So Unsound

No one really believes in vampires and neither did I, until my cousins were taken. One morning my mother got a phone call it was grandma telling her that my auntie, her sister had died. ...
The police report read some maniac had broken into her house and killed her. Yeah some maniac had been in the house, but the police were having a hard time figuring out how he ‘broke’ in.
There wasn’t a broken lock on any of the doors and how about answering the question of where were her two missing children? Where were Tarelle and Addais*? No one knew it was all a mystery. The police eventually wrapped it up as a cold case since they had no leads, no prints. I mean this kind of stuff never happens in the quiet little town of Len Kansas! Brutal murder doesn’t happen here in the place where the elder multi millionaires come to retire. They were baffled so they wrote it off.
My family didn’t get any answers.
My mother was devastated and I….
I was just angry.

Pissed off with the system. Just cause they were baffled didn’t give them the right to just drop the case. To write it off as unsolvable!
So I took it over.
At the time I was only eighteen and just graduated high school. Tarelle and Addais were only a year younger than me they would have been seniors. That was over two years ago. For two years I’ve been looking for my cousins.
And the one who tore the heart right out of my aunt’s chest and left it withered on the floor.

xXx

The first thing he noticed was that he couldn’t feel his toes.
His fingers twitched and he struggled to open his heavy lidded eyes. The deep breath he took was cold and froze the back of his throat and chilled his lungs, but he didn’t shiver.
Addais sat up on numb hands he was in a dark room with walls made out of big bricks that looked metallic and grey in the dark. He unconsciously ran his hands against his arms.
Why was he so cold?
His heart ached too.
A sharp cough came from another corner he slowly turned his stiff neck and looked at the grey shape of his sister struggle into a sitting position just like he’d just done. She coughed again and he could see something black and thick land on the stone floor, no it wasn’t black but red.

Blood.

Suddenly a flash of memory washed over him of sweet nurturing warmth washing down his throat reminding him of things when he was a babe. His mother snuggling him close to her chest so he could feed. It was only appropriate for him to think of that. After all it was his mother who was feeding him again. Though instead of milk it was her very essence.
Her life’s blood.
The image of his mother looking up at him from the carpet of their little duplex her bloodied arm reaching out to him snapped him back to the present.

“Please tell me that really didn’t happen.” His sister croaked the very thing he had been thinking. He looked at her, she was a mess. Tarelle his older twin sister always strong in body and will looked utterly defeated. She was still in her pajamas, a blue pair of loose work out pants and a black band tee shirt. Her short dark hair was all over her head in an unruly tangle that was only worse because of its natural curl. Even her naturally dark skin looked pale and ashen. He doubted he looked much better.

“I’ll kill him!” She suddenly growled hitting her closed fist onto the stone floor in frustration.

Him.

That crazy alluring man they had met in the park a few months past then all of a suddenly the man had started following them around.
The man followed them home, to school even to the damn grocery store! And what was worse, it seemed only the two of them could see him or feel his presence. Their mother never seemed to notice the tall red head trailing behind them. She never paid him any attention when their van passed him standing on the sidewalks at night, on the driver’s side no less! His eerie eyes looking straight through the tinted windows right at the twins sitting in the back. It was completely maddening the twins thought they were going crazy but he had to be real if the both of them could see him. Right?

“I can feel him.” Addais whispered clutching at his chest. Tarelle’s eyes snapped to him.

“Where?” She breathed.

“I don’t know but close.” The heat he felt in his heart didn’t ease up or turn into tense agony so that had to mean he was near.
Not too long ago they had figured out that Addais was connected to their strange fire haired stalker. Addais had never felt the discomfort Tarelle did whenever he came around he felt oddly content and safe, like the stranger was their protector. A couple months ago though he had awoken in the middle of the night with an ungodly pain in his chest. He’d clutched at his chest his heart beating erratically and painfully, with every harsh thump he had to struggle to breathe. That evening when they were walking home from school the sun setting in the background, they hadn’t seen him in the usual spot sitting at the local bus stop waiting for them. The throbbing pain in Addais chest never relented.

Until a few hours ago.
When Addais saw their fiery stranger walking up the steps of their split level duplex with their mother trapped behind one of his arms her face turning blue from lack of oxygen. He hadn’t felt fear for his mother’s safety but relief.
When he met the glowing blue eyes of the stranger the pain in his chest had immediately relented and turned into soothing warmth. He’d even smiled.
The stranger had smiled back.
Then….then he’d thrown his head back and opened his mouth revealing viciously elongated canines and pierced the side of their mother’s neck. Pulled back and let blood spray all over their white walls…

“I hear footsteps!” Tarelle suddenly whispered.
Addais sat up straighter the heat in his chest growing warmer and warmer until he felt soothed and un afraid. Why was he so worked up about his mother’s death? After all it was only fitting that her children end her life so. From now on she would always be with them, her blood swimming through their veins and keeping them alive.

“Addais we gotta hide!” Tarelle seethed her eyes flashing in a panic as she looked around the sparsely furnished room. Now that Addais thought about it the room they were in looked like a storage room in an old, make that very old, house. There were only a few boxes here and there that weren’t tall enough for them to hide behind and a couch with a sheet thrown over it.
The footsteps got closer, hard leather heels clicking against stone.
Tarelle moved closer to Addais hiding partially behind him and grabbing hold of the hand that wasn’t still on his heart. It had always been that way, even though Tarelle was the oldest by six minutes she was still a girl and he a guy. She had always sought comfort by her brother.
The footsteps stopped and the handle of the wooden door to their stone prison jingled and clanked until the old door opened the bottom scrapping against the floor.

The tip of a shiny black leather boot crossed the threshold the intruder was holding a torch a bonafide big thick piece of wood with fire blazing on top of it torch. The blaze made the two of them squint and crawl back. The orangey flames licked and hissed around the wet cloth drenched with lighter fluid that was wrapped around the thick piece of wood.
Soon Addais and Tarelle’s eyes adjusted to the harsh light and met crystalline eyes sparkling with amusement and mischief set in a pale exotically angular face framed in long curling wine red hair.
Him.
“Ah…my children you have awakened.”


AN: Okies this is the first chapter of So Unsound a story that’s been swimming in my head for years now. Please tell me what you think. So until then see you in the next chapter.