The Werewolves of Nyxryn

Chapter 2 -the human realm

I let the front door of the apartment ease shut behind me. The couch had claimed her—My mother slumped there, mouth slack, the cheap cardigan bunched in odd places. The smell hit me in the hallway: liquor, the faint chemical tang of someone who’d given up arguing with the world a long time ago. I could wake her. I could shake her until she remembered she had children to love and take care of. But I didn’t. I’d done that dance before. She would just open her drunk eyes, look at me like I was a stranger, and say whatever disjointed sentence the bottle had taught her to say that week.

It stung, sometimes, remembering the way things had been for us once. Not so long ago — longer than the years my mind wanted to admit — our house had been small and honest and full. We weren’t rich by a long shot. The floors of our house had creaked in places, the paint had flaked in others, but there was always enough food, always a reason to laugh in the kitchen. Love was in the air. My father could make a pan of eggs feel like a feast. He had this habit of humming off-key and pretending to conduct the kettle as if it were an orchestra. We would eat and talk and laugh, and the world felt like something we could hold.

Then the debts came.

Not the slow, fixable sort; something ugly and greedy and fast. Gambling had been my father's private flame at first — a shrug, a lucky week — and then it was an animal in the house that did not care about our faces anymore. It ate money, then pride, then sleep. The arguments between my parents started small, whispered across the hallway at first, then more ragged and sharp. I watched my father shrink into someone who counted on luck the way people counted on breath.

In the end, he chose a way out that had broken everything. He took his own life with a gun; that was the honest sentence, and it sat in my mouth like a rock. I didn’t dress it up. I didn’t add metaphors to make it gentler. He had killed himself because the debts were too big, because shame was a heavier coat than he could wear, because he could not see a path through.

I still replayed that day in bad, jagged snippets: the principal who came to pick me out of my classroom, the silence afterward like something had been pulled from the room. After that, the people remaining in this family had kept their shape, but they had all lost the music. The happiness.

The truth was more complex: the debts were real; the bills remained unpaid; the bank knocked twice too many times. But guilt was porous — it found all the places where you thought you could have done more and leaked in. I had been fifteen when my father had passed. Stubborn as hell, and busy trying to be hopeful in small, imperfect ways. I fed my siblings as best I could. I tried to hang onto my mother as she slowly slipped away from reality, and it wasn’t enough.

None of it was enough.

After the funeral, there were letters and phone calls and men in suits who explained that there was nothing left to claim for us. The house, the few savings, gone in the tangle of loans and repayments. My father’s decisions left a ledger with our name on it, and the world, practical and unsentimental, expected someone to pay. I stepped up because I had hands that could work and people who needed to eat, no matter how many shifts my mother worked. That was the logic of it: work until work surrenders, keep the kids fed, don’t let the memory of what happened weigh them down. I became a ledger-keeper by default.

I didn’t let myself think about that other awful night often, but sometimes it just crawled up from where I kept it buried, heavy and uninvited. It was after my father had died — after the bullet, after the debts he’d left behind swallowed everything else. The bank had already come. They took the house, the account, the sense of safety we had thought was permanent. What they didn’t tell us was that he hadn’t just owed money to banks. There were other men, harder ones.

I remembered the night they came to the door. My mother had gone pale, her whole body going stiff like an animal that knew the predators had already seen it. She turned to me, whispering fast and sharp: “Take them. Hide. Don’t make a sound and don't come out.” Her hands shook when she pushed my brother and sister into my arms, but her voice was steel.

The closet in the back smelled of old wood. It was dark, cramped, our knees knocking together, our breath too loud. I held my siblings against me, one on each side, their small hands clinging to my shirt like lifelines. They didn’t understand what was happening, not fully. My brother started to whimper, and I pressed my palm against his mouth, whispering that he had to be quiet, that it was a game, that we were hiding, and if we stayed hidden, we would win.

The sounds outside the door still lived in my bones. The men’s voices were sharp and ugly. Mom’s voice rising, breaking, turning into something I’d never heard before. Then her screams — not the kind you hear when someone stubbed a toe or burned a hand on the stove, but the kind that ripped the world open. My sister buried her face against me. I bit my lip so hard it bled just to keep myself from making a sound. Afraid of what those men would do when they found us.

