The Rose On His Grave

Note: Sorry about the bad format, thanks for letting me know :)  I miss the old days of uploading on here >.>

 

The next night, Seth awoke snuggled beneath the covers, cheek pressed against the mattress. It took a few moments to remember what had taken place the previous night before dawn had come.

With a blush he slowly sat up, the sheets spilling down into his lap in a thousand folds as he looked about the room. He found Skulli pulling on his big black boots, face looking anxious. “Good evening” Seth murmured, his blush deepening when Skulli looked up at him, gaze running down his slender bare chest. “Good evening my sweetheart” Skulli replied softly, walking over to give him a lingering kiss.

“I need to get going, the pack will start getting worried because I haven’t been back home since last night, I’ll text you as soon as I can” Skulli slipped on his jacket and ruffled Seth’s silky black hair before heading towards the door. He threw one last sexy smirk over his shoulder as he left, leaving Seth grinning happily. He stretched, feeling deliciously sore from the thorough love-making, and then stood up to go and clean up. The little shower stall was already wet, no doubt Skulli had scrubbed himself as much as possible so the smell of sex and vampire would be almost gone.

Seth stepped inside and slid the door shut, turning the taps so the water was boiling hot, and began to soap up. Five minutes later he climbed out and dried himself off with a big fluffy towel provided by the hotel, and rubbed it through his rapidly drying hair. With a dreamy sigh, he skipped into the bedroom to get dressed, humming a little tune as he did so. Despite all his efforts, he couldn’t stop thinking about the Werewolf, and couldn’t wait to see him again as soon as possible.

Clean and dressed, Seth hurried out and handed back the key at the desk, ignoring the receptionist’s stare after seeing his gold eyes, and strolled off through the streets towards his home.

Zack was waiting in the living room, with his twin sister Scarlett curled up beside him with her head buried in a book, as usual. “I kept guard all night, but don’t worry, I closed off my hearing as soon as I realized what you two were getting up to” Zack said immediately with a little smirk. Seth blushed and scowled at him, but said nothing, knowing his brother would just tease him even more if he did. Instead, he kicked off his shoes and hurried up to his bedroom, running over to his desk to write in his diary.

*

A couple of weeks went by with very few meetings in different hotels, and it was on one of these nights, after making love for a few hours, the two of them lay on their sides facing each other, Seth pressed up close to Skulli, wrapped securely in his arms. They exchanged soft tired kisses, hands occasionally stroking the other’s face or hair.

“This feels so nice” Seth murmured between the sweet kisses, making Skulli smirk and give him a little squeeze, “It does, I could do this forever. I don’t wanna let you go”. For a moment they fell into a comfortable silence and then Seth ran his fingertips down Skulli’s nose and down to his lips to stop the kissing. “Why do we have to worry about what the others will say? If we want to be together we should be. All it takes is breaking away from them, and we could get our own place and start a new life” he suggested, a little nervous about Skulli’s reaction but confident in their feelings for one another. Skulli stayed silent for a minute, mulling things over, and eventually replied “I can’t live with you Seth, this is the way it has to be. I’m loyal to my pack, they rely on me as Alpha. More than that, they’re my friends…I can’t just up and leave them. Besides, even if I did, they’d find us and kill us. Werewolves never forget or forgive a betrayal from one of their own”.

Seth pulled out of his lover’s arms, sitting up and looking down at him with big sad eyes. “Please Skulli, we could try. It can’t stay like this forever, we can’t keep secretly meeting up a few times a week. I want more than that, I want to be with you all the time and not worry about risking my life. If we move far away, things will be better”. Skulli sighed and sat up as well, reaching over to brush stray locks of black hair out of Seth’s gold shimmering eyes. “I’m sorry Seth, I can’t do that. It’s this way or not at all”.

“Then I guess it will have to be not at all” Seth snapped and got up, pulling on his clothes as fast as he could as tears blurred his vision. Skulli got up as well, dragging on his trousers and blocking the door. “I’m willing to leave my home and family for you. I’ve never strayed too far from them, I love them, but I’ll leave them behind for you. Why can’t you do the same for me?” Seth said, with such a sad broken voice that it made Skulli’s heart ache painfully in his broad chest. The little Vampire turned and was out the window before Skulli could run over to block his path like he had planned to do. “Seth come back!” he shouted, but the Vampire was long gone as he peered out the window into the darkness. He looked down when something shimmered in the corner of his eye and found a little red droplet on the window sill. A blood tear was all Seth had left behind.

Seth stopped running when he reached his area, realizing he was near a pub where drunks were all standing outside smoking and laughing. He pulled the hood up on his coat and kept his head bowed so people wouldn’t spot the red stains on his pale cheeks, and he stuck to the shadows as much as he could until he reached his house.

