Helena Silverlake has had many guardians throughout her life. It all started out simply enough. She and her twin sister, Lucy, came in to this world just minutes apart, much to the elation of their parents. They were the firstborn, but unfortunately they were the only children the Silverlakes would have. Helena's parents were killed in a terrible accident when she and Lucy were small. Almost too small too remember. Sometimes she has small glimpses of the life she had when it was still the four of them. When things almost seemed normal in her life. She was still sick then. She'd always been sick. But no one loves you as much or as unconditionally as your parents do. It's something she'd severely miss when they were gone. She was only seven.

From there, there was foster care. Being so prone to long illnesses, it was impossible to find anyone who actually wanted to adopt her. A sad, dark underside of the foster care system is the current of people who simply do it for the assistance the State provides in return. They do it for extra money, not to spend that much more than they're bringing in per head. Plenty of offers poured in for Lucy, who was healthy, vibrant, and strong. But Helena was quickly and easily deemed a lost cause and no one wanted to bring her burden upon themselves.

She had many guardians throughout her time in the system. Each more short-tempered and short-lived than the last. Her and Lucy saw it all. Those who just wanted a check, those who wanted free slave labor, those trying to save as many souls as possible as though Jesus himself were handing out incentive pay, those who could never have children of their own, those who just wanted the pats on the back and praise for their generosity, their charity. A few of them she believed may have even felt sorry for her. Poor, dying orphan who nobody wanted. But she believed it was her sister they felt even sorrier for. Without Helena, Lucy may have had a chance.

Her time in the system was cut short when her twin sister took her and ran. And though they had people that helped them out here and there, such as Reena, the only person who cared for Helena was the same person who had cared for her all her life. Lucy. There wasn't a day that went by that her heart didn't ache for the weight that must have been planted so firmly on her sister's shoulders. Even though she never complained. That was just Lucy. She didn't complain.

That's the reason that Helena chose to move back out of the school, and in with Kennedy again for good, despite her sister being back in her life. The urge to overwhelm and in a sense to smother Lucy is definitely there. But she's afraid to need her. She's afraid that when and if she slips, she'll just pull Lucy right down with her. Again. She doesn't take for granted all the things her sister has done for her, and all the ways she protected her from a world it seemed like Helena was never really meant for anyway. But the fact that Lucy never got to be a child, not really, still haunts her to this day. She refuses to take away her adulthood too.

"I wanted a perfect ending... Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity." --Gilda Radner

There have been many times over the course of my life where I have desperately wanted to turn off whatever inside my mind is open and allows the premonitions through. Sometimes in life, I've wished I could have been more surprised. Other times, I've had to live knowing that something terrible was about to happen and there was nothing I could to stop it. Like the night I knew that Caleb was going to die and they put me out for a little while. When I woke up, he was already gone. So at least I didn't have to live with that looming knowledge for too long. It never made it any less sad, knowing it was coming. It only made it hurt worse somehow, because I knew I was powerless to stop it. In the beginning, I may have never sent Lucy off to Last Chance, even though I knew she was destined for it. But eventually, I caved. I began to realize that everything I saw was a preview. It would happen whether or not I told anyone about it; even if I tried to stop it.

I'd also learned down the line how to fight it. It took almost all the energy I had to do so, but if I wanted to badly enough, I could keep the truth at bay. When I felt it coming on right before the big battle between good and evil, I fought it. Part of me was desperate to know what would happen to my sister. And yet a bigger part of me didn't know if it was coming. Fate is already established. If Lucy was meant to die that day, it would find her. It wouldn't matter how hard I tried to protect her. So I chose not to know. I didn't want to sit in agony that day, just waiting for her to die. It was hard to have the access to that kind of thing and not take it, but I truly believed that some things were just better off left unknown.

All's well that ends well, right?

Slowly the girls began to start coming back to the school. The ones that had lived, that is. Some stayed in the hospital longer than others. My sister's best friend had taken a particularly vicious hit, so Lucy spent a lot of time in the following days at the hospital with her. I didn't mind. She had always been there for me when I was sick. I knew how much she could make things better just by being there.
Come Valentine's Day, Ryan wanted to take Lucy to Vegas to celebrate. At first she didn't want to go. She didn't want to leave me there by myself. But I kept insisting she go. See, if she started doing things like that, missing out and being held back just because she was worried about me, then I'd feel horrible. It was the exact thing I'd tried to avoid by not coming back into her life. The last thing I ever wanted to do was bring her down again or hold her back. She had a great life now, with great people. I didn't want to hold her back from that.

