CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"He was – he was going crazy. I don't know when exactly it started, but I think it must have been when I was young. It was little things at first, like he'd forget something as soon as I told him, or he'd react strangely to things people said. But then when I was eleven, it just accelerated. It snuck up on us. All of a sudden, he was all over the place, mixing around his emotions, forgetting people he'd known since forever, believing they were other than were. He got paranoid. He was convinced my English teacher was out to harm us and set up security cameras all around the house. He even got arrested by the police for harassing people at work – for being 'violent', they said. It was terrifying.

"But mum – Katherine – didn't want to tell anyone. Our predicament was tough enough as it was and she thought something otherworldly was causing the mental illness. She didn't want doctors digging around finding things they couldn't understand. So we left it. She was always bringing in healers – a new one each week, it seemed – but they did nothing to help him. And it just got worse.

"A couple weeks after I turned twelve, he started acting suspicious towards – Katherine. He'd say things to me, like, 'Don't listen to your mother, don't trust her, don't let her get too close.' And then, one afternoon when I got home from school, he pulled me into the hallway while mum was cooking and whispered, 'The lady in our house is not who she says she is. She's tricking you.' You can imagine I was pretty freaked out. He thought Katherine was an imposter in her own home. It was dangerous.

"So I told her what he said. She looked pretty afraid after hearing it but told me not to speak of it anymore – to anyone – and went on as normal. Then the next week, when dad was working late, she sat me down on the couch. She said, 'Don't freak out,' and then pulled out a gun from behind one of the pillows." Sarah laughs, albeit grimly. "I freaked out. But when I got over it, Katherine told me that it was for my protection. She didn't mention what it was meant to protect me from – but I knew. Of course I knew. She didn't need it because she had her powers, but I was completely defenceless without it. She taught me the basics – showed me how to switch the safety on and off and pull the trigger – and then we hid it in my bedroom.

"A couple weeks later, I got used to the idea of it being there and was even glad for it – especially on days when dad was acting the worst. Whenever he started acting violently, she'd send me a warning look that I took to mean, Get the gun. So I'd retreat to my room, dig out the gun, and shove it in the waist band of my pants, or in my undies if I was wearing a dress. Then I'd return to whatever I was doing and try to forget about it. It was a horrible feeling, having it so close to my body, up against my skin – and I couldn't even imagine actually shooting it – but I did what I had to. That's the way lived." She shrugs.

"Every now and then, Patrick would stop by to see how we were doing. He'd always made it clear not to view him as an uncle, so I didn't, but there was no doubting he cared for Katherine. He was the first one she'd told when she started noticing the signs, and since then she'd kept him updated. In return, he helped us; he made sure we were okay. I didn't view him as a bad person back then – I would never have thought it possible. But I think mum might have had her suspicions. I only say that looking back on it now, of course. At the time, I didn't see it.

"Nevertheless, he was there for us. Dad trusted him even though he didn't trust Katherine, so at least we had that in our favour. Plus whenever Patrick was around, dad seemed to act normal – or at least more normal than usual. He was getting more unstable than I thought possible – in one week, he had gotten arrested for injuring a stranger he thought was trying to kill him, and had punched a hole in one of the walls of our house. His mental illness – if that's what it was – was steering him towards violence.

"And he'd started hitting mum as well. He got angry all the time – he was always shouting, calling her first an imposter, than a spy, then a demon. I kept urging her to tell a doctor, to get him some help – even if that meant locking him up in mental ward – but she still believed something paranormal was the cause and didn't want any normal humans to stumble across something they weren't supposed to. Plus, she was looking too much into the how and why of his illness. I think she may have believed that if we got medical help for him, one of us would get sick next. She was going crazy. Everyone was. We were all insane." She laughs again, but I fail to find the humour in her situation. All I feel is sick, sick, sick.

Her face falls flat. "Then one day – I think it was a Saturday, I can't really remember – he got really bad. We were just finishing up breakfast and something mum said must have ticked him off, because he got really angry all of a sudden, shouting things at her, making threats. I remember he slammed his palm down onto the table so hard the whole thing shivered for an instant. Mum's cup fell over and the last of her tea splashed out across the table. She gave me that look then – the, Go get the gun – and so I used the pretence of clearing the table as a way to get out of the dining room. I stashed the empty bowls and mugs in the kitchen and fled to my room to grab the gun. It felt heavier than usual that day – and colder too. My palms were all sticky and my hands were shaking, so it took me a couple tries to get it secured comfortably in the top of my jeans. And then I had to wear a jacket on top because dad would've seen the gun through my shirt otherwise."

