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  The Werewolf

  &

  The Raven

  by Emily Madison

  Copyright © 2020 by Emily Madison

  Copyright © 2020 Raven and The Werewolf All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This also included conveying via e-mail without permission in writing from the publisher. This book is for entertainment purposes only.

  CHAPTER 1

  Raven

  The first time my mom tried to kill me I was only six-years-old.

  I can still feel the water burning as it forced its way up my nose, the sting of my hands impotently slapping at the water as I thrashed weakly. I can still hear the water gurgling with the air leaving me, the slosh of my movements slowing as my strength left me. Her hand gripped me by the throat, holding me under the bathtub water, my lungs about to burst.

  My screams were stifled by her grip around my neck, but I tried to say, "Mommy," underwater, but that small noise was lost to the sound of the water splashing less and less as my limbs gave out, my kicks and flailing rapidly weakening.

  "Die! Die!" she screamed, but her voice was not her own. I clawed at her hands, the cold of the air above rushing across my fingertips. My fingers slipped against her skin, too wet to find a grip. I could feel my arms burning, my fingers growing numb. It felt like my entire body was admitting defeat, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of me.

  "Please," I said weakly. The water splashed as my arms finally gave up, and fell back at my sides, sinking into the tub with me.

  "You shall pay for all you have done," she said, her voice muffled underwater. Her eyes had rolled back in her head and they glowed white, almost as white as her teeth, bared in a snarl. The last air bubble was forced from my mouth and the light and view of my mother faded to black. I would be gone in seconds and I had only begun to live, and the last sight I had in this world would be my own mother, looking at me with such disdain that I wished she would have never had me at all.

  Only by a miracle had she come to her senses and released me, pulled me out of the tub, and held me tight as I coughed up the water. My nose still burned and my chest ached horribly, but all I could think about was how close I had come to dying and what I could have possibly done to deserve it. There was a weakness in my limbs, and my fingers and toes tingled from the return of sensation, but through my waterlogged ears and over my coughing and sputtering, I could hear my mother talking.

  She rocked me back and forth, saying, "Emma Raven, my sweet baby."

  My full name is Emma Raven-Lopez, but my friends and family call me Raven. That was the first time I knew my mom was out of her mind. And I don't mean in a figurative sense, I mean someone literally possessed her.

  I coughed, my lungs bursting in pain.

  "Why?" I managed to say after a while. Even that was only in the barest of wheezes, my voice having all but left me. "Why?"

  "It's not my fault. It's not my fault," she kept muttering, but even at that age I wondered, if it wasn't her fault, whose was it?

  "I almost died." I couldn’t help it, the frustration, the confusion, the anger. She had almost killed me, a kid, and that was all she could say? I felt like I had to explain to her what she had almost done. What she had been trying to do to me.

  "I know baby," she crooned, rocking me harder. I felt her pet my hair, still flattened against my skull from the water. "She made me do it."

  "Who, Mommy? Who?" I asked, both wanting to know and hoping she wouldn’t tell me.

  She looked at me as if she wanted to tell me but instead, her lips quivered and she sobbed. "The one who cannot be mentioned. I cannot say her name and you should not either."

  Her voice had dropped into a whisper, as if she were afraid of this other person, or worse, other thing hearing her and punishing us both for talking about them. When I shuddered in her arms, I couldn’t tell if it was from the cold that had seeped into my bones, or if it was from the way she seemed scared of whatever was inside her, too. It was likely a bit of both.

  "Why not?" I asked, whispering too, just in case she was telling the truth.

  "Because ... bad things happen when you say her name ... don’t even think it. You must not know it, baby. That's the only way to keep you safe." She explained hastily, pressing her lips to my forehead as she tried to comfort me with the same hands that had tried to kill me.

  It didn't make sense to me then and it still doesn't to this day. It was jibberish, but I remember that day clearly. Hard to forget, considering what almost happened to me. Even as she had tried to soothe away my tears and get me warm and dry, I didn’t know how to feel, only that I felt irreversibly worse than I had before. There I was, a child too young and too weak to properly defend myself and with nowhere else to turn, now having to rely on a person that might only sometimes want me to stay alive. I never fully reconciled who my mother had been with who she had become.

  She became a different person and it scared me. My mom was more than just my mom now, and now whoever she became could want to kill me, could even go so far as to try to. My mom later told me that sometimes spirits took possession of her body and made her do bad things. Some people would have thought that she was making an excuse, but something inside me made me wonder. Because… I wasn’t sure what was scarier to me: the idea that my mom secretly wanted me dead and had to fight that urge every day of her life— of my life — or the idea that she had to fight someone else from doing the job through her.

  The hows and the whys ultimately didn’t really matter; either way, I lived every day wondering if I was going to be safe in my own home. I didn’t know what peaceful sleep was, under the same roof with this woman who I should know as my mother, but who was someone else part of the time. I found myself searching for the devil in every one of my mother’s smiles, always tensing when it was time to go to sleep, outright freezing whenever she called me to help her with something.

