He shouldn’t have ignored it. A giant hound
looming from the shadows was ominous enough, let alone the rumours.

 The
first time, their mother was drinking again, so as always it was Will’s job to
pick up Paula. He found her sitting on the steps on the elementary school. She
was looking away from him, her eyes fixed on the shadowy alley opposite her.
She looked up as he approached, her blonde pigtails bobbing as inquisitive grey
orbs met his brown ones.

  “Where’s mum?” She asked, cocking her head.

  He didn’t expect her to understand. She was
only eight. “At home,” he grunted, and after a moment of consideration she
seemed to accept this answer. “C’mon.”

  She took his hand, and they started down the
street. The street was crowded with children or parents coming to pick them up.
Cars and school buses packed the road, and some of Paula’s classmates passed
them by, chatting and complaining about mundane things, Miss Wilson is making us do essays again. Nobody noticed the
dark-skinned fourteen year old boy holding his little sister’s hand in the
middle of the pavement.

  The walk home was quiet and rather
depressing. Normally, Paula wouldn’t shut up about the lovely day she had had
at school, but today she was quiet, her eyes focused on the ground as she
trudged along the road. Normally, Will would have asked her what was wrong, but
today he was tired as well, so he simply let it pass.

  He shouldn’t have.

Will turned
down the dark and twisted alleyway, leaving the safety of the crowded and
bustling avenue.

A woman
looked up from hanging her garments on a clothes line and sneered. “Well, look
who it is. The Fernadez brats. Is mommy too hung up over your father to look
after you properly?”

  Paula’s eyes widened, but Will squeezed her
arm- code for keep walking. Mrs.
Martinez’s words stung but they held truth. Mrs. Fernadez had not been the same
since that night when their father had walked out the door and out of their
lives.

  They rounded a corner and the shack they
lived in faded into view. Paula let go of his hand and hurried to the small
unnoticeable door. Will shook his head and was about to follow but stopped dead.

  A chill made its way up his spine, and he
shivered. He frowned; it was mid-July, there was no reason for him to be cold.
A quick look around his dingy surroundings told him that there was no one else
seemed to be affected by the sudden draft. Then why had he-

  Will suddenly had the oddest feeling that he
was being watched. He turned and froze.

  There was something in the corner watching
him. It was hiding in the shadows, so he couldn’t make out what it was, but
savage black eyes were fixed on his. Animalistic.

  He wasn’t sure how long he had stood there
staring, but eventually the animal gave up and retreated into the shadows,
disappearing entirely. He felt the need to go closer, but at the same time a
nagging fear held him back. Curiosity and reluctance battled within him, but
when he heard Paula calling for him- “Will? What’s going on?” He gave up and
turned away. 

   “What took you so long?” snapped Marcia
Ferdanez. She was leaned back in a cheap plastic chair near the entrance of the
house they called home, wine bottle held loosely in hand, watching him with
narrowed eyes. “The floor doesn’t clean itself, you know.”

  Will frowned at her, the memory of the cruel
eyes fading to the back of his mind. There was a time when he had still
respected her, before their father left. Back then she was a kind and gentle
woman, who read Paula bedtime stories and told Will old superstitions. “Look at
the clouds,” she’d say, tilting his head up to look at the cloud-filled sky. “Back
in Brazil, your grandma always told me that the clouds could see the future. If
fortune is upon us, they smile and float around, bringing pleasantness and
happiness to everyone. When something bad is going to happen, they screw up
their cherub faces and cry. Their tears get us all wet, but at least we know
when misfortune is gonna strike.” She would smile, eyes lost in thought. “People
complain that they never know when their life takes a nasty downturn, but I say
that there are always warning signs. It’s just that people never know where to
look out for it.”

She certainly hadn’t known where to look out for her own. Not
three months after the tale of the cherub clouds, the night of the Shattering,
as Will called it, had come. The arguing, increasingly frequent over the
nights, had suddenly escalated into crashing, then shattering, then silence.
Will closed his eyes, not wishing to hear any more, and the next morning he’d
found his mother weeping on the floor and Paula wailing from the bedroom.

