Evening brought weight and a sense of a day that had slipped side.
The promise was simple, baked into a cake and sealed with a pinky swear. Rosie wanted a rare Bera Bear and that cake shaped like a wish. The bakery smelled sweet, almost too sweet, like goodbye sugarcoated in frosting. A promise, Lily thought, is something that clicks into place—whether you mean to or not.
When Lily reached the front door, it hung open, creaking softly in the wind. She stepped inside. The living room was wrecked—tables overturned, drawers gutted, papers scattered like fallen feathers. Her shoes crunched on glass, the sound too loud in the silence.
The television flickered in the corner, showing footage of a school bus—metal twisted, windows shattered, smoke rising thick and black, curling into the sky like a wounded thing. The air around her felt heavier.
Her chest tightened. It wasn't fear, not yet—just that wrongness that made it hard to breathe. The flickering light painted her face in ghostly flashes, and for a moment, it didn't feel real.
The headline hammered in the silence: School bus crashed and exploded; many casualties. A list of names scrolled in a news crawl that held Lily paralyzed until the reporter spoke one name.
"Rosie D—Ann," the man said. The letters blurred, but the name was clear: Rosie D. Ann.
Lily's knees gave way. The cake fell, hitting the tiles with a muffled, obscene thud. She stumbled further into the room.
Her parents lay on the living room floor—not hurt by people, but by something wild and impossible to name. Their faces were still, their bodies covered in deep, strange wounds that no human could have made.
"Mom? Dad?" Lily's voice shook, barely a whisper. She crawled across the broken floor, hands trembling so hard she could barely move. There was no answer.
Then she screamed—a sound that filled the whole house and broke the silence wide open.
Aunt Rosbery, the neighbour, must have been the one who found the door open. Her hands shook as she grabbed her phone to call for an ambulance. In the distance, sirens wailed, their echo rolling closer, painting the walls in flashing blue light.
The paramedics and police seemed to take forever to arrive. When they did, they moved carefully and quietly, their faces pale. The reports that followed were full of confusion—no one could explain what had happened, only that the injuries were brutal and unlike anything they had seen before.
Detectives began asking questions, their voices calm but distant, like echoes underwater. The living room was crowded with uniforms, camera flashes, and quiet murmurs. Lily sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket she didn't remember being given.
Across the room, the television still played. The screen showed the wreck of the school bus—firemen moving through smoke, twisted metal glowing faintly in the dark. A news anchor's voice broke through the noise of the room, steady but cold, reading the forensic report.
Lily caught only pieces of the words, and each one landed like a weight she couldn't lift: "sabotage" and "intentional."
The double truth was undeniable: her parents had been killed by something ancient and wild, while her sister had fallen to something modern and cruelly planned.
Lily left the scene of her parents' murder for the only thing that still mattered—her sister. She found Rosie at the county hospital, lying in a white bed surrounded by machines that beeped softly. The blast had left her body covered in burns, her small face almost recognisable beneath the bandages.
A grim-faced doctor described a nightmare diagnosis: Rosie's organs had all failed and she needed immediate, expensive surgery and transplants.
"I'll pay. I have my savings, it's all yours," Lily pleaded, desperate.
But the doctor, with soft regret, explained the reality: her savings were not enough for the immense procedure.
Worse, the hospital discovered that Lily and Rosie were not related by blood.
The transplants, the vast expense, and the legal liability were refused.
Lily pleaded, sobbed, and begged, but the bureaucratic wall would not break.
The doctors, seeing the sheer desperation of a girl who had just lost everyone, tried their best with the resources they had.
A day later, the doctors had done everything possible, but Rosie's severe injuries proved too great. Lily stood over the hospital bed, her last remaining link to a recognizable world held in place by tubes and machines.
Despite all the efforts, Rosie was officially in a coma. Lily, an orphan and alone, was left with two impossible mysteries: the beast that murdered her parents, and the man who bombed the bus.
Her phone buzzed with a message she did not recognize: MEET ME AT TOWER CLOCK AT 10:00. 99+ missed calls. The numbers looked like fingernails scratching a glass that you could not break.
That night, it rained as if the sky was falling apart. Lily walked through the drizzle without direction, the city around her glowing and blurring in the car lights. She had no umbrella, no strength left to care.
A car suddenly swerved and sped toward her—too fast. The horn screamed. For a single frozen moment, the world narrowed to the instant before metal met bone.
A hand shot out of the rain and grabbed her, yanking her backward with a strength that was gentle and absolute. "Stupid girl! Watch where you're going—do you want to die?" a man barked, half-angry, half-terrified.
Lily's vision folded into the sensation of being held. The warmth of someone's coat, the quick beat of a human pulse under another heartbeat, the scent of smoke and leather. She fainted in his arms.