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PRESENT DAY

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Jensen Wilder sits alone at a round table in a high school cafeteria. His dark, shaggy hair shields his eyes from the people around him. However, his reflection on his phone screen shows his face.

It shows his blue eyes that are captured by a thin, bright ring of orange. Certainly, his eyes look out of the ordinary, but not that anyone would notice.

With a sigh, he sets his phone down and glances around the cafeteria. Every table seems to be full. Well, except for his. No one sits at Jensen's table that resides in the farthest corner of the room.

He frowns as he thinks about how it has been a long time since anyone sat with him. In fact, it has been an even longer time since anyone talked to him directly, except for Daisy.

Even the self-proclaimed "loners" stayed away from Jensen.

Daisy is a petite girl with golden hair. She offers a sweet smile to everyone she passes in the halls--including the boy who walks alone.

His gaze sets on the table that she sits at with her friends, who coincidentally, happen to already be looking at him. They giggle and turn away.

In instinct, he raises his hand to hover over his eyes. He bows his head. He can't let anyone see his eyes. It doesn't happen often. He can never control it. It's just another one of the problems that so wonderfully come alone with being a supernatural being.

The girls at Daisy's lunch table giggle loudly and Jensen hears his name being whispered.

The skin on his knuckles turns white from clenching them into tight fists. The whole reason he avoids people and having friends in general, is to be invisible. He has apparently failed.

"I bet he's thinking about how to grow weed in his backyard. As if he isn't faded enough." One girl scoffs as she turns back to her friends, casually flipping her bleach-blonde hair over her shoulder. The other girls at the table laugh and agree with her.

Another adds, "No way, he's beyond that. Anyone can get Marijuana these days." She pauses, "I heard he sells the hard stuff behind the soccer shed."

"Like what?" Someone speculates.

"Crystal Meth," she whispers loudly.

Someone of the girls gasp and a few squeal in humorous delight.

However, only one of the girls stays silent. Her hazel eyes carefully watch as Jensen looks over at them. She wears her blonde hair in two braids with loose strands hanging around her face. She looks radiant.

His breath catches in his throat when their eyes lock.

Daisy looks away as soon as their eyes meet and averts her gaze back to her food.

Jensen feels a pang in his chest. He knows he did this. Every time she tried to talk to him over the years, he cut her off, walked away, or simply ignored her. He doesn't want to be like this, but he just doesn't know what else to do. There's no other way.

What she didn't know is that every time he was rude to her, it hurt him and he wanted to run after her and apologize immediately. The way her face fell was an image that he couldn't seem to get out of his head. She was only ever kind to him and was one of the only people in the world who actually seemed to care about him. But yet, he couldn't drag her into this. He didn't even really understand much of anything that was going on himself.

He didn't expect the nightmares to get as bad as they did. After he found out he was a Lynx, nothing was the same again.

Four years ago, when he heard the word Lynx for the first time, the dreams stopped. Then, a couple of months later, they turned into horrible nightmares.

He began to research everything he could think of pertaining to supernatural abilities and creatures. However, he still managed to find nothing useful, just more pages filled with viruses.

At this point, he believes that he's just a freak of nature and that nothing and no one can help him--not even someone like Daisy.

The rest of the day goes by in a hazy blur, like most days for Jensen. This is a side effect of rarely getting any sleep. When he finally gets home, he throws his backpack onto the floor next to the coat rack.

"Hey, JJ. How was school, hun?" his mother calls from the next room over.

Jensen walks down the hallway and into the kitchen that connects to their living room. His mother sits on the couch with her bare feet propped up and a wine glass in hand. Her raven hair is tied up in a perfect bun and she wears an expensive black pantsuit.

He grabs a water bottle from the fridge before turning to face the back of his mother's head as she watches TV on the sofa. 

"It was fantastic, Eomma." With that, he takes his leave. He quickly jogs up the stairs and makes a beeline for his bedroom.

He passes by his younger sister's bedroom and grimaces. Even though her door is closed, he can clearly hear a generic K-pop song playing.

Before he walks past his brother's room, he passes a wall filled with numerous display boxes containing an array of shiny medals and colorful patches. Most are his father's, but some are his mother's. Before she was an attorney, she was a Korean marine visiting the states. That's how his parents met. And his father, well, he hasn't been able to move forward with his life since he was in the military. At the top of the wall is a framed American Flag, a symbol of what they used to be, as opposed to their less-than-extraordinary lives now.

