To Be...

Chapter 20

No one followed. They all knew. They had destroyed my family. They were monsters. They faked kindness, and I returned it unknowingly. They didn't deserve it. Why did they drag me into this to begin with?

Aaron, my Aaron. My Emily! My parents! They took them both.

My everything. My family. No monsters could replace them.

When Emily died, when mom died, I knew to expect something bizarre. I knew, as soon as he informed me that he was a vampire, what happened. But his dad was dead. He lost someone, too. There was a body to view, a dead body. A person for a person.

Who killed who? When a mother dies, you stay strong, but when a father dies there will be Hell to pay.

What I wanted didn't make sense, anymore. I had just cried out all of my tears for a monster, for a murderer.

Aaron deserved to exist.

I stopped in front of the church, and stared at the damp iron doors. I lost myself in hateful thoughts.

God did this to me. 'The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.' That was crap. Man takes things away. Beasts take things away. God destroys perfectly upright people.

I slammed my fist against the iron, and darted away. I didn't know where to go, I didn't to want to go home. Not my home, their home. Their lair. Their coven.

My legs couldn't take me far. I couldn't run far enough away. My stomach cramped and I tumbled over into the gutter. Polluted, reeking rain water greeted me with a repulsive embrace, cleansing part of me from the clay, or making it bond. It smelt like rotten eggs. Sulfur water, rain, and gasoline. If only I had a match. A lighter. Two combustible rocks.

Light myself on fire and burn perpetually. In Hell, where I belong. For homicide, for loving a wicked monster, for falling for their lies. I deserved Hell. They deserved worse than Hell.

What's worse than Hell?

Being found out?

No one would believe me. And even if someone by some miraculous occurrence did believe, they could enamor them into forgetting it. I didn't want them to exist. If they didn't exist then things could be ordinary, life would be average, I could live a wholesome life, and my parents could be alive to supervise it.

It wasn't destiny to meet them. It wasn't fate to live with my father's killer. He never cared for me.

'Good blood.'

He only sought after my blood, from the very beginning. He treated his food with dignity. The beast having dinner with the prey, complimenting the prey, getting close to the prey, and then killing the quarry without a second thought. Without a single lament, other than that there wasn't extra.

Aaron's blood was contained inside of me. Blood that he didn't know existed any longer. So he hunted me down, deceived me. And I was fooled.

But that wasn't the most horrible part.

Aaron died before me, again.

... and again.

... and again.

I had always had nightmares with his wreck within it. I never paid as much consideration to it as I did now. To the other driver's face. Before I had just disregarded it; believing it to be fervent and vengeful. Aaron's killer could not be good.

Now, as I rewound it in my mind, I saw the familiar composed countenance. In my peripheral vision was a calm, cool, collected, slender face...

Stunning in concentration. It wasn't the face of the Hitler I had anticipated for six years. It was a face I loved, adored, slaughtering the father that I treasured.