Blood

fourteen

CHAPTER 14

Elliot

"Your last name, reminds me of trees." Ruby randomly says. She leans back on the tree branch and looks at me.

"Trees?" I chuckle. The tree's strong branch looked like a bench, it was crazy.

"Yeah, you've never heard of Evergreen trees?" She questions me with a smirk.

"No," I laugh.

"What kind of boyfriend do I have?" She tells herself as if it was a shame to date me. I look at her weirdly.

"At the party, you've kept kissing me. Let's not forget, you took off my shirt." I remind her. Ruby puts her hands inside her sweater's pocket. Her face was red as tomatoes. I knew she was thinking something to protest against my point.

"You kissed me back!" She retorts. I did kiss her back...and I told her to confess her feelings for me. Goddamn.

"Point proven. I guess you win then." I surrender with my hands up. I put them down and look at the sky. It was so beautiful. The world was changing, evolving as scientists say. I found that fascinating. Ruby and I move closer to each other, until I had my arm around her. Her head had leaned in to my chest.

I wake up with Ruby in my arms. I blink again and myself up in the tree. I try shaking Ruby to wake up gently. She opens her eyes and widens them once realizing that she slept on a tree's strong branch.

"Ahh! Holy shit! Max is going to kill me!" She begins to freak out and climbs down the tree.

"Damn Ruby, aren't you going to say morning or something?" I climb down the tree after her. She looks at me worriedly.

"Max must think that Blood probably killed me!" She pulls my hand to walk faster. I stop her and pull her closer to me. I make her face me and look into her eyes.

"As long as I'm alive, Blood will never kill you." I seriously say and lean in to kiss but she stops me.

"You rejected my kiss?" I say in an almost question with a frown.

"Morning breath, Elliot!" She states in an obvious tone.

We enter Ruby's house and Max sat there on the couch with his bat in hand. He looked at me like if he was about to kill me if I did a step closer to Ruby.

"Where were you young lady?" He sternly says in a brotherly tone of voice. Ruby begins to fumble with her fingers.

"Um..."

"Lauren and I have been very worried about you." He adds. He looks at me angrily.

"What were you guys doing last night?" He asks us. The wrong answer and I was dead for sure.

"We were at the forest and slept there by accident." I step in. Max looks at me, he knew I wasn't lying. I don't lie. He looks at us with a serious face and nods his head.

"Okay, well just don't let it happen again." Ruby kisses his cheek and walks upstairs to her room.

"Hey Max I'm s-"

"Don't. It's okay. Plus we need to talk, it's about tonight." He hints. We walk into the kitchen and Max is still carrying his wooden bat with him.

"Bell told me that Caleb is in town." Max tells me. I look at his bat and then at him. I see anger in his eyes.

"I saw him already. He was at a party where Ruby and I were at." I inform him.

"So, what are we going to do about him?" Max releases his bat and puts it away in the kitchen's closet. He turns around to look at me, waiting for an answer.

I sigh and shrug, "Let the time pass for now. We'll figure it out later."

***

Vicious killer, Blood, has killed it's new victim. His name was Jeremy Rio.

I look at the newspaper in confusion. I continue to read the newspaper in confusion.

Apparently, this time Blood didn't leave a message on the wall like he always does. Whipped, beaten, and scratched all over, Jeremy was killed instantly. The victim was not stabbed at all, but left with the B for Blood. It seems to be that Blood the killer now has a new way of killing its victims.

AN HOUR LATER

"Who the hell is Jeremy Rio?" I throw the newspaper on the table. Max grabs it and begins to read it the article about Blood. I was confused right now. I kept walking, pacing back and forth. Max squints his eyes at times and he was surprised by this.

"It wasn't me if that's what you were thinking." Max shakes his head. I look at him in bewilderment and stop pacing back and forth.

"Then who the fuck was it, Max? From what we know, neither of us know a Jeremy Rio." I tell him. I lean back on the counter and fold my arms. My face looked serious. I didn't know what was going on.

"Only us kill in Dark Woods..." Max says thinking. There was an imposter, but was it. He continues to read the newspaper and his eyes widen. He slowly looks at me. I feared it would be bad news from the look of his face.

"Elliot, it's not just Jeremy Rio who was killed by this imposter. Apparently, you killed 4 others too." I quickly sit down and look at the newspaper. He points where it had said that I had killed 4 other people. I read their names, but none is whom I recognized. I slam my fist on the table in anger.

"Who the hell is doing this to us?" I loudly say.

"If it's not me, and you. Who could it be?" Max says thinking. His eyes widen once he has an answer.

"Caleb."