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feverinfeveroutfic · 2 years

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eerie inhabitants | chapter seven

*blood trigger warning*

I couldn’t stop thinking about what Rob’s grandmother had told me back there. I wanted to believe that it was all quackery and she only said that to me to remove me from the room, but I had absolutely no proof of that, however. I didn’t want to think about it, either: the thought of someone in my family dying to something that they had absolutely no control over whatsoever. She seemed to be deadly serious about it, however: I kept my mind on it the whole entire time I was in there in the bedroom with Abby, Mark, and Rob, and those two little guitars.

I sank down next to Rob on the floor before the side of his bed, and he in turn flashed a mischievous glimpse over at me.

That smooth head of black hair dangled down to his shoulders in the finest fashion I had ever seen: in the amber light of the lamp before us, I made out the fine tips of coarseness closest to the fine part of his shoulders. He was adorable, I would say that much.

But my heart was with Alex, however. Part of the reason was that Alex had moved past that prepubescent mindset before he had been shot in the head. But the reason also came from the fact that I had no desire to get down with Rob, especially since he was still a young teenage boy and especially since I had my heart set on Alex, too: I couldn’t do that to him. A cold-blooded killer regardless: I simply did not have the gumption in me to betray the trust I built with him like that.

It only worsened as Mark and Abby left the room at one point, and Rob and I took our spots on the edge of the twin bed. The head of his guitar hung over my lap and I knew what he was intending right then and there, especially when he had no intent to move it, or his hand for that matter, away from my body.

“You want me to lay down on the bed, don’t you?” I teased him; it was all could do given he had no intent on backing off. He turned his attention to me and flashed me a smirk.

“I kinda want to,” he confessed to me in a low voice.

“You just want to because we’re all alone here in the bedroom,” I scoffed at him.

“I won’t deny it,” Rob continued with a little gyration of his head at me. “Just like I won’t deny your beauty.”

“Again, I have a boyfriend, you little scoundrel,” I told him off once again.

“I’m a bad boy who needs a little punishing,” he followed it up.

“He’s bloody hot, too,” I said. “And he knows what I mean when I say ‘no’, too.”

“Oh, really?”

“Really, really,” I assured him; at the same time, it seemed strange to refer to Alex as hot given his body was icy cold with the feeling of undeath that ran throughout him. Rob set his guitar in between his legs and he leaned in closer to me: at least he smelled good. A part of me imagined him with the usual smell of a teenage boy, but he carried a kiss on cinnamon and spice on the side of his neck and within the roots of his hair.

“What are you doing?” I demanded from him.

“I want you,” he blurted out, and he set his hands on either of my shoulders. I lunged back away from him.

“Rob, stop,” I scolded him, and I pushed his hands away from my shoulders and my chest. He was so grabby, and yet I pushed him back away from me.

“But I want you, though,” he begged me.

“No, you want the idea of me,” I corrected him.

“What the hell is going on here?” Abby’s voice never sounded like more of a relief to me than right at that very moment. I finally broke away from his grip and towards the foot of the bed. She stood there by the board with a cup of tea in hand, perhaps her second one for the afternoon. I peered up at her with a huff and a shake to my hands.

“What happened?” she asked me.

“Your sister’s hot,” Rob declared. I blushed at that. Though my heart was with Alex, there was something rather flattering about that remark. Though he insisted despite my telling him off, I still had to stop myself from reaching over to slap him across the face.

“She’s too old for you,” Abby told him with a straight face.

“I don’t care—she's a fox,” he insisted, and he swallowed and bowed his head so his hair blanketed over the side of his face. He peeked around his dark hair at the sight of me. A soft blush emerged in his sun-kissed brown skin. “An absolute fox.”

Abby sipped on her tea at first, and then she nodded her head at that.

“Right. Like I said, she’s too old for you, Robbie boy.”

“Hey, man, there’s a bowl of soup waiting for you in here,” Mark called through the doorway. Rob sighed through his nose and he bowed out to the hallway: I swore that he swayed his hips at both me and Abby as he ducked out of there. I fixated on that shoulder-length black hair that sailed behind his head. My face still felt as warm as ever, but I had no desire to be with him, however.

