Lydia Caatt

Chapter  4 “Overbearing, pigheaded, egotistical…..”     “Heard that.”   ”……son of a monkey’s butt.” Claire complained as she stomped up the stairs.  How could they be so unnaturally stubborn?  Her anger built with every step.    “Heard that, too!”    “ And another thing, STOP ordering me around, I am not a child anymore! ”  She yelled back down the stairs.  “ You’re both lucky I am not eighteen or I would move out.  TONIGHT!”   “You’re right, Sweetheart, we’ll think about it, OK?”  Keith yelled back up at her.  She almost smiled as she stormed into her bedroom.  At least he could think practically and reasonably sometimes.   “Yeah, thought about it and the answer is still NO!”  Mark yelled.  She slammed her bedroom door and glared at it with the ferocity of a she-wolf.  Leave it to Mark to cast a shadow on any hope Keith might offer.  She heard a shuffling downstairs.  Fighting was how all major--and most minor--decisions were made in their household.  If Keith won the

Chapter 5 “One of these days they will be forced to let me go!”  Claire mumbled as she stared at the small photo on her night stand.  She understood they wanted to protect her and that they were so overbearingly protective because their parents had died when she was a baby, but that was beside the point. No, that was exactly the point.   She had asked her brothers what had happened the day their parents died many times, but both would immediately become somber and refuse to tell her, stating she was too young to know the heartbreaking details.  Instead they had made up childish fairy tales.  In them her father was always a great hero fighting against a villain worse than any book could describe.  Her mother, innocent and pure, a princess of such grace and beauty the villain would have taken her as his own, had her husband not protected her so fervently.     In every tale they painted a marvelous picture of her parents fighting against ‘The Shadow Lord’ and saving the lives of