Still, it was immediately lonely. I didn't really know anyone here and I wasn't the kind of person who went around introducing themselves or trying to make friends. The only friend I really had was Kennedy. I missed being at her place, which was so familiar and so comfortable after all the months I'd spent there. Plus, I hadn't even really gotten a chance to talk to her after the big fight. I knew that she was alive, but from what I'd heard, there'd still been a lot of losses. A lot of severe injuries to people who didn't heal like my sister and most of her friends did.

Lucy would probably be mad later that I had left the school, which she seemed to think could protect me from the world. She might also be a little mad since it was Kennedy who had sort of harbored me all that time, and I'd seen the bruise that was proof positive of just how not happy my sister had been about that. But I wasn't about to let her start taking responsibility for me again, for trying to protect me. I needed her to know that I was strong now. I was healthy, and good, and hadn't even had so much as a sneeze ever since I came back.

Leaving a note for her, in case I wasn't back by the time that she was, I grabbed my laptop and a few of my personal things and headed over to Kennedy's to spend a few days with her. It would be good to get a few days of quiet after all the chaos that was constant at the school.

My sister was always my companion. My best friend, my confidante, my protector. Anything that I needed in this world, she could somehow mold herself and become. I live with knowing I was never half the things to her that she made herself for me. And I know, she probably doesn’t blame me for that. No one knew better than her how sick I always was. I think she knows that I tried as hard as I could with what little strength I had in me.

I’ve missed her so much since I’ve been back. There have been so many times I’ve almost broke my own vow and just ran up to her, to throw my arms around her and squeeze the breath right out of her. The same air she doesn’t even know I’m still breathing. It’s hard to keep my distance, because it is the loneliest thing in the world to be without her. She was all that I ever had, once our parents died. And even though she’s not alone now, I still feel like I owe it to her to be that person she always was for me. I just can’t, that’s all. She’s so much better off on her own. She’s got a best friend of her own now, and Ryan, he seems like both her confidante and protector. Not that Lucy needs one. But I think everyone could use someone to fall back on every now and then.

I haven’t been completely alone though. Kennedy took me in when I had nowhere else to go. She’s been so kind to me, giving me a room of my own, not charging me rent, insisting on lending me money even though she won’t take it back when I try to pay her back. And she’s kept my secret. She didn’t have to do that, and considering she didn’t know me at all, she really had no reason to. But she did it anyway. I owe her so much. She’s kept me company, and she’s looked out for my sister, and she’s given me the same chance at a good life that Lucy had to fight so hard for.

Now that it’s out there, now that Molly and Ryan know and are inevitably going to tell Lucy if they haven’t already, I know that Kennedy is going to come under fire for keeping me a secret all this time. I just want to say, that that’s not fair. It was my decision to keep my own existence hidden. And Kennedy did nothing but help me, all this time. So I hope that if anyone wants to be mad at her or judge her for doing what I asked her to, they’ll at least stop to think about what a good person she is and how she helped me more than she harmed anyone else. We’re all loyal to our friends. And Kennedy was just being my friend when I didn't have anyone else to turn to.

It's strange when you're born with someone who wears a face that's identical to yours. To look at another person and see yourself reflected there. Or to look in the mirror and see your sister instead. We're not a perfect match, but we're nearly flawless. And even to this day, despite death and all these days in between, I can still look in the mirror and remember every single nuance of her face. Every subtle difference that made her Lucy, and made me Helena.

Now she's gone. Well, I'm supposed to be gone, but I'm still here, and she doesn't know that. We're two people, we've always been two people, but sometimes I can't help but feeling like half of me is missing. Like I look at a ghost in the mirror, and it's never really my face. Always trying to find those tiny lines, the beauty mark high on my right cheek, the slightly thinner shape and more hollow dimples that came with years of illness. No one could ever really tell the difference between us, unless we had different hair. And there are still some days when I couldn't tell whose face I was seeing: my own reflection or the deeply embedded memory of my sister.

