Chapter Text
Prologue
Growing up by herself was all Zanna had known. Deafening silences of empty homes, miles of cracked pavement that all blended together, sallow pale skin reflected in every mirror, all seen through dull watery blue eyes. She knew that there was a time, albeit long ago where her father wasn’t the cold shell he had always been to her. She had seen the pictures from before she was born of her mother and him together, faces both filled with so much life and love that it was hard to reconcile the man in the picture with the man who locked himself in his bedroom in whatever old rundown apartment they were living in this month.
She was aware that the childhood she had would have some mental ramifications but it never occurred to her to be worried when the cold nauseous feeling that sat in her chest started to slowly numb until the angry pain she had retained throughout most of her youth settled into a dull hollow feeling. Part of Zanna couldn’t blame her father for his actions, he had lost the love of his life on the same day he gained a daughter, that couldn’t have been easy for him. But a much more logical side of her brain screamed at her that it shouldn’t affect how he raised her.
All of these overwhelming feelings and emotions and thoughts were contained to beat against the inside of her skull while she went through the motions of her daily life, feeling as if she had a tsunami contained in her head. So on the day of her 18th birthday when she noticed a strong twisting feeling in her chest she pushed it off as a bad day to be trapped in her head and went through the motions of getting ready for her average summer day. It wasn’t until she was walking to the nearby park that she noticed anything amiss.
Kingston’s Park was a park in name only. In reality it was a small chunk of land covered in cracked pavement the color of cigarette ash and littered with debris. The left corner was disturbed by a power line post covered in half torn flyers and staples. The only two pieces of equipment where an old wooden bench and a dull metal basketball hoop without a net. Currently crows covered almost every surface they could perch on and as she approached, more hesitantly, they all swiveled their heads to stare at her with their dark eyes. They followed her movements as she made her way towards to the bench.
As she sat on the uncomfortable old bench she tried to ignore the birds around her who were still staring at her from their perches, silent. She shifted uncomfortably as she pulled out the book she was reading and tried to focus on the words. She flinched minutely as one of the birds who were perched on the chain link fence that surrounded the park flapped it wings lightly as it made its way to the ground and over to sit several feet in front of her.
Zanna ignored the crow in front of her and narrowed her vision down to the book she had pulled in close to her face. She heard the sound of wings as another crow moved to join the one in front of her quickly followed by another. She counted them off in her head as more and more crows settled in to stare at her. When ten of them had moved in front of her all the noise around her stopped, the sudden dead silence causing a ringing in her ears.
She slowly moved the book down from her eyes to stare at the crows who wear all gazing at her with an expecting look in their eyes. She wondered if they expected her to feed them but shook that thought away, no one who came here fed birds. After a few moments of locked gazes the crows that weren’t in front of her began to take to the air one by one until the ten in front of her were the only ones left. Several moments passed before the remaining crows all hobbled off one by one to take to the air, the last one being the first one that had settled in front of her. For a moment before the last crow took off Zanna thought there was a spark of something in the dark black eyes.
For a full minute she sat there, processing the experience she just had before deciding to process it as an odd occurrence in nature. She reached out with hands that shook slightly to flip back to the page she was at in her book and shifted on the bench to get more comfortable as she lost her self in the paperbound world in her hands.
Several hours had past when Zanna finally emerged from the trance like state one goes into when they’re absorbed in their reading and as she straighten out her legs that at some point gotten folded under her, she grimaced at the shooting pain of being in such an uncomfortable position for so long.
Zanna stood up and stretched the rest of her body, making a face at the odd popping sounds that came out of it, before making her way back down the route she had walked several hours ago back to her temporary home. Unlike every other apartment in their complex the one Zanna steered towards was completely silent. No noises from pets, no children’s laughter, no television sounds. If it wasn’t for the fact that both her and her father came in and out of the place fairly regularly she was sure that most people in the complex would think that there were no occupants.
She stopped briefly at the door as she pressed her forehead against the hardwood and braced herself for the frigid air she was bound to meet inside. True to her thoughts the atmosphere inside was cold, despite the mild temperature of the room. Surprisingly her father wasn’t locked in his room for once, but sat at the wooden table that passed as dining table, looking at paperwork spread out across the table.
Zanna shut the door behind her and moved over to her bedroom silently, neither of them saying anything. She curled up on the lumpy mattress and curled up to face the wall. She closed her eyes and let herself drift through the memories in her mind. The one that floated to the surface of her brain was the one she could never outrun. When she was younger she had a nightmare, the king of nightmare that woke you up from terror, heart beating wildly and sweating. In her nightmare she was sleeping in her bed, a different bed in a different town, and she heard a scratching at her window. She turned over to look at her window to find herself with locked gaze with a monster made of shadow with blood red eyes. She turned back over, thinking if she ignored it than it would go away, but she heard the monster come in through the window. And she had to make the decision, would she turn to face her monster and try to fight back even if it was certain that she would lose, or should she stay facing the wall and let her last few minutes be in blissful ignorant peace. She had just made the decision to turn back over and face her monster when she heard the most awful noise, like the roar of a lion echoing through a tunnel. And then she woke up, panting and grasping at her mattress. Even now, years later, that dream haunted her.
