Avenged(2)

This was the worst day of my life.

I’d buried my baby sister and almost died running away from grief and guilt.

Once I was free of the car, I flopped on my back on the fluffy blanket of white that covered the surrounding ground. The chill of the snow immediately sank through my clothes and, while it worked to numb the parts of me that were blazing hot with pain, it also dropped the temperature along the rest of my body in no time. I began shivering so hard that I thought my teeth were going to chatter out of my mouth.

I was wearing jeans, a thermal, and a flannel shirt over that. I had on sturdy leather boots that were decorated with cute silver studs. Somewhere in my SUV, if it hadn’t been thrown out, was a puffy coat with a fur-trimmed hood that was perfect for this kind of weather. I didn’t think I could pull myself up to go find it. Everything hurt and I was cold…colder than I had ever been in my life and that included the way my heart had turned to ice when I found out that within months of losing my best friend to bad decisions, I’d lost my baby sister as well. So much loss. All of it unnecessary. I thought I was never going to be warm again, but I never considered it was possible to get colder.

Blood was pooling around my head, staining the pristine snow scarlet. I could feel the thick liquid rolling over my temple and into my hair and no matter how fast I blinked, I couldn’t keep my eyes clear. I wasn’t sure where the blood was coming from, but there sure as fuck was a lot of it.

I lay there long enough that I started to collect snow. The flakes got caught in my eyelashes and melted with each blink. I could see the fluffy piles building up on my chest and on the tips of my boots. I knew I had to move, but the idea made everything hurt and it was so much easier to simply lie there and pretend nothing was happening.

It would be so easy to drift away. That was what my best friend had done, even though she had a little boy she was leaving behind. It was what my sister had done, even though she knew I wouldn’t be able to handle it and that our parents would inevitably blame me for her taking her own life. It seemed so much easier to let go when hanging on required so much more effort.

An owl hooted from somewhere overhead and somewhere in the darkness there was a lonely howl that had to belong to a wolf that broke through the eerie silence. It was a reminder that you were either predator or prey and I wasn’t ever going to be the type of woman that let herself be hunted down. I was a fighter through and through—which meant I had to put the effort into hanging on and getting up. I refused to let go of anything.

When my best friend died because she chose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with absolutely the wrong man, I did everything I could to find her son the best home possible. I wanted to keep him—I loved him like he was my own—but with my past and the glaring mistakes in it, there was no way the state was going to let me do that. They put him in foster care, ready to call it a day, but I was determined that Hyde would have better. I tracked down his father, a giant, bearded badass my bestie had indulged in an illicit one-night stand with, and sprang the news on him that he was a daddy. Of course, I checked the guy out before telling him he had a son. I was pleased to learn that, despite a few hiccups in the past, he was a standup guy, more than willing to give his son a good home.

I also refused to let go of the fact that my baby sister was no longer with me. Xanthe had always been special, a sweet soul who was too trusting and too soft. She was precious and delicate, always a little too fragile and breakable for the reality of the world around her. My entire family did their best to protect her, to shelter her, but Xanthe was like any other twenty-something and she wanted to live. She wanted to experience love and relationships. She wanted to mess up and try again. She wanted to be normal…but the fact of the matter was, she wasn’t wired the way the rest of us were. I did my best to protect her while helping her live as normal a life as possible, but that was a full-time job and there were times I couldn’t be there. My parents always accused me of encouraging her, of enabling her whims. They swore I was going to be the reason she ended up hurt. I told them she needed professional help, that there was something chemically wrong in her brain. They insisted she was nothing more than a special snowflake that needed to be coddled and loved.

There wasn’t any time left for either of those theories because Xanthe was gone, her life stolen away too soon at her own hand. She fell in love, fixated on a man, couldn’t let it go, and when he left, she decided she couldn’t live without him…even though he’d never encouraged her in any way. She was shattered, fundamentally broken, and forever lost to me.