Evie

“Awesome, you’re finally back,” Hali says, coming out of the kitchen, and running over to me. She doesn’t look at me with any kind of care or worry, nope her eyes are just on the Chinese. A girl after my own heart, right there.

“I have to feed the teenager I look after, don’t I?” I say, and she smiles, taking the bag off me. I glance over at Hali, wondering when she started to look so much older. She doesn’t look like a child anymore, which to be honest with myself, freaks me out a little. She turned fifteen yesterday, but I still think of her as the eight-year-old she was when she started living with me, after her mother died. Hali is beautiful, with black, long African hair which she braids, and it matches her deep-brown skin. She has stunning pale-grey eyes, that all witches have, and nearly all lights reflect off them. I turn around, pulling my coat off and hanging it on the hook by the front door. I put my sword underneath it, using my coat to hide the blood on it from Hali. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind the door, almost cringing at how much of a mess I am. My dark-blue, waist length hair is messy today, and my blue eyes look tired. I don’t look like my twenty-five-year-old age, no, I look about fifty from all the stress. I swear if I find a grey hair, I’m going to lose it.

“Did you finally kill the Protector following you?” Hali asks, shocking me as she sits on the sofa and pulls Chinese boxes out of the bag like she didn’t just ask something important.

“How did you even know we had one following?” I ask, curious. She never has noticed before, and she is basically a human until she turns eighteen, so it couldn’t be magic she used to find out.

“You look tired, exhausted really, and it’s because you don’t sleep when one follows us. Plus, you have blood on your boots,” she says, and I look down, seeing that she is right. Damn, I hope that comes off, these are new boots. I reach over, picking up a box and grabbing a plastic fork out of the bag.

“Good work, detective,” I say, making her laugh, but it dies off quickly as her pale, serious eyes meet mine.

“Do you think they will ever stop coming after you? What did you do anyway?” she asks, and I go to change the subject because she is too young to deal with the truth, when she interrupts me.

“Don’t lie to me. I’m not a kid anymore, and don’t you think I have a right to know?” she asks, locking her eyes with mine, so I can’t really look away. I know she isn’t a child, sort of, but I still want to protect her. She is like a little sister to me, and the only person in the world I’m close with. I don’t want her to understand the evil in this world until she really has to. This world is full of demons, protectors, witches, angels, and even the occasional reaper. It was, apparently, better a hundred years ago when all supes used to hide from humans. Now everyone knows about supes, and supes rule the very world humans pretend they still have control over.

“They don’t come for you, so no, not really,” I say, shoving food into my mouth, hoping she will just drop this. I almost gag on the taste of the sweet and sour chicken, it’s crap. I miss bacon already.

“Evie . . . protectors don’t come after me now, but you know I will be hunted when I’m older. It’s why you teach me how to fight, and it’s why we live in the middle of Scotland. I want to know why they come after you, as you already know why they will surely come after me,” she says, seeming much older than she should. I’ve always known why they will come after Hali one day, but I won’t let anyone touch her.

“I don’t know why they come after me, Hali, but I know they can find me because of my rune name. Protectors can always find one another if they know their rune name,” I explain to her the little I actually do know. I don’t even want to think about my asshole ex who is the only reason I know this much about my own kind.

“Like a tracker?” she asks, thinking about it. “Why don’t you just remove the rune name off your skin? It doesn’t give you powers like your others.”

“The problem is, I don’t even know what my rune name says, and have no clue how anyone else could know it. I won’t remove it, not until I know. I was born with it, and whether it’s a curse or not, it’s mine. It's the only potential answer I have to my past, and one day I will find out what it says,” I explain to her, and her eyes cloud over in sadness. I often forget what she was born with herself, and how she lost everything because of it.

“Could it be your family that knows? That send their people to kill you?” she asks.

“I don’t have any family, not other than you,” I reply quickly.

“I mean blood family. You had to have had a mother and father, and it would make sense they would know your rune name,” she says.

“I don’t get why the person hunting me doesn’t just come after me themself, but that’s not your problem,” I say. “Now let’s change the subject to something less depressing.”

“Like watching the new Catfish episodes?” she says, thankfully agreeing to the subject change, despite the sadness I still see in her eyes. I smile at the big, fake grin on her face. She is hooked on these shows, and I can’t say I don’t find them funny and addictive as well.

“Go on, then,” I say, smiling at her overly excited face as she grabs the remote.

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