Shadows and Secrets
PART TWO
| "Michael?" Lucy's hand hovered on the refrigerator
door, her brow furrowing in concern. Her son looked pale, frighteningly so.. And it reminded her of the blonde one.. The one they prized from her father's stuffed moose and buried along the beach. "What?" He asked sullenly. He felt guilty for using such a sharp tone with her, for refusing to meet her eyes when they spoke. It wasn't her fault.. None of it was. But then it wasn't his fault either, was it..? "Maybe there's some kind of doctor.. " She began. But his laugh cut her short, scornful and devoid of any mirth. He snorted quietly and moved away from her, gazing out of the grimy window at the porch, remembering how it had once been lit up by headlights, filled with their mocking laughter. Lucy rummaged around in the fridge for milk, the sound of the door hinging closed bringing Michael out of his reverie. He watched his mother boil the kettle, the steam rising in puffs, clouding her face. "...Going out." was all Lucy caught of his mumbled sentence. She listened to the front door swing shut behind him, staring motionless into the empty room for a long time after he had left, her tea going cold. The beach was as silent and eerie as it had always been at night, far from the noise and chaos of the board walk, Michael pulled his jacket tight around himself and sat down on the cold sand. The hunger was there again tonight, as it was every night. He'd look out for some dog or cat.. Any animal, anything that would spare him the fate of becoming a murderer.. And a fully fledged vampire. But for how long could he do this? Every time he drank the reeking blood
of animals he felt a sickness unlike any he'd ever experienced. When the
hunger was at its peak and he was around people.. He could hear their
blood.. Singing in their veins and calling out to him, drawing him to
them. This is why he avoided the crowds tonight, praying silently that
no one should cross his path by chance, alone especially. He still avoided that memory. Star screaming in his face that it was a sham, hopeless, that they were doomed. All for nothing, she said. She had actually cried over David, and even though he had felt some sort of regret lifting that body from it's makeshift stake, burying it in the unforgiving earth.. He hated her for that. He had been the one to kill him.. And she had been the one to cry over it. The memory of finding them both, Star and Laddie, impaled on two identical antlers a week after the final confrontation with the vampires had been more than he could handle. It was the others who buried those bodies.. Far away from David's body at Michael's request, while he sat in his room and stared up at the ceiling in shock, unable to believe that they would actually commit suicide.. After it all! And the little one, Laddie, did Star kill him first? Hard to believe, too, that he would have been able to accomplish it alone.. Star and her ideals.. Her morals. Saving his soul. "What about my soul?" Whispered Michael to nobody at all.
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