“I have no clue what that was all about,” I told her.

“It’s easy to figure out, though,” she replied. “I’ve seen plenty of boys like him before at school. I mean, really, it's just how it is. He's not out of place with one of those boys you see in class who cracks a couple of dick jokes and then just runs away with it.”

“It’s exactly just how it is,” I followed it up as my face cooled down a bit.

“His grandma is such an enigma,” Abby confessed to me with another sip of her tea.

“Yeah, I’ll say,” I told her. “Did she warn you of something?”

Abby paused for a moment with the cup up by her mouth and then she shifted her weight.

“Actually, yeah, she did,” she confessed to me. “It was weird how she just dropped it onto me, too. It was as if she had been following you and me both around this whole entire time. She never fully clarified it, either.”

“She said ‘next sundown,’ though,” I pointed out to her.

“’Next sundown,’” she echoed that. “Funny, she never told me of a specific time frame. She just told me that someone in our family is going to die soon, but she never went further than that.”

“Huh, that’s interesting. I want to know who it is that’s going to die, too—and I want to know if she meant the next day or today. I also want to know how she knows this, too, because there’s only so much that we can stomach at the moment—especially since we’re just believing in the vampires.”

“Yeah, she called them something else,” Abby recalled, and she took another sip from her tea.

“Aswang,” I said. “My guess is it’s like the Filipino equivalent of vampires. I never thought that vampires were really a thing over there, to be perfectly honest.”

“I can kind of see it,” she confessed. “I’m sure every culture all around the world has a lot of similarities to one another.”

“Every culture has a death story,” I pointed out. “I can tell you that without even looking. But I never would imagine vampires, though. I mean, thousands upon thousands of islands that make up the Philippines—surely, there are plenty of folk tales.” A spicy, warm smell wafted into the room right then. “Did you try that soup, by the way?”

“Nah, she pretty much made that for the two of them,” Abby replied with one final big drink of her tea. “Good tea.”

“I know, it’s delicious,” I said.

We stayed there in the house for the rest of the morning, and then Abby and I decided to head on back home given the truants were no longer an issue for us. I also wanted to be on the street and away from that house, given Rob kept up with the stray glimpses and the fact that he had a hard time in keeping his hands away from me. I didn’t want any more of it.

Thus, Abby and I ducked out of there and we returned back home at high noon.

We reached the block before the Iverson estate when I felt something on my shoulder. Something cold and icy.

I stopped in my tracks and I whirled around for a look at who stood behind me. Abby stopped right next to me on the sidewalk.

I recognized those blue eyes, vast and liquid like the stretch of the Pacific Ocean beyond the Bay Area; that soft milky skin as pearlescent as fresh fallen snow; those lips as full and sensual as ripe little cherries; that body as lanky and delicate as I ever imagined.

“Alex!” I declared.

“Hello, my love,” he greeted me in a low voice.

“Funny, I was just thinking about you,” Abby joined in.

“Really?” He cracked the both of us a mischievous, lopsided little smile: the fangs had disappeared back in lieu of his crooked teeth on his left side. “You know, it’s funny, I was—just going to invite the both of you to another ceremony off in the woods.”

“Oh, Alex, that’s so sweet of you, but neither she nor I can handle any more bloodshed, though,” I quipped to him in a single breath.

“May I ask what the two of you are doing for the remainder of the day?” he started again, and he pressed a hand on his hip, which in turn pushed up the hem of his shirt over his hip bone. The full shape of his hip underneath his hand and lanky fingers. His waist still remained slender and delicate, even with all of the feasting on flesh and blood: but I knew that his belly was as soft and silky as a little pillow. The sight of his body made me knit my knees together all to accentuate the shape of my hips. Even slender, he was as gorgeous as ever out in the middle of the day.

“Probably nothing,” I replied to him.

He ran his tongue over his teeth as well as his bottom lip. “Then... you wanna come along with me?” His face softened and he showed me the little cheekbones with the incoming smile. I wanted to kiss those little cheekbones, which made me think of kissing a pair of plump little apples.

I swallowed down my fear. So soft and sweet, and yet something dug away at me.

