SELENA'S POV

(FIVE YEARS LATER)

They told me time heals all wounds.

They lied.

Five years had now gone by since I had run from all I had ever known.

It has been five years since I had ran that night my world had been torn apart into a million little pieces.

And the pain still lingered.

Iris had survived.

And the baby I conceived?

He had survived too.

I was happy I never aborted him.

It no longer suffocated me every morning as it once had.

I remembered when it had been so hard to get out of bed and fight for air there.

I had faced the world despite the pain that never simmed to dim inside of me.

It sat deep within me like a bruise reminding me that I would never be whole again.

And I had built another life.

My town used to be small, and nowadays it still happened to remain that way.

The world just continued and did not even notice that my dark day had existed.

The town was a pinpoint on a map, far enough away that you did not even ask after it.

That's if you knew it.

I wasn't the kind who needed to be around people and the townspeople grasped that.

My neighbors thought that I was a work from home, stay at home, computer bound mom who was home-schooling her child because I was that overprotective paranoid mommy.

They thought I had moved down here to hide because of a divorce or some awful breakup.

Maybe they were right.

But still, they would never get it about what I had been, or what I had run away from.

And that was perfectly good by me.

"Mom!"

I moved back from the sink and automatically turned to smile at my son.

Jace.

He stood in the doorway which was filled up by his itty bitty body.

His hair looked a completely mess in all directions cause he just woke from sleep.

He was wearing his blue pajama top with the wolf chasing the moon.

It was his favorite.

And it was all rumpled.

"Why aren't you in bed sweetie?" I reproached him softly, wiping my hands on the dish towel.

"I, I heard a creak mommy," he told me, while rubbing a fist against his eyes.

I went up to him to brush a clump of black hair away from his forehead.

"What creak?"

He stared up at me with his tiny baby brows all scrunched up.

"The lamp was swaying again. And, and there was something on the table. And, and, and it fell over all on its own. I didn't touch it."

My heart broke again.

"It's fine baby," I smiled at him, trying to fix everything. "Let's go pick it up."

He turned in the doorway towards the bedroom and I followed him.

My heart was racing.

It so happened to be that the lamp on the end table had tipped over onto the floor.

I could tell from a distance that it wasn't broken even though it had already turned off.

One of Jace's books lay face down on the floor three feet from where the lamp was.

I stooped to pick it up.

"Did you lose this?"

"No."

He shook and flung his head about.

His eyes were wide with fright when they were staring blankly at me with horror.

"I didn't, Mom. Seems the monster under the bed put it right there," he mused.

I comforted him by stroking his hair.

"I know you didn't, baby."

I wanted to, but did not actually say the words that was thundering in my head.

It was not the house that was scaring him.

It was him.

It started a couple of months ago, maybe four.

Three was small things at first, things you might perhaps dismiss as coincidence.

The cup spilling on the counter when he cried.

The TV turning on by itself when he laughed a little too loudly.

I had been explaining it away to myself as possibly coincidence, maybe even a faulty wire.

It was worsening though.

The doors would slam close with no one's hands on the handles.

Light bulbs would start to flicker and most often in odd places around the house.

His nightmares would occasionally end by spinning all of the chairs of the overturned set of dining chairs into the room.

And I was out of excuses soon.

I had already removed him from kindergarten.

His teacher had called me one time too many to inform me about "suspicious incidents" when Jace was having a bad day.

Crayons went whirling across the room from desks and even students' hands.

Windows were blown open on a breezy day.

A clock once fell and shattered at the same moment another child laughed at his cost.

I couldn't get any questions answered, not after I had taken such a long detour to be subtle.

"Come on," I told him before setting the book aside on the bed.

He struggled against it, his dark eyes blazing with fear. "Mom… am I weird?"

The question hit me hard.

I leaned back down beside him so that we were nose to nose and my fingers were framing his little face.

"No, Jace. You are not weird. You are just different in a special way."

"Special like a superhero?" He inhaled it softly when he spoke to me.

But there was warmth in his voice.

I nodded at him, hurting on the inside.

"Yeah. Kind of. But you promise not to tell, okay? You can't tell your friends. You can't even tell Mr. Tom at the store. It is our secret."

He nodded seriously.

"Okay."

"Good." I kissed his forehead and helped him back onto the bed.

He regained his sleep and was snoring again in minutes, sleeping peacefully and naturally.

I waited, watching.

He slept like Damien had slept that night, so soundly that it hurt to look at him.

They were spitting images with the same black eyelashes and the same face.

And though he wa little, Jace had that same unspoken power which had attracted me to Damien in the beginning.

I pushed the errant curl off Jace's forehead.

My chest was burning with terror and hope which was horribly entwined.

He reminded me of Damien so horribly that I almost could not stand it sometimes.

I stayed until I knew he was asleep.

Then I wrapped his body with the blanket and slipped out the bed room door unseen.

I went back into the kitchen to finish the rest of the dishes in the sink.

And then, I heard a crash.

I froze.

I wiped my hands and headed out in panic.

I was roughly halfway across the corridor before the humming began at the base of my neck.

I slowed and glanced back over my shoulder.

The house was empty, but the fine hairs on the back of my arms stood up.

"Come on, Selena, get a grip," I told myself.

I couldn't be scared too like Jace.

But the feeling did not disappear.

I sensed it wasn't ordinary.

I saw something move kn the shadows.

My heart pounded.

The night was quiet.

I was frozen, unmoving, not breathing.

Nothing moved.

"You're losing your mind," I told myself out loud. "You're just tired, that's all."

Another sound reached me.

I turned around.

It was the front door.

I ran down to the door and found it open.

My stomach dropped to my feet.

It was not really open.

It was just a minimum possible requirement of a crack creaking gently in the wind.

"No." I breathed. "No, no, no."

I rushed up and pushed the door closed.

I shut it tightly and turned the key again.

And then I heard it, the sound that made my souls nearly leave my body.

A wolf, upstairs, probably in Jace's room.

"Jace!" I screamed, panicking as I rushed up the stairs to his bedroom.

I heard the sound as if two wolves were struggling over a slab of meat.

And when I reached the hallway, my heart fell.

The smell that greeted me first was that of blood.

It was so overwhelming that it made me nearly sick.

There was blood on the floor.

The hall was dim.

But even in the terrible light I could see the huge gashes ripped out of the walls.

My heart was racing so hard that I couldn't hear.

My baby.

I opened his bedroom and went to his bed.

But, he wasn't there.

"Jace?" I screamed.

My voice was high and trembling.

"Baby?"

Nothing was there.

My throat clogged with fear.

Was this blood Jace's?

I heard grunts in the living room.

I tensed like a board as all my muscles contracted.

I edged toward them while I was still shaking from scalp to toes.

And then I was staring at them, two red-rimmed eyes glinting in the dark.

My mouth went dry.

The creature slowly moved into the light so that I could see the outline of the body.

A tall silver wolf with red eyes.

"Hello, Selena," a growly, husky voice slipped out as the wolf morphed into a tall braid shoulders and extremely familiar man.

My knees almost buckled.

"Damien?"