Ch 2 part 1

It’s how I am, I casually walk around in my underwear and shirt but I always knew when it was appropriate to wear trousers.

The lights flashed blue and white around the front of the house at three o’ clock. She was only awake to make sure her mother came home safely. It was completely quiet and all she could do was wait for three knocks.
She opened the front door and let in a waft of cold air that ran around her but she didn’t feel it. Mum wasn’t coming home that night.

After that, we couldn’t keep fostering. It was some technical thing that Dad couldn’t keep doing it and I don’t think he would have wanted to. It took everything I had to keep him doing the seminars because we needed some kind of income. I wanted, really wanted, to go into a hole and just let myself give in but I was all that was left for my two younger brothers and my younger sister.
I hate saying this but ‘luckily’ her life insurance paid off our mortgage but we still sold the place for somewhere in the city. It was a huge shock- having to go from a house that had 10 bedrooms because there were nine of us to somewhere with four bedrooms because there were five of us. I got to keep my pet cat, though.
It was over a year ago- I don’t think that I’ll ever be eloquent enough to explain to you why I’m not playing the tortured soul song or why it makes me feel sick to think I should. I can’t tell you how ‘sad’ I was, but it’s easy to say how angry I was. I was angry that this kind of thing actually happened and it wasn’t the convenience of plots in films. I was angry no one told me it would happen to me. I’m angry that the other driver didn’t come forward, and that some coward got away with putting my dad through hell and taking away everything that was our life style.
It’s been a year- I think I can live.
I went and found a job quickly and that was where I met Ivy. Of course, I had no idea what I was getting myself into until my first night. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into either.
They have three names that I’ve heard of:
Scythes : because they were said to be the death tools of the Nazis
Paladins or Pladyrs: Pladyr is scythe in welsh and Paladin came into use because of a misunderstanding in translations.
Alchemists: It’s said that they are only the way they are because they had alchemic blood.
I wasn’t one but I think they might have thought I was and that’s why they let me work in an alchemy bar. I thought it was like a normal bar but I changed my mind when I saw someone move a chair by their eyes, a fire ball start a fist fight, a wall of ice end it and a girl with the strength of ten men, the ability to fly, take a lot of a beating and match the fire ball from before then double it to enforce the rule that there was to be no fighting. That was Ivy. She was fifteen, my age, and just amazing. It’s been about a year since I met her, so two years since my mums’ death.
She let me join her league straight away. A league is a group of scythes who kinda get hyred to do stuff… it’s really nothing big.
I met Rose, who was like me only life was a bit rougher even though she was considerably richer than me. Both her parents had died in a stabbing so she was alone apart from her grand father who owned a big business that I never asked about and her little brother. She was working to pay so she could live in her parents’ house and so her brother could soon come with her. She’d started living on her own when she was young- never arousing suspicion so no one would pick up on the fact that she was breaking the law at the age of fourteen.
Ivy lived without a dad- he’d been beating her mother and he was the one she inherited her strength from. Luckily, they got away from him.
The other members of the group were Alice, a technomancer, and Flick who generally kept herself secret. Alice picked up Flick from the gutters- running away from the police after many times being caught for pick-pocketing.
I don’t know their pasts and they know little of mine. I think we’re all pretty much a bunch of girls who are running away from aspects of ourselves. I left everything behind.