The floor tasted of drywall dust and copper.

  Leilani Rivera couldn’t feel her legs. The impact with the wall had severed the connection between her brain and her lower body, leaving only a cold, static hum. A teakettle’s whine shrieked in her ears.

  Get up.

  She pushed herself off the floorboards. Her arms shook. Her left wrist flared with sharp, hot pain. Broken.

  She ignored it.

  The living room was a war zone. Orchids lay crushed on the carpet, mixing with soil and shattered glass from the window. The air was thick with white plaster dust and a smell she didn’t recognize—something sharp, like bleach and burning hair.

  The woman in white. The monster. Daria.

  And Frankie.

  Daria had her pinned against the wall. Frankie’s feet dangled six inches off the floor. She looked small. Daria tore her slip, staining it with black grease and red blood. Her head lolled to the side.

  Leilani tried to scream.

  Let her go.

  Her throat muscles had become paralyzed. All that came out was a wet wheeze.

  Daria held a jagged piece of wood in her right hand. A leg from the oak coffee table. Leilani had bought that table at a flea market in ’08. She and Frankie had sanded it down together on the back porch.

  Now it was a spear.

  “Now,” Daria said. Her voice didn’t register as human noise. It vibrated in Leilani’s teeth. “We end the lineage.”

  Daria pulled her arm back.

  “This is the end.”

  Leilani clawed at the carpet. Her fingernails broke against the subfloor.

  No. Please. Take me. Not her.

  The wood grain came into sharp focus. Dust motes danced in the shaft of gray light coming through the broken window. Frankie’s eyes fluttered open.

  They weren’t green. They were red. A deep, bruised crimson.

  Frankie looked at the wood. Then her gaze shifted past Daria.

  To Leilani.

  Her lips moved.

  Mom.

  Daria moved.

  Thud.

  Frankie stopped breathing.

  The wood entered Frankie’s chest. Right in the center. It punched through the sternum with a sickening crunch of bone.

  Frankie jerked once.

  Then, she went still.

  Her arms dropped to her sides. Her head fell forward, chin resting on her chest.

  The red light in her eyes flickered out.

  “Done,” Daria whispered.

  She let go of Frankie’s throat.

  Frankie didn’t try to catch herself. She crumpled. She slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood on the yellow paint. She hit the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and lace.

  Buried deep. Dark wood against pale skin.

  Leilani stared.

  Her brain refused the image.

  She’s playing. She’s faking it. She’s going to jump up.

  But Frankie didn’t move. Still. Like a doll.

  Leilani opened her mouth. No sound. Then, a tear. A rip in her throat.

  “FRANKIE!”

  The sound shredded her throat. It filled the room, raw. Ugly.

  Daria turned. She looked at Leilani with mild annoyance. She wiped her hand on her white trousers.

  “Quiet,” Daria said.

  “YOU KILLED HER!” Leilani shrieked. She dragged herself forward, pulling her body across the debris with her good arm. “YOU KILLED MY BABY!”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Daria didn’t answer. She simply raised a hand.

  She flicked her wrist toward the front door.

  A wall of pressure. A headache that dropped them.

  It hit the front porch just as shadows appeared in the doorway.

  “Frankie!”

  Damon’s voice.

  He burst through the door, followed by Ted and Dee Dee.

  They didn’t make it inside.

  The blast caught them mid-stride.

  BOOM.

  The impact lifted them off their feet, throwing them backward.

  They flew off the porch, crashing into the bushes and the muddy lawn.

  Daria smoothed her uniform. She stepped over the mess. She strode to the door, ignoring Frankie’s body.

  She walked out into the fog.

  She paused on the threshold. She looked back at the carnage. Satisfied. Then she stepped out, dissolving into the gray mist like a ghost.

  The house was quiet. The war was over.

  Leilani lay on the floor. Her ears rang. Her wrist throbbed.

  She was alone in the room.

  Just her. And the body.

  Leilani pushed herself up. Her legs were coming back—pins and needles, agonizing prickles.

  She crawled.

  She dragged herself over the broken glass. It cut her knees.

  She reached Frankie.

  “Frankie,” Leilani whispered. “Baby. Wake up.”

  Frankie lay on her back. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. They were green again. But they were dull. Flat. Like sea glass rubbed smooth of all sharpness and life.

  There was no rise and fall of her chest.

