Blood and Beasts

Prologue - Fifteen Years Ago

Hey!!  This was originally the prologue, but I got the suggestion that the book might read better without it.  I agreed and figured I'd try that out, but left this here at the end in case anyone wanted to read it :)

The house was haunted. Cara was certain of that. 

Well, almost certain. They had been living there a few months now and that was more than enough time for her. It was an older house, easily the type you would watch in a horror movie. Old red bricks, peeling and splintered boards making up the deck, a precarious looking chimney, and those two large windows staring out from the top floor, from her room and her brother's. 

The rest of the street didn't have that feel though, as all the houses around theirs had been renovated and refurbished. That was the main draw for her mom and step-dad when they bought the place. The house was a steal and with the neighbourhood on the rise, it seemed like a sure-fire investment. But Cara didn't care about that. She was far more concerned with the creaks and the bugs.

Since the house was old, some creaks were to be expected. Cara wasn't stupid, so she accepted that the porch steps bent slightly under her weight, and that the floorboards in the living room groaned with each pass over them. No, it was the creaks late at night that told her something was off. The house would grow deadly silent at night once everyone was in bed. Neither street noises nor the wind seemed to reach through the walls, which was odd enough on its own. 

 But then the house would breathe. 

This was the best way Cara could think of it. A gentle crick cracking would start from the roof and stretch along the walls, through the upper floorboards, down the stairs, through the main floor and settling in the basement. And then "they" started moving.

Cara wasn't sure yet who "they" were, but she was sure there had to be someone moving around the house at night. The creaks in the floors and scratches from the walls took on a very human feel, sounding as it did when she would walk around the house. Creak-crack, creak-crack, one-step, two-step, right foot, left foot. 

 Cara would cautiously peek her head out of her bedroom door to see if she could spot the source of the noise. Sometimes it was her mom or Greg or her little brother Nolan. But most of the time it was nothing. "They" didn't want to be caught.

Cara had brought these concerns to her mom, multiple times, but it all came down to the same thing for her mom and Greg, "It's an old house, there's bound to be a few things off with it." They were both far too stubborn to admit they had bought a shit hole.

The bugs were far harder for them to ignore. At first there had only been a few more flies than seemed normal, and more spiders hiding in the corners. Her mom had assured her that the flies would die off as it got later in the fall, but they only appeared to keep multiplying. The flies along with the creaks would keep her up at night with their incessant buzzing, always loudest at night. Then they had started finding the cockroaches, which finally spurred the parental figures into action. Exterminators were called and they all took a much needed weekend vacation from the house. 

That had given them a temporary reprieve from the bugs, though they appeared to be slowly finding their way back to the house. Her mom and Greg felt they simply needed to speed up some of the repairs they had in mind, help keep the bugs out permanently, but Cara doubted that would make much difference.

The most disgusting of these insect run-ins had happened just two weeks prior. Cara had been in the shower after school, in the midst of washing her hair, Angel on her mind, when that thought was interrupted, words flashing in her mind, "Don't forget to wash behind your ears." It felt like a voice was hissing this directly into her head.