Devil in Disguise (Kai Parker)

Chapter Four: How she came to Portland

7.08 PM, 27th March 1980,

A small girl crouched behind a sofa, fingers in her ears, a white feather in front of her. She had tangled brown hair and an overlong fringe, covering one of her tawny eyes, and her face was scrunched up in pain. There were two adults on the other side of the sofa, arguing with each other intensely. They both looked like the girl; the man had her eyes, the woman, her long brown hair.

With each word the pair of them seemed to get louder, their voices echoing in the child’s ears. She dug her fingers in further, because if she didn’t hear them, it wasn’t happening. If she didn’t see it, it couldn’t be real.

She half-opened one eye, checking the new watch on her wrist – a gift from her mother. It read 7.08 PM. The girl had made a habit of checking her new watch when she was nervous. Numbers calmed her down; they, at least, made sense.

The pure white feather was from a pillow. The girl had found it, hidden under the sofa, and started playing with it before the two people had started quarrelling. Once they started, the young girl just shoved her fingers in her ears in order to repress another memory. The feather had been forgotten.

But, as the voices continued to rise in heat and volume, the feather too had started to rise. The girl watched it with quiet fear, eyes fully open now, as it levitated jerkily with every insult.

"YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME!" came the voice of the man, and the feather soared upwards.

"WHAT, AND HAVE YOU THINK I’M INSANE? THAT’S A GREAT IDEA!" the woman laughed humourlessly, her sarcasm making the feather rise another few feet.

The girl felt like a shard of glass had been pushed into her stomach, and the feather started to curl in on itself. Smoke rose in little ringlets from the soft plume, and the untainted white colour burned orange. She watched it with horror and panic, knowing she was the one doing this but having no idea how to stop it. The people’s voices were pounding in her ears and this feather, suspended in thin air, was slowly burning.

***

04.43 AM, 12th August 1981

The girl, a year older but pretty much unchanged in appearance, stood by the window and watched as the man got into a car. Her hand curled around the curtains, tightening unconsciously as she watched him leave. She was still in her pyjamas. She shouldn’t really be awake at this time. But she had just woken, as she often does, with the feeling that something wasn’t right and that she needed to look out the window.

He was a coward. Insufferably mundane, afraid of anything different, an absolute coward. In agitation, she checked her watch. It was 04.43 AM. The watch was a little bit more weathered than it had been a year ago, but it still fit comfortably around her wrist. She couldn’t bear to take it off, although her mother offered to buy her a new one. It was the one thing she had from before, before her father found out and everything went crazy.

"Ahem." came a voice from the doorway, and the girl turned around. The woman was leaning against the door, her gaze cold as she beheld the child. The year’s passing had had more effect on the woman’s appearance than the girl’s. Age and worry lines covered her face and the sparkle in her eyes had long gone. She was ice. "I don’t believe you should be up." she told the girl tightly.

The girl shook her head silently, and ambled back over to her bed. Pulling the covers up to her chin, she looked at her mother with a small amount of apprehension in her eyes. She wasn’t the same person she had always known.

"Stay there." her mother said bluntly, closing the door with a bang.

The girl did as she was told, but the curtains started to open of their own accord, showing her the cloudy night. The street was illuminated by several flickering streetlights, and if she squinted she could just see the car exiting the street. He was leaving her. Running away where she couldn’t follow, to a place he would never want to come back from. Anger spiked within her, and she gripped the quilt tightly, squeezing it in her fist. How dare he leave her? Why was it so different now that he knew his wife was a witch?