The Devil's Guardian

1)Blast From The Past

"Sally's song" by Amy Lee
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Life will pass by even when it feels it impossible for it to happen. People grow, every single day, physically and emotionally. There is no stopping it and no pause button for when it comes to time passing by.
That is what Neve learned nearly sixteen years on. People die every day, no one is immortal. Your entire family can be lost, your entire childhood can crumble, but, the world will still go on, not stopping even when it feels as though your entire universe as you knew it was shattered.

Life in the aftermath of her family's passing was as decent as it could be. There was no returning to normalcy for Neve, such a thing was impossible. Her intermediate family was divided upon her family's deaths. Her father's mother was too old and sickly to take her in. One aunt from her father's family wanted nothing to do with the child after her family's grisly end. Her other aunt from her father's family attempted to take her into her family home, but, the situation didn't quite work.

The aunt still lived in town with her husband and son. They attended church, in-town high school football games and PTA meetings. The Duncan's were well known in town. Therefore, there was a dark stigma attached to taking in the only survivor of a bloody massacre. It was a small town, people talked. Glances of both pity and fear would plague young Neve wherever she went. Even her aunt and uncle received the same blank pity stares. People who knew the story of what happened to her family would shake their heads, wearing heavy sadness filled expressions. No one knew what to say. Neve's aunt received the pity glances nearly as much as she did. There were no words for when someone murdered your brother, his wife, and their toddler-aged child in a satanic way. The only thing there was were pity glances and murmurs of 'Sorry for your loss'.

Eventually, Amanda Duncan and her husband grew tired of the constant stares and condolences. Soon enough, people stopped being kind with nice gifts or dishes of casseroles and baked goods. They even stopped offering condolences. After those were all gone, the pity stares were the only things that stuck.

It rattled Amanda and her husband to enter a church and to have the entire congregation turn to look directly at Neve. She was a little girl, but, she was also a little girl a psycho murdered an entire family in order to get to. She was the sole survivor of her family along with being the cause for their deaths, unintentionally, but still.
The entire Catholic church of St. Peter's wore the same horrible pity-filled expressions and said nothing, but, their silence spoke volumes every time they saw Neve.

Their eyes would watch the young girl with hauntingly empty gazes, everyone silently wondering; 'why was she the only one who got to live?'

It was as though they thought watching the small child would provide some sort of insight into the matter. As if looking at her long enough would eventually show off the reason. But it never did. It took less than three weeks for the Duncan's to decide they couldn't handle being the primary caregivers of the little girl everyone looked at in church. It wasn't just the rude staring that caused them to send Neve away, it was the nightmares she would have that finally caused them to call up her estranged grandmother out in California.

They couldn't handle the little girl's tearful cries in the middle of the night screaming for her mommy and daddy. The nightmares were constant, always coming and never going. The blood and gory memory of that horrible day would plague Neve every time she fell into a deep sleep.

Therefore, the Duncan's called up Estelle Stone out in Los Angela's California and shipped Neve off to become someone else's problem the first chance they got. Neve had then discovered the reason her own mom had never spoke to her estranged grandmother was relatively simple; the older woman was unpredictable, and maybe even a little nutty.