His father was gone. The broken shards of the shattered dish
lay on the floor.

No more were the bedtime stories or the tale of the prophetic
clouds. Instead were an endless stream of wine bottles and “I’ll spank your
sorry rear if you don’t wipe this table by the time I get back from the liquor
store”.

  “I was busy,” he said now, looking at her
defiantly in the eye. “I had to pick up Paula from school.”

“Did you? Who told you to?”

“You did.”

 She faltered for a
second, then her gaze hardened again. “Does it matter? Get to work!”

 He stormed from the
house to get a mop.

  Pete was reading a magazine when he got to
the store. He looked up at Will when he barged in, taking in his red face and
furious expression, and whistled. “Your mum again? Sucks for you, buddy.”

  Will couldn’t help but roll his eyes. Pete
was his age and his best friend, if not his only friend. “Yeah, I appreciate
the sympathy. Hey, could I borrow a mop by any chance?”

   Pete
snorted derisively. “Not the floor cleaning again. Didn’t you do that, what,
last Wednesday?” He reached under the counter and threw an ugly red mop at him.
“Take the bucket too, free of charge,” he said, and Will just managed to catch
a similarly horrid red bucket which was thrown at his chest.

  “Thanks,” he said. It was good to have a friend
whose father worked at a nearby convenience store.

 “No
problemo,” said Pete, whose attention had returned to his magazine. Curious,
Will looked at the front cover. He paled.

  “No way.”

  Pete blinked. “What?” He closed the magazine
and looked at the cover. “Oh, this is a special on death omens. Apparently, if
you see one of those grim reaper dogs, it means you are going to die. Either
that, or you’ll have to watch someone close to you do. Neat, huh? I don’t
believe a word of it. Hey, Will? Will!”

 Will had grown paler and paler through his
friend’s spiel, and was already out the door.

  He leaned against the wall of the alleyway
once outside, trying to steady his breathing. “It’s just a stupid
superstition,” he told himself. “It doesn’t mean someone’s going to die. You
probably just saw a stray rabid dog. Heck, maybe it wasn’t even a dog at all.
It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Even so, his heart rate was accelerating out
of control, and it was a while before he could begin to walk home again.

 The darkness surrounded him. A black dog
appeared from the shadows, then another, then another. They circled him like
wolves did their prey, fangs bared in a feral snarl, ferocious black eyes fixed
hungrily on him. He screamed, and all three hounds dissolved into darkness. All
that was left were the footprints on the ground-

  “Will! Will!”

   He
jolted awake, heart pounding, to see his little sister peering anxiously at
him.

   The
sun was up outside. He was late.

  Will tried not to swear. He leapt out of bed
and got dressed hurriedly. Paula watched him with stormy, brooding grey eyes.

   “I
might be late,” he told her as he pulled on his shirt. “You should leave
first.”

  Her eyes widened
immediately in fear, and she shook her head profusely. He was confused; she’d
walked to school by herself before, when Will was too tired to get up and walk
with her. “Why not? What’s wrong?”

  Paula bit her lip
and looked at her feet. “It’s nothing… yesterday at school, before you came to
get me…” She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “I don’t know if I actually saw
it or if I thought it but, but there was this big black dog-”

   He jerked back, away from her. “Will?”

  No.

   It couldn’t be.

   Pete’s face flashed before his eyes again. It means you are going to die. Or you’ll
have to watch someone close to you do…

  The black hound
veiled in the shadows, its aggressive eyes trained on his.

   You are
going to die.

   “Will?”

  He was shaken from
his reverie by his sister, her pale eyes fixed on his. “Can you please walk to
school with me? I don’t want to go alone.”

   He should have said no. He should have told
her to go ahead. Heck, given the signs, he should have told her not to go to
school at all.

   He shouldn’t have ignored it. A giant hound-
no, two  giant hounds looming from the shadows were
ominous enough, let alone the rumors.

   But he didn’t.

