No, the thing that had caused the damage was far worse than any fire. There was no warning, and there was no escape. One minute you’re standing there, thinking about gas prices or making a grocery list and the next thing you know, Chaos reaches inside of you and does precisely what his name entails. Your molecules speed up, your body temperature rises, your blood cells turn against each other, and in a manner of nanoseconds; you’re a pile of cold ash on the ground waiting for the slightest breeze to come along and erase the fact that you ever existed.
He shuddered at the thought of having those slimy tentacles inside of him. He had heard through the grape vine that Chaos had, more than once, used the beast inside of him to separate information from its owner. Nobody was sure exactly how he had done it, but there was no doubt that he had.
He also had no doubt that Chaos would employ whatever tricks he had up his vile little sleeve to get to Ardra. Word had gotten out that a prophesy from as far back as anyone dead or alive could remember had been put in motion.
Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Prophesies were made and fulfilled all the time. This one however, concerned some mighty big powers. Neither side liked the idea of this particular prophesy being brought to fruition. However, there were some who lobbied to see it brought to reality. It would mean big changes in the chain of command as far as breaking the rules went. And since both sides broke the rules every chance they got, they didn’t want to run the risk of not getting away with it anymore.
Enter the “Bounty Hunters”, for lack of a better term. These were beings from both sides of the war who were sent here to search out and eradicate anyone who could have something to do with said prophesy. Chaos being the best of them all. There were others of course, but none of them even compared to him and none of them dared get in his way.
If Kaiser was right in his suspicion that Chaos was coming after Ardra, he needed to make sure she was ready. He had been around for thousands of years and had completed nearly every task his master had given him. Meaning he had been granted more power each time he had done what he was told.
He had only been known to have failed once and that had been enough. The tortures that he was submitted to due to that failure had become the stuff of legend in the circles Kaiser ran in. If it was ever spoken of, it was done so in hushed tones far from prying ears. The things that the master of Darkness could and would do to you for even talking about it were terrifying.
Pulling himself from his reverie, he followed Piper to the table where he lie down at her feet and waited for Ardra to get out of the shower. He wanted to be around when the topic came up just in case things got out of control. After seeing what had happened to the living room, he was afraid to actually hear about what had happened. If he was right about how it had gone down, Chaos himself might actually be Kaiser’s preferred cause of the mayhem.
Kaiser and Piper both turned their heads towards the stairs when they heard the bathroom door open. The sound of her bedroom door closing sent Kaiser back to relaxing on the floor and Piper back to eating her second apple.
A few minutes later, the bedroom door opened again and Ardra came down the stairs while pulling her hair up into a ponytail.
“Morning!” She chimed to all in attendance.
For the second time that day he damned their lack of a means of communication and thumped his tail on the ground in greeting. Piper, still a little shaken up, said absolutely nothing. She continued to eat her apple and waited for her friend to join her at the table.
Ardra, with her bowl of cereal and banana, joined them in due time. As she sat, Kaiser stood and relocated to a spot on the floor a few feet away so he could get a better view of them but still be close enough to intervene if things went south.
Piper started right in with, “What the heck happened to your living room? I mean, I know you’re upset, and you have every right to be, but I didn’t peg you as the arson type! Not to mention the type of arsonist that would light her own house on fire and then forget to tell me about it!”
A confused look crossed Ardra’s face for a moment. Then she realized that Piper had given her the perfect lie to feed right back down her throat. The arson story was much easier to accept than what had actually happened, so she ran with it.
“Piper, it wasn’t me who set the living room on fire you moron! That was only one part of my incredibly bad day yesterday. I came home from the store to a yard full of firemen spraying hoses through my front door. Sorry if I forgot to mention it, I kinda found out that my parents were dead shortly thereafter.”
She knew the guilt would cause the other girl to drop the issue entirely. She had a backup plan ready involving a couple of the firemen being extremely good looking and flirty just in case. If guilt couldn’t deter Piper, boys were always a solid backup plan.
Ardra relaxed when Piper seemed to buy it and dropped the issue with little resistance.
With that out of the way, Ardra focused on her breakfast while Kaiser watched her carefully from the floor. No sign of Chaos was present in her soft green aura as of yet and he hoped it stayed that way for as long as possible.
The girls engaged in idle chit chat as they both finished their breakfasts.
He relaxed when everything seemed to be as normal as possible under the circumstances.
After she had rinsed her bowl, Ardra dumped a large portion of kibble into his dish. He had been trying not to make a scene with his growling stomach, but he seemed to always be hungry. It was especially bad in the mornings and even worse when someone was eating in the same room as him. He forgave her on the premise of her never having owned a dog before. Besides, he wasn’t the pushy type to make her go out of her way to take care of him.
Naturally, there were some things that overrode that trait, but a grumbly stomach wasn’t one of them. If it got to the point where she could play the xylophone on his rib cage, he’d probably speak up and direct her attention to it. As it stood, she wasn’t doing half bad at the whole owning a dog thing.