This morning is one such morning when I spent too much time trying to study my face while trying to invoke the ghost of my sister's too. Kennedy had been late leaving, something unusual enough. But I had this feeling that I couldn't shake. Like something bad was going to happen or something major was going to change.

I ate French toast while reading the newspaper, CNN news floating in from the living room on the t.v. there. Not much was new in the world. New stories, different days, but it was all old. And by the time I finished my breakfast, I was ready to get back to work on my translations. Livre de la Vie was almost ready to be printed and bound. And then my promise to Anaisa would be fulfilled.

But no sooner had I fixed myself some hot chocolate and set my laptop up on Kennedy's expensive glass coffee table when some really insistent banging on the front door started up. I could hear two voices, one male and one female calling out Kennedy's name. And that strange feeling twisted up in my stomach again as I climbed back to my feet to go see what was going on. I normally tried to keep a low profile, but something told me whoever these people were, they weren't going quietly.

Pulling open the door, I came face to face with a girl and boy who were about my age. I was stunned for a second at the fact that a light snowfall had begun. But they were stunned in a completely different way. It was like they'd seen a ghost or something.

"Kennedy's not here," I offered them as I framed myself in the doorway. "She was running late. Is there something I can help you with?"

((Open to Molly & Ryan...))

What makes my life complicated is that I'm technically supposed to be dead. No one who actually knows me or knew me before knows that I'm alive. Which isn't really such a big deal in context. My twin sister, Lucy, and I were always being bounced from here to there, from this person to that. We were lucky, in a sense. No one had the heart to separate us. We're identical, and even more than that, we've just always had this bond. Our parents said that we slept in the same crib until we were almost a year old. We couldn't bear to be apart. They said we would just cry and cry until they put us together again, and then the minute they did, we'd fall fast asleep. I guess it was just that way from the beginning. Me and Lucy against the world.

Her life was so complicated with me in it. I was always sick. I always held her up and kept her back. She had to work twice as hard to make up for both our weight when we were looked upon as a burden to our foster families. Not only were there two of us, but I was so sick all of the time. And then I had to go and die on her. So I'm doing her a favor, by not going back into her life and making her have to undo all the things she did to deal with me dying in the first place. She's so happy now. She has friends, and I think she even has a boyfriend. And no one's hurting her now. No one's using her or making her miserable. No one's making her pick up my slack or carry my weight.

It makes sense to me. And I don't think it's wrong. Kennedy doesn't seem to have a problem with it either. She's been so great to let me live with her, and to keep my secret, and to just help me when I came her with nothing. But then her friend Grace has been here this last week or so, and when she found out, she really hit the wall. She was so mad. I had to listen to this big lecture about all the time she'd lost out on with her own sister, and how much it would kill her to think her sister was dead. Especially if she wasn't, if she was alive out there somewhere. Grace thinks I should tell Lucy, and for a second, I was almost afraid she would if I didn't.

She said she would never forgive her sister, Faith, if she did something like that to her. And that she had barely been able to forgive her just for being gone all that time, and not bothering to find her again. For deciding for her that she was better off.

If Lucy ever does find out, I hope that she will forgive me. But more than that, I hope she never finds out in the first place. Maybe she wouldn't agree that she's better off without me, the same way Grace never thought she was better off without her sister. But it's not the same thing, and I know deep down, that I am right. I only complicated Lucy's life, and this is my chance to make that right. To give her the escape clause she never gave herself.

Even if it means I'm the one who's complicated now.

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love." - Washington Irving

My sister didn’t cry when I died. I knew she was holding it in. And I knew that some part of her refused to believe that it was actually happening this time. I’d been sick so often, so many times. And of all the things you’d have thought would have killed me by then, pneumonia seemed like nothing. Like some silly cold. A scratch. I’d suffered and survived so much more, so much worse. I understood how she could resist; how she could refuse to believe that this was the end.

