Sunder (12 page)

Briton gave me a sad look. “What are you doing here?”

I shook my head. “I had to see if it was all true.”

The other man laughed, boldly. “You will see soon enough, child. You don't even have two weeks, I would imagine.”

I stepped back from them. “What do you mean?” My shaking started up again.

“The eyes, they are the first to change. They are the windows to your soul, after all.”

I dropped to my knees in the dirt, words spinning around in my head. “What does that mean? That's doesn’t answer anything.” My anger was bubbling just below the surface. “WHAT AM I BECOMING?”

The other man stopped smiling. “You will be like us, you are born like us. You will change around your eighteenth birthday.”

I gulped. “That's the second week of November.”

He nodded.

Liz walked to me, wrapping herself around me, but I barely felt her. I was lost inside of the words and my body and the glowing eyes. What was happening to me? Why was it happening?

Briton held a hand out to Liz and spoke in a calm voice I didn't recognize from him. “Come to me, Liz. Come and take my hand.”

She let me go, walking to him as if she were in the zombie trance again. I didn't care what they did. I was stuck, paralyzed by the things the man had said. My eyes were glowing and I was changing. I had heard them talking from two blocks away. I ran in heeled boots like it was nothing. I was craving meat lately too. I was going to become a vampire. I knew it. Oh God, my mother was probably looking down on me from the heavens, disappointed in the curse I was. I was a monster?

But how?

How did a girl with normal parents become a vampire?

Oh God. Oh God. I let my face fall into my hands. My parents weren’t my parents. It was the only way.

Oh God, I was a monster and an orphan. Oh God.

What could I do to stop it?

Liz screamed.

My head shot up.

Her hand was bleeding over the open caskets, blood dripping like she had a terrible cut.

The man with the flashlight was screaming and pounding on the wall of the cave. Apparently, he couldn’t get to us. He was screaming and motioning at me.

Everything fuzzed out. Briton’s eyes were glowing red and his fangs were dripping with blood.
He looked at me
,
we froze for a moment
. When I saw what he was, I screamed. It rang off of the walls of the cave. It made him wince, like I had hurt him. I screamed again. It forced Liz out of the trance she was in. She grabbed my hand, dragging me from the cave. We raced past the man with the flashlight, through the tunnels, tripping and screaming. When we broke out into the forest, we were both still running and screaming. Her hand gripped to mine, slipping in its grip from the blood that coated it.

We cleared the field fast, like track-star fast. She didn't wheeze and I didn't stop. When we got back into town, we hid amongst two buildings, leaning our butts and bent over gripping our knees. I was gasping for air and she had started the whole wheezing thing. Tears rolled down both our cheeks as incoherent words slipped from our trembling lips.

Nothing made sense. The whole world had fallen apart.

I shook my head after a minute, fully recovered from the run but scared I might never recover from the rest. “Why did you let him bite you?”

She started to cry harder. “I don't know. I don't know. He bit me. Now I’ll become like him. That’s how it happens in the movies.”

I wrapped my arms around her and prayed that she wasn't on the same track as I was, sort of. The selfish part of me was grateful to not be alone, but the mature part of me was heartbroken for her. She was shaking harder than I had been.

We were doomed.

Everyone from our class was partying somewhere and we were coated in blood and tears, hiding in an alleyway waiting for some sort of death to take us.

Briton

She screamed so loud, and her face looked frightened in a way that scared him. He wanted to soothe her but the beast was out. There was no calming it when he was in such a rage. Their eyes locked when she screamed again, breaking his hope of love forever. He looked past her, to where each of their gray faces started to take shape again, amongst the screaming of the girls and Jamie.

Suddenly, the girls were gone, and he was left with only Jamie screaming at him. He ignored him and looked down on his family. He had never been more excited in all his life, apart from the moment he saw Liv. Not that it would matter now. She was destined to be something he could never be with.

His kind always had red
eyes,
only wolves got to keep their natural color.

Hers were bright blue.

He pushed her face away from his mind and smiled down upon his reviving family members, apart from one. His brother Gunnar was not there. No doubt the witches had refused to save him. He had been the start of the trouble in the haven.

He had been the one who had shed innocent blood with no remorse, drawing the eyes of the hunters there.
Unexplained deaths, tragic losses, strange behavior.
And someone had betrayed the witches’ secret to the hunters. Someone had made it possible for
them
to come into town. Gunnar had no doubt taken the blame for that too, bargaining for his life and selling out the haven, in return for sanctuary. Briton didn't really know the story. It had been confusing and hushed up. He clenched his jaw at the thought of it.

It didn't matter now. His family was waking, thanks to the blood of the Whitburn witch. She might not have had power yet, but she could enter the caves and free his family with her blood.

