The Keeper's Vow

by B. F. Simone

“What? Allison, he’s going to die!”

  “Shut up, Katalina,” Tristan said between breaths. She stared into his eyes. They were calm, and if anything, aggravated.

  “Why? Why aren’t you guys freaking out? Why did you say Brian was lucky? Am I the only one seeing all of this blood? He needs a hospital!” Katie cried.

  Before she got any answers, an SUV screeched into her driveway and Brian’s parents, Will and Lucinda, got out.

  “Tristan? I told you NOT to leave the house,” Lucinda said, kneeling next to him. Everyone stared at Lucinda, even Brian who was still bent over the roses.

  “Lucy, how do you know—” Allison started.

  “He’s my nephew,” Lucinda said.

  “But he’s a—” Brian gasped.

  “Shut up, Brian,” Will said moving to the other side of Tristan. “Help me get him in the car. Katie, keep your hands on that. Got it?”

  Katie did as she was told and they all moved him into the back of the Anderson’s SUV.

  “I’ll clean up here and take his car back,” Lucinda said, pulling a set of car keys out of Tristan’s pocket. “You’re going to have to earn these back, Buddy.”

  Katie watched as Tristan’s face turned from pale white to a morbid gray.

  “Get home as soon as you can, Lucy. He’s lost a lot of blood. I’m gonna need help,” Will said.

  “We aren’t going to the hospital?” Katie screamed. She trusted Brian’s parents—she had spent more of her childhood with them than her own dad—but this was wrong. She began to shake violently and her bloody hands slipped over his wound. He screamed.

  “Katie, just sit tight. Everything’s going to be fine.” Will said, pulling off. She looked out the window to see Lucinda spraying off the puddle of blood Tristan left in the grass…covering up a soon to be murder scene.

  Katie had just taken part in a murder cover-up.

  “I’m not dead.” Tristan grimaced, “And I’m not going to die. Takes more than that to kill a vampire.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Katie waited for him to pass out—for his head to go limp and fall to the side. That was what happened when people were badly injured. They became delusional and passed out—but, he continued to stare at her with blue probing eyes.

  In the review mirror, she caught Will’s eyes. “That’s enough, Tristan,” he said as they took the left turn into Brian’s adjacent neighborhood. Allison cursed under her breath.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know anything,” Tristan said between breaths.

  “Quiet,” Will snapped.

  Tristan coughed up blood. “I just want to know, who the hell carries a hunting knife to school? Isn’t that against the law, no matter what kind of school you go to?”

  “I—I didn’t mean to—” Brian mumbled next to Katie.

  “Shut up, Brian,” Will yelled. His voice boomed throughout the car as he pulled into the driveway of his house.

  “Will,” Katie said. She couldn’t take anymore. They needed to go to the hospital. Not their house. What could Will and Lucinda do? They weren’t doctors. She choked back fresh tears. The blood kept pouring out between her fingers.

  “Katie, I know you are confused, but we need to get him inside. We don’t have much time.” The car jerked to a stop. Will got out and flew to the back door. He pulled Tristan out fast and gently. “Brian, get the door. Allison, I need you to get everything I tell you. Fast.”

  Tristan put all his weight on Will as Will helped him to the door. They moved into the house and Will took Tristan into one of the back rooms.

  Katie stood in the doorway. She couldn’t stop shaking. She shivered as air hit her blood soaked shirt. There was blood everywhere. The smell of it burned into her nostrils; the smell even stained the back of her tongue.

  She sat down. She had lost her mind somewhere in between Brian stabbing Tristan and Will telling her they weren’t going to the hospital. Tristan had said he was a “vampire”—that’s what she heard while she was losing it—or maybe he was losing his mind while spiraling into deaths arms.

  “Bring me water…I need that rubbing alcohol in here,” Will shouted from the back room. Allison ran from the hallway to the kitchen and Brian slowly carried bloody towels to the laundry room. “I need more water. Where’s the water?” Will shouted every time Allison stopped to rummage in the kitchen drawers.

  “Do something, Brian. We need your help,” Allison said with gauze under her arms and a bowl of water sloshing onto the carpet as she rushed back down the hall.

