“Little is known about the beasts of shadow. Some believe demons and ghosts attributed to various cultures may actually be the so-called Zara. They seem to be beasts capable of powerful magics, driven by malice or malicious instinct. The last officially documented sighting was in Peru in 1932.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

It struck Silver as amazing that a day could dawn so beautifully. She woke to the snow again, a world painted porcelain and shimmering ice. Everything had about it a new charm, a new beauty. Houses spread across the changeless white road, and she could not see where yard and road began. Their roofs were white, hung with foot-long icicles that shone like elongated Christmas lights where the meager sunlight hit them, or threatened danger with their gleaming elegance where they were cast into shade. The trees were coated, nothing but towering white silhouettes whose prickling branches caught and held and dipped with the weight of the snow. That snow was still falling. A muffled silence had settled over everything.

It struck her, too, as amazing that she could be so sore. Every joint seemed to ache, and her neck had an unusual knot that burned whenever she turned her head too far. That, she supposed, was from the car accident. But she did not let it slow her down. School had been canceled, the world smelled of water and pine, the robins and crows wheeled across a watercolor sky – there could be no calmer day to put the terrors of the previous one to rest.

She, Lena, and Ren spent the day in the snow. They built snow-people and snow-rabbits and snow forts, until their jeans were sodden and their wardrobes, unaccustomed to such weather, exhausted. Three times they came in, fueled up on hot tea and cocoa, and laid their clothes in front of the fire. Each time they returned to the brilliant world beyond the wide bay windows. Even the appearance of the green-eyed wolf at the edge of the trees did nothing but lend wonder to the day, and they pointed and whispered as it stared at them for a long minute before vanishing back into the woods. There was a magic that day that resonated with her very soul; in a pristine world of love and laughter, there could be no evil.

Sunset crept slowly over them, and the lights leapt into vibrant life on the streets and front stoops of the houses. Darkness fell in a dark cloud, leaving the sky remarkably clear and sprinkled with stars. They finally moved indoors to escape the white chill of their breath in the frigid air, defrosting their fingers over steaming bowls of chili and cornbread. No one asked her about the car accident, and the only thing she heard about her car was that it would be at least a day before the passes were cleared again and it could be towed.

Even in her dreams, hours later, the warmth of the day remained. Poised hundreds of feet above the world, Silver hung her legs over the side of some sort of massive stone structure, too entranced by the view ahead of her to care where, exactly, she was. The view was of a city the likes she had never known, drowned in the colorful flora of spring, houses huddled close together and creeping inevitably towards the sea. Here, she had courage like she would never possess in her waking world; she leaned into the wind, feeling its warmth break against her body as she teetered at the edge of a steep drop to hard earth. When something pushed her back gently, she wrapped her fingers in its fur, turning her head to meet green eyes like wells bored deep into the earth.

It was the wolf. For an instant, they stared at one another. There was an understanding in that moment. Then its lips drew back in a feral snarl.

Silver felt herself gasp and draw back, and in that instant, she jolted awake. In the silence of reality, Silver gasped, her chest heaving with sudden shock. There was a dizzying moment before her conscious mind took over, a second where her body was not hers, and she felt torn between two worlds. Mortal danger or the softness of her familiar bed. A sheer drop to her certain death, or a one-foot pitch to carpet.

Finally, she sat up, dragging her hair from her eyes and peering around the dark room. There was nothing amiss but the chill. It must have been hours since the fire in the stove downstairs had gone out, and she shivered despite the thick bulk of her comforter. Her heart still raced as she flung her feet to the ground, nearly stepping on her laptop. That gave her pause. It thrummed softly, the mechanical whir the device made when it started up from sleep mode. That was weird. The sleep light was still lit. There were three…she reached for the laptop, hesitating when one of the lights blinked out. Then another.

Sharply yanking the top of the laptop open, she blinked blearily at a screen that displayed nothing intelligible. Random bars of color, half formed words, blocks of pixilated images that looked like a part of her desktop.

And then abrupt nothingness. The laptop shut down, deepening the silence in the room. For several uncertain seconds, Silver blinked at the device. Then she closed the lid and pushed it out of the way. Her heart was racing again. Sure, it was just a computer. Maybe she had picked up some sort of virus, or dropped the laptop one too many times. Maybe it was just old.

She stared at the inert device for a few minutes more as she pulled on a sweatshirt. Then, slowly, her eyes strayed to the window. Darkness pressed in from beyond, broken only by the faint light of the snow. It dawned on her only as she opened her door and headed down the stairs what was missing. The streetlamp at the edge of their driveway. There should have been light from the streetlamp.

Silver shivered a little harder, wrapping her hands in each other to warm them. Problems for morning. Right now, she just planned to light a new fire and go back to bed.

