Blood Line

2 When Time Stood Still

The sun had barely risen to a cotton candy sky. I awoke to the incessant blare of a repetitive beep. I pushed my plain bed sheets up and hit the alarm to announce instant quiet. With a yawn and a rub of my eyes, I fully awoke. I opened the blinds to the windows that carried up the slanted ceiling of my room. Just as I finished I heard a knock at the bedroom door.

            I sighed “Come in.” The boys opened the door still in their pajamas, with their bed hair covering their worried faces. “How about you guys go get dressed and I’ll make breakfast? While we eat we can talk about my . . . death.” Death, it’s not like anyone else or I talk about it on a daily basis. It doesn’t sound normal or easy to say. As I thought to myself I didn’t hear the boys shuffle out of the room and into their own. I know they don’t want to talk about it just as much as I do, but delaying it won’t help.

            As we sat at the breakfast table we didn’t talk. Once we were done Byakko left for work and the other three sat on the couch. I made everyone their lunches with nothing girly. After that we grabbed our belongings and headed out to school.

            I use roller skates to get around. The twins have skate boards that they invented to hide in their bags. Ryuu has to use the rustic blue bike with the faded lightning on it. I t has been passed down in the family for years. We usually race to school and who ever won got to choose dessert for that night. Today we didn’t and the people in the small but intelligent town knew something was wrong. Although no one asked what was wrong for the sake of being polite. They all talk though it’s a small town just outside of the main cities.

            When we were young we used to visit here as a family. Our parents owned a shrine here and the top floor of an apartment complex. When they died we had to choose between the two and chose the quiet town. It helped our nerves. We also know everyone here which is a good and bad thing.

***

I finally got to school and had to change my shoes as a tradition in Japan. I then had to put my sports bag and skates in my gym locker. It was only two weeks into the semester and I already felt the glares on my back. I hate it. Everyone hates me for being what they call the “perfect being”. I have all of one friend. I am on the girl’s varsity tennis team, I get good grades and I know several languages. I also know martial arts and am pretty great at that because I am in gymnastics. Everyone says that I can do anything that I want to. That I can breeze by without doing anything but bat my eyes and give a certain look. All those people don’t know what life is really like and neither do I. I do know that I work for those great grades. I practice every day for tennis, gymnastics and martial arts. I am a normal hard working girl who is striving to be perfect in more than one thing so I have options in the future.

            I walked to first period which is my math class. I am pretty good with math when it’s not first thing in the morning. I have always wondered why they even have a class for math in the morning. I always try to stay awake and write notes but today my mind wondered.

I happen to sit next to one of about six windows in the class room. I find myself looking out the window a lot. When I finally looked back to the board and started writing notes again I saw something out of the corner of my eye out the window. I figured it was just a bird and kept writing. When some girl two seats behind me screamed just two seconds later, I had to look.

Once I looked I realized it was what looked to be a person falling from the sky. The students watched with gasps and open mouths. I stood from my seat and opened my window to get a better view and by this time the person thing had hit the ground. Students were hanging out other windows wondering where the man fell from. Once I fully paid attention to the person thing I realized that it was a man in a cloak but half his face was animal and he had claws. A weapon shaped to what looked like a scythe lay just under his cloak. I couldn’t believe what happened next. His scythe just evanesced right before my eyes. No one else noticed; I guess because they never saw the scythe to begin with. All of a sudden his face formed back into a man’s face completely. This was creepy. It gave me chills.