Sarah shakes her head. Her eyes are wide with remembered horror. "When I got back out, Patrick was there. He must have teleported there to check up on us as he often did on weekends, but that day he had teleported into a mess. My father was hugging Katherine's back to his chest with a knife up against her throat. I remember freezing up at the sight. He was shouting at Patrick, and he kept repeating, 'She's not Katherine! She's a demon!'

"Patrick was trying to calm him down best he could, but it wasn't working. The calm his presence usually brought to my father was non-existent. When it became apparent that my father was turning on Patrick as well, making threats to kill him, he teleported out of the room. Just...left. One moment there, the next...gone. I think that's when I first started to realise he wasn't who I thought he was. I mean, he was meant to be there to help us, but he'd fled.

"Suddenly, the entire situation was in my hands – literally in my hands. Katherine kept giving me that look, and I knew she want me to pull out the gun. She couldn't risk using any of her powers because of the knife up against throat. I, on the other hand, had an advantaged. My father still trusted me – he still thought I was at least somewhat on his side. And he had no idea that I had a gun in my jeans.

"Mum was pleading with him to let her go, and now that Patrick was gone, he spun her around and smashed her up against the wall, making sure to keep the knife to her skin. He was still shouting – all sorts of gibberish it seemed at this point – but his back was to me. He – he trusted me." Sarah swallows and looks down, and in the movement I can see all the pain and guilt she's kept pent up over the years. It seems to roll all over in dark, suffocating waves.

As I watch, new tears well in her haunted eyes. "My heart was beating so fast and my hands were still shaking, but I reached in under my shirt anyway and tugged the gun free. It was still warm from the heat of my stomach, but even then, it felt horribly cold. It felt like death." She exhales slowly. "It was the kind of moment when you realise what you're made of. The gun was in my hand, and I had it pointed directly at my father's back. All I had to do was pull the trigger. But–"

At this point, the tears break free of whatever constrains she kept them under. They shoot down her cheeks like rain charging for the ground. "But he turned around. He was looking at me – frowning at me, like he felt betrayed. He asked me what I was doing and I said I couldn't let him hurt mum. I told him she was still my mother and that he needed to put the knife down. I told him I could help him...

"But he just got angry. He started shouting at me – saying that I was an imposter as well – and he pressed the knife deeper into mum's throat. Even from the other side of the room, I could see the blood. I screamed at him to stop but it did nothing. I said to him, 'Don't make me do this,' but he just shouted, 'She deserves to die!'"

Sarah takes a gulp of air and swallows it down. The tears on her cheeks sit still, flashing like crystals as she speaks. Suddenly, her voice has gone hard and cold. "They were his last words. He pulled the knife back from Katherine's throat, about to slash it. Recognising the movement, I aimed the gun at his back and shot. Three times, one right after the other. He slumped against Katherine and then to the ground, dead."

Sarah is silent for a minute. All she's told me whirls through my mind, bringing with it a horrible feeling of sickness. All I can think is, why didn't you tell me?

She starts up again. "Katherine was quick to react afterwards. Straight away, she ran over to me and took the gun from my hands. There was no hug, no are you okay? It was all business. She told me to fetch the med-kit from the bathroom and when I returned with it, she was wearing plastic gloves and was cleaning the gun with a cloth. I knew she was getting rid of my finger prints, but her reason for doing so just wasn't clicking at that point.

"When she finished with the gun, she turned to the cut on her throat, using antiseptic from the med-kit to disinfect the wound. I helped her stick a patch over it, then she went and changed out of her bloody clothes into clean ones. She came back out wearing a turtle-neck jumper, presumably to cover the patch on her neck, and stuffed her bloodied clothes into the washing machine amongst a bunch of other random items. Then she returned to the gun, taking off the gloves. She picked it up with her right hand, as if she was about to shoot it, before putting it back down. I just stared at her. It was hard for me to process all that was going on. I was still in a state of shock. I mean, I'd just shot my father. And he was dead.