  I never really knew if I was going to see my mother, or someone else entirely, and I never really learned how to live with that.

  CHAPTER 2

  Raven

  The secret the two of us held did not last forever. Despite my best efforts to wear long sleeves and high necklines, to keep myself as covered as possible even when it was sweltering out, had only served to put a target on my back, for how suspicious it seemed. Eventually, my first-grade teacher noticed the marks on my neck and my arms and my reaction to her asking about them.

  My teacher noticing turned into a meeting with the school guidance counselor, which turned into the county social worker coming to the school, which inevitably turned into me having to tell them everything, every horrible thing that had happened to me, explaining every bruise, every scar, everything I had been made to endure.

  I asked to go to the restroom and made my escape. I ran home, thinking if I just got there it would all be okay. I saw the police cars and people talking to my mother on our porch. I ran up the steps and threw myself into my Mother’s arms. But it wasn’t okay. [1]

  The mental health specialists and police took my mom away from me that day and told me she was mentally ill. I remember them ripping me from her arms as she pleaded with them, "I'll be good. I promise I'll be good."

  I remember her staring at me with wide, glassy eyes, overflowing with tears. I remember begging them to not take my mom from me; even if I was scared of her, she was my mom. I didn’t know any other way, any other person I could turn t
o. I remember the pitiful looks the mental health specialists shared between themselves and the looks they gave me as they did their job.

  But nothing worked. Not the tears streaming from my cheeks, nor the look of shock on the neighbors' faces as the patrol lights flashed a blue and red glow on my mother's face. They were doing their job, after all. They were protecting a kid from their abusive mother.

  But they didn’t know the...the thing that held my mother hostage. They didn’t understand— and my fumbling explanation must have just sounded like I was repeating the gaslighting of a horrible parent. I’m sure they had heard it all before.

  The child protective services held me back while the police placed my mother in the back seat of the cop's car. I was cold and alone, the bitter winter wind licking at my lips, making my limbs brittle. I already felt weak from the dread of being alone, of being without my mother, and the child protective service workers went from having to hold me back to holding me up as my legs gave out.

  I wanted to stop all of this, I wanted to take away the thing that was making my mom do all the horrible things she was doing, make all these people go away. I felt like my world was crumbling, slipping through my grasp, and the more I tried to clutch at it, the more it gave away between my fingers.

  "Mommy!" I called out one last time. For a moment, my mom's expression changed, a crafty smile spread across her face as if the woman she'd said had taken her over was looking out through her eyes one last time. As if this had been that spirit’s plan the entire time, even if I couldn’t understand what that plan might have been.

  None of that mattered, though; in the next moment, she was my mom again, looking up at the house and seeing me, in the arms of strangers. Her wide, horror-struck eyes met mine and pierced my soul. Even after the police had shut the door behind her and she became obscured through the tinted windows, I felt like I could see her eyes through the glass, even as they were driving away.

  The cold dorm-style room they put me in with the other abandoned and abused children is an image that will never leave me. I still have nightmares about it to this day.

  "I heard your mom's crazy," said a little red-headed girl. I almost hit her and had I done so, I don't think either of us would have been here today.

  The truth was, as my blood boiled when she said it, I wondered if she was right. Even now, I don't know what to believe.[2]

  Though I had held back that time, eventually when the other kids were relentless with their taunting and their tormenting about what had happened with my mom, I snapped. Rather than use my fists, I remember that I had instead lashed out with words.

  "Someday, you’ll all see! I’ll...I’ll be somebody great!" I had shouted when one of the kids commented snidely that I would wind up like my mom.

  "Oh yeah? Like what, a great serial killer?" One of the older boys retorted, and the small crowd of kids around him laughed and cheered him on.

  "I’ll be a princess someday!" I’d yelled, or something to that effect, and stamped my foot for lack of any other way to express my impotent rage. "I’ll be treated like royalty! And no one will be able to hurt me anymore!"

  They all laughed at me, then, but they largely let that comment lie. Whenever they continued to mock my ‘crazy’ mother, I swore any petty vengeance I could think of— which as a kid, amounted to little more than putting rocks or mud in their shoes. It was a small thing, but I could do it quickly and quietly so I couldn’t be blamed for it, and if it made them even a little bit miserable, I figured it was good enough at the time.

  My life there wasn’t much better than before, even when the kids were kinder to me. Cold stale glop for food, echoing noisy rooms that made it impossible to sleep, itchy threadbare clothing, and stoic caseworkers who treated us all like slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse — that was all that filled my days there. Even surrounded by so many other kids and being monitored so heavily by the caseworkers and the staff, I had never felt more alone than I did back then. A part of me had preferred when I was with my mom and bad stuff was happening; even if I was in constant fear, at least I felt anything but lonely. At least then I could escape to school where the other kids and adults didn’t treat me like this. At least I had something to enjoy.