After he had finished eating and Piper had showered and gotten dressed, they spoke briefly about funeral arrangements. Ardra didn’t see the point in having one, but Piper insisted that it was the decent thing to do. Ardra caved after realizing that her grandmothers would insist and they headed out the door to run errands.
As she put the phone up to hear ear, calling one of her grandparents he assumed, she glanced back into the house at him from the front porch and asked, “You okay to stay here for a couple hours on your own?”
He thumped his tail on the floor to tell her that he was fine with it and she closed and locked the door. She had seemed to be in control of herself all morning, so the need to keep an eye on her had faded. The irritation at his lack of progress on the teaching field however, grew.
He really hoped that Piper would go home after they were finished.
He needed Ardra to take him home.
He needed her to start learning how she was going to save the world.
As they pulled out of the driveway Ardra thought about how strange it was that she had become the type of person that could cope with “burying” her parents. If you had asked her two weeks prior, what she would do if her parents got hit by a bus, she probably would have collapsed to the floor and cried at the mere thought of living without them. Yet here she was, sitting in the passenger seat of Piper’s car, driving to a funeral home about to make phone calls to both of her grandparents, her father’s employer, insurance companies, flower shops and close family friends without even thinking of crying.
As she trudged her way through phone calls she hadn’t planned on making for a few more decades, her mind kept wandering back to how utterly numb she was. Both of her grandmothers had bawled hysterically into the phone and began packing for a trip back to Salt Lake as soon as they had hung up the phones. The family friends had all expressed their deep concern and offered to help in any way they could. Some cried, some just listened in shock as she informed them of what had happen
ed in her robotic, empty tone.
Even the insurance agents, funeral directors, and florists seemed to express more emotion over the death of her parents than she seemed capable of. She thought maybe she had spent her share of emotion on the issue the night before when she had terrified herself by destroying the living room. Maybe whatever it was that was inside of her was feeding off of her emotions instead of letting her have them for herself.
Maybe she was broken.
Phone call after phone call, office after office, she went about the business of arranging for her friends and family to say goodbye to a pair of empty boxes.
Piper tagged along loyally, always right at Ardra’s side ready to take over if she happened to break down in the middle of one of these, what should have been, very difficult conversations.
She was sorely disappointed when Ardra stayed strong and made it through the day like one of those terracotta warriors that they had unearthed in China. After their last meeting, she plopped down behind the steering wheel of her car, slammed the door, and turned to stare at her best friend with fire in her eyes.
“Ardra! What the hell is wrong with you! You’re freaking me out!” her best friend shouted into her face.
Ardra’s response was to raise an eyebrow.
“Yes! That! Right there! For the love of Pete, I have cried more than you have today! We just made arrangements to bury both of your parents! You’re supposed to be upset! You can’t lock your emotions in a little box and stash them away for use at a more convenient time!”
Ardra wanted to say, I’m not stashing them away in that box. That box is reserved for something else and I’m pretty sure that something else is eating the emotions that you’re looking for like a tapeworm.
Instead she asked, steady and calm, “What am I supposed to do, Piper?”
“Cry! Scream! Punch me! Grind your teeth! Break something! I don’t know!” She slammed her palm into the steering wheel form emphasis before finishing. “All I know is that nothing is not what you’re supposed to be doing! It’s not healthy! The girl I have known my whole life is inside this shell somewhere and she doesn’t want to be sitting here like a statue! This isn’t you!”
That provoked a thought, What if that black stuff isn’t stealing my emotions? What if it’s stealing Ardra? Wouldn’t that be something? Can a personality even be stolen?
“I’m sorry Piper. I guess I’m just in shock. I don’t think I’ve wrapped my head around it yet. I guess you’re never really ready to be blindsided like this, you know?”
That seemed to disarm her. The fire went out of here eyes and her face went from Amazon-Princess-Piper, to Let-Me-Feed-You-Soup-And-Draw-You-A-Warm-Bath-Piper.
Suddenly Ardra felt like a kitten trying to nurse off of her flat mother in the middle of the road and Piper had just stumbled onto the scene. It wasn’t something she liked to feel. She wasn’t vulnerable, she wasn’t broken and she wasn’t alone.
She had realized all of these things while she was in the shower that morning. She was an adult and could take care of herself. She’d make a plan, get everything in order, and go for it.
She may be a little off in the emotions department, but that didn’t mean she was broken. Some people simply didn’t like to make an ordeal out of things. She wasn’t sure when she had become one of these people, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad change.
She may have lost her parents, but she still had her grandmothers, Piper, her ward, and most of all, she still had Kaiser. He had become a part of their family while her parents had still been alive, so, in a way, he was kind of like a sibling. Something left of their legacy other than her.
She knew she was going to be okay and life would go on. People go through losing their parents all the time. Some people lose their parents at birth even. She had had twenty-one wonderful years to get to know and love her parents. She was thankful for that and had faith that she’d see them again someday. That was part of her Heavenly Father’s plan.