  Deep within the earth, the wood lay buried.

  Leilani reached out. Her hand trembled uncontrollably. She touched Frankie’s cheek.

  It was cooling. The heat of the room seemed miles away.

  “Frankie,” Leilani said. She brushed a strand of black hair away from Frankie’s forehead. “Come on now. Don’t play games with Mama. Get up.”

  She grabbed Frankie’s shoulder. She shook her.

  “Wake up!”

  Frankie’s head lolled. Loose. Heavy.

  Leilani pressed her fingers to Frankie’s neck. She searched for the pulse. The rhythm she had known since the first ultrasound seventeen years ago. Thump-thump.

  Nothing.

  Just stillness.

  Leilani pressed harder. “Come on. Come on. Fight it.”

  Nothing.

  “No,” Leilani whimpered. “Please. God, no. Not her. Not her too.”

  She looked at the wound. There was surprisingly little blood. The wood acted as a plug.

  She grabbed the wood.

  Maybe if she pulled it out. Maybe if she stopped the pressure.

  She gripped the rough oak.

  Then she stopped.

  She’s gone, Maka.

  The voice in her head sounded like her husband.

  She’s gone.

  Leilani let go of the wood.

  She collapsed across her daughter’s chest. She buried her face in Frankie’s neck, smelling the sweat, the ozone, the faint scent of the ocean that always clung to her.

  She wailed.

  A keen replaced her scream. A deep, rhythmic sobbing that shook her entire body.

  Footsteps on the porch. Scrambling. Desperate.

  Damon stood in the doorway.

  He was bleeding from his nose. He held his ribs. He looked like a ghost.

  He walked into the room. He stumbled over a piece of the ceiling fan.

  He stopped.

  His gaze tracked from Leilani, to the red slip, to the wood.

  Damon made a sound. A low, wounded noise.

  He fell to his knees. He crawled the last few feet.

  “Frankie?” he whispered.

  Leilani looked up. Her face was wet, her eyes swollen. She looked at this boy—this boy who loved her daughter, this boy who had eaten at her table a hundred times.

  “She’s gone,” Leilani said. The words tasted like ash.

  Damon shook his head. “No. No, she’s not. She… she can’t be.”

  He reached out. His hands hovered over Frankie’s chest, trembling violently. He wanted to touch her, but his hands hovered, trembling violently.

  “Do something,” Leilani begged. “Damon. You were with her. You know what to do. Call 911. Do CPR. Something.”

  Damon’s eyes darted from the stake to her lifeless face.

  He slumped back on his heels.

  “I can’t,” he choked out.

  Tears spilled from his eyes. He put his hands over his face and bowed his head. His shoulders shook with silent, racking sobs.

  Ted and Dee Dee limped into the room.

  Ted took one look. He turned white. He spun around and vomited onto the ruined porch.

  Dee Dee stood in the doorway.

  “We left her,” Dee Dee whispered. “We should have been here.”

  Leilani sat up. She pulled Frankie’s upper body into her lap. She rocked her. Back and forth.

  “My baby,” Leilani murmured. “My brave girl.”

  She looked at the room. The ruins of her life.

  The acceptance letter to the University of Hawaii lay on the floor, trampled under a boot print.

  Congratulations.

  Leilani closed her eyes.

  “Why?” she asked. She looked at the teenagers. “Why was she fighting? What is happening?”

  Damon lowered his hands. He looked at Frankie’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, but he paused for a moment.

  “She was protecting you,” Damon whispered instead.

  “She shouldn’t have had to,” Leilani wept. She stroked Frankie’s hair, smoothing it down. “She’s just a baby. She’s just seventeen.”

  The wind blew through the broken window. It carried the fog inside.

  The mist curled around them. It touched Frankie’s bare feet. It touched the pool of blood.

  The house grew cold.

  No one moved. No one suggested a plan. No one ran for the car.

  They just sat there in the wreckage of the living room, gathered around the girl who had been their shield.

  Leilani rested her chin on the top of Frankie’s head. She stared at the wall where the slime had held her.

  The clock ticked. The fridge hummed. Normal sounds. Wrong sounds.

  “I’ve got you,” Leilani whispered into the cold silence. “Mama’s got you.”

  But Frankie didn’t answer.

  The fog drifted through the window. It touched Frankie’s face. Cold. Wet. Final.