16 year old Willow had a pretty normal life, aside from the mystery about her origins and who she was before she was adopted as an infant by crazy cat lady Elizabeth Day-Morris. After some strange magical events, she has to find her way in a world t...
Tossing her midnight black hair over her shoulder, Willow slides her laptop into her turquoise messenger bag and slings it over her shoulder. Typically on a sunny April day like this, she would linger to talk with her friends, but today she has something waiting for her. After briskly walking through the school and to the parking lot, she hops on her lavender moped and speeds home.
There, on the front porch of the Victorian style house, sits the package she's been waiting for.
"Yes!" Her blue-green eyes light up with excitement.
A calico cat looks up from licking itself in surprise as the front door closes loudly. It jumps off its perch and follows the teen upstairs where she flops on her bed and starts cutting the bindings on the cardboard box.
Willow scratches the head of the cat that now sits at her feet. "Hey, Winnie, look what's here!" she sing-songs ecstatically. The tape all severed, she opens the flaps and sorts through layers of tissue paper until she pulls out the object she wants badly enough to have paid $5200 for it. Inside the box lay a painting.
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She breathed, "Isn't it beautiful, Win?" Handling it delicately, she takes it out of the box and starts to decide where on her walls it should go.
An hour later, after deciding where the piece goes and starting on homework, Willow hears the front door open and close. "Hey, Liz," she calls. "I have something to show you." A few moments later, the sound of shoes on stairs gives way to the door to her room opening. She smiles as she sees her adopted mother take in the painting.
"Oh wow..."
"It's great, isn't it?" The 16 year old beams.
"Absolutely." Liz strokes Winnie, who nuzzles the woman's ankles. "And how's my favorite calico?" After a mew from the cat, Liz straightens up and tells Willow that dinner will be ready at six, then leaves to feed the rest of the eight cats living in the house.
Willow turns back to her desk and her eyes land on her phone. Getting up, she opens the Instagram app and turns on the fairy lights on the wall above the painting. Then, standing at the foot of her bed, she snaps a beautiful picture of the scene she created. Once she adds a caption, she posts it and goes back to her homework, occasionally picking up her mobile to text her friends.
For dinner, they watch their favorite TV show while slurping store-bought Ramen noodles. As they watch the action unfold, Willow thinks to herself, Boy am I glad none of this could ever happen in real life. Not everyone needs adventure in their life, and I love being one of the people who don't.
She is perfectly happy later that night in bed as she drifts off to sleep. How could I ask for more? I have everything I need. A smile floats onto her lips as her eyes flutter shut.
Suddenly, a loud thud in the hallway outside her door startles her into a sitting position.
"Liz?" she calls uncertainly. It wouldn't be good if the crazy cat lady fell too hard at her age, but it just doesn't seem like it was her. Willow knows she should stay in bed where it is nice and warm and keeps a semblance of safety, but something draws her towards the door. Just as she's about to reach for the doorknob, the door flies open of its own accord, The hallway is pitch black, surprising since there are always supposed to be nightlights in outlets throughout. Maybe Liz forgot to turn them on?
Just as she thinks that, she feels something tug her hair. Spinning around, she comes face to face with a terrifying cloaked figure with red pulsing light coming from within their hood, where she imagines its eyes would be. She tries to scream, but her vocal chords are frozen with fear. A shadowy tendril reaches out from under the cloak, and Willow stumbles over her feet and falls to the ground. Scrambling away, she regains her footing and books it down the stairs, two at a time. At the bottom of the steps there is another one of the cloaked things, but she doesn't notice until it is too late. She skids right through it and in that moment she feels such a darkness and despair that she just wants to give up. What's the point in running, she's just going to die anyway. Then that moment is past, and even though she's chilled to the bone she keeps going. Her socks hit hardwood and she slides, slamming hard into the island. It's harder to get up this time, but she tries. Then she looks up directly into the emptiness of a face that belongs to the creature and realizes she's surrounded. The teen whimpers softly. There are what she guesses to be probably over a hundred of them in a circle around her. It's hard to imagine how this could possibly go well for her.
One of them glides forward with a bronze goblet with some sort of strange hieroglyphics on the outside and a bronze knife thing. The circle tightens so that if she tries to go anywhere, she'll go right through them. Falling through one of them was depressing enough. Falling through 10 or more would be unbearable.
Willow takes a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves and think of a way out of her current predicament, but is interrupted by the blade cutting through her throat.
For a few seconds, she can hear the blood gurgling in her wound, then she jerks awake in bed. She coughs and gasps for air for a good minute, then feels her neck for any slash or mark, but there's nothing. It was just a dream. She stumbles to the bathroom and flicks on the light, squinting as it momentarily blinds her. After splashing water on her face a couple of times, she looks in the mirror and tries to convince her brain to calm down and her heart to stop beating a mile a minute.
Winnie curls up with the girl when she goes back to her bed, and falls asleep long before the human does.