When he walks past his younger brother's room, instead of music, he can hear him yelling at his computer as he plays a video game.

A sigh escapes Jensen's lips as he closes his door behind him. He throws his backpack on the ground and falls back onto his bed, running his hands over the soft duvet. His eyes close and he allows himself to relax for a moment.

A minute later, his eyes open and he turns his head to look at the floor in front of his closed closet door. He wills his eyes to change and the walls and floors around him disappear to reveal the back porch of the house.

Jensen's father sits in his rocking chair, swaying back and forth as he stares into the dense woods behind their house. A cup of coffee he made when he woke up still sits next to him on the table. Occasionally, his father strokes the fur of the old beagle sitting in his lap, but other than that, he remains still, his gaze unwavering.

His father is still doing the same thing that he's done for years. Ever since he retired from the Marines, he has sat in that very mahogany rocking chair from five AM to five PM every day. Still, Jensen checks every day to see if something might change, but it never does.

He flips flat on his back to stare at the ceiling now. A yawn escapes his lips, causing him to sit up and sift through his nightstand. He pulls out a small orange bottle and opens it, shaking out a pill.

He tosses the small white pill into his mouth, swallows it, and then throws the bottle back in the drawer without a second thought.

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As she watches houses go by in the windows of the school bus, Daisy thinks about Jensen, whom she saw earlier in the cafeteria. He looked worse than usual.

She has always wondered what happened to the boy she met in the eighth grade. He was the first person to introduce himself to the new girl who had just moved to Denver, Colorado, a long way away from her previous home state of West Virginia.

The cute little half Asian kid with high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, and spikey black hair, was an inch shorter than she was then. He held out his arm straight ahead of him and practically yelled at her, "Welcome to Hell!" She shook his hand awkwardly but embraced his enthusiasm. "Thank you, kind sir" she said and laughed.

Jensen was the class clown, but not in an obnoxious way. He was always very kind to her. She never forgot that. That's why Daisy didn't understand when one day he just shut down.

His personality turned from a funny extrovert to someone who barely spoke. He stopped playing sports, stopped having friends, and he stopped talking to her.

Daisy had tried to talk to him after he changed. Even last week she tried to ask him if he was okay after catching a glimpse of the horrible bags under his eyes. She looked up to him now as he was at least half a foot taller than he was in middle school. She smiled and set a hand on his arm, hoping he just needed a kind gesture. But he shrugged her off. His response was always the same, "Don't talk to me," and he walked away.

Daisy's phone buzzes next to her hand on the blue leather of her seat on the schoolbus. The screen of her smartphone lights up, displaying a text from Tony Moretti. A smile graces her lips at the thought of the silly boy she calls her best friend.

She briefly glances out the window to make sure she isn't missing her stop, before reading the message. Mama is asking when you will come over for dinner next. She misses you, lol.

Daisy picks up her phone to type a response. Lol, soon. I need to ask my mom when she works her next night shift. Tell Mama I miss her too.

A couple of minutes later, she gets off the dirty, yellow bus and walks with her head down towards her home. It only takes about a minute before she's standing in her driveway. She looks up, hoping to see her brother's car, but it is nowhere in sight.

She sighs and a frown pulls on her lips. She knows he's never coming back, but she still looks for his blue Mustang. Daisy gave up on her father a long time ago, but she still holds hope in her heart for her brother. But constantly waiting only makes the disappointment weigh heavier on her. With one last longing look at the empty pavement, she spins on her heels and leaves her temporary sadness behind.

The door slams behind her as she enters the old house. The paint is chipped and faded on the outside but is cleaned to a pristine degree on the inside. Picture frames litter the house, but most pictures are of Daisy as a child. The others are black and white portraits of some random ancestors.

The only picture of her family is tucked away safely in the bottom of her nightstand, hopefully where her mother will never venture. If she didn't have that singular picture, then, just like their house, she might forget there was ever more than the two of them.

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A young man, on the other side of town, throws a small basketball into a hoop on the wall opposite his bed.

"Did you tell her yet, Tony?" Tony's mother pops her head into his bedroom. The woman tries her best to casually stroll into the room, but her eagerness shows as her strides become increasingly more like a skip. She stops at the foot of his bed and places her hands on her hips and they instantly become hidden by her hair. The thin Italian woman's long, dark hair flows down her back.