But I knew better. I’d known it all along, since the night before when I’d told her. I’d seen it. I’d sign my eyes fall closed, the light fade, doctors and nurses rushing to my body which was stiller than it’d ever been, electrical charges meant to save me getting lost somewhere on the surface of my skin where they did nothing but overheat the skin that hadn’t even begun to grow cold. I can’t remember dying, but I have absolutely no doubt that that’s exactly how it happened.

Just like I know how much harder it would have been to die if I’d seen beforehand how much it would devastate Lucy. I know people expect others to grieve them, but I’m honestly grateful I didn’t have to see her cry. The way I went, well, dying is never easy. But it was less hard, believing she wouldn’t suffer too much because of it. I was leaving her. And how could I do that if I sensed she couldn’t make it without me? She was the strongest person I ever knew, and I needed to know that she would endure.

All the same, I showed her the same mercy. I saved all my tears for when she left for work that last night. I got it all out where she couldn’t see, so that I could be strong for her when I needed to be. I think sometimes, there is more love in not crying. When you can hold your tears away just long enough to save someone else when you know you yourself cannot be saved.

I used to have a lot of scars. Track marks from needles that had been stuck into my skin so many times, I no longer felt their sharp sting, just a dull ache of metal piercing flesh. Scar tissue forming in the crooks of my elbows, the insides of my forearms, and the tops of my hand. Making it harder and harder to stick each time. There were braided white lines that stuck out unnaturally, jagged from the many scrapes and falls I'd taken as a sick child. From the bursts of violence I'd experienced while I was dreaming yet wide awake. Surgeries to remove everything from my tonsils to my appendix to a kidney. They covered my body like a roadmap of where the disease had been.

Sometimes, I'd stand in front of a full length mirror and just cry. I think deep down, I always knew that I wasn't going to live very long. I think I knew I was going to die long before the pneumonia took its final hold. But the part of me refused to give up on hope so easily, and that could still believe I'd somehow be better one day, that part saw those scars as a permanent disease. I couldn't imagine anyone ever looking at me, fully or even halfway undressed, and not being completely disturbed by the sight of all of them. It was such a silly thing to worry about.

And then I died. Those scars were supposed to accompany my body into the ground. Tattoos to be recognized in the afterlife, if there is one at all. Instead, I was resurrected. Restoring life to a body requires more than just a return. As they say, the moment we are born, we begin to die. And while I think that's meant to be a more of a metaphor, to say that life is only the long process of death because our time is always running out. I also think it's very literal. We grow old. Our bodies change, and they break down, and they're never as new or as complete as they were when we were first born. It takes us almost a hundred years to complete the circle when we're still breathing. But once we're dead, it takes almost no time for our bodies to break down. So being dead for even just two days destroys the cells, the tissues. And the blood flow doesn't just start right back up after it's been stilled.

Being resurrected means that you start back over new. You still look like you, and it's still the same body you always had. But you're like the newborn version of you. Everything that was broken, becomes fixed. Restored, even. It's like being reset. I never felt as alive as I did the moment I took the first breath of my second life.

It's funny though. Now that the scars are gone, I kind of miss them. They'd become as much a part of me as anything else.

Helena Silverlake
Original Character/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
500 Words

"Well your faith was strong, but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof.
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to her kitchen chair,
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah...
Hallelujah, Hallelujah."

Gabriel.

That was his name. "Like the angel," She told him when she first met him, smiling her quietly sweet smile. Helena extended her long, thin arm so that she could shake his hand. He struggled at first, the I.V. was tangled. Two different bags of two differently colored fluids hung on the pole, filtering down through the clear plastic tubing leading to the heplock stuck in one of the bigger veins in his hand. Swollen and electric blue, bulging against skin so pale with sickness it almost looks translucent. Like an angel.

He was sicker than she'd ever been. But the doctors actually knew what was wrong with him. Leukemia. "I'm dying," He told her one morning as they sat in a large recreational room, looking out at the sunshine that neither of them had felt for weeks. "I've always been dying." He added, the softness of his face and the curve of the small smile that seemed to always be on his lips when she was around, belying the sobering thing he was saying to her. She'd go on to borrow it from him.

"You're dying," Lucy told her, disbelief self-evident in her voice as the doctor disappeared from the examination room they'd brought Helena in to in the Emergency Room. And Helena managed one of Gabriel's smiles. "I've always been dying," She rasped, followed by a series of coughs.

