#1st Place Jared Leto & Mars Fanfiction Contest-- Full-Length Piece
When an accident at a concert gravely injures Jared, he and Shannon are plunged into a dangerous supernatural world. Desperate to protect his brother, Shannon finds himself hunted b...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As Masha pulled into the warehouse parking lot she glanced at the clock on the dash again. Over forty-five minutes late. She hated to leave Davrosh and the others waiting like this but the sight of Shannon on the ground, desperate and helpless, had nearly broken her. As ashamed as she was to have caved in to sentiment and interfered where she knew she shouldn't, she was even more ashamed of the intense internal debate it had taken her before doing so. She was becoming hardened, and though she probably should have spent some time examining why, she had to set aside her existential crisis for the time being. The hard truth was she didn't have time for any of it right now, Shannon's grief or her own remorse. She pushed her feelings away and got out of the car.
The dark silence of the warehouse hadn't set off any alarm bells on its own, and Masha had been too lost in her own head to think about properly checking the area. But the second the car door closed Masha knew something was very wrong. The building wasn't the only still thing; the breezeless night held an unnatural emptiness. Every living thing in the building's radius had fled, as far as Masha could tell. The building itself felt like a hole in the world, as if it did not exist but was merely a painting, an illusion of some sort. Her friends should have been waiting for her inside but she couldn't feel anything coming from the structure. She quieted herself and reached out with her senses, she should have at least been able to feel Davrosh regardless of where he was, but there was nothing, just a menacing hush where things should be. She knew she should probably leave, this was the way stupid humans in horror films died, but there was no telling if Davrosh and the others were inside, if they were in trouble, or if they needed her help. She braced herself and headed towards the entrance.
Shannon opened the duffel to find a dozen or so chilled bags of whole blood. Most of the labels were marked with large "O"s but two had "A"s on them. He briefly wondered if they tasted differently before fishing out an "O" and handing it to Jared, who sat on the edge of the bed staring at the dark hotel carpeting. He hadn't said a word, not in the ambulance, or while Shannon was trying to convince the doctors he was just stunned and needed to go back to the hotel to rest, or in the car on the drive back. He just kept staring, his blue eyes almost unblinking. It was scaring the hell out of Shannon. What if Masha had intervened too late? What if there wasn't enough of Jared to come back?
"You need to drink that," he said to Jared, trying to sound as firm and sure of himself as possible under the circumstances. "She said you need to drink most of these. You'd better get started." Jared shifted his gaze to the cool pouch but made no move to open or consume it. Shannon rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. He felt like he had aged ten years in the last hour. "Jay, please..."
He knelt in front of Jared, taking his younger brother's hands while he tried not to let his voice shake. "I called Mom. I told her you were okay, that you'd just been stunned by the fall." Jared finally looked at Shannon for the first time since arriving at the hotel, but his face was flat and unreadable. Shannon did not find it reassuring. "Don't make me have lied to her." Shannon pleaded.