She is referencing the conversation they had earlier that day. She told Tony to tell Daisy to come over since she misses seeing her often like she used to.

He rolls his eyes. "Yes, Mamá. She says soon and that she misses you too."

A warm smile appears on the older woman's tanned face. "Oh, how sweet. She is such a sweet girl, Tony! You know you two-"

"Mamá!" Tony exclaims and throws his head back into his pillow.

She chuckles and quickly leaves her son's room before she gets a lecture.

Tony shakes his head from his spot sprawled out across his bed. He's getting very tired of his mother (and the entire rest of his family) trying to set him and Daisy up. The girl is a good friend of his and has been for a few years now. He would be lying if he said he'd never thought about it, but the thought of them in a romantic way just doesn't seem realistic.

She doesn't like him that way, at least that's what he's always presumed. And, besides, they were too good of friends, he didn't want to risk messing that up.

He lays on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his head swimming with thoughts. He stays like this for a while and doesn't come back to reality until a weird feeling emerges in his stomach. A feeling of distraught surges through Tony's body, catching him completely off-guard.

He shoots up in his bed, surprised by the strong emotion that doesn't belong to him. The moment the emotion is there, it's gone, not lasting more than a couple of seconds. Tony had only ever felt emotions through physical contact, none had ever been without touching someone. This is one of the supernatural side effects of being a Phoenix.

Tony leaps off his bed and runs out of his room. When he enters the upstairs hallway he can hear voices coming from the living room below him.

When his foot hits the first step of the stairs, another twinge of emotional distraught passes through his mind. This time it is stronger and lasts a couple of seconds longer. Tony takes in a sharp breath and pauses for a moment to recover before descending the rest of the stairs.

Upon reaching the living room, he is instantly greeted by a view of his parent's backs. His father's large arms are wrapped around his mother's contrasting, short, slim figure.

"Che c'é?" What's wrong? Tony asks as he steps around his parents.

A man is sitting on the large red couch. His wavy, almost black hair hangs over his hands that are holding his bowed head.

Tony's sisters, the eldest Moretti children, sit together on the loveseat adjacent to the couch. Isabella, the oldest, has her arms wrapped around Luna whose gaze is set on the ground in front of her, but when Tony speaks, she lifts her head to look at him.

Luna, who is never without a smile, doesn't wear one now.

Tony's eyebrows scrunch together as he takes in the unusual sight of his siblings. He turns his head to look at his parents who are standing to the side of him. His mother has tears streaming down her cheeks, while his father wears a deep frown.

All of the blood in Tony's body turns cold as reality sets in. He isn't sure what exactly the reality is yet, but he knows that it must be something terrible.

Tony hesitantly sits down next to his brother. "Alec? Cosa sta succendo?" What's going on?

Alec stays silent for a moment, his gaze set on the carpet in front of him. He rakes his fingers through his dark curls. "Ariana," he finally says. "They killed her." His voice comes out shaky and breaks every other syllable.

Immediately, Tony knows who he's talking about: hunters.

He opens his mouth to say something, but no words come out. He closes his mouth and instead wraps his arms around Alec. For the first time since they were ten, the two youngest Moretti children embrace each other.

He couldn't possibly even begin to imagine what Alec must be going through right now, so no words would suffice. He was only one month away from marrying her. Ariana had already begun to feel like a sister to the Moretti siblings, especially the girls. They were together and planning the wedding any chance they got.

His dark eyes settle on his sisters. Isabella keeps a straight face while rubbing her hand up and down Luna's back. Luna, on the other hand, her dark curly hair is in disarray upon her head. Her hands continue to tug at her curls while she stares at the ground.

His heart not only hurts for his brother but for them as well. Every Moretti in the room shares the same pain.

Still in his brother's embrace, Tony does his best to keep Alec's feelings blocked out, but he still can feel his pain from the powers he has as a Phoenix as well as his own.

Tony swallows a lump in his throat. If I ever encounter a hunter, I will make them burn alive, he thinks. And he means it.

Ariana's death is only one example of their endless tyranny, but their mistake was taking it out on a Moretti. They hadn't met a Phoenix yet, and Tony is sure that they won't like him, not after he's through with them.

Minutes pass before Alec breaks out of Tony's embrace and rises from the couch. Tony watches as he walks around his parents and heads for the front door. His brother doesn't say a thing and walks out of the silent house.