It was a long hospitlization. Just over a month. They were getting longer, as she got older, and seemed to get sicker every time. This time, she had anemic hypoxia. She had to stay for so long because they hadn't been able to diagnose a cause for the anemia which resulted in a bone marrow examination. It took a blood transfusion from her twin sister, Lucy, to finally heal her.

During that time, she became very close to Gabriel. He was the only one around her age. 17 years old and dying. They'd spend hours stretched out in the sun of the common room, or curled up in Gabriel's room watching DVDs. His family had a lot of money, and they'd turned his private room into an almost indentical duplicate of the room he had at home. The family that Helena and Lucy had been placed with didn't have a lot of money. At least not that they'd spend on making either of the girls any more comfortable. So Gabriel took it upon himself to spoil her. Every morning, he had fresh flowers sent up to the semi-private room she stayed in. Magazines for the nights she couldn't sleep, chocolate covered peanut butter candy that she craved. He even asked her what Lucy liked, and always had something waiting for her when she visited.

Three weeks into her stay, he kissed her. She was 15 and she'd never been kissed. It was nice. Until it turned violent. When his lips touched hers, she felt a shock, like an electric volt run through her. Images filled her mind. And she knew that he really was dying. But sooner than anyone expected. They had just told him, two days ago, that he was doing better. There was even talk of switching him to the care of a home nurse. But there was something inside his brain. An aneurysm.

Pulling away, she tried to tell him, she tried to explain. But her tongue was heavy and felt like cotton, thick and malleable, no form. Gabriel's smile quickly faded, and he yelled in to the open hallway for a nurse. Frustrated, Helena lashed out, weakly turning over a small cabinet and knocking the contents off of the tray table next to his bed. A nurse came in, grabbing her arms, trying to fold them over her chest harmlessly, but still she struggled. And still, she couldn't speak. Couldn't scream, though she tried. Two more nurses joined Macy, the nurse trying to pin her down. One of them grabbed her feet, and Macy wrapped her arms around Helena from behind, using her own strong arms to keep Helena's arms trapped against her own chest as the third nurse lifted the hem of her pajama top, pulling her pajama bottoms down just enough to expose her hip. Scrubbing it with an alcohol pad, he quickly jammed a syringe into her flesh, pushing Thorazine to the pulse of Helena's silent scream. Her body went limp after a few minutes, and the last thing she saw was a faded view of Gabriel's face.

The next morning, he was already dead. She'd never had the chance to warn him, never gotten to say good-bye. They gave her another small sedative, and she cried herself to sleep.

She cried again when she saw the flowers.

I'd been living with Kennedy for about a month and a half now. It was still hard, moving throughout L.A. and subsequently, my sister's life, like a ghost. But that's what I technically was supposed to be. The upside was that I got daily updates from Kennedy. Just things like that she was okay and still there and happy. That was all I really needed to know. I still had to see for myself sometimes. It wasn't really to confirm. It was just that I needed to see her for myself. After all this time, I, I just needed to see her. I was pretty good at coming and going unnoticed. Though there were a few times I think she almost saw me or thought she saw me. But I knew how to disappear quickly, and as much as I hated playing with her head and playing on her grief, using the fact that she thought I was dead to my advantage, it was still better than giving her the truth.

Most of the time, I was busy transcribing Anaisa's diaries. I had an entire vintage Louis Vuitton trunk full of her books and papers, all the things that had been handed down to her and that she'd used as a Bokor for all those years. She had lived to be a 106 years old. They started teaching her simple things when she was six, so she'd pretty much been doing this for a hundred years when she died. It was a lot of information. Huge chunks of it, I was having to have translated. I didn't speak or understand French. It was all interesting, but it was mostly just business until I got to the part about resurrection spells. There were all these different ways to bring a person back, an emphasis on the difference between bringing back the person as they were (though death apparently changes us all indelibly, it leaves a mark on us that can't fade) and creating a zombie.