  At an early age, I had to grow up fast. That maturity forced on me so young had at least prepared me for what I was going to have to endure in the future.

  When my mom was released from the mental hospital a few months [3]later, I was so happy to go home, but she wasn't the same. Ostensibly, she seemed reformed. Better. She was docile and quiet and not at all the woman that had been dragged away in hysterics, but I knew better. The medication they gave her only stripped what was left of her personality away.

  "Are you hungry?" I would ask her, but she'd just stare at me like an empty shell. It was clear she heard me, but whether she had processed what I’d said was another story. She walked around like a zombie, depressed, spent most of her nights in bed crying, staring out the window. "I'm sorry," she would say. "I'm so, so, sorry. I didn't want them to take you. You have to understand."

  At first, I thought she was talking about me and protective services, but I began thinking that she was talking about something altogether different. I’m still not sure how to feel about that, knowing that there was some other thing that my mother missed more than me, feared losing more than losing me.

  We'd been home a month or so when she became very upset one day. She was crying and sobbing, "I don't want them to take you. Please, don't let them take you," while running around the house and covered up all the mirrors. I didn't know what she was talking about, but I agreed to keep the mirrors covered which seemed to calm her. [4]

  As much as it hurt, I knew she wasn’t whispering about ‘them’ taking me again, but whatever had compelled her to madness in the first place. I might have been wrong, or only half right, but neither would be much of a comfort.

  There were times late at night, I'd swear she, or someone, was whispering my name, but when I'd look around my bedroom — the Barbie posters, the long dark shadows cast by the moonlight through my blinds, all the veneer of a normal girl in a normal home’s bedroom — I'd see nothing unusual and my door was still closed.

  There were moments when she'd glare at me and growl, the strange woman looking out through her eyes again. Sometimes she'd cackle like an old witch. It was always sudden, always startling, but that was all it ever was, a look, a sound and then it would be gone. Even though I tried not to react to it, I couldn’t tamp down that instinctual fear of this being the moment she would attempt to kill me again. I wasn’t sure I’d ever grow out of that feeling.

  Nevertheless, it was my responsibility as her only child to take care of her, to keep her spirits up, to clean for her, cook for her, and most importantly, to make sure that she took her meds. I was nine years old by that time. Despite not being even ten, I felt so, so much older than I really was. Even back then, I had to remind myself that I had only been alive for nine years.

  It wasn't much of a childhood and for that, I'll never forgive her. Nor could I exactly take the time to mourn what I didn’t have, as what was left of my childhood was replaced by adolescence, my innocence gone, and the worst was yet to come.

  CHAPTER 3

  Raven

  The truth was, things were looking up for quite a while. For years in sunny San Diego, my mom stayed on her medication, she even got a little job which she loved. I went to school and had some semblance of a normal life as I became a freshman in high school. I could almost forget everything that came before, were it not for the fear that it would all come back.

  My life now had friends, talking and texting on the phone about cute boys, hanging out at the local pizza shop, even going to the high school football and basketball games. The feeling of normalcy — or at least, what I assumed normalcy was — had begun to settle in just long enough that I had begun to hope that it was all behind us, that we were finally free.

  That's when it all changed
.

  The door slammed hard as my mom pressed her back against it, interrupting my studying as I looked at her from my desk in the living[5] room where I usually did my homework. At first, I had thought she had stormed in, and instinctually tensed for a fight, but she had such a look of bliss on her face I realized she was just distracted by whatever it was that had made her so happy.

  "Hey mom," I said, looking up at her and biting the end of my pencil eraser, a nasty habit.

  "I am so in love," she said with a smile on her face.

  I couldn’t help but be a little startled; she hadn’t even said hello to me before she made such an unexpected declaration.

  "In love?" I said, my eyebrow arched. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean birds are singing, the flowers are brighter. I really think he could be the one I've been waiting for," she said twirling around like Snow White and finally collapsing on the couch. She let out the kind of sigh I would expect from those old cartoon princesses, wistful and breathy, deep enough that her chest heaved from the effort.

  My heart raced, conflicted. Although I was happy for her, there was a part of me that was jealous. I worried this would mean the end of our close friendship. My mom was more than just my mom, maybe because she was so young, she was also the one I told everything too. I had thought I finally had her to myself, free of whatever had possessed her in my younger years, only for someone else to swoop in.

  "Well, who is this guy?" I asked, getting up and going to stand beside her, "What's he look like? How long have you know him?"

  "Just today," she said, staring up at the ceiling with that silly smile on her face.

  I wasn’t expecting such an answer; I had thought maybe she knew him from work or had met him a few times before mentioning anything. But to call something so soon love? That seemed alarmingly sudden.