Her foot had only just hit the bottom of the stairs when she heard a crackling sound coming from the bay windows of the family room. Pausing, she peered into the dark space. A sickly glow from the single light above the stove in the kitchen shed faint light across the dining table and the television. Nothing moved.

And yet the crackling continued, clearly coming from the window itself. The sound drew her like a moth to the flame. For her own sanity, she needed to prove that the sound was nothing. It should have been nothing, after all. It should have been…

When Silver reached the window, however, she stared into the eyes of a demon.

When she blinked they were gone, but the world beyond the window was pitch-black, as if a void had opened up and sucked in the world. Only their house remained. Silver could see the source of the crackling sound now; crystals of ice spread slowly from the corners of the glass. The outer edges were so thickly frosted as to be opaque, but at the center, the crystals formed a pattern. A giant lizard, curled around, body arched delicately, winged. She knew the image because she had seen it on the library window, but then she had not recognized it for what it was. A dragon. Tiny ice flames shot from its mouth across the glass as she watched.

Then the glass shattered.

There was no warning. Simply a crack like a gunshot, and then heat hit her like a solid thing and Silver felt herself thrown back into the wall behind her. Immediately she was fumbling her way upright again, snatching at boxes and books and even trying to grip the wall. She could see the glass of the windows melting in the sudden blaze that had engulfed the living room. Her voice was hoarse with shouting before she even realized she was yelling. Even then, she had no idea what she was saying.

More flames exploded through the walls ahead of her, engulfing the stairwell in ash and smoke. There was no time for her to think. Only react. And that she did, wheeling towards the stairs with all the strength she could muster. They were ablaze, and at first, she thought she could fight her way through. It was a naïve hope. The heat bit at her skin, a solid wall that sent her staggering back towards the kitchen. She was too stunned to fight when something grabbed her arm and dragged her backwards, towing her in the direction of the back door. A harried glance behind her revealed no one.

“Wait!” she was shouting despite herself, as she turned back to the flames. “Just wait!”

A deep rumble sounded from overhead, and she saw the walls of the house shudder. Her eyes flew across the moaning ceiling as her body locked up. It was going to collapse. She knew it with an eerie certainty. But there was something moving in the fire, and it drew her gaze the way all predators draw the gazes of their prey. Where it stepped, there was no light. Around it, the fire blazed black and sapphire. She had to squint through the fire and smoke, but its shadow flesh was unmistakable, and it was tall enough that its spine only just cleared the ceiling. This was the thing that had attacked her car. It had tried to kill her.

For a heart-stopping second, Silver thought it would come for her. The breath caught in her throat as she tried not to choke on the smoke that filled the kitchen. Her entire body shook with the hammering of her heart.

But the thing did not see her. Mute, she watched it pass her to move up the stairs. The strength left her limbs. This time, she did not resist when she was dragged back, inexorably out into the night.

Not until she realized the one dragging her was none other than the wolf she had seen earlier that day.

It was no larger than a dog, but it had its fangs caught in the loose fabric of her sweatshirt. Snarling, it threw back its ears as their eyes met.

Choking in surprise, Silver lashed out, wrenching her arm painfully from the beast’s jaws. She fled around the house, praying against the odds, and dared stop to look back only when she had reached the road. Nothing followed her. No wolves. No monsters.

But the flames…she stared in wide-eyed disbelief, all pain or cold forgotten as fear and anger coursed through her body. Where before the fire had been its usual shade of orange and burning yellow, the flames that now danced across the roofline were black and sapphire. They ate without pause at glass, stone, wood; there was nothing safe from their blazing touch. It was a phantom flame, a terrible, burning, destructive fire that would not stop until everything was consumed.

Somewhere in the distance, the wailing cry of a siren blared into existence, and then another. Not fast enough.

Silver looked down the dark road, seeming not to see the flickering streetlamps in the distance or the shapes that huddled under them, frantically calling for help. Her eyes only touched on the driving snow and the darkness that veiled everything beyond the edges of her small world. Had it really already been long enough for people to call for help? How many minutes had passed? Too much had happened too quickly. The sky was crumbling down over her, and there were not even stars, only solid blackness and the billowing rise of smoke from her own home.

And no one else is coming out.

The realization hit her like a bucket of cold water, and her body slumped beneath the weight of it.

“I have to…I can’t,” she said softly, fear turning her legs to stone as she stepped forward. Her gaze flickered back down the dark street and the silhouettes of the people coming towards her, their faces worried and uncertain, arms hugged to themselves against the cold snow. None of them would be of any help. “I have to…”

Her voice hitched.

