River Falls
The Wolves
Lizzie Wildblood
Copyright © 2020 Stacy Mannino
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
River Falls
Books In This Series
About The Author
Chapter One
Death and New life
Death.... It’s funny how quickly things can change, one minute you’re just a normal sixteen year old girl, then five minutes later it feels like your whole world has been turned completely upside down. That moment you see on films when someone answers the door and there are two police officers there. That actually happens in real life, it’s exactly what it’s like.
“Are you Alexia Johnson?” A plump middle aged officer asks.
“Yes, why?”
“Can we come inside, we have some bad news, is there someone we can call.....”
I didn’t really hear the rest of what they said, Aunt Sara had to repeat everything to me later on that night.
Eight days later here I am, sat in the car not wanting to get out. If I get out and go over there then it’s actually real, what those officers said, had really happened.
Mum and dad really are dead.
Looking down at my only formal black dress that was in my wardrobe, I find myself thinking that I wish I had something better to wear, my parents deserved something better than a dress that’s been hanging in a wardrobe for the past year without even being considered worth wearing. I don’t suppose what I’m wearing really matters though does it?
Slowly getting out of the car, I start walking to where my parents will be laid to rest, Aunt Sara grabs my hand for support but I can’t really feel it, everything still feels numb. I wonder if this feeling will ever go away? Will I always have this pain in my chest. I find myself thinking of the future, my mum won’t get to see me going to my senior prom, my dad won’t ever get to walk me down the aisle, I mean who will do that now? I don’t have any grandparents left alive, no uncles, no one apart from Aunt Sara....
Ok Alex, get a grip, I can do this. Stop thinking of the future and concentrate on now . The only problem is that what is about to happen, I think is actually worse than what’s to come.
We come to a stop beside a large hole in the ground.
The grave.
I can’t call it that, it’s a hole. A deep dark hole. I can tell they tried to make it not look like a fresh hole by putting that fake green grass around the edges so you can’t see the dirt, but what’s the point? I mean it’s a hole, it’s there for one purpose.
One reason.
To bury my parents.
“It’s a beautiful day today isn’t it?”
Did I really just hear someone say that? A beautiful day? A beautiful day? I want to scream at them, it’s not a beautiful day, it’s a horrid day! This is the worst day of my life, it’s a funeral, two people are dead! Actually five people are dead if you include the people in the other car that crashed head on with my parents car. How can people think anything about today is beautiful?
I can’t pay attention to what’s being said or what’s going on. I can see people going up to the hole and throwing flowers in. I can feel Aunt Sara tugging on my hand to get me to do the same, I know my feet are moving but I don’t really feel completely with it. I can feel my hand stretch forward and I can see the flower in my hand. This is it. It’s real. It actually happened.
My parents are actually gone. I’m officially an orphan.
My fingers slowly open and I release my hold on the flower. It seems to take hours to float down the hole, finally it lands on top of the coffin, and although it’s just a single flower that I know isn’t very heavy, it somehow makes the loudest thump in my head as it lays down mixed in with the others. Like a clock striking the hour, it rings in my head and blots out everything else.
Aunt Sara lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, literally, nowhere. I had never even visited her there with my parents. She always came to us. She moved away about 6 years ago, not long after my grandmother died. She was an artist, and to be honest she was a good artist, and made a good living out of it, she had exhibited at several major galleries and got good reviews, so I suppose the reason why she moved to River Falls, makes sense. For her.
But now, as I have no other family, still a minor and an orphan, I have to move there too. Aunt Sara keeps telling me that I will love it there, so peaceful and quiet. Good to clear my head she says. I don’t want to tell her that my head is already empty. Has been since the funeral. I’m just moving around and doing things on autopilot. It took a few weeks after the funeral to clear the house of what we wanted to keep and what needed to go to goodwill. Walking around it while it was empty was strange. I kept trying to remember what it was
