This is it. He's going to die, and I'll be free.
At the last second, he moved, and I was suddenly pinned up against the wall, the silver dagger now in his hand. He pressed the blade to my throat, a sadistic grin creeping across his face.
"Oh, Reese...
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After Kenny's death, nobody was allowed to patrol without an adult.
Cedric, who was, of course, legally an adult, pleaded with Mom to allow him to go out on his own to hunt the vampires - he was revenge-driven, I think, by the loss of his friend. I didn't blame him. Two years after Dad's death, I still dreamt obsessively of stabbing Cedric's dagger into Elijah's heart. I wanted him dead. I wanted it more than anything.
But, of course, I wasn't allowed out on my own any more than Cedric was. The leaders of our little safehouse - that is, the middle-aged adults - grouped anybody younger than twenty-five with the children. At seventeen, I was technically still an actual child, but Cedric, twenty, begged on nearly a nightly basis to go out on a solo hunting mission. At one point, I even offered to go with him, but of course, that only made them more certain that it was too dangerous for any of us to go out there.
In the year since our patrol had been ambushed by vampires, since Kenny died, I grew more and more restless. I was only allowed to go out on patrols on the nights where things seldom happened - the days leading up to the full moon, where the werewolves plotted out where they'd go to search for their mates, where the vampires had no opportunity to create new vampires, where the magic-wielders were weaker without their beloved half-moon. My patrol nights were almost as boring as being holed up in the safehouse.
I dreaded patrol duty even more as summer shifted into autumn. The air grew colder, both inside the safehouse and outside. The insulation in there was a joke.
Burrowing deeper into the thick blanket draped over my shoulders, I let out a long, frustrated sigh. Anya, sitting against the wall on my left, frowned over the book she was reading. It was one of mine - one of the few things Mom had managed to take from the apartment when she fled with Thomas during the Takeover. It was my copy of Twilight - one of my favorite books back when I thought supernatural beings were little more than a fictional story.
"What is this?" Anya said, jabbing a finger into the book. "How does she not realize that he is a vampire?"
"In my experience, humans are often blind to the truth," I muttered, especially bad-tempered that evening. "Especially if the truth seems nearly impossible."
"Yes," Anya agreed. "But look." She skimmed over a few pages. "Here, Bella learns the truth, and she does not even seem to care." She glanced up at me through bloodshot eyes. None of us had slept well in... well, in years. "How long did it take you to believe the truth? Not this quickly, surely."
"My dad was murdered in front of me by a man who turned into a wolf," I said nonchalantly, all but examining my nails as I spoke. "So, I think my eyes were opened fairly quickly."
Anya swiftly glanced at me, her expression oozing with apology. "I am sorry, Reese. I did not mean - "
"It's all right." I spoke quietly, wanting to burry my head into the blanket and scream until the images flashing across my mind disappeared for good. I'd never been able to remember that day with certain clarity - just a lot of blood, a wolf, a corpse, and a man.
