Frenzy (The Frenzy Series Book 1) by Casey L. Bond Page A

the last steaming chunk of egg. She scowled, screeching “What is this? You’re eating all of the extra food we have?”
    Father stopped her rant. “She needed the energy! She’s hunting so we can all eat this week or next.”
    Mother’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better hope the hunt is successful, you pig of a girl!”
    “Enough, Miranda!” Father shouted at her. My fork clattered to the floor and I stood abruptly to go wash my dish and find Ford. “And she needs Mercedes’ coat!”
    “She will not touch her things.”
    “She will . I’ll not lose another daughter because you’re hell bent on placing blame in the wrong place. Your bitterness is suffocating us all. Now allow her into Mercedes’ room, or I’ll remove the door from the hinges and let her in myself.”
    Screw the dish , I thought, abandoning it in the kitchen. I jogged up the steps and took an immediate left, barging into Ford’s room. He was snoring, one arm thrown over his eyes. I shuffled through his drawers, pulling out one of the few pairs of pants he had clean and one of his button down shirts. I’d have to hem the pant legs to make it work, but I could make it temporary. “Just use darts to secure it,” Mrs. Dillinger’s voice said in my mind.
    I slipped from Ford’s room without him even stirring and turned to meet Mother in the hallway. With a scowl, she used an old key to turn the lock on Mercedes’ door. “If you ruin it...” she threatened.
    “Mercedes is gone, Mother. She won’t need it anymore.” My voice sounded as tired as I felt. Without a word, Mother retreated to her room and slammed the door behind her. Sighing, I opened the door to Mercedes’ room. Her bed was exactly as she’d left it that day, down to the quilt perfectly in place on the bed. She always made her bed so neatly, even though everything else was a mess. Her dresser was strewn with things she and I found during our childhood: jewelry boxes and trinkets that went in them, books and paper, pencils. Her sketches, intricately blurry, of the townspeople, the falls at the river, me and Ford, hung on her walls. When she would sketch, she got the most serious expression on her face. She would bite her lip and her hands would fly over the paper in a frenzy. From that flurry of lead and paper emerged beauty, a moment of life captured by a young girl’s raw talent.
    As responsibilities grew in number she had less and less time to draw, but every so often I would catch her scribbling furiously over the paper. My hand drifted over the drawing near her dresser. It was of a man in a long coat, walking along the pavilion at night. Could she have seen a night-walker? Mercedes saw the world differently. She taught me to consider the goodness in everything. Since she fell, I’d forgotten that. I was letting Mother’s bitterness seep in and steal that joy away from me. I needed to cling tightly to it. And to do that, I would need to leave home soon.
    From her closet, I grabbed everything that looked like it might fit, which wasn’t much. A spare dress, some underthings, and most importantly, Mercedes’ double-breasted, black woolen coat. Catching a glimpse of a pair of sturdier boots tucked neatly into the corner, I snatched them up and walked quickly to my room. Mother would lock her memory away again soon.
     

     
    Although Mrs. Dillinger wasn’t feeling well, we continued to work on the dress I began yesterday. She instructed me on the types of stitches to use in various places to make the fabric hold together strongly. I made her tea and she insisted that I take some with her.
    “How did it go this morning?”
    Awful. Horrific. Terrifying. I almost died.
    “Not as bad as I expected,” I lied.
    She made a non-committal noise and glanced at my neck where the wounds were beginning to ache before averting her eyes to the contents of her tea cup. It was almost midday. “My father wants to show me a few things before I have to try to sleep this