When I was a very little girl I found a fairy sleeping in mother’s garden. Father, Mother, and James didn’t believe me. Not until I dragged James into the garden and showed him the fairy.

But James shook the sleeping fairy awake. He demanded the fairy tell him who he was and what he was doing on our property. He sounded angry with the fairy.

I begged him not to yell at the fairy but he laughed at me and said he wasn’t a fairy, just a human like us.

But I knew I was right.

I knew he was a fairy.

The flowers around him were growing bigger and prettier than any I had ever seen before.

The sleepy fairy rubbed his eyes and told us we were both wrong. Told us he wasn’t a human or a fairy. He was a demon. A Demon of the Briar.

James shook his head and muttered something. The fairy stood up and took a step out of the flower bed. Thorny rose bushes broke out of the ground at his bare feet. I squealed and clapped my hands in delight. James took a step back.

James ordered the fairy not to move with a shaky voice then dragged me away from the flower bed and out of earshot of the fairy. In his secret voice James told me we weren’t going to tell Father and Mother about the fairy. He told me we would hide him in my playhouse and bring him food.

I readily agreed. To keep a fairy as a pet seemed like a wonderful idea at the time.

But Kira Thorn was not a safe pet to keep.

We should have listened when he called himself a demon

At first the fairy didn’t like the offer of my playhouse. He left Mother’s garden for what I thought would be forever. But months later he came back bruised and bleeding with his clothes a little baggier than before.

His name was Kira Thorn and he was in my life for years.

We brought him food and made sure he didn’t sleep too long like he begged me to do. James wrote down everything Kira ate and every flower he grew and every hour he slept. He drew him in the style of the drawings in Papa’s books. When Kira cut his hand, James collected the drops of blood. When Kira fell asleep, James took some of his hair.

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While James played at being Papa, I played with my pet fairy.

Kira would grow me flowers and I’d weave them into crowns and necklaces. I taught him chess and checkers and played until he beat me. He taught me the games of his people . I’ve forgotten their rules but I remember their splendor.

Kira would read to me as well. His voice was beautiful, like the whispering of wind through the woods. I would listen, enraptured, to even the most horridly boring of stories if he was the one telling them.

And once, only once, was I blessed to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of his singing wafting up to my bedroom window from the garden.

My little pet fairy became so much more to me.

After years of friendship, I fell in love with Kira Thorn.

And he shattered my heart and soul.

I have made quite a few mistakes in my life. For instance, leaving my bedroom open the night of a thunderstorm only to wake up and see Father’s book that I borrowed without permission ruined or ripping my wedding gown only hours before my wedding. The worst, by far, though was falling in love with Kira Thorn.

I grew into a woman with my eyes and heart set on a fairy that nobody believed existed.

They were right though. There was never a fairy. Only a demon.

Why did I have to love him?

Why did he have to be like that?

One day when I was 17, I decided it was time to tell my darling fairy how I felt about him. I went to my playhouse, where we kept him. None of Kira’s flowers were around it, which meant James had been there.

I was not prepared for what I would see beyond the door of my playhouse. Kira… kissing my brother. I stood in the doorway unnoticed as James shoved Kira away and yelled obscenities at him. Words meant to cut, to bite, to burn. To poison, to scar. The same words that coursed through me, that wanted to attack Kira as well. I couldn’t speak though. I couldn’t do anything but stand and watch. And cry.

It was when the tears fell that James noticed me. When he saw me crying he moved from harsh words to fists.

Kira didn’t even guard himself. Nor did he cry. He simply looked at me with black, empty eyes while James hurt him again and again. I couldn’t stand those eyes.

James said something I couldn’t quite hear. It had an effect on Kira. His eyes stopped being empty and they stopped looking at me. They looked at James and welled with angry tears.

Kira’s plants began to grow through the floor. Obscenely large rose bushes with no flowers. Only thorns. He tangled James and I up in them and left us suspended to be found hours later. By then covered in hundreds of small wounds from struggling against the branches.

We never saw him again.

The flowers in my mother’s garden never bloomed again.