light. He turned and followed the sound, walking through the dark hallway into a tiny room with two stained and filthy sheetless mattresses on the floor.
Diel paused in the doorway. A little girl sat on one mattress. She was playing with a doll. The doll was old and missing an arm and a leg. One of its eyes was painted an ice-blue color, and red pen covered one side of its face. The little girl had long dark hair and was wearing a dress riddled with holes and sullied with dirt.
She looked up and stared right at him. Diel couldn’t move, the air in his lungs escaping. “You’re back,” the little girl said, and he felt his heart beat fast once again. The girl smiled widely at him, and he felt something inside him crack. Because she was like the doll. Half of her face was covered with a deep red birthmark, the eye on that side an ice-blue color compared to the dark blue of the other.
Blind, Diel realized. She was blind in one eye.
“You’re back!” she said again in relief, and something made him want to hold her in his arms. But then the half-starved boy from the living room rushed through and sat beside her on the mattress. He took her in his arms, and Diel couldn’t look away from them. “Finn,” she whispered, utter relief in her tone. “I’m so happy you’re back.”
“Cara,” the boy, Finn, said in response. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?” The boy’s voice was familiar to Diel, but he didn’t know why. Then the boy’s head ticked to the side, and his eyes blinked in rapid succession.
Diel felt a crack splinter down his chest as he watched him, as he watched them both. As he saw the boy sit beside her in her bed, a protective arm around her shoulders. Diel knew that the mattress next to her was the boy’s. The two children hid away in this tiny, filthy box of a room while their mother got high. They didn’t attend school. They’d taught themselves to read and write. No one knew or even cared that they lived there, miles from anyone else.
Diel stayed in the doorway as the boy put his little sister to bed. Darkness fell outside, but the boy sat all night, staring at the door, a knife hidden under his bed just in case the man tried to come in.
He was guarding his sister from the man outside.
His mother hid her away from the outside world; she forever stayed stuck in that tiny room. The mother and the man mocked her for her birthmark. They neglected her needs enough that when an eye disease came to the eye on the marked side of her face, they didn’t get her help. They let her lose her sight in that eye, told her she deserved it … and she remained hidden away, a lost, sweet soul.
Sweat dripped down Diel’s neck. His pulse fired into a heady beat as he stared at that boy. He felt what that boy felt inside. Rage. So much darkness and rage and—
“Go back into the hallway,” the voice told him, and Diel made his feet walk back through the shack and out into the hallway of doors. He wanted to go back. He wanted to go back and be with the children. He wanted to help the children. But the door to his left pulled him close this time. He couldn’t stop thinking of the boy with the knife under his bed and death in his soul, or the little girl with the birthmark and one blind eye, but the other door compelled him to look inside.
“Enter the door,” the voice said. Diel stepped through. And he was met with carnage. Blood covered the shack’s floor. The drug-addicted mother was on the floor, eyes open with a bullet wound in her head. The man had the small girl over the kitchen countertop, a gun at her head. “You ugly little shit.”
Those words were a flint to Diel’s tinder. He shook as he stood in the doorway. He went to step forward, the scene feeling more than familiar to him, when—
“Let her go.” The boy walked into the room. Darkness flickered in his eyes, a darkness Diel recognized. One that he knew. It looked remarkably like the monster that lived within him. Diel watched the boy find a knife on the counter and hide it behind his back. Diel felt a spark