I had very little resistance, especially with him and those deep blue eyes. I couldn’t turn away from him, especially after the incident with Rob back at his grandmother’s house. I was headed for danger with my sister right by my side.

Alex guided us back to another patch of trees, right nearby Rob’s grandmother’s house. Though it was the middle of the day, a veil of darkness sank over us and I recognized that goldenrod fairy dust upon the leaves of the bushes all around us.

I also recognized Greg and Louie underneath one of the trees before us like a couple of regular boys, except I remembered that they were vampires as well. Indeed, when we came within earshot of them, they conversed like a couple of regular boys.

“Shed a little bitta blood,” Louie joked, and he nodded at both me and Abby. “Hey, you two.”

“Hey, Lou,” I greeted him as Alex lifted up a low-hanging branch for Abby and me. “How’re you doin’?”

“I have to shed some blood,” Louie replied to me.

“Shed some blood and bring another mortal over?” Greg cracked right behind him.

“It’s business as usual, after all, Greg,” Louie retorted back to him.

All I could extrapolate from that was he was about to perform a kill right there in the trees with the golden fairies at the helm.

Indeed, Alex guided us to a small clearing lined with all of those fairies courtesy of King Diamond. Louie and Greg did in fact prepare at a double-headed kill on their own part. Another mortal on their side, another man who was about to die and he had no other choice at life than to give himself to the vampires and the bloodsuckers for a bit of dignity. The way of the killer and the assassin.

But Alex kept me and Abby back away from the clearing, tucked back into the shrubs so we could be safe from the blood. A part of me wanted to return home and I even considered getting up and running out of there by myself; but Abby held onto me and Alex tugged at my shirt to keep me down on the ground.

“Stay with me,” he whispered to me. “Please... stay with me, Lilian.” I gazed into those blue eyes, as blue and vast as the Pacific Ocean, as gentle as the rain that fell all around us. He parted those Rainier cherry lips at me, ever so slightly no less, and to the point in which I wondered if he beckoned a kiss or something else. Even as a cold-blooded killer, he still carried a hearty dose of desperation.

“Stay here, Lily,” Abby joined in next to him. “Please don’t leave me here.”

I swallowed down my fears.

“I’m not going to leave you here, Abs,” I vowed to her, and I took my spot in between the two of them right then and there. Alex put his arm around me and Abby huddled up close to me. The three of us watched Greg and Louie stand opposite each other with the fairies at their backs.

I still thought about what Rob’s grandmother had told me and Abby, and I still wondered if there was in fact any iota of truth to it. I rested my hand on Alex’s shoulder and I shivered at the feel of his skin through his shirt.

“You okay?” Abby asked me.

“He’s cold,” I told her, and I turned my head back to him.

“You’re so cold,” I whispered to him.

“And you are so warm and tender,” he whispered back to me.

“Warm and tender like a piece of meat?” I teased him, to which he rolled his eyes at that.

“Nah, I'm the piece of meat,” Alex assured him with a raise of his eyebrows.

I gently caressed his chest and his shoulder: as cold and firm as stone. Frozen in time.

“If flesh had been frozen over for all eternity by the kiss of death,” I told him in a low voice.

“The kiss of death to give me a new life after it all,” he added onto it. He showed me the tip of his tongue as well as the crooked teeth on the left side of his mouth.

“After death is a new life,” I said right into those smooth little lips.

“You are so warm and tender,” he repeated, that time in the huskiest, silkiest voice I could ever possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, before us, the man stumbled into the clearing right in between Greg and Louie. He was a heavier fellow complete with a full head of puffy brown hair: for some reason, I thought of a bulldog with one of those big puffy clown wigs upon his head.

“Go gently with me,” he begged them, and he spoke with bit of a lisp. “I had a stroke about a week ago. I'm due for another one—I can’t do this anymore.”

Greg doubled back to the shrubs for something, and he took out a gilded gauntlet the size of a loaf of bread from underneath those lush leaves.

“Drink it all down,” Greg told him. The man’s shoulders heaved as he brought the vessel up to his lips. He gagged and coughed on it.

