announced that he was stepping down. More importantly, he'd already decided who would take his place: my dad.

So maybe it wasn't just the ice that sent our tiny black car sliding across that dark back road and into a tree three miles from our house, all while I lay, unconscious, under a pink snoopy blanket in the backseat. That fourth glass of Champagne, the one I'd seen my mom try to take from my dad's hand no more than a half hour before we left, might have had something to do with it too.

I'm not supposed to remember anything. I was asleep. I hit my head against the front seat upon impact, knocked unconscious until I woke up in a crisp white hospital bed two days later.

But, sometimes, I dream of their screams. My mom, my dad, echoing infinitely in my ears. And sometimes, only sometimes, I dream of a face, leaning over me as I shiver in the sudden cold: a man, tall and hulking, with a scar that ran down one side of his face, a crescent moon slicing through his left eye.

Slowly, as his gaze travels from my toes poking out of my black tights to the warm drip of blood slipping down my forehead, his grizzled face stretches into a wide grin. "See you soon, little one."

And his eyes glow red.

***************

I woke up in a cold sweat, the sheets tangling around my legs. The bright blue ceiling above my head looked as foreign to me as the soft dinging of the grandfather clock that echoed through the thin walls.

It took six whole dings before the dream faded into recent memory and reality came rushing back like a tidal wave.

I'd had the dream again.

Slowly, I sat up in bed, letting the soft sheets pool around my legs as I rubbed my face with one palm.

There wasn't much about my nightmares that were real. Not lately. The accident though, was far too real.

Two days afterwards, I'd woken up in a stark white hospital room with no memory of it whatsoever, just a fuzzy recollection of too many cookies stolen from the holiday tray. For a moment, just the tiniest of moments, I'd thought the blurry figure of a woman standing above me had been my mom coming to wake me up for school like she usually did. But I'd blinked, hard, and the image of my mother was gone, replaced by a woman who I'd only ever seen once outside of pictures tucked away in the back of scrapbooks.

My Aunt Rita, who looked very much like a petite version of myself, especially now, had had no problem convincing the staff to let her stay in the room with me until I'd woken up. She'd been the one to break the news to me, her small hands clutching mine like she knew me.