“Let’s get you home.” Piper had used her voice that was made for a two year old that had just had its shots.
She turned the key in the ignition and pointed the car in the direction of the freeway.
One of the great things about the Salt Lake Valley is; you can get from anywhere in the valley to anywhere else in the valley in less than twenty minutes. The other great thing is, it’s so cold during the winter that the roads are almost always icy and it can require some concentration to maneuver on them.
The combination of those two godsends equaled a quiet fifteen minute drive back to her house. Piper was so busy trying to avoid all the idiots that refused to slow down for the icy conditions that she didn’t have time to pepper her with questions or smother her with concern.
It was the most peaceful part of her whole day.
After assuring Piper that it was okay that she went back to her house for a while to finish up some homework and grab some clothes, she closed the door and waved to her friend as she drove off. She was sure that it wouldn’t be more than two minutes before her phone started chiming at her, telling her she had a text message from Piper. She was equally sure that the message would be some variation of “Are u sure ur ok?”.
Sure enough, as she was letting a very excited Kaiser through the back door, her pocket chimed. The screen read, Let me know if u need anything. xoxo. She chose not to respond and stuffed the phone back in her pocket.
Kaiser finished his business, which she chose not to clean up right then, and came back inside. She ruffled his ears as he walked past and sent his tail into a frenzy. She smiled as he walked over to his dish and sat, tail thumping noisily against the island. She really was going to be okay.
After sitting in the too-quiet den, watching a too-loud TV for about fifteen minutes, she decided that she needed to be moving. Sitting still was making her antsy and she didn’t like it. There was plenty to do and her body was telling her that she needed to get it done before it was too late.
She decided to start with the living room. She couldn’t stand looking at it. It kept giving her flashbacks to the night the bishop had sat in the formerly tidy room and delivered the news that had spurred the events of the last eighteen hours. She swept the ash from the hardwood floor, scooping it up with a snow shovel and dumping it into the garbage can she had placed at the front door.
Then she started wiping down the walls. The slight texture had created perfect little shelves for all the ash that had been blown up into the air by the air conditioning vents. She stared at the hole in the sheet rock for a few minutes before deciding that she could fix it. She’d seen her dad do the sheet rock in the basement when he had finished it. It didn’t look that hard.
She skipped mopping on account of the fact that she would be cutting and hanging the powdery material and painting the next day.
She moved on to the kitchen. There was dust on almost everything, so she dusted every surface she could reach and then wiped them all down with a damp rag. She washed the few dishes that were in the sink, then dried them and put them away. She didn’t think that the dust from the sheet rock would get as far as the kitchen so she got the mop out and mopped the tile floor until it shone.
She headed down to the den next. She picked her books up and made a neat stack with them on the coffee table next to her laptop. She wiped down every surface she could see that needed wiping and even most of the ones that didn’t. She got the vacuum from the utility room and vacuumed the carpet, couch cushions, under the cushions and under the couches and tables.
She was slightly irritated when she saw that the guest bedrooms had been left spotless and moved on to the guest bathroom. There was always something to clean in a bathroom. She hunted down and eliminated every water spot she could find, wiped down the clean shower, scrubbed the clean toilet bowl and emptied the single receipt out of the garbage can.
She moved up to the top floor of the house, intentionally avoiding the master bedroom, and proceeded to scrub her bathroom
until it shone the same as the guest bathroom.
Kaiser watched her intently the entire time with the canine version of a slightly worried look on his face.
She looked over at him sitting in the hall outside of the bathroom and assured him as best she could. “I’m fine. I just needed something to keep me busy. There’s so much to do all of a sudden! My body is telling me that I need to get my butt in gear, so I figured cleaning was a good distraction from thinking and it is also considered getting something done. No harm in that right?”
He cocked his head to the side and thumped his tail on the ground halfheartedly. He still seemed to believe she had lost her mind.
She chose to ignore his pitiful face and focused all of her attention on scrubbing the tile beneath the toilet tank. She didn’t realize what a pain it was to reach back there and wondered how long one could go without cleaning it before the grime had to be removed with a putty knife and paint thinner. It made her glad that she was a very clean person and could never let things get that bad. She involuntarily thought of this very spot at a bathroom in a frat house. She shuddered and considered the merits of tossing her cookies into the porcelain bowl.
It would give her an excuse to clean it again.
She vetoed the idea on account of her severe hatred for vomit and told herself that there was still plenty to clean in her bedroom.
She shoved the frat house visual out of her head, finished scrubbing behind the toilet and quickly dusted the pipe under the sink before mopping the floor and heading to her own room.
She had neglected it for the past couple of days and was surprised at herself when she had rounded up a full load of laundry from the floor. She packed the basket down to the utility room and put the load in the washer.
She never worried about separating her clothes, everything she owned was bright and colorful, and generally made of cotton, so there really was no point.
She grabbed the vacuum on her way out and headed back up to her room. She finished tidying up, made her bed, organized her desk, straightened all of the picture frames that hung on her walls then kicked on the vacuum.
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