  Katie looked at Brian standing in the middle of the kitchen. Doing nothing. She wanted to do something. She should do something. But she was like Brian—frozen. Of all things, why did he have to stab Tristan? She didn’t know whether to be grateful or scared of him. She couldn’t take her eyes off him—his soft round face and puffy green eyes. She had to keep watching him. If she didn’t, he would cease to be Brian; his round face would turn sharp and his eyes would become dull and dead. If she looked away—even to blink—he’d turn into someone who could stab another person.

  “Katie!” Lucinda shrieked as she came into the house. “Brian, go get her one of your shirts and a pair of pants. She’s covered in blood. On—the ivory Valdi. Katie?” Katie watched Brian disappear up the stairs. “Can you hear me, Sweetie?”

  She looked down at herself. The baby blue tank-top she wore under her white blouse was purple. The blood stuck to her stomach. Her navy skirt was darkly stained. Blood.

  Tristan’s blood.

  She flinched when Lucinda pushed hair out of her face. “He needs a hospital,” Katie said.

  Lucinda waved a finger in front of Katie’s face. “Follow my finger.” She checked Katie’s pulse. Why her pulse? She wasn’t the one bleeding out. “You’re just a little shook up.”

  “He lost too much blood,” Katie said.

  “Let’s get you off this very expensive couch and cleaned up. Of all places to sit, you know how expensive that Valdi is.” Lucinda gently helped her up and lead her to the bathroom. This house was all of a sudden foreign. This couldn’t be where she had all of her birthday parties until she was too old for backyard parties. This couldn’t be the place where she learned how to do cartwheels and climb trees. This was not the bathroom door Brian had tied a string to, to help her get rid of her loose front tooth when they were ten.

  “Lucy, w—what’s going on?”

  “Remember when you were six, I used to run your bath water every night? You were so particular about using the jasmine bubble bath. You were addicted to it. I think I’ve got some jasmine body-wash under the sink.”

  “Lucy. Brian—” she couldn’t say it. Not out loud.

  “You loved it when your dad worked nights. You’d come over carrying your overnight bag and spent hours in the bath—”

  “Lucy!”

  “Tristan is going to be fine.”

  A scream filled the house. It rumbled through the walls and shook her. Lucinda’s eyes were wide and worried. He wasn’t going to be fine. It was written all over her face.

  “Oh my god,” Katie cried. She tried to wipe her face, but stopped as she felt the blood coat her cheeks. She turned and saw herself in the mirror. It couldn’t have been her. She looked down at her hands. They were someone else’s. Not hers—hers could never be that red. She rubbed them on her wet skirt.

  “Listen to me Katie.” Lucinda gripped her shoulders tight. “I need you to keep it together for just a little bit longer.”

  “I can’t.” Katie said, trying to rub the blood off her arms. It smeared like lotion.

  “Katie, remember when Brian fell out of that old tree-house and his bone stuck straight out of his leg. You were the bravest ten-year old I’d ever seen.”

  “He wasn’t going to die!” Katie’s heart pounded. “I wasn’t covering up a murder.” She shook harder.

  “Tristan isn’t going to die.” Lucinda turned on the shower, and checked the water. “I promise, things will be fine. You just
need to get out of those clothes and cleaned up.”

  Lucinda left the bathroom and it took every ounce of self-control not to scream as Katie peeled off the bloody clothes. She stood under the shower head and watched the tinted-pink water roll down into the drain. No matter how many times she scrubbed, she couldn’t get the red stain from underneath her nails or the smell out of her nose.

  Ten-minutes had passed, or maybe twenty. She couldn’t move. Didn’t want to. She turned off the water. Only the sound of water being sucked down the drain echoed in the bathroom—the house was silent. She hesitated before she pulled back the shower-curtain. What would she do with her clothes? Burn them? It was evidence of whatever they had just done.

  She squeezed the curtain in her hands and moved it. It came more as a relief than a surprise that her clothes were gone and replaced by Brian’s old shirt and basketball shorts.

