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It happened in the middle of the night, just after she had been caught running around in the halls. She had only got up because she could have sworn she heard whispering coming from the walls.
Odd things had often happened around Pandora growing up, but they weren’t the type of things you would expect from a young witch. She simply knew things. She had freakish luck, always one step ahead of her peers, always just avoiding situations that normally would have been deadly.
****
Pandora skidded around a corner, scrambling to stay upright when her socks caused her to slip on the dark wood floors. Somehow, at that very moment, something shifted in the universe, changing the paths just enough to create a domino effect for everything that was to come. Though she would never be able to explain why, she had always known that that night was when everything went wrong. Perhaps some event had happened across the other side of the world, or maybe it was just how the universe willed it to be, but she could never shake the feeling of dread that accompanied her memories of that night.
Suddenly, hands reached out of the shadows, snagging Pandora by the back of her neck and hissing about little gremlins disobeying orders in the middle of the night. She was shoved into a cupboard for the night, one of her first encounters with punishments from their parents. As the door slammed shut and locked behind her, she stumbled, scrambling for a few seconds before was able to slide down one of the walls to the floor.
Pandora didn’t mind the dark, she found it almost comforting most of the time. She wasn’t sure how long she sat in there for that night, waiting to be released, but she knew she must have drifted off at some point.
****
It began in the dark, with flecks of moonlight dancing across the dark space. She felt movement to her left, and turned to see a young boy, perhaps not much older than herself, sniffling on a bed. The room was small, with pale walls, and sparse furniture. There was a small wardrobe, a bed, and a beanbag in the corner. She could tell from the reflections on the walls that they were painted blue, they must have been the colour of the sky during the day. The boy on the bed shifted again, and she realised he was awake. She drifted forward, coming to hover over him like a ghost in an old haunted house. He didn’t seem to notice her presence, despite the fact that he was looking right at her.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded wrong, even to her own ears. It was floaty and high, with a fragile quality that made it seem like she really was a ghost. The boy didn’t respond, he simply tucked his blanket up higher and stared straight through her. Pandora reached out, trying to touch the boy's cheek. Her hand floated through him, splitting around his features as though she wasn’t there at all.
Unsure, Pandora moved around the room, taking time to look at everything more closely. There were books on the shelves, but everytime she tried to focus on the letters, they slipped away. The closet was closed, but she could peek through the gap in between the two doors and make out a few cloth-like shapes.
The window was open, though a set of thin curtains had been closed over it. A breeze blew around the room, drifting right through her, as though she were smoke. It felt odd, like she was being very gently pulled apart. She had to focus to be able to stay together, which seemed extremely odd to her four-year old self. A sudden noise from outside the window brought her attention back to the room she was in.
The crack of twigs underfoot, the soft pad of feet moving across wet grass.
That was all the warning the boy in the bed got before a great shape surged up through the open window. The boy shot upright, eyes wide in terror, but he wasn’t able to move, the beast launched itself forward, slamming the boy back into the thin white sheets below him. He seemed frozen, for he did not scream. The beast snarled down at him, gnashing its teeth and growling.
It was covered in short grey fur from head to toe, with bulging yellow eyes and huge spit covered teeth. It looked almost rabid in its apparent thirst for flesh and blood. Pandora was frozen to the spot, unable to do anything other than watch as the boy cowered below the terrifying beast.
Beast.
Man.
Wolf.
Werewolf.
In one fluid movement, the beast reared back, nearly unhinging its jaw as it stretched up to the ceiling. The beast sank its huge teeth into the boy’s side, prompting him to give an ear-splitting scream of pain so gut-wrenching that she swore she could feel it reverberating in her very soul. The beast yanked its canines out of the boy, and disappeared. It shot back out of the window, vanishing into the night, leaving behind a bleeding husk of a boy and a smoky ghost of a girl. Pandora shot over to the bed, staring down at the boy, the sheets turning dark from his blood. She could hear movement, the sound of running footsteps and slamming doors, but she didn’t care.
The boy was looking at her now, staring at her, begging for help she could not give. She brushed her fingers over his bloodstained cheek, feeling shock settle in her bones as their flesh connected. Barely a second of contact had passed, however, before the door banged open, and Pandora was spirited away by the sudden wind.
She watched as though she was looking through frosted glass as a man rushed into the room. He looked vaguely like the boy, though the real look-alike was the woman who ran in after him, looking downright terrified. They were screaming and crying, calling for healers and aurors, trying to fix the young boy who had just had his life ripped out of his tiny child-sized hands. The image in front of her seemed to flicker, like it was rotting away behind her eyes.
As she was cast away into darkness, Pandora thought only of the boy, his pale bloodstained face, his honey coloured eyes, glassed over with pain, his tiny hands, curling in the damp crimson sheets as his parents called for help.
When she woke, there was blood on her fingers, stained from where they had ghosted over the boy's cheek.