It was the fifteenth of January. The air was cold and there was still snow on the ground. The trees were bare and didn’t have leaves. They were empty.
Just like me, I thought.
School was out for the weekend, and instead of taking the bus home, I decided to walk. I knew the way like the back of my hand. I walked home almost every day. It gave me more time to compose myself before I had to see my current foster parents, and their bratty ten-year-old daughter.
I fumed on the way home, just thinking about her. She was always annoying me, she wouldn’t stay out of my belongings, and apparently she idolized me and followed me everywhere. It was so stupid. Why would she idolize me? She had a family. She had her parents and her grandparents. Aunts, uncles, and cousins. Mine was gone. My whole family was gone.
The sky darkened slowly, and hoping I would get home before it began to rain, I decided to take a short cut through the forest. I had come this way before, and wasn’t worried when I looked back and saw the trees, closing me in, like in a cocoon. I thought nothing of the natural forest sounds and lost myself in the beauty of the snow-covered trees. I was gazing up in awe at the snow-laden branches when I froze.
“Ahhhhh!” A scream pierced the air, followed quickly by another. The screams made the breath whoosh out of my lungs. It wasn’t because they surprised me, or even because they sounded as if they led further into the dark forest. The screams reminded me of the night my family had been murdered. They sounded exactly like my sisters’ screams. The resemblance paralyzed me. Then, I started running, incoherently, toward the screams.
In the back of my head a voice kept shouting, “It’s not them! It’s not them!”
My only coherent thought was, I have to save them. I NEED to save them. It was my fault, I should have died. Not them. I didn’t know where that idea came from.
I just kept running and running until I reached a clearing in the heart of the forest. Standing in the middle of the clearing, was a little girl. She was about three. Long, brown hair reached down her back. I stopped running. The little girl in the clearing was Terri. My beautiful little sister was alive! I managed to choke out her name.
“Terri!”
She turned and that was when I saw her eyes. They were crimson red, and rimmed with black. They seemed to suck me in and hold me captive. I couldn’t look away, not even when I heard footsteps behind me. They were feather light on the mossy ground.
Then, he spoke. “I promised you I’d be back. It’s a little later than I would have hoped, but time passes a bit slower for me. You see, when you’ve lived for as long as I have, a year doesn’t matter much. Understand?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay. Let’s get down to business. You see your sister, correct? You know she isn’t human. She’s going t live forever. Cool, huh? Guess what? You can, too. I’ll even change you myself. That’s something I swore a long time ago I would never do. But for you, I’ll make an exception. Deal?”
I didn’t answer. I just stood there staring at Terri, my poor baby sister. As if she sensed my thoughts, she grinned. I shivered. Her teeth were sharpened to a point; all of them. Her tongue was forked and the inside of her mouth was blood red.
“It’s not that bad,” she whispered. Her voice was cold, like ice, and burned my ears.
It was her voice that spurred me into action. I turned away and ran toward the other end of the clearing, away from the strange man and away from my sister. I didn’t get very far. I heard a strange sound behind me, like a roar, and I glanced over my shoulder. What I saw stopped my heart. My sister, my wonderful little sister, was changing. As if what she had become wasn’t bad enough. Nature just had to pull this trick from up its sleeve, didn’t it? Little Terri was becoming a monster. Reptilian-like skin was spreading across her arms and her beautiful face. Her torso elongated and shifted into that of a snake.