  Lucinda. She was like that. Thorough.

  Katie dried her hair and her body expecting to see blood every time she pulled the towel away. She had to stop looking in the mirror because every patch of pink blotchy skin looked like a permanent stain, and she’d rub on it until it burned.

  She opened the bathroom door. Silence. Tiptoeing down the stairs, she checked the living-room. What if they’d left her in the house. What was she supposed to do?

  She jumped when she walked by the dining-room and saw everyone sitting at the table. Every one except Tristan. Her heart pounded and her stomach lurched. She swallowed back vomit and breathed deep, using the doorframe for support. Lucinda said Tristan was her nephew, but Katie had never heard of him before. From the look of Brian’s face, neither had he. Why would she not take her own nephew to the hospital? What—who—

  “Katie?” Lucinda got up from the table and hugged her. “He’s going to be just fine. Don’t look like that, Sweetie. He’s okay. He just needs a few days to get back on his feet.”

  “A few days?” Had Lucinda not seen the way blood spilled from his body like a knocked over carton of milk?

  “Katie, sit down.” Will said. He sat at the far end of the table. He had changed his shirt, not a drop of blood to be found. His hands were spotless.

  “Will—”

  “Lucy, we don’t have time. They’re coming. The longer we wait the more we put her at risk.” Will’s eyes were soft and green. The same soft eyes she had seen nearly her entire life—eyes that were honest. She looked away. Why did every thing about him, and the way Lucinda held her close, make her want to run for her life. She pulled away from Lucinda, and opened her mouth to scream all of the questions that had been building ever since she saw Tristan standing on her front porch. Nothing came out. She was too afraid to say anything.

  She sat down in the chair farthest from them all.

  Will sighed. “Katie, there are people coming here. They are going to give you two options. We can’t make the decision for you. All we can do is tell you that no matter what, we will always be here for you,” he said.

  “What decisions? Who’s coming?” Katie could feel her muscles contracting, telling her to get up and run.

  Lucinda sat in the chair next to her. “Katie, Tristan is a vampire. We couldn’t take him to the hospital because the people there, who could help him, can’t know that. In fact, no one can know that, especially the people coming.” Lucinda reached for her hand.

  Katie pulled away and looked around the table. They were all watching her, waiting for some type of reaction. “What’s really going on?” she said.

  The doorbell rang, echoing throughout the house. Katie looked at them and then the hallway.

  “I’ll stall them for as long as I can,” Lucinda said, getting up from the table.

  “I know we are asking you to believe something that seems crazy, but you have to listen to me,” Will said. “There is a lot more to this world than you think, Katie. The people who are here are bringing someone who is going to erase your memory unless you choose to become one of us.”

  “Erase my memory?” Katie’s insides squeezed. She could hear Lucinda open the door. Voices filled the hall. “Will?”

  “Trust me Katie. Don’t say a word unless I tell you to.” He looked at Allison and Brian, “Repeat the story I told you. Don’t so much as mutter Tristan’s name.”

  “Got it,” Allison said. Brian nodded, his face just as pale as before. His eyes never left the table.

  Will got up and moved to Katie, as the voices grew louder. “Trust me Katie. Everything I’m about to say about you, is true. Everything. But once they tell you everything, it’s your decision.”

  “Will—” Katie stuttered.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Nothing about what he said was reassuring.

  “My wife and I are looking forward to another one of your dinners, Lucinda. Don’t tell Mariam I told you this, but I dream about your steaks,” said a voice in the hall.

  “Nonsense, Jim,” Lucinda said, walking into the room. Her voice was light, but Katie knew by the way her eyes darted from Will onto her, that she was on edge like the rest of them. A large man followed Lucinda in and laughed.

  “Will, if Mariam was half as good at cooking as your wife, I’d have have all my clothes custom made.”

  Katie took in Jim, the man that made the room smaller. He was as big as his voice, almost as tall as the doorframe, and—staring at her.

  “This is her?” A high-pitched voice said behind Jim. An old, thin woman fixed a pair of glasses on her face and peered at Katie. Not a hair strayed from her tight, white bun. She moved past Jim and closer to Katie.

