Heather Heffner

I want to be humbled. I want to meet people more messed up than I am. I want to get lost and come out the other end having no idea who I am.

The lanterns filled the sky, pulsing with the harmonious light of fireflies, and a great host of ghosts departed from the earth to join them. The higher they rose into the zenith of the heavens, the further night was chased back, until a great and radiant being resumed its throne in the sky.

It felt as if I__ been teleported to the dark side of the moon, forced to gaze out at the stars and wonder which one I__ come from.

__e are all dying_ she told me. __ven something of the immortal will die___hat?___eaning_

_the door banged wide open, and the most striking man I had ever seen stood in the frame, the black winds whipping around him like a chariot of storm clouds.

The Bloodsucker Queen has lived for what, a millennium? She can wait on her decaying ass a little while longer.

We__e only five years apart,_ I said defiantly. __f you look at some of those dysfunctional vampyre relationships, we__e near normal.

I blew a strand of black hair from my face. __ demon treating another with kindness is something I have yet to see.___areful,_ the demon whispered. __ou may have already seen the rough shape and form it takes in this world, and yet you do not recognize it.

In a world of fog and gray, the youth is a shining being dressed in dark violet, his golden-flecked hair smoothed back from his bronzed temples. He resembles a human, but no man I have ever seen holds himself like a king, like a gleaming statue chiseled from topaz.I swallow. I am standing before a demon, the most beautiful being I have ever seen, and I can__ run. I can only stand in the hushed glade and stare, snowflakes falling in the space between us.

Clinging to the rags I had left, I gazed out upon the full breadth of the Furnace and shook at what I saw.The world had been wiped clean of all trace of humanity. Sharp sandstone peaks protruded into the gray sky like a humped backbone, spilling into vast seas of sand on either side. Boulders and driftwood, the castaways of some bygone mountain, cast the only disruption upon the land. And I realized__o sun crossed the sky; there was only constant, lingering grayness.

Father never went into depth about what happened if I woke up, unable to remember how I__ died, but most definitely in the hands of those not selected to have s__ores and sleepovers for all of eternity.

There is a rule in Hell: Don__ trust anyone who takes time out of their day to help you.

I__ like to sit there,_ I said softly to the girl sitting in front of the other mirror. She scampered. I took over her abandoned make-up and painted my face. Red cheeks, to attract hungry vampyre glances. Black liquid eyeliner and mascara, to draw attention away from my bitter eyes. My silky-thin, raven hair, undone in waves over my bare shoulders. The magenta shade of apple gloss on my lips, to make them plump and inviting. Finally, a strapless golden dress that hugged my hips and not much lower. I stood up, feeling the cold air slide down the bare skin of my back like fingers, and panicked. I couldn__ wear something like this! Not without a cardigan! A light dress jacket, at least!I took a gulp of Amrit__ wine and detached myself from the fretting child in my head. Then I strode from the sleeping chambers.

We cannot leave, but that does not mean we will stay__tay in the same place in the same system that profits from recycling us at the bottom. We will disrupt it. Build our own space that will swallow bits and pieces of theirs. We were waiting for permission, waiting for the Darkness to acknowledge our worth, but we__e always had the power to make it come to be.

My body slid from human to wolf in a crack! of black smoke. Wolf was panting and I watched frost dissipate on my hot tongue, sending tiny rivulets of steam into the air. The world was sharp and clear, and I never realized how many different colors of shadow there were. It made me savor the dark beauty of night even more.

Behind lay loneliness and delusions. Ahead lay answers, and yes, Riley. So bent double beneath my load, but naked no longer, I followed the two demons deeper into Hell.