yay! this is the prologue to this book that im writing... i know its really awkward near the end and i would absolutely love some help!! look out for chapers 1-6 once i put them up!!
Prologue ~ Burned
I was crying, a small child of just seven years, in the tree house as my home was aflame behind me. My baby brother Jack and my parents were getting burned alive in its fiery depths.
“Mommy!” I screamed out through my tears. “Daddy! No!” Somewhere on the ground below me, a dozen voices cried out.
“Oh my God!”
“No! Charlotte! Jameson! No!”
“Easy, easy, they might have gotten out.”
“No, they’re gone, Amanda.”
The voice was sobbing.
“And the children?” There was silence. I cried out again.
“MOMMY!”
“Oh my God! There’s someone in the tree house!” Someone scrambled up the rung ladder to the tree house. The woman that joined me was tall and dark-skinned. Her hair tied back and she was wearing all black.
“Honey?” I cringed back into the corner. “Honey, are your parents the Whites?” I nodded and started crying even harder. “Oh my Lord,” she whispered. “Are you Deborah?” she demanded firmly.
“Yes!” I wailed, a flood of tears streaming down my face.
The woman turned and yelled out of the doorway, “It’s Deborah! Deborah is alive! Someone help me!” She turned to me, holding out her hand. “Come here, darling. You don’t have to be afraid. Everything is going to be okay.” A man and a woman, also dressed in black, came into the now-crowded tree house and dropped to their knees beside the woman.
“Deb? You need to come with us. Everything is going to be okay,” promised the man. I nodded, scared out of my mind. “Were your parents in the house?” I nodded. The first woman, the dark-skinned one, started crying, sobbing into the shoulder of the man at her side. The new woman turned to me, tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Honey, come with me, you’ll be okay,” she said, holding out her arms. I eagerly crawled into them and curled into her, burying my face into the crook her neck. “That’s a good girl . . .”
She walked on her knees to the door and jumped off the ledge of the tree house, falling the whole distance, and landing smoothly on the hard forest floor.
“She’s fine,” she said to the others waiting at the bottom. “She’s fine.”
~~~
The next 10 years were a blur, passing by as if someone was fast forwarding my life at a hundred miles per hour. The week with the strangers in black telling me my parents and brother were dead, five years with the even stranger couple that had convinced themselves that they were my parents, my run from them at the young age of just twelve, sleeping in the tree house, using money I acquired from the strangers and my late parents to nourish myself. Since the day I ran away, I spent the darkened hours of night at the place of my old home, grieving under the stars at the ashen grave of my parents and brother, Jack.
That was where my life was changed—when I was seven, and again, 10 years later . . .