Zack was waiting in the hallway, the family photo album clutched in his right hand. “What happened?” he asked as Seth let himself in, but he ignored his older brother and rushed upstairs, not bothering to get undressed as he threw himself onto the bed to sob into his pillow, hood slipping off his head. Zack sighed and followed him up, walking in without knocking and sitting on the edge of the mattress, patting his little brother’s back. After a few minutes of continuous sobbing, Seth finally started to calm down. “All I wanted was to be with him, without having to worry about that stupid pack…why can’t things be simple?” he hiccupped, frowning down at his blood-stained pillow. Zack had no answer, he just leaned down and kissed the back of Seth’s silky-haired head before getting up and walking out, a dangerous gleam in his silver eyes.

Seth scowled when his mobile began to ring, but he made no move to answer it. He did not look when it beeped with a new text message every few minutes, and when it rang for the fifth time he grabbed it out of his coat pocket and hurled it across the room so it smacked into the wall and fell to the floor.

*

As Seth continued to cry in his bedroom, Zack made his way out of the house and to the local woods, standing beneath the cover of the trees in the moonlight, staring at the fallen leaves and broken twigs as his ears picked up the sounds of the pack closing in. He knew they’d be here, knew they had hoped he’d pass through the woods to hunt sooner or later. Zack smirked when the first large beast appeared, brown fur bristling, thick lips curling back in a snarl to display long sharp fangs ready to tear him apart. He was disappointed to find there was only two of them, the other one had been there not too long ago but was now gone. His strong musky wolf scent still lingered in the air. No doubt he was off to find their Alpha. The blonde one was the clever one out of the three after all, he would figure things out much quicker than the two stupid mutts now circling Zack with hungry eyes that glowed intensely. 

Zack eyed them both with mild disgust, and then darted towards Mike, but dodged out of the way of his swiping paw, flipping over Thom who had attempted to pounce him from behind and landed on Thom’s back, grabbing him by the snout and hooking his arm around his furry neck, crushing his windpipe so he wheezed and swayed on the spot. Mike growled and knocked Zack aside, fangs ripping into the Vampire’s shoulder so he hissed in pain. They tumbled across the leaf-strewn ground, fighting for the upper-hand, until Zack finally managed to pull away and grab Mike by a fistful of twisted skin and soft fur, using all his supernatural strength to throw him against a thick tree trunk. While the Werewolf was dazed, Zack took the opportunity to run back over to Thom and stomp his face into the floor, bone crunching and snapping, blood gushing under Zack’s big black boot until there was nothing but a mushy pulp splattered there.

Mike made a noise of despair and rage, but his movements were stopped when he caught the scent of a human. He took one last look at his dead friend and then ran away to where they’d hidden their clothes to change back to human form and dress, before hurrying back home to tell the only ones remaining in his pack.

The Vampire’s smirk faded when the other ran away, and then he realised why he had. Zack turned to see a scruffy little human man standing near to them, glazed drunken eyes staring straight at him as his slow mind tried to process what had just happened. Zack sighed and wiped his boot on the dead Werewolf’s fur before walking over to the homeless man who was slowly sobering up in his fear and disbelief. “You really shouldn’t wander through the woods at night. You never know what lurks in the shadows” the Vampire said with a soft, quiet tone. He reached out and snapped the man’s neck before he could even think of a reply.

His father would not have approved of how he dealt with things, but Zack could care less when his father wasn’t even around to know about it. Sure, he could have erased the man’s memory, but where was the fun in that? They weren’t allowed to kill when they fed, so he hadn’t fed on him, so technically he’d done nothing wrong. At least, that’s how he saw it.

With a frustrated growl, Zack heaved the man’s body over his shoulder and ran with all his supernatural speed towards the nearest canal. He found some heavy stones and stuffed them into the man’s dirty raincoat and ripped trouser pockets, and then dumped him into the deep dark water of the canal. He then raced back to where the bloody corpse still lay, only now it had changed back into human form. “Well that makes things much easier” Zack muttered, and then thought whether to dump the corpse in the canal. He didn’t have anything to set the thing on fire and he could be bothered to go searching. He decided he couldn’t dump the body in the canal, in case it emerged and was discovered by humans. A dead human body was one thing, but a freak of nature like a Werewolf? He could imagine the poor human doing the autopsy and forensic tests.

He looked at the ground, nudged the dirt with the toe of his boot, and then sighed. Kneeling down, he began to dig, arms going too fast for the human eye to see, but even with his speed it took some time to dig so deep that the body would not be discovered for a very long time, or not all perhaps. When finished, he dumped the body, which fell and landed with a loud crunching thump at the bottom, and then gathered up all the leaves and twigs covered in blood and gore, putting that in the hole as well.

Zack then filled it back in and stomped on the uneven ground, kicking more leave over to cover it for good measure, and then strolled happily back to his house after circling a few times, to go and sleep the day away, after stripping off his gore-stained clothes and having a nice cleansing shower of course.

*

Meanwhile, just a few towns away, mind closed off from his children, Ray was finally buried in Rikki’s body. It had taken a while to win his affections, but after some persistence and patience, Ray had won him over and now he thrust into his slender body with slow, sure strokes, wanting to make the moment last as long as he could.