  Will squeezed Katie’s shoulder one more time. “Yes, Katalina Watts,” Will said. “Drew and Katalina’s daughter.”

  “Oh, Katalina Rockwell? From an eastern province? The one in New York?” Jim said, nodding. His voice bellowed in and out as he looked back and forth between Will and Lucinda.

  “That would be her,” Will said.

  “Well,” the woman said, looking away from Katie and on to Brian and Allison. “What exactly happened?” She peered at them over the top of her glasses.

  Allison sat up straighter than a board and cleared her throat. “We were walking to get ice cream. We took a shortcut through the alley between Second and Third Street and a D-Range vampire attacked us. She was feeding off a homeless man and tried to attack Katie. We—me and Brian—fought her off but she ran off when she smelled the iron in Brian’s knife. As soon as she hit the sun she crystalized.”

  “A D-range in the middle of the day?” The woman said with an arched brow.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, Henrietta. Women are always getting changed and then thrown out. The north gate is right there next to that ice-cream parlor.”

  Henrietta looked between them; she settled her gaze on Brian. “Where exactly, Sir, did you get an iron knife, and why did you have it while walking home—from school?”

  “I—I—”

  “Speak up boy,” Jim cleared his throat. He too had hardened his gaze on Brian.

  “I took it from my dad. I didn’t mean to—I just wanted to—I don’t know. I—”

  “That’s enough,” Henrietta snapped. “You know the rules. We have them for a reason, if you can’t follow them—I don’t care who your father is—we will send you to an omitter.”

  Brian didn’t move. If it weren’t for the tinniest lift of his chest, he could have passed as dead. No one in the room moved. Katie had been wrong. It wasn’t Jim who had made the room small—it was this woman; she stood no taller than five feet.

  “Glock,” she said to the doorway. A tall thing walked into the room. It wasn’t a man—it couldn’t have been a man. It had no face—nothing Katie could see. Just a single black eye peering out from a head wrapped in gauze. It wore a suit, but she could tell the clothes were meant to hide something. Something hideous. Its hands were a color between gray and white. The veins clearly webbed and green.

  It reached toward Katie and she jumped back in her chair.

&
nbsp; “Don’t worry dear, you won’t remember a thing,” Henrietta said.

  “Wait.” Will moved between Katie and the thing, Glock.

  “Will, you know the rules,” Jim said, seemingly bored and ready to move on to something new.

  “She’s a guardian.”

  “She isn’t on the list,” Henrietta said.

  “She was born with the mark. Drew didn’t register her. He didn’t want her to know about us after he lost her mother.” Will seemed unfazed by the thing standing only inches from him. A smell seeped from Glock that was inhuman.

  “I thought that was a little suspicious given the lineage,” Jim said, eyeing Katie. “Why didn’t you say anything three years ago? You know we’re short on recruits. Especially ones with a solid bloodline like hers. If you knew, it was your responsibility to say something.”

  “It wasn’t my place. Drew made his decision clear,” Will said.

  “It’s her decision. Not his,” Jim said appalled. “Really, Will. You let an old friendship cloud your judgement. I told you he was no good when he became a deserter—”

  “We can’t change the past, Jim.” Will turned around to face Katie. “But, it’s her decision now.”

  As soon as Will moved, she was flooded with the putrid smell seeping from Glock. She tried to avert her eyes, but his single black eye was like a magnet forcing her to look.

  She was mesmerized. It changed colors from black to green-gold. Like an animal in the night. “I know you. I’ve tasted you before. I know what you are. I’ve drank the horror that is your past.”

  “What?” Katie said. Her heart pounded in her chest and her skin itched with disgust.

  “I said, it’s your decision now.” Will looked between her and Glock. “Glock, could you wait outside, we’ll call you back in if we need you.” Glock’s orb returned to black and he left the room, leaving behind his smell. Had no one else heard him?

  “I—I don’t know,” Katie said, looking between all the eyes staring at her.

  “This isn’t fair. Brian and I had three months to decide,” Allison said. Katie wished she had sat next to Allison.