Child of the moon

Jacob dashed into the kitchen, dragging mud across the floor from the front door. "Mom!" he shouted on his way in over and over. He had been playing outside nearly all day, and it had rained only the night before. As his mom turned to look at him, she saw the mud long before she saw him, and sighed in agony. "Mom!" he just kept yelling, his voice a mixture of ecstasy and nervous anticipation.

"Yes, Jacob?" she asked with a dull tone to her voice. It took every ounce of willpower that she had not to immediately start scolding him over the mud. She had tried to raise him better than this. It must have been her husband's fault. "What is it?"

"I was playing out in the woods and I found this girl and she's really weird and cool and she doesn't know who she is or where she came from and her clothes look really weird and I think she's hungry so I told her she should come home with me but then I wasn't sure if you would approve and you probably wouldn't be prepared for her so you wouldn't have enough food and so-"

His quick, incessant jabbering was finally cut off by his need to breath. He had been talking so fast that his mother was only able to catch every other word he said. She massaged her skull, trying to make sense of what she had just been told, but only spent a few moment's on the task before giving up on it. "Whatever it is, Jacob," she said, "just get it inside and get it cleaned up before dinner. And stop dragging mud through the house."

Jacob let out a whoop of happiness and ran back out of the house to get the girl that he had been talking about, and his mother turned back to the dinner she had been preparing with a sigh. That boy was going to be the death of her.

When she finished cooking, she made her way up to the bathroom, anticipating having to clean Jacob and get him dressed before dinner. He was only five, and was still struggling with fully understanding things and doing much other than playing and eating. She nearly screamed when she opened the door to the bathroom to find two children naked in the bathtub, attempting to scrub the mud off of one another, and one was a girl she had never seen before.

The girl looked at her, confused, a look of blank curiosity on her face. Her eyes were a pale magenta, so pale in fact that they nearly blended in with the whites of her eyes, and her hair was shoulder length and dark purple.

"Jacob!" his mother shrieked. She hardly noticed the way the girl flinched and scrunched up at the loud noise. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Who is this girl, and why is she naked with you?"

"Mom," Jacob whined. "I told you! I found her and she doesn't know much! And you told me to take what I found and clean me and it up, so that's what I'm doing!"

"Jacob, that is not what I meant and you-"

She was cut off as the girl screamed in pain at all of the noise, her hands pressed tightly against her ears. She was so small, but Jacob's mom felt like the scream itself had reached out to punch her in the gut. She crumpled to the ground, hands holding onto her stomach as the air rushed from her lungs. Jacob was knocked out of the bathtub by it, spinning into the wall where he was pinned.

The screaming stopped as abruptly as it had started. It took a while for Jacob's mom to compose herself enough to be able to sit up. And when she did, she found the girl still in the tub, though half the water had spilled to the floor, and passed out, her energy having been used up by whatever demon spell she had just cast.