Then she was running back towards the burning house and the black flames, her eyes fixated on the bedroom windows high up on the second floor. Pain cut through her clouded mind like a knife when someone caught her arm in a vice-like grip, pulling her back to the ground. She fell forward, her knees slamming into the snow-powdered earth. Almost dimly, she could feel warm wetness running down her arm, and when she lifted her hand, it was to see trickles of blood crisscrossing her palm.

“You can’t go near the flames. You must have faith in your family, now.”

She could only stare wild-eyed at the fire, and then at the blood, back and forth, her fists clenched so tightly that her hands ached. Her mind screamed to stand, to save them, but some other part of her wanted nothing more than to run away. That part froze her legs in place. The strength had gone out of her. Even if she wanted to stand, she was not sure she could, and the frustrated tears that she wiped angrily from her eyes made matters no better.

I have to, I have to, I have to. I can’t leave things like this. I have to save them.

“It is too late now. These flames run quicker than your human legs. Have courage.”

She rounded angrily on the person who had stopped her, and injured her in the process. “No! I should’ve gone already. It doesn’t matter if I die going back in there. If I don’t, I’ll regret it forever. And you—”

But there was no one behind her, only a silhouette vanishing in the direction of the trees. For a moment it stopped, its sharp green eyes cold in the face of her tears and hysteria. Again, she looked at her arm, and she could see now that she had been bitten, not grabbed. The wolf had saved her twice that night.

Silver sat dumbly, staring at the bloody wound on her arm. Then she looked back towards her burning house, feeling suddenly far away, living someone else’s life. Numb, she tugged the sleeves on her sweatshirt down to cover her wounds.

Voices filled the silence around her. She wished the gawkers would go away, because she did not want anyone to see the silent tears that blurred her vision, but they had come nonetheless, and one of them had had the good sense to bring a blanket. Silver felt it settle around her shoulders, and her fingers found the soft fabric and pulled it closer around her body automatically. It was an impossibly soft blanket. It smelled of cinnamon, of flowers, of everything lovely in the world. And the woman who had given it to her knelt beside her, a hand on each shoulder, trying to reassure her even though her words fell like stones against Silver’s ears, pelting her again and again with an inescapable reality.

“It’ll be alright. Just hold on.” They repeated the soft words over and over again, until she found herself clinging to them as tightly as she was to the blanket. As if from a great distance, she could hear the sirens growing louder. Red and blue light flashed against the windows of the houses down the road. They would find her injured, and broken, deaf to the people around her but not the flame’s continuous roar.

There was no heat.

The realization left her feeling hollow, empty. She could not move, not even to resist the people who finally came to take her away from the cold. Their hands were gentle but strange, and she became aware through them that her clothing was ruined or at least stained beyond recognition by smoke and ash. They asked her questions, but she did not remember any of them afterward, though she was sure that her voice had whispered out more than one response. She had blinked away painfully when someone shone a flashlight in her eyes. Only when they pulled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt to find the source of her bleeding did she rouse herself enough to realize that the wounds were gone.

That seemed to be the final straw, the last bit of unexplainable fact that let her hole up inside of herself. She did not struggle against being moved anymore, and she walked on her own without knowing where her feet led her. At some point, Silver lost the soft blanket, and it was replaced by a different one that she vaguely thought was nowhere near as nice. The sound of the sirens became muted and then hushed altogether as she found herself in a tiny room with a person-sized table, benches on the walls and enough cupboards and compartments that if she had possessed the energy to look, they would have kept her busy for the entire grinding, swaying trip on the ambulance. The lights were bright and electric overhead, and a uniformed man helped her clean away the dirt and blood on her skin with antiseptic wipes. Silver left her arms and hands limp in his care. After that, he remained on the opposite bench, and flicked his eyes to her with periodic concern.

Looking back later, she could remember everything only as a blur, with stark details where she least expected, and sometimes least wanted, to remember them. She could not recall which neighbors had stayed with her until the ambulance arrived, nor which hospital they had come to in the early hours of the morning. She was told that it had started to snow more heavily in the night, and that she had slipped once on the way into the hospital, but somehow caught herself before she face-planted at the entryway. She was told a great many things, but they became stories and dreams, and that was all.

It was not until later, when someone at the hospital had put her up for the night in a small and amazingly blank room while they watched for further symptoms of shock, that more coherent thoughts began to drift back to her.

A curtain divided her from everyone else, and there were several nearby chairs that remained empty the whole while that people were fussing over her. The bed was probably a bit hard and rough, but it felt so good that her eyelids grew heavy the moment she was left in relative peace. But as she drifted through the gray haze halfway between wakefulness and sleep, the loneliness that yawned within her shifted to nightmares and dreams that woke her shivering in the night. This time, there was no comfortable world for her to wake to.