Sarah takes a couple deep breaths. "Katherine sat me down on the couch and told me the story. My father had gotten angry. He'd attack my mother with a knife. In self-defence, she had grabbed the gun she kept behind the pillows on the couch and shot him three times in the chest. I had been in my room the whole time, hiding." She breathes in deeply again, and the sound quivers on the exhale. "Only then did I realise she was framing herself, erasing any trace of me from the death. She was protecting me, because she knew that it'd make the news if it was found that I had killed my own father. She knew what that would do to me and rest of my childhood.

"That's when Patrick came back. He appeared right in front us, not even flinching at the dead body, and said, 'The police are here.' Apparently he'd called them. He said it was the reason he left, because he didn't see any other way out. I saw in my mother's eyes that she didn't entirely believe him, but she let it slide.

"The police came in. They cleared the scene and we were herded to an ambulance where they made sure we were okay. Then we were questioned and we each told our story: Katherine, the one she'd told me; Patrick, the true version of his own, minus the teleporting of course; and myself, the one where I spent the entire time under my bed. Where I didn't witness my father going crazy, and I didn't pick up a gun and shoot into his back.

"And it was all okay. The police accepted our self-defence statement and we got a temporary apartment while our house was cleaned of the body and investigated, and by the end of the day, I went to sleep in a different bed and pretended nothing had happened. Patrick thought my mother had killed my father, the police thought my mother had killed my father, and I was still in too much shock to accept the truth.

"Katherine only told Ethel, Rand and Scott the real story. A few others found out later that it was really me who had killed him, but it didn't really spread past that – Katherine made sure it stayed, for the most part, a secret. Of course, just because it was a secret, didn't mean I didn't feel the full effects of what I'd done. It was...tough afterwards. But I got through it. I had to be okay – for you, because it wasn't my body. It wasn't my life."

I let out a slow breath. Whatever anger I possessed before vanished while she was speaking, leaving me with only guilt and aching sympathy. "And are you okay?" I breathe.

Sarah smiles sadly and shakes her head. "No. Not really, anyway. Some things just don't leave you. I keep running it over my head, thinking about everything I could've done differently. Like shooting him in the arm or leg instead of the chest. Or calling the cops instead of fetching the gun so that they could've gotten there quicker. If I'd just gone to a doctor in the weeks leading up to that day and told them of my situation at home, he could've gotten help. There are hundreds of different ways it could've played out so that he lived – maybe if I'd reasoned with him more or stayed in the room after breakfast, I could've stopped it. But I didn't. I didn't do any of those things. Instead I killed him, and I can't change that."

I'm silent. I think about all the people who have died because of me – the strangers, the friends, my mother. All the pain and guilt their deaths have caused me. And yet, none of it will ever compare to what Sarah's been through – not really. I've killed people inadvertently and stood from afar as it happened. But Sarah – Sarah's held death in her hands. She's had to personally tear the life away from someone she loved. And then she's had to survive the aftermath.

Suddenly all my problems feel small, blocked out by the massing guilt. While I've been focusing on myself – on school, on the future – she's had to carry the weight of something much worse inside. And ignorantly, I've gotten angry at her. I've looked at the surface, at her actions – lying to me, disappearing without explanation, acting like someone I didn't know, closed-off and moody and different – and misjudged it for the whole. Sarah's haunted by things too. We all are.

I shake my head. "God, I'm so sorry, Sarah. I'm so sorry."

She frowns. "You're not angry at me?"

Now it's my turn to look confused. "Why would I be angry at you?"

"I killed your father."

"And I killed your mother. Besides, you had no other option. It was self-defence."

"I think that's debatable." She pauses. "And you didn't kill my mother. You had nothing to do with it. I place that blame solely on Patrick, and you should too."

"I'll tell you what. I'll stop thinking I killed my mum if you stop thinking you killed your dad. Sound fair?"

Sarah thinks about it for a moment. "I can't just turn off my thoughts and feelings with a switch."

"Can you try?"

She gives me the smallest of smiles. "Yeah. I can try."

A/N

Hope you enjoyed that bit of Sarah's backstory! I'll be slotting in some more of her backstory in the coming chapters, and I'm also thinking of writing a chapter from her point of view, so let me know if that's something you'd be interested in reading :)

Also, i apologise for all these heavy chapters. I promise, next chapter, things get exciting again ;)

song up top is an absolute gem ("all we do" by oh wonder). the lyrics don't go so much with the chapter but the tone certainly does. I definitely recommend giving it a listen! it's one of my faves at the moment.

- Shaye