“Oh, god...” he groaned.

“What’s that?” Abby asked Alex in a near whisper.

“Wolf’s bane,” Alex replied. “Also known as monkshood. You might’ve seen them more inland—they're these big bluish-purple flowers that almost look like irises. One of the deadliest plants on planet Earth—everything about it is toxic. Everything. It's right on par with deadly nightshade in terms of poison. It makes the killing faster with bigger subjects like him. With Chuck, he was emaciated and weak and thus, all I had to do was slam my claws into the side of his head. But he says a stroke could get him at any time, and he’s a big guy, too.”

“Does it hurt a vampire, though?” I asked him; the man gagged on the concoction again.

“It makes us go to sleep for a bit but not in the slightest,” he assured me. “The poison just slides right off of our flesh more than the venom of a snake or a scorpion. It's not like the poisons used in chemotherapy which can quite literally destroy our bodies. The two of you don’t want to touch it, though. It'll kill a mortal human in about an hour.”

“This will kill him in an hour,” Abby flatly stated. The man dropped the gauntlet and fell to his hands and knees with the driest of heaves I had ever heard in my life.

That was when Greg and Louie mauled him like the couple of carnivores that they were: they sank their fangs into his flesh and he gagged on that instead.

“Nope,” Alex said right then.

Abby huddled closer to me as the two vampires ate this man alive and let him hemorrhage out on the cold earth. Louie then did the honor of transforming him into a vampire.

He still had the fine fuzzy head of hair about his head but his skin washed out to the pallor of death. He shook his head about and the shadows immediately caressed over his eyes. Though Alex ate his hearty share, it wasn’t all that often I got to bear witness to a chubby vampire before. He nudged his hair away from his eyes and he peered up to the canopy of the trees overhead. As cold as death. As alive as any live man.

“Welcome to the fold, Paul,” Greg greeted him.

“The fold of the eternity,” Paul declared.

“You know the drill now, my ladies,” Alex told me and Abby.

“First kill?” I suggested.

“First kill. The man needs his first kill, especially with night upon us.”

I was stunned by that.

“It’s already evening?” I gaped at him.

“Not quite. It's coming. But why else would he be willing to go ahead with his own bloodshed?”

“Holy shit, we gotta get home,” I told him as Rob’s grandmother’s words echoed through my mind.

“I kind of need to be home,” Abby added; nothing could deny the tremble in her voice, either.

“I’ll take you there,” Alex told us. “I’ll take you and then I’ll help out with Paul over here.”

Indeed, Alex walked both me and Abby back to the Iverson estate for the night. It felt as though a million years had elapsed since we were there. We were out all night long and then we skipped school and went right for Rob’s grandmother’s house as well as the vampires: surely, we had to give an explanation of some sort to my dad, Nana Iverson, and of course, Uncle Phil.

We reached the corner before the house and I was about to thank Alex for the walk but he had disappeared at that point. He had disappeared into the incoming twilight over our heads.

“Where’d he go?” Abby wondered aloud.

“I have no idea,” I confessed to her with a shiver and a shudder. I led her back to the Iverson estate and that was when I spotted Mark and Rob on the front step of the house together.

“What’re you guys doing here?” I asked them once we came within earshot.

“We got bored,” Mark replied, “and so I showed him this house to see if the two of you were home.”

“There’s no one home?” I sputtered out, and those two boys both shook their heads at that.

“Door’s locked,” Mark continued. “And it’s dead silent in there, too.”

Indeed, no cars parked in the driveway. We had been out over a whole entire day and no one seemed bothered to know where we were all this time.

“Where’s Uncle Phil,” Abby asked aloud. “I mean, he’s usually home with Nana if nothing else.”

“Bob’s your uncle,” Rob joked right then, and Mark burst out laughing.

But a sinking sensation emerged in the pit of my stomach right then, however. I didn’t want to think about it, but there was nothing I could do so as to stop the incoming darkness. But his grandmother told me “the next sundown”, however. Surely, there had to be an explanation for Phil’s disappearance. I had no iota of love for him, but I still had my concerns, however.

As far as I knew, he was the one to go as Rob’s grandmother had said before.

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