I didn’t remember how long it lasted. Long enough to know that when the door slammed shut and the silence came back, nothing would ever be the same again. When we finally crept out of the closet, the house looked the same, but it wasn’t. Mom was on the floor, shaking, her face pale and her eyes empty. I wanted to go to her, to help, but she shoved me back with a look I would never forget — not anger, but a warning. A plea for me to keep the little ones safe.

The next morning, I found her in the kitchen, a bottle in her hand. It was the first time I’d ever seen her drink in the daylight. She didn’t stop after that day. Not one sober day since that night. What those men took from her that night was something no one could give back.

I grew up in that closet that night, in the silence of holding two children’s mouths shut while the world turned into something cruel on the other side of the door. I had learned how to keep quiet. How to survive. How to step into her place without being asked. Because somebody had to. So, I did the same thing as I did every other day. I walked past my drunk mother, went to look over my brother and sister as they slept, and tried to find some sleep inside this living hell I called my life.

I rolled out of bed the next morning like a corpse learning to walk and shuffle toward the kitchen. Mom was still passed out on the couch, one arm dangling, the empty bottle keeping guard on the floor like a loyal dog. I didn’t even look twice at it. That was just background noise now. A permanent fixture in my everyday life.

I opened the fridge and stared into its bleak landscape: a half carton of eggs, some bread, and the questionable remains of last night’s leftovers. Gourmet dining, I thought to myself. I got the pan going, cracked the eggs, and dropped bread into the toaster.

By the time the smell of food started creeping through the apartment, they shuffled in. My sister, hair sticking out in every direction like she had fought a war with her pillow and lost. My brother, dragging his blanket like a cape, also still half asleep like me.

“Morning, zombies,” I said, voice thick but trying to at least sound cheerful.

“You’re the zombie,” my teenage brother shot back, slumping into his chair. He yawned so wide I swore I saw his soul escape for a second. Malrik was tall in that awkward way boys get when their bones outpace the rest of them. His shoulders were starting to fill out, though, hinting at the man he was becoming. His hair was a dark brown and wavy like mine, always a little too long and falling into his eyes, but he refused to cut it because he swore it made him look mysterious (it didn’t, it just made him look like he was always losing a fight with gravity). His humor was dry, sarcastic, sometimes cutting, but it was his armor — a way to pretend he didn’t notice the empty bottles on the counter or the exhaustion in my face. He did grow up to hate our mother, and I honestly couldn't blame him for it. I had heard them fight countless times, had heard him scream that we needed a mother and not a drunk. After a while, just like me, he had given up on that battle, and now simply lived his life as if our mother wasn't there. He was smart, sharper than he let on, but stubbornly refused to apply himself in school unless it was a subject that actually interested him. Still, he was fiercely loyal to me and our sister, even if he hid it under constant teasing. Malrik was now seventeen, caught in that limbo of wanting to be grown but not ready to shoulder everything just yet — and I would never let him, even if he tried.

“Actually,” my sister said, sitting down with the gravity of a philosopher,

“Veyra’s more like a vampire. She never sleeps, and her skin is super pale. Do you sparkle in the sunlight, sis?”

I snorted. Elira was all restless energy and wide eyes. She was small for her age (she had just turned thirteen), with an unshakable spark in her smile that made her look like she was perpetually up to something. Where Malrik’s humor was dry, Elira’s was mischievous — quick, playful, always looking for the laugh. Her hair was a shade lighter than ours, a light brown that caught golden in the sun, usually tied into messy braids she insisted she could do herself. She was endlessly curious, always asking questions, always poking her nose into things she probably shouldn’t. School was something she actually enjoyed, though she pretended not to when Malrik was around — but I had caught her up late, reading by flashlight under the covers. She idolized her older brother, though she had a streak of independence that made her insist she could handle things on her own (she couldn’t, not yet, but the confidence was there).

“If I sparkled, don’t you think I’d be rich and famous by now? I’d be on a beach somewhere, sipping smoothies, not frying eggs in this dump.”

“True,” my brother mutters,

“But you’d still have to make us breakfast.”

I slid their plates onto the table.

“Consider yourselves lucky you’ve got a vampire-s***h-zombie for a sister, then.” I yawned, making sure my siblings were fed.