She finally managed to fall into a fitful sleep, twitching at every creak and breeze through the apartments old wooden frame. When she awoke the sun had gone down, though how long ago she couldn’t tell. The grumbling of her stomach drew her out of her room and into the main area of the apartment where, thankfully, her father wasn’t. She drifted to the outdated kitchen as silently as she could, not wanting to break the tentative silence that seemed to settle whenever one person was awake when the rest of the world wasn’t. As she waited for the leftovers to reheat in the microwave her eyes were drawn to the old tap on the other section of the counter. She reached out to turn the cold water on and let her hand sit under it for as long as she could, letting the cold water fill in all the cracks in the surface of her being. When she noticed that the microwaves timer was reaching zero she pulled her hand out and turned the water off, not bothering to dry her hand off as she opened the microwave at the last second as to interrupt any sound it might make. She moved to the old second hand couch in the dimly lit section that could be called a living room and sat at she spooned the food into her mouth robotically, barely acknowledging the taste. When she was done she moved back to the kitchen to place the bowl in the sink and go back to her room but her gaze was drawn to the tap and she found herself unable to look away.
Hesitantly she reached out with pale fingers that trembled and let the cold water spring free before letting both hands lay under the flow. She cupped her hands together and let the water fill them and overflow over her fingers. The tugging in her chest that had been absent for most of the night awoke as she gazed, mesmerized by the feeling of water in her hands. She tilted her head as her eyes dropped with a sudden hit of exhaustion. It took a moment for her tired eyes to process the scene in front of her when she finally managed to pry both of her eyes all the way open.
The water in her hands was slowly frosting over from where her hands where cupped inward. As she watched the frost grew more solid and hardened into a solid chunk of glossy ice cupped in her hands, still under the flow of the water.
Her eyes grew wide in shock and she ripped her hands apart letting the chunk of ice fall into the sink with a loud thunking sound. She backed away from the sink slowly and retreated to her room, unable to process what she had just seen herself do. That night she fell asleep staring at her own hands, as if making sure they weren’t causing anything to happen in her sleep.
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The next several days would prove to be no weirder, and as much as Zanna wanted to live in denial that there was anything odd going on around her it was hard to deny the strange occurrences. On Wednesday the books at the library started to tumble off the shelves as she walked past them, as if her foul mood was literally shifting their centers of balance. On Thursday she found herself followed home by every pet in the neighborhood, many of them breaking away from their owners just to make sure she got home okay. On Friday she returned to the park, hoping she didn’t find it covered in crows again, only to find that several trees and flowers had pushed through the cracks in the cement and gone into full bloom. By Saturday she more than tired with the oddities that had been going on every time she left the apartment and had resigned herself to just staying in the apartment all day, even if mean tolerating her fathers frozen attitude.
She grabbed one of the books she had grabbed from the library and settled into the pea soup colored couch before curling up in the corner as her father’s pointed silence rang through the air. On a normal day it would vex her to be so noticeably ignored like this and at the most she’d slam a door or retreat to her room to fold into herself. She focused on the words in front of her and managed to read through a few pages before getting lost in her own thoughts again.
He hadn’t spoken to her in days, not even to wish her a happy birthday. How does a parent act like that? She could feel her temper growing and at this point she would usually leave the room as not to lash out but right now she was beyond furious.
The twisting feeling in her chest that she had felt earlier in the morning got stronger until it felt like a clenched fist around her heart. She rubbed at her collarbone uselessly as her anger grew until the feeling in her exploded. Literally exploded. One moment she saw nothing but black and red behind her eyes and the next the red had flared up on the other side of the couch in a large wave of fire.
For a second she was frozen, mesmerized by the spontaneous combustion next to her, fear not even being in the realm of possibility for her until she heard the familiar sharp bark of her father as he rushed over to beat out the fire with a blanket that had been sitting on the armchair nearby. She continued to stare at the flame as her father began to smother it, for some reason feeling that if she were to reach out and touch it, no harm would come to her.
Soon the fire was out, the only remnants being the arid smell of smoke in the air and the burnt section of the couch. Her father stood a distance away from her, chest heaving as he dropped the blanket he had used. His eyes traveled from the remains of the couch to Zanna back and forth before something resigned settled over his eyes and he let out a deep sigh.
Zanna was startled out of her trance by the scratchy voice that she rarely heard, “We should talk. There are some things you need to know.” He forced out as he moved back towards the table he had been sitting at, bending down to pick up the chair he had been sitting at that had presumably been knocked over in his haste to deal with the fire. He settled into his chair with a groan before looking back at her and letting out a groan as he rubbed at his eyes with his hand and gestured towards the only other empty chair.
