Page 3 of Demon Rejected

Roby was the nicest person I ever met. He examined me and saw my bruises. He kept talking, but my mind was blank. What happened to my mom? One moment she was about to attack me with the broken bottle. The next, Sparky defended me by turning itself into a huge wolf of fire and flames.

“Did you find my mom?" My eyes burned and tears streaked my dirty cheeks. The power of sadness cleansed my clouded vision.

“Was your mom inside the trailer?"

“I… I don’t know. I’m not sure."

That was a lie. I knew she was in there. Did she leave after I passed out?

Roby turned away and gave me a plastic oxygen mask that he asked me to put on my nose and breathe through slowly.

“Breathe through this. I’ll ask about your mom. I’ll be right back. Sit tight and wait for me, okay?"

I nodded. Just when his large frame disappeared and stopped shielding me, I saw the chaos that had broken loose in the trailer park. There was a police car, two ambulances, a fire truck. It was all madness, chaos, and destruction.

Roby returned.

“There was no one else in the trailer. Your mom is safe. Do you know her phone number?"

I shook my head. I had no idea what her number was or if she even carried a phone.

“Don’t you worry, Scarlett. My colleagues will find your mom.”

Everything else happened so fast. As I look back, I feel it was all a weird dream to help me forget about my mother.

After that day, I landed in foster care. My story is the same sob story many other kids left in the care of the system share. The care system attracts a specific type of people. Not all were bad. Some of my so-called foster parents were merely indifferent. I knew the drill. Don’t attract attention. Make yourself useful. Keep your head down. Don’t get into fights. It would work most of the time if the people who cared for us were not evil. Other times I had accidents, incidents that brought me to the place I am now.

Now, at the age of seventeen, I’m still unsure if it was a crazy dream or real. During the years, after some of my foster parents abused me, there were incidents involving fire. My dreams are always about fire.

I flick a Zippo lighter out of my pocket and start to play with it. Most people get freaked out by fire, and my new therapist is no exception. As I sat on the couch and listened to another therapist, I knew what they expected to hear.

“Scarlett, who gave you the lighter? You should not have it, not in your condition."

They believe I’m a pyromaniac. Little do they know.

As a little girl, I talked about Sparky. The doctors called Sparky a projection of my fears, and I just went with it. How could I tell them that Sparky was as real as they and I, even though she stopped visiting me? She comes to me only in my dreams when I’m on the edge of despair. When she’s near me, things burn down. I’m not bothered by fire or heat. I don’t get burned. Not even a blister forms on my skin, no matter how long I touch the flame with my open hand.

They searched for my mother. She didn’t die that night, not in the fire, but she disappeared. My mother could not be bothered to claim me or get in touch with me.

I’m at the point where I can’t remember the number of foster families who have kept me for a while then pushed me away. I wasn’t an adoptable candidate. From day one, they stuck the label pyromaniac to my file. As I grew, I developed faster than other girls my age. A look at me was enough to convince future moms that they didn’t want me as a potential daughter in their family. I kept going, moved from one foster home to the next. Head down, hoodie pulled over my hair, eyes averted.

The last one was the worst.

“Daddy” had a taste for young girls. Me and Cara, my foster sister, tried our best to protect the little ones from him, but he would have his way, sneaking in at night, throwing Cara and me out of the bedroom, then hurting the little girls. His wife was usually drunk and too lost in her stupor to want to notice anything. One night, I had Cara take the girls and hide them at her boyfriend’s house. I knew if I opened my mind and called on Sparky, she’d help me.

And I dreamed of fire again.

This time, he died. It was the first time when my fire was strong enough to kill someone. I wanted to kill him. It made me happy. He was a horrible creature that preyed on the small and helpless. He twisted their minds and broke them for life, making them distorted reflections of himself. I saw the flames eating his flesh and bones. I stood there, in the middle of the burning house, with flames all around me. A small wolf of fire that attacked at my command, cleaning the world from scum like “Daddy.” I laughed as my clothes burned and the flames moved on my skin, creating a faint tickle, the way you get tickled by the tongue of a puppy who likes your hands.

The firemen found me passed out in the middle of the house. No one could come up with a logical explanation for how I could have survived a fire, so they decided to assume that I snuck in in search of thrills after the house had burned down. They couldn’t be more wrong even if they tried. People can’t accept there are things in this world that are what they seem, like Sparky and me, for example.

I’ll always be a teenager that likes to play with matches. When I am awake, even I have a problem believing what happens when I see her, Sparky. She’s like my guardian angel, a guardian angel wolf that can make things burn.

After the fire, no one could pin it on me. I was painted as a victim, a kid disturbed and maybe who smoked in bed. It’s what I said.

“Scarlett, after analysing your file, the judge institutionalized you." His voice was velvety soft.

I was lost in my reflection and wasn’t listening to the therapist. The police could not prove that I set the fire because there were no traces of gasoline or any other burning material. They saw me as a kid who liked to play with matches. They went with the classic. A cable melted and burned in the walls, setting fire to the house. As much as they wanted to keep me out of it, there were too many incidents that connected me to the fires. A fire once during class, a few accidents in the houses I lived before, and last but not least, the trailer I grew up in that burned. I would have been sent to the sixth family, only I was already seventeen and had been labeled a pyromaniac. No one wanted me.

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