Free Bzrk Apocalypse by Michael Grant Page A

living. But listen to me, Lystra.
    Listen to me. You’re a very smart kid. And better than smart, you’re
    determined. You’ll do fine. And if you ever need me, really need me,
    life-and-death need, I’ll be there.”
    “What about Mom? Is she dead?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    She knew he was lying. She couldn’t recall the exact moment
    when it dawned on her that her father had killed her mother. But once
    the idea had dawned, certainty soon followed.
    Her mother had been a bit of a party girl. That was the nicest way
    to put it. Lystra’s mother liked a good time, and she had not found it
    in the life her husband gave her. She’d looked for comfort elsewhere.
    In booze, in drugs, in sex.
    “I know,” Lystra had said. Nothing else. Just those two words.
    Her father had said nothing. The two of them just sat there on the
    broken-down lawn chairs. Then her father had poured two fingers of
    bourbon into a paper cup and handed it to her.
    God, it had burned her throat, but she had swallowed it and not
    made a sound.
    “Bad things happen in this life,” he had said at last.
    Lystra had held out her paper cup and said, “More.”
    He shook his head. “That taste was enough. You’re still a kid.”
    “You killed my mother. Now you’re dumping me. Okay. That’s all
    done. Yeah. Maybe I’ll never see you again.”
    “Maybe.”
    “But if I do, you’ll do whatever I ask you to do.”
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    “Will I?” He’d seemed almost amused, but seeing the look in her
    eyes he had flinched, looked down, and finally poured her a second
    drink. “I will,” he had said, and there was a sacredness to that vow.
    Lystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name
    of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely
    bothering to crack a book. She wasn’t just a smart kid; she was bril-
    liant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless-but-never-bullied kid.
    But at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those
    stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her
    long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walk-
    ing through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat
    in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl
    when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity
    on the back of a man’s neck until by sheer force of will she could make
    him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the
    danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.
    Her father’s voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels,
    sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl
    with the odd name of Scowler.
    She never told anyone about the voices; they had universally
    warned her not to. Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’re here, they’ll lock you
    up. Yeah.
    Then both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The
    particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lys-
    tra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite
    the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years,
    she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the
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    car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing
    behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.
    The police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could
    not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly
    into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and
    had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the
    rear bumper and the two Reids.
    “When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what
    was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the
    brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.”
    “And then?”
    “I felt the impact, and my only thought was that I should pull the
    car forward. Yeah. Undo my