“YOU FOOL! YOU WILL GET US ALL KILLED!”

Seeing the rage upon Jamie’s face Briton scoffed bitterly. “What did you think you brought me here for? Of course I would wake them!”

“I DIDN’T KNOW THE WITCH WAS HERE! I BROUGHT YOU TO LOOK! THEY ARE NOT USED TO THE NEW WORLD! THEY WILL EXPOSE US ALL!”

Briton shook his head. “No, they will learn to fit in like we all have. They will adapt. The old witch spared them because father is the oldest of us. She knew he held importance.”

Jamie’s face twitched slightly. “I asked Helena; your father held her children captive and forced the spell. He did it against her will when he heard the hunters were coming.”

“Then how did he save your family from the hunters if he was here?”

“It was all a ploy. When they felt the hunters coming, your family helped move all the wolves to inside of the guarded area where Helena’s sister Grace was keeping everyone safe with glamour. Only then did Helena cast her glamour, making it look like your family had fled for the farmhouse, leading the hunters there to the place outside of the guards. But only she went inside. Only the old witch burned to death in that fire. She sacrificed herself for her children and the town. Our debt has always been to the Whitburns, not you. You fool. Your parents fled for the caves with your brothers. It was a trap. She told them to get into the coffins and hide
there,
they were spelled to keep them hidden. But really it was the only magic the old witch had against them. She sealed them in there for the safety of everyone else.”

He didn't believe it. His father had lived thousands of lives without ever being barbaric in his ways or noticed by the hunters. He had always taken what he needed but never too much, and he had never killed without thought. He wasn’t a risk to the townspeople then, and he wouldn't be now. “My father has never been a danger to humans.”

Jamie looked disgusted as he spit his
words,
“You were always the only one of your family members who didn’t live as a vampire. Why do you think Miles hid you? He did it because he knew you were salvageable. It has been quiet here this last hundred and sixty years—no hunters. Do you think it’s a coincidence?” He didn't wait for Briton to answer. He turned and walked from the cave, leaving Briton standing in the dark, amongst his waking family.

They groaned and writhed, making sounds that forced a grimace across his face. Had he made a mistake? He didn’t know the answer, but he was frightened to see if his love for them had blinded him.

“Nicolai?” a dark whisper crept through the cave. “Nicolai?”

He shuddered at the disparity in it.

“Yes, Father. It is I.”

The dark came alive with shadows as they crept from their coffins in a fashion suiting a monster.

“Brother!”

“Bright one!”

“Nicolai!”

The voices that he had convinced himself he would never hear again, filled the dark. Hands reached out, gripping to him. Arms wrapped around him, embracing him—love so desperate and fierce.

His mother cried into his nape, his father shook with a strange laugh, and his brothers joked and slapped each other.

But he remained still with the words of Jamie Michaels ringing in his ears and the face of the ever-beautiful Liv haunting his eyes.

“Nicolai, what year is it? How long have we slumbered?”

He glanced at his father. “It’s 2013. You have been gone nearly one hundred and seventy years.”

They all fell silent. None of them had missed a year in
their
one thousand, eight hundred years, and now each was missing almost one hundred and sixty years.

“The world you will see is not the one you left. Let me show you.” He gripped each member of his family, doing the thing only born vampires could do. He flashed images and knowledge to each person, apart from his mother. He kissed her leathery cheek and
whispered,
“I will explain it all to you at home.”

He looked around the dark, barely able to make out their faces. “Now let’s go home. You start making your way from the cave, and I will find some animals for you to eat. I will meet you at the entrance.”

They were weakened from their hunger but each made a sound when he said animals.

He sighed. “We do not survive by human blood, but we treat ourselves to it without killing the person we take it from. This new world is filled with technologies and surveillance and the population is large beyond what you can imagine. I eat animals if I am desperate, otherwise I feed from humans without killing them. That is the reality of this world. It is no longer our playground.”

His father grabbed his shirt roughly. “You expect us to live like we are the lesser?”

“No Father, I expect you to live as though you are exactly like the other men in the town. I expect you will live like a regular man would. I expect no one will ever know what you are. What we are lives silently in the shadows in this world. We are the last of our kind.”

He grabbed his father’s shirt back, shaking slightly. “There are no more born or cursed vampires in the world!”

The group of them fell silent. He nodded. “None that I have found. The hunters have killed many. I will find you food. Make your way to the forest.” He got up and hiked down the tunnel. When he walked out of the cave and stood again under the majestic moon, tears filled his eyes. He closed them and nodded. “Thank you. I know they are not perfect, but they are all I have.”

And there it was. The thing that separated him from most vampires: he believed in something beyond them as the gods of the world. It was what drove him to be a better vampire than most.