The Family Secret (Draft)

Prologue

“We started out always together. Born together, five minutes apart. Growing up I could tell you everything, work out my thoughts and work through  my problems. We told eachother everything, our hopes, our dreams, our fears. That’s what I thought from birth until you disappeared. Turned out there was something huge that I’d overlooked for all 21 years we had together, and I have blamed myself since that first phone call of Moms that you didn’t answer. When I went to your dorm to search for you, finding your side bare was like a slap in the face. Your roommate apologized, and handed me a note and a picture. One from the last time I’d seen you. The last time your fiance had seen you.

“Uncle Maxus damn near lost his mind when he got the news, and immediately got his people together to start searching for you. Back then, it was just Maxus, Jensen, me, and our neighbors. Mom stayed by the phone, waiting to hear from you. ‘She’ll come home, she always does.’ Her mantra, you’d left for a few days before but you’d always get a hold of us eventually. 

“My phone still hasn’t rang.”

Applause from the small audience in front of me, along with sympathetic and understanding smiles. I could read everyone’s faces like a book. Except Quentins, of course. Hard to read the face of someone when they’re a full blown skeleton. He marked off something on his clip board, nodding.

“That’s very heart felt and moving, Dante.” He replied, “Does anyone have any questions for him on this piece?”

“Is this your first piece about the incident?” My head turned to see an Insectaur girl, who had just joined our therapy group a few weeks ago. Lindsey. She was part BumbleBee, a Winged Insentaur. They had the heads of Insects and the body of Kivens, with large sets of impressive wings. She was younger than me, about 18, and tended to dress in bright colors to accentuate her buzzing personality. She was here due to the loss of her grandmother, and she was young and learning to cope with it all.

I had no more than smiled to her when the Orc woman sitting between us, Billie, whipped her head around in surprise. Her blonde braid almost nailed me as she did, her brown eyes lit up like street lamps at night. She and I were the closest in the group, we’d joined the same week, long before Quentin was even our group counselor. She’d read my whole young adult series with her niece, and when she’d recognized me she wanted to gush and ask me every question she could. But she froze up and got nervous, and that first day she was stone stiff next to me for the whole hour.

When we started talking after a few more sessions, we found out we were also in here for damn near the same reason. Her twin brother had died in a motorcycle accident not long after Elise’s status as missing was getting a huge boost on social media. My books were what kept her and her niece close after her brothers passing, and it warmed my heart. Made things a little less tough.

“Of course not, have you read The Family’s Lost?” Billie asked, already reaching in her bag for her spare copy. The girl was shaking in her exoskeleton for a moment before Billie handed her a pretty copy of the book I’d had written 2 years ago, that was published last year. She gushed over the book with her and I tried to tune her out and focus on the task at hand, and the vampire on my left.

“What’d you do for this, Phil?” I asked, him holding a little black box in his hands. He turned to me and a smile touched his lips, his mind both a million miles away and right there with me. He clutched the box warmly to his chest as he spoke.

“Acquired something so dear to me, my  boy. Something wonderful that I never thought I would find again! I thought it had been lost to the ages, yet I found them in a museum!” Phil had been around since they tracked time backward, he’d seen and done so many cool, and devastating things over his years. He still looked my age, 26. His raven hair was always shorter but out of his face, today it was tucked back just barely behind his ears, his blue eyes had faded grey, the only way to tell a Vampires age, and he still dressed closer to 100 years ago than now. A sweet man, who ended up here after a few decades of sitting alone after he got revenge on his wife’s killers. He’s not quite all there, but who would be after that?