The Shadow Circle

Chapter-8

I don't remember much of the day I found out my parents were gone, except that Arianna carried me upstairs in her arms and told me it was going to be just the two of us. You would expect me to howl and cry and create a ruckus, instead I went deathly silent. It was days before Christmas. I always loved the fact that dad was Jewish and mom was Christian. It meant that I got presents from dad for Hannukah as well as from mom for Christmas.

It was the first Christmas we had without our parents, Arianna had a boyfriend and she was never with me. That didn't endear him to me very much and I was very clear in letting him know it. I remember emptying a tube of expired toothpaste in his shoes. I couldn't remember much of my parents but I did remember that Christmas.

That morning, I woke up to the scent of gingerbread. I walked down the staircase, it was silly of me, but I thought mom and dad had finally come home. They hadn't. Arianna was trying to bake gingerbread cookies. She looked dazzling in the golden morning light. Her fair hair looked like liquid light.

"Up so early?" She smiled.

"Mom used to make gingerbread cookies," I said.

"I remember. She taught me how," she smiled.

"I helped her."

"I remember that too," she smiled.

"She used to call me her little Angel," I said and Arianna's face fell. She wasn't smiling anymore. I made her sad.

"You're my little Angel too," she said softly and hugged me. "Now help me with these cookies."

"Okay!" I smiled enthusiastically. I felt the innocent pride of being given an important job.

So together we baked cookies and set up the Christmas tree. The cookies tasted like a mixture of cardboard and sawdust but I didn't care. I told Arianna what was happening in school, how this boy was bullying me and how I got in trouble because I wrote 'idiot' on his back with red marker. She had laughed and told me how she had done something along those lines when she was bullied.

Then we spent the day decorating the house. At midnight, presents appeared under the Christmas tree. There was a present from mom. It was an encyclopaedia which was weird because only Arianna knew that I wanted it. I didn't question it as we had dinner together, just Ari and I.

And for the first time, I could believe that we could truly be fine all by ourselves.

When I woke I felt completely refreshed, It wasn't much but I still got more sleep than I've had in the past three days combined. I woke up to the smell of coffee. I reached out for the knife on my dresser only to find it missing. So I picked up a nail file and walked out.

I slowly crept downstairs into the living room. There was nothing out of ordinary, white lace curtains, red carpet, bleeding corpse on said carpet, vase of flowers, polished coffee tables and a certain assassin sipping coffee from a Starbucks cup on the couch.

"Kai, please please please don't tell me that's a corpse," I said.

Kai calmly sipped his coffee. His cup had a lot of hearts, a 'call me' and a phone number written on it. "In that case, I have some bad news..."

"Why did you kill this guy?!" I asked, stepping over the body without looking down.

Kai nudged the corpse with his black combat boot. "He was sent to kill you, there was another one but he took off when I killed this one."

"Why are you in my house this early?"

"It's eleven. You're late," he said. "If we had left earlier this guy might still be alive."