She moved over silently and sat down at the chair, taking note of how much larger he seemed since the chair she sat in was much lower than his since they didn’t match. For a moment neither of them spoken before he let out a sigh.
“You’re mother would have been so much better at this…” he muttered, his word tinged with bitterness. Zanna perked up at the mention of her mother, as she was rarely mention. Her father took a deep breath before beginning his long and unbelievable story.
Somewhere deep in the northeast there’s a small town called Coldbridge. An idealistic town filled with happy people going through their quiet lives. Or at least that’s how it appears on the surface. Anyone who has ever lived there knows the truth. Coldbridge is home to a variety of non-humans who gathered in one town to make home and be safe as a community. Every human who lives in the town knows what their neighbors are and understand that it all must be kept a secret and go through their days surrounded by werewolves, witches, vampires, djinn, sphinx, and other beings straight out of the pages of a mythology textbook. And it’s where her mother and father met and fell in love. Her mother was the last living heir of a formerly powerful witch coven and her father was a human who had grown up in love with her all throughout middle and high school. As the two both had decided to attend the town’s community college they shared a early morning class and before long fell in love.
It was at this point her father’s eyes began to grow misty as he continued. The two had planned to wait for children but were happily surprised to discover she was pregnant and celebrated the news by going to the town’s city hall and getting married. Pregnancy was never easy but in a town like Coldbridge it was considerably more stressful. The town being a safe haven for magical creatures always came with some negative side effects. Angst-ridden teenagers with magic who liked to street race, vampire children who tried to bring hellhounds to school, and so on. But the biggest issue was that since there was so much magical energy residing in the town negative entities were drawn towards the town, and both of them agreed that they wanted to raise their child safely in a human town and that in order to ensure that safety she would bind their babies magic as soon as they were born.
It was at this point that her father stopped and it wasn’t hard to predict what had to be coming next. During her birth there were several complications, especially considering since her mother decided to go without an epidural. When Zanna was finally brought into the world, face red as she screamed, a sudden flash of thunder from the raging storm outside took out the power inside the hospital. The backup generator hadn’t been used in far too long and was to slow to kick in. The machines keeping her mother alive began to fail and even when the power came back on the doctors, human or not, couldn’t keep her alive. Her last action was to bind her child’s powers until the day of her 18th birthday when she could make the decision on whether to use them or not. Her father, shattered by the loss of the woman he had loved for so much of his life, took Zanna as soon as he was cleared to. And then he left town…
“…And I never stopped running. I couldn’t. Not when I knew that if I looked next to me your mother wouldn’t be next to me.” He finished softly before wiping away the lone tear that had fully formed in his eye.”Whatever you decide to do is your choice. At this point I suppose I just don’t have it in me to care or fight you.” He said softly.
Zanna should have been angry, she really should have, and she should be furious and throwing things while screaming about every instance in her childhood where he wasn’t there for her. But for once she wasn’t angry.
“I don’t forgive you. I was a kid and I- I needed you, I needed my Dad. I’ll probably never forgive you for what you’ve done to me. You didn’t support me and-” She sniffed while wiping at her eye, not daring to look him in the eyes, “I can’t stay here. Not anymore. You broke me and I want to get better, I do, and I can’t do that with you nearby. So… goodbye Dad.” she let out as softly as she could. He nodded stoically and retreated into his room, the sound of his door closing behind him being the only sound in the empty apartment.
Zanna made her way into the room she called hers, although with its blank walls and emptiness it could pass for a guest room. She laid down in her bed and curled to tuck her knees as close to her chest as she could. She ignored to grumble of hunger in her stomach as he thought about all the information she had just had thrown at her. She never felt like she belonged in any of the places they had lived, she was too quiet, too used to being alone that she never made any sort of friends. She knew at some point she would have to push herself outside of her comfort zone and try to branch out but maybe part of the problem was that there was always a piece or two of her that was missing. One was obviously the magic that she could feel humming in her chest, as if making up for the years it had been shackled. But the other might be the one place in the world where she would belong, a place where she could feel at home.
She pulled out her old nicked phone and pulled up the search engine. She typed out Coldbridge and spent several minutes just scrolling through all the information in front of her. She closed her eyes for a second before taking a deep breath and selecting directions to the town. If she drove throughout the night she could be there before the sun rose tomorrow. She pressed the sleep button before dropping the phone next to her as she debated the paths in front of her.
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A dark road illuminated by only the moon was suddenly awash in the yellow lights of an old ’92 Dodge Daytona. The dark blue car pulled to a stop in front of a wooden sign, half hidden by the bending branches of the trees that loomed over the road as if watching those entering the town. The occupant stepped out of the car, boots crunching the dirt gravel mixture on the side of the road as she approached the sign.
Zanna looked up at the faded sign that read “Welcome to Coldbridge” and squinted as she read it, “The home of magic. Huh. That’s ironic.” She muttered. The twisted feeling in her chest settled at the sight into a warm glow that brought a small smile to her face. She had made the right decision in finding her home. The home of magic, indeed.