Felicity

A little girl sat alone at the kitchen counter. She doodled on a white paper, crayons gripped in her fist. Pages she’d already scribbled on lay in a chaotic pile beside her. Her right forearm was tightly bandaged with fresh gauze. The moon had risen hours ago, yet no one had come to take Felicity to bed.

In a room upstairs, her father paced while her mother watched him from the edge of their bed. “We can’t seriously be considering this, Joe…”

He winced and rubbed his face. “Do you have any better ideas? It won’t be long before she starts changing. I’ve seen it before. And then everyone will be in danger. I think we owe it to our community to keep them safe. There’s a reason her kind usually die naturally after the bite.”

Martha swallowed. “We could send her away.”

Joe stopped and looked at her. “So she can hurt other people? No.”

She shook her head. “I meant to a place where they can handle something like this.”

Joe stared at his wife in disbelief, like he had the first night he saw her shift into a wolf. “Are you mad? Do you know what they do to people like her in institutes?”

The air grew thick between them. Martha stroked a loose thread from the comforter between her fingers. “But she would be alive…”

“Hardly!” Joe tossed his hand in the air. “And if the community found out, Martha, think of that. If they knew what sort of daughter we have, we’d be dead by association.”

She bit her lip. “If you hadn’t taken her to the meeting—”

“This is not my fault,” Joe snapped, pointing a calloused finger at her nose. “That thing attacked her from out of nowhere.”

Martha lifted her jaw. “She’s too young to be going to meetings. If she’d stayed home, like she’s supposed to do until she can control herself, then we wouldn’t be having this damn conversation right now!”

A growl rumbled in Joe’s throat, and he gritted his teeth, canines protruding.

The hair stood up on Martha’s arms. She swallowed and looked down, her heart rate picking up. “Sorry.”

Joe pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed, and knelt before his wife. Taking her hands into his, he looked into her eyes. “I wish there was another way, honey. I really do. But for the sake of our community, the world, and our lives, we have to do this. She is too dangerous.”

Martha sniffed. “Can we wait just a bit longer?” Tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto his hand.

“The longer we wait, the stronger she will get.”

She lifted her head, tightened her jaw, and ordered herself to numb. “The stake is in the closet. Careful to not touch the tip.”

Joe kissed her forehead. He opened the closet door.

Downstairs, Felicity swirled her blue, purple, and pink crayons in a circle. She winced at the pain in her arm. The bandage was a bit red, and she stared at it. It was a pretty color, she decided. And she wanted more of it. She pulled her bandage off and smeared her arm on the paper. Red covered her crayon work. Felicity smiled.

She glanced at the stairs, and something in her felt the urge to find ways to get more of this red stuff. Setting her crayons down, she headed for the stairs. She cocked her head as fur crawled up her neck. Fangs shot out of her mouth, and she followed the smell of blood. Vampiric blood coursed through her werewolf veins. She dropped to all fours and climbed the stairs.

“Do you hear that?” Martha glanced at the closed bedroom door.

Joe lifted the silver-tipped stake and slowly pushed the door open. At his feet, his toddler daughter looked up at him with red eyes. Her sharp fangs sent shivers down his spine.

Felicity tilted her head, eyed his leg, and lunged. Her claws dug into his calf. Joe stumbled back, falling onto his rear.

Martha shifted to fur. She dove at her daughter and knocked her away from him, growling.

The little girl yelped. Her body snapped and contorted until she rose a foot taller than her mother. With a force much too great for a child, Felicity picked up her mother, held her legs in one hand and her wrists in the other and began to slowly stretch.

Marth screamed, shifting back to flesh. “Felicity!”

A joint popped.

And Joe drove the stake through Felicity’s heart. She froze, gasping, and dropped Martha with a thump.

Felicity clutched her chest and fell to the floor as her body shriveled back to its usual size. Paralyzed in a temporary death.

Marth’s shoulder was dislocated, and she crawled over to her daughter. “Do it. Do it now, Joe.”

Joe took a deep breath, then sliced his baby girl’s head off.

Felicity’s head rolled and bumped Martha’s knee. She stared down at it, heart racing. But she refused to feel, not until this was over.

“The fire is ready out back,” Joe said stiffly. His mind and body were not one in the same, and his mind had shut down hours ago.

“Right.” Martha picked up the head. Blood dripped onto their hardwood floor.

Joe lifted his baby’s body and silently carried her outback. The stake or beheading might have worked for a normal vampire, but Felicity was no such thing and required every step of extra precaution possible.

Husband and wife laid their sweet baby girl on the pyre and watched her soul burn. Martha could have sworn her fingers twitched, but soon enough, she was nothing but ash.

Martha fell to her knees and wept.

Time passed, and they reported Felicity missing, even though her ashes were scattered in the flowerbed. They had more children, who eventually went to meetings and became very important werewolves in their community.

It was the summer after their youngest child left for college when Martha picked up the telephone and heard nothing except a sort of scratching. She hung up, didn’t say a word about it. Two weeks later, Joe picked up his cell and heard rusty breathing, but when he asked who was there, they hung up. “Damn kids,” he’d said.

A month later, crayons started showing up in odd places. One stuck in the shower drain. A handful in coat pockets. Crayon shavings in the flowerbed.

And one late night when Joe was working late, the phone rang. Martha picked it up. “Hello?”

Silence.

Scratch. Pause. Scraaaatch.

“Hello? This isn’t funny anymore,” Martha said. She paced the kitchen and froze when she realized what the scratching was. On their fridge was a crayon drawing Felicity had made years ago…with her blood smeared on it.

Martha could have sworn she burned that thing.

She swallowed. Scratch. The sound of crayon on paper…

And in the phone came a little voice: “I know what you did to me, Mommy.”

Martha dropped the phone and stumbled back. Out the window, she saw fire light up their backyard, and faintly from her phone on the ground, “Your turn…”