   For a long moment, the house was silent
except for their mother’s drunken snores from the other side of the room. Then
he sat up. “Yeah, I’ll come.”

   They hurried down the street, brother and
sister, hand in hand, as it should be. Will must have gotten up later than he
thought, because there was nobody else in the street. The road they usually
took to school now looked so much darker and more foreboding in the morning
sun. He hesitated, but Paula, oblivious, dragged him into the shadowy alley.
They ran on, until loud voices cut across their path.

   “Are you askin’ for a fight?”  Will heard a shout from around the corner. It
was the voice of an angry drunken man. He encountered enough of those around
the neighbourhood, and knew well to avoid them. He tugged on Paula’s hand, and
she turned around and stared at him with wide grey eyes. He shook his head
slightly.

   “So what if I am? Bring it on!” Another man’s
voice, also angry and intoxicated. Will was about to pull Paula in the opposite
direction when the sound of a gunshot stopped him in his tracks. Paula gasped
loudly, and he wanted to cover her mouth, but it was too late.

  Heavy footsteps
sounded, and a bald red-faced man appeared around the corner. His eyes were
sunken into his head, and he held a wine bottle loosely in one hand and a gun
in the other. “Eavesdropping, are ye?” He roared, getting up close in their
faces. Paula whimpered slightly and tried to back away, but he knelt to her
level. “I don’t know you, ye little rat, but you’ve been awfully bad this
morning,” he cooed in her face, gripping her shoulder as she tried to shrink
back.

  Will could hardly contain himself. “Leave her alone!” He snapped, and the thug stood
up and glared at him.

  “What? Acting
all purposeful and righteous now, are you, kid?” He roared, swinging his arm.
Will’s attention was drawn suddenly to the gun in his moving arm- There was
something about it that warranted attention…

  You are going to die.

  It all clicked.

  The dog hadn’t
been trying to scare him, or his sister, by appearing in front of both of them.
It had been trying to warn them. To warn him.

  What had Pete
said? If you see one of those grim reaper
dogs, it means you are going to die. Either that, or you’ll have to watch
someone close to you do.

  He’d been given
a choice. The drunk man and the gun he was holding were a ticking time bomb,
and either led up to his doom- or his sister’s.

  And there was
no way Will was going to willingly let Paula die in front of him.

  You are going to die.

  “You’re stretching
the limit, sonny!” The man practically spat in his face. Will could smell the
foul breath coming from his mouth. He turned his head away. “Oi! Look at me!
Oi!”

  The drunk
leveled his gun in Will’s face, and he could just about feel Paula cry out. A
wave of protectiveness surged up within him. He had to make sure that Paula
would be fine. If it was the last thing that he did, so be it. He brought his
foot up to kick the thug in the shin.

  “Argh!” The man fell back in pain,
clutching his leg, and Will turned. “RUN!” He yelled at Paula. She looked at
him, shock everywhere on her face. He didn’t blame her- everything had gone
wrong so quickly. “I said RUN!”

  She seemed to
process his words, and she turned and ran back the way they had came from, just
as the drunk man leveled his gun at Will’s head and pulled the trigger.

  His head seemed
to explode with pain, and he fell backwards, landing with a thump on the hard
pavement. His head turned listlessly to the side, and he saw Paula stop, turn
and look at him. So she was the one to watch him die. It was better than the
other way round.

  So this is what it feels like to die, he
thought. He knew that Paula was screaming, he knew that blood was gushing from
his head and he knew that the drunken man was running away, but it all seemed
distant, otherworldly. Even the head splitting pain seemed to be fading,
resounding into a dull, rhythmic throb.

  The hounds were
reappearing, circling him like wolves did protecting an injured member of their
pack. He no longer shrank away from them in fear; instead, he welcomed them,
because he knew they meant no harm to him. His gaze lowered to the ground, and
before his eyes slipped shut, the wolves dissolved. He knew rather than felt
that they had left to welcome him on the other side, wherever that was. All
that was left were the footprints on the ground, and before he succumbed to
darkness, his mind picked up on something.

  They were the
footprints of a gigantic hound.