I read that collection of her notes at least ten times through before I even made a single note about it. I just sat there, for hours, reading the complicated process it had taken to bring me back - the real me - and not just to simply reanimate the dead version of me. It struck me that I could probably publish this book instead of selling it to the highest bidding voodoo priests. And no one would even believe it was real. They'd think I'd made it all up. These things, the occult, the supernatural, were so popular, but mostly for entertainment purposes. Even if anyone could actually pull off Anaisa's ressurection, they wouldn't even try. They'd figure it was an updated version of "Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board" or something.

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction. And sometimes, fiction is truth.

Helena Silverlake
Original Character
477 Words

I'd been in Los Angeles for just a few days, and so far, I'd managed to track my sister to just a few places. It was easy, yet hard at the same time. Slipping into the shadows and staying just out of view while I watched her, talking, laughing, continuing to live her life. And I couldn't be part of it. I wasn't sure she wanted me to. I was supposed to be dead. And even alive, I'd always just been this heavy thing for her to carry along when our lives were always already so heavy by default.

I couldn't interrupt her now. I could only make sure that she was okay.

The first place I'd found her was at some sort of party. At first it had been hard to place her in the darkness and the masses of people spilling in and out of some house and around a fire someone had built. But then there she was. Beautiful as ever. She looked happy. Like maybe she had finally found her place in this world. Or a place she didn't want to run from. It made me feel so good. So happy myself, even though it was tinged with so much sadness because I knew I couldn't just... burst from the shadows and run right to her for some big surprise reunion.

She caught a glimpse of me, I think. But just as quickly as her eyes landed on me, I managed to disappear, my toes digging into the sand as I ran back to the dark spot behind someone's garage where I had parked my car. I guess Lucy thought it was a shadow or just a trick or her imagination or something because she didn't follow.

Then I'd found this place. Some kind of school or dorm that she was living in. I hadn't quite figured out what they were teaching here, but so far I knew that it was all-girls and that it wasn't exactly secondary education or anything.

My hands were pressed up against the bricks and I was moving from window to window, trying to scope what was going on inside when all of a sudden I sensed a looming prescence just over to my right. Whirling around, I pressed my back to the brick and looked quickly for an escape route.

((Kennedy...))

"And all the roads that lead to you were winding,
And all the lights that light the way are blinding.
There are many things that I would like to say to you,
But I don't know how..."

I had 15 hours in the car to think about what I was going to say once I got to Los Angeles. 15 hours, give or take the extra time when my car ran out of gas as I was turning on to Baseline Rd. The busted flat I got in the long stretch of road that passes through Arizona and Nevada before it passes into California. By the end of it, it was almost 17 hours.

It hadn't seemed like a good idea to spend the night in Last Chance, waiting for the first light to hit the road. People were looking at like me like they were seeing a ghost - the ghost of Lucy, undoubtedly. And the way they whispered and pointed and watched me with these cold, quiet eyes was unnerving. So much so that I'd decided to make the drive to California overnight.

My sister wasn't there. That wasn't going to change by morning.

So at 8 that evening, I packed my rental car back up and headed out of town, to Boulder, where I fueled up and I swear, I fended off at least one more strange look. I missed Lucy even more than I'd first realized, just seeing the lasting impression she'd left on all these peiople. Probably not for any particularly good reasons. But that's what I'd always loved about her.

Her fire.

It was about 11 in the morning when I finally started seeing the signs for L.A., the sun glaring off of them in a way that was practically blinding me. From there, it was just those winding freeways and a couple of exits to a place I'd never been but to a face that couldn't have been more familiar unless I'd seen it yesterday.

And I still had no idea what to say.

"I said, maybe,
You're gonna be the one who saves me?
And after all,
You're my wonderwall."

Helena Silverlake was born just three minutes ahead of her identical twin sister, Lucy. The children of Celia and Dean Silverlake, the girls began their life in West Springs, Ohio where they grew up. Despite being the one to make an earlier start into the world, Helena was a sickly child, requiring her parents' constant attention from the moment she could walk. While she was never pinned down to just one particular illness, Helena was almost always sick in one form or another. It only increased as she got older and tried hard to be a normal child, like her sister Lucy who was tough and energetic. But something as simple as a scraped knee would become instantly infected and land Helena stuck in bed for days, if not in the hospital. As a result, Helena was coddled by her parents and treated like porcelain, while it was drilled into her slightly younger sister that she had to protect Helena because Lucy was the strong one. But nothing could have prepared either of the girls for the fateful night their parents were killed when their car was hit by an on-coming tractor trailer, killing them instantly. The girls, only seven, were with a baby-sitter when it happened.

