Sophie

Sophie misses the apartment.

Or she feels something about the apartment. Ever since they moved into the house, she's felt a strange sort of bubble in her belly, and it's been hard to fall asleep at night.

It isn't that she doesn't love the new house. It's so big and beautiful, and her bed is really the most comfortable one she's maybe ever slept in in her entire life. Part of it might be because of the different sounds here. The apartment was noisy — neighbors and the street and the funny sounds of the boiler and other things, she thinks — and the house is so quiet. It has its own sounds, but they're small and distant, spread out through the bones of it, and it's nice, but different.

And so one night, after making sure that her homework is done, and the dishes are in the dishwasher — a dishwasher! — and her stuffed animals are all tucked in and her teeth are brushed, she approaches Shion and asks if they can go see the apartment. It isn't that she misses it, she explains, but maybe it misses them, and maybe it will be good for it to know that they're okay.

She's too young to understand entirely why she feels this way, that it hearkens back to her time before even Shinelem. But maybe this will help her.

Shion brings her, even though it's after her usual bedtime, and she holds his hand until they reach their old street, and then she says, “Is it okay if I go alone? I'll come right back, I promise.”

And then she steps toward their old stoop and looks up at the window she knows used to belong to them.

As she stands there, she realizes that she isn't alone. It isn't Shion, or even Solon, but someone else. She turns, pigtails swinging, but she isn't afraid — not yet.

The nightmares are back. She'd had a horrible one about the monsters eating Daddy. She'd gotten away, but only when she became a wolf so she could run faster. Her body is small and warm in the bed — too warm, and then too cold, and then too warm again. When she's too cold, the dreams are gone, just black sleep. When she's too warm, they're back.

She wakes after a moment of quiet, black sleep, because she can smell Daddy. His scent is too familiar to mistake. She sits up, eyes heavy and crusty with tears and sleep.

She's alone in the room, the fire burning bright not too far away. Sliding bare feet onto the stone floor, she follows the scent she's known her entire life towards the closed door.

“Da… Daddy?” she calls softly. She pads softly over, and pulls the door open. It isn't locked or barred. The brothers would never lock her away. She follows Daddy's scent out of the room.

As she steps through the doorway, she feels a faint chill pass over her. The shadow cast on the hallway wall only a heartbeat ago vanishes, the fire snuffed as if by magic, and Sophie freezes in place. She sniffs slightly, but Daddy's scent is gone. The smell of burning wood is gone. The fire is gone.

She turns around, but the room is still there — just cold and huge and scary without the merry fire. She hunches slightly.

“Daddy?” she calls again. “Solon? Shion?”

She turns back to the hallway and coughs softly. It echoes and feels scary, but the shadows don't shift into black ink and the ground doesn't melt beneath her feet.

Slowly, Sophie pads further down the hall, to the stairwell she's come to know as well as if she'd made it herself. She steps down, taking each step one by one.

“Hello?” she calls, then coughs again. Her throat is dry, her arms cold but her head hot, and Sophie reaches the bottom of the stairs and stops again. “Hello?” she calls, eyes beginning to burn.

If this is a prank, it's a bad, mean one. She feels her eyes well with tears as she imagines the brothers, each of them strange and quick-tongued and playful in their own ways — each of them kind and caring of her when she coughed or grew lethargic. She can't imagine them being so mean as to pretend to move away without even saying goodbye, but she thinks that's what's happened. They left her, and they didn't even say so first.

Sophie sits on the bottom step and swallows down a whimper. They left her and they didn't even say goodbye. She sniffles again and shakes her head. No. They didn't leave. They wouldn't have. They would never hurt her like that. And as this thought rises above the other, sadder ones, she realizes she can smell them still. She pushes to her feet again. Scrubbing her eyes with the back of her hand, Sophie tries to follow the scent, familiar but so different from Daddy's.