Chapter 1

The brown cushioned spinning chair did a swift one-eighty as she slammed her heal down hard into the floor.  Well, that was just fine with her; she didn’t want to look at him anyway.

          “What would you know?” she spat out, “you probably never had any friends to miss!”

          Starring out of one of the room’s two windows she noted again how gloomy this place actually was.  The whitewashed walls had turned yellow with age and sunlight, the windows looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in a decade and the door hung loosely on it’s top hinge so that a draft crept in and it scraped the floor every time someone moved it.  In fact, she occupied the only sound piece of furniture in the place; even the sofa had a few springs showing through the material.

          She wondered, fleetingly, if he had gotten the chair solely for her, but dismissed the thought immediately.  Anyone nasty enough to keep her under lock-and-key in this place couldn’t have thought about her even as much as that in the first place.

          “I want to go home,” she mumbled dejectedly.

          “Well you know that isn’t possible!” he snapped back, his eyes flashing menacingly from under thick, honey-blond lashes.

          It was his eyes that scared her most.  They were blue-lilac and could be soft as forget-me-nots one moment, but if he was annoyed they looked like two stones of ice and always managed to make her flinch away.

          “Well, if you hadn’t kidnapped me in the first place then I wouldn’t have to be missing home now, would I?”

          “Kidnapped you?” he slammed his fist into the rickety coffee table, giving her a start, “if you would rather I hadn’t helped, then go home!  I’m putting my life on the line for you and if you’re not happy then I won’t bother because it’s of no great significance to me!”

          “Why did you help me then?” she asked, a little more timidly, “if it doesn’t matter to you.”

          “Because my old man got careless, that’s why.  This was his job, his sacrifice; I was just next along the bloodline.  So, of course, he had to go and get himself killed.”

          She spun the chair to face him, “So you didn’t want this either?  Although you could leave whenever you wanted, I’m stuck with this.”

          “No I couldn’t,” he answered, but left her wondering at exactly what he meant.

          “Will it finish?” she asked him, “can it finish?”

          “Oh, it will finish,” he answered, but the look he gave her was almost apologetic.  It didn’t seem to bode well for someone and, at a guess, she presumed the someone would be her.

          He started to tap his tail against the coffee table absently.  It was quite a long tail, the same colour as his eyes and looked like it would feel the same as lizard skin, only it was smooth, no scales at all.  It ended with a small triangle, which always reminded her of how she would see a demon’s tail, and served as a reminder of the fact that he wasn’t human.  In fact, this was where her attention had been drawn when she first met him.  She hadn’t really noticed he wasn’t human until she noticed the tail, and this reminded her of what a predicament she was in.

          How did I get into this mess? She wondered.  She had never noticed she was any different from other girls until she was twelve.

          She had gone to the park with her mother.  It was a warm, sunny afternoon and the air smelt of sweet flowers and the birds that sang with the joy of living had filled the place with their sweet music.

          She had skipped and played amongst the trees, the pollen from underfoot tickling her nose until she sneezed, and her mother’s pleasant laughter as she watched her.

          The day couldn’t have been better, the sky was a brilliant blue and the sun blazed down warming their backs.  Other children ran hither and thither around the park accompanied by smiling adults, and some by boisterous puppies that wanted to run or older dogs that just wanted to laze in the sun.

          It was then she had spotted it, a little bird at the base of a tree.  It’s brilliant green and yellow feathers had caught her eye and she wondered how close she could get before it flew away.  As she got closer she noticed that it wasn’t moving, just sitting and looking around.  Her first thought was that it was a tame bird that had escaped and as a result was not afraid of people.  Then she noticed the dark stain marring the little animals back and the red across its yellow wing.

She had immediately scooped up the bird and run to her mother, “Mummy look, it’s hurt.”

Her mother had examined the little creature and looked up into the expectant eyes of her daughter.  Sadly she had shaken her head and reached to take the bird away from her.

“I’m sorry honey, but its wing’s broken, even if it did live it could never fly again.  We would be kinder to send it to Heaven now.”

“No!” she had cried, snatching the bird away from her mother she had hidden it between her two hands and cradled it against her heart, “you can’t kill it, you just can’t do that.”

Her mother had shaken her head and, still clutching the little bird to her heart, she had begun to cry and wish for it to get better.

A warm feeling had spread from her heart right the way through every vein in her body and her precious little cargo had begun to cheep and flutter between her palms.  Opening her hands to see, she had watched as the bird flew away.

She sighed at the memory and glanced around the room again.  So she wasn’t normal, she had learnt that four years ago.  Did that mean she had to stay locked up in here for the rest of her life?  It wasn’t as if the place was even nice and if he had had to kidnap her it would have only been manners to rent a nice room first.

Now she was talking like an insane person, why would he possibly have done that?  He probably didn’t even care whether or not she was comfortable, else why would he have brought her here in the first place?

“That must have been a nice memory,” he startled her; she had forgotten he was in the room.

“It was,” she answered his half-asked question.

“Good, hold onto them, because there won’t be many more from here on in,” he sighed and, standing, left the room.  Leaving her to wonder what exactly that comment had meant.