They barely had time to recover from the double tragedy before they were thrown in foster care which ultimately led them to Cleveland. There were several offers to adopt Lucy, but no one wanted to take on the responsibility and the financial burden of a child as sick as Helena. Lucy refused to be split from her twin sister's side and was consequently stuck moving from one foster home to the next just to be moved around yet again.

If she was sick before, the having the only constant in her life be change only made Helena grow worse. Lucy always did her best to protect her, to shield her from the people who had taken them in only governmental supplement for doing so. Or the people who truly had the best of intentions, but drew the line somewhere between the third and fourth hospital bills. Which weren't just run-of-the-mill blood works up and IV antibiotic drips. She would wake violently from dreams that made no sense. Which eventually bled into wakefullness. Hallucinations perpetuating violence to a cause that wasn't even real. Bits and pieces would filter down to Lucy, and make some sort of sense to her. A frightening kind of sense that ultimately turned out to be all too true once Helena's words began manifesting before Lucy's eyes in ways that couldn't just be written off as coincidence. Something else was at work. Something darker. It ultimately proved itself just enough to save them when Helena saw her death in the future, and Lucy took them on the run.

They were only 16 when they found a small place on the outskirts of New Orleans. Lucy found work waiting tables at a strip joint, while Helena remained too weak to even leave the small room in the only apartment Lucy could afford. She kept insisting that Helena be taken to the emergency room, as the older girl grew sicker and weaker and sicker still. But Helena refused, knowing, the minute they didn't have a parent or guardian there to consent for them was the minute they'd be sent right back into foster care. Or worse, to the man they'd only just escaped.

One night, a stripper who worked at the club Lucy waitressed at offered to take Lucy and Helena to a doctor who often visited her at work. Something quiet, and under the radar. Unfortunately, Helena's condition had deteriorated so far, there was nothing he could do for her. The hospital was their only choice.

Helena had no idea when they told her she had pneumonia that she'd be dead barely thirty minutes later. But as the moment moved closer, the truth washed over her calmly and she knew what she had to do. A vision, tunneling its way through the fading remnants of her brain, played behind her eyes in the space of her memories. And as her breath was leaving her, as the darkness was pulling her like a stronger tide, she grabbed Lucy's hand and told her: Last Chance is going to need you.

It was the last time she ever exhaled.

She stayed in the dark for a long time, though time was of no consequence to her. There was nothing where she was. No Heaven, no Hell, no idea where her body lay. The first hazy lights that welcomed her back to the world startled her, as she struggled to open her eyes. The lids felt weighted, and her whole body was numb and anchored to the cloth she could feel spread out beneath her skin.

The stripper, Reena, who had helped Lucy find a doctor to look at Helena, was the great-grandaughter of an old Haitian Bokor named Anaisa. Reena was in the room, and witnessed the strange exchange between Helena and Lucy. Upon reporting it along with Helena's last words to the aging monarch of her family, Anaisa set forth plans to recover the body. Using a powerful form of black magic thought to only be a voodoo myth, Anaisa raised Helena from the dead. It was no small or easy task, and required the sacrifice of another human life in her place.

Helena was brought back into this world seven days after she died. She was brought back a new person, completely healthy and strong with a newfound and stunning clarity when it came to her gift. Anaisa kept the girl there with her, teaching her much of what she'd been about to take to the grave with her up until the point she began ailing too much to teach her anymore. When the old woman died, she left everything to Helena except for a few sums of money left to other surviving family members. Shortly before her stroke, she made Helena promise that she would make a collection of her spells, stories, chants, recipes, and diaries and pass them along to others like herself to save the dying practice.

And though she has every intention of fulfilling her promise to the woman who ressurected her, she has an even bigger priority in life - finding her sister. A trip to Last Chance was only weird, to say the least, with everyone looking at her strangely and whispering with no idea that she could hear them. She got the impression that Lucy was long gone.

Which meant Helena Silverlake was going to Los Angeles.