DEADLY STITCHES.

CHAPTER ONE

MORDRED MEIER

I’ve always thought of my heart as a cavern- dark and cold. The lights do not reach in. Warmth ends at the door.
I retreated there for the switch on my emotions, when I needed a hole to hide in. The lightning started, and everything came alive and bright as day. I could see the flowers, the icicles, the beauty- but the bolts, however grand and beautiful, struck my cave without a thought.
I go now for a hole to hide in, but what I find is broken. All isn’t cold and dark anymore, all is smoldering. My fragile, human heart is smoldering…
“Mordred. Do it.”, she said. She was bound with red cords to an oak tree in the woods. It was raining, and I held the sword at her throat.
“Say it!” she said. “You want to. You want to hurt me. Please.” I shut my eyes to say No, or Wait, or anything else but then she screamed. She shook against the tree and tried to flail her bound arms. “Say it” she whispered brokenly as a tear escaped her eye.
“No!”
“Then kill me.”
“I was going to.”
“No. You will - now. This just shows that everything- the kisses, the fun times, the laughs- don’t count.”
“Stop!”
Then she said, “It’s over. This is who you are. None of it will matter. Kill me.”
I took the blade from her neck and brought it slowly down to her breast. I always prefer the heart.
“Mordred, find the courage to push it in. Send me to a place where none of it matters, where I can live a single day without the thought of you.”
My arms were steady. I was calm. The sword was poised in my hand, ready to strike, but it didn’t feel right. I shook my head and backed away, choking out a frustrated “No.”
She swallowed tightly and said with so much venom, “I guess I’ll get to keep my head today then, to control this spineless brat of a brother.”
“Ouch!” Yes, she hit me. I ducked the second blow but when I straightened up and opened my eyes, the tip of her sword stood between my eyes. She drew back and said, while examining her sword, “Imagine the person is more dangerous than she seems and distracts you with all that farewell drama, all the while plotting how she’s going to kill you,”- and at that she pushes forward and looks me in the eye, while her sword finds my throat- “and just like that, ding dong, Mordred is dead. And then she’ll mount your head on her wall like a trophy; an exotic animal she managed to get the best of.”
She was Silena. Nineteen, with all the jadedness and ruthlessness of an immortal deity, her dark skin and blonde hair lending her the air of a slightly unattainable exotic girl next door. Half-sister and only surviving relative.
She offered me her gloved arm and pulled me up from my crouch. We used to always stray from the house for an hour and she’d make me act out different scenarios in which I had to try and kill her. She always said it was our special ritual; our only link to our family.
“Coke or Champagne?” she asks, drawing me out from my thoughts for a moment as she deftly climbed up the lowest branch of the tree I was leaning against.
“Champagne.”
“Dummy,” she said under her breath as she held out the can of Coke to me. “You know we don’t have champagne now. Maybe someday, we’ll be careless enough to spend all our money on luxuries like that.”
I nodded, even as she poked me rather hard in the arm and grinned at me adoringly.

                                            

Five hundred and eleven days later

I don’t live for the force of life within me. I live because I fear death. I live to find a way to survive the smoldering, and when I think of that day, five hundred and eleven days ago, and all the days after, I see the bolts following.
I call him Felix. Not Mr. Felix Hogan, because I don’t want to remember him as someone’s father. He was a husband, once, to a lady named Chloe who died tragically (really, aren’t all premature deaths tragic?) and is buried in the large Catholic cemetery off Monding Avenue. He has a crew cut, is olive-skinned with a birthmark on his lower lip that is a shade darker than his complexion. He has only one child, a daughter name Elfreda, with whom I share some classes.
I’d strapped him to a chair made of stone with cuffs locked to it to restrain him properly at the ankles and wrists and a clamp across the shoulder. I secured his head between two more clamps, to make him unable to turn his head to see what would be going on behind him.
I walk over to the control panel to flick the switch to throw the room into darkness, when I catch my reflection in the window. Brown eyes with a hint of dark shadows around them stare at me from an aesthetically pleasing symmetrical face with lips that inspire songs and a perfect nose. I look like your average pretty-boy-next-door-who-lives-in-a-large-house, except there’s nothing average about me, and this house, and all who live in it carry a secret that would make the toughest of men fall into a dead faint at the faintest whispers of it.
Disgusted by the deceit in my reflection, I scowl and draw the curtain closed, and the room is plunged into darkness so black I can’t even see the outline of my hand in front of me. Satisfied, I take in the darkness for a while, until an incessant buzzing and a faint light draw me out of my silent appreciation. A phone. My phone, ringing. I find my way mostly by touch to the control panel table and sigh before I answer the call.
“Mordy!” The voice on the other end calls me the name that only one person has ever been brave enough to call me without immediate repercussion. She’s the only one that I let call me that atrocious name.
I sigh and don’t answer.
“Mordy?” she says again, uncertainly.
“Hey.”
“Hello.”
It’s a little uncomfortable, talking to her. We’re always hyper conscious of the words that we say to each other.
She sighs. I can tell it’s involuntary when I hear it.
“Hey again,” I say, my tone softening.
“You left early.”
“Yeah.”
She giggles. Like a five year old. “Nobody believed you could, you know. You punched J in the face right beside his buddies. They could have taken you right there, you know. Now you’re going to have to watch your back around them.” I can’t help the laugh that escapes me. They should be the ones watching their backs around me. She giggles along with me, and when she quiets down, she says “Thanks” in a voice so quiet it almost seems like she doesn’t want me to hear. We both know I heard it, and I nod as if she can see me from the other end of the line.
With her, Elfreda- Freda, actually, there’s so much ignored history between us that we have almost nothing to talk about for fear of opening old wounds. Sometimes, I think we’re friends because we think we owe it to our younger selves not to fall and break.
“Mordy,” she breathes out, and I can tell what is coming and it makes me squirm, “I love you...”
“No!” I choke out. “Don’t say that again, Freda.” Something in my tone must have made her back off, because all I hear next is the dial tone.
She always does this. And every time it sounds to me like it’s just her way of saying thank you. She does it, even when she knows it makes me uncomfortable every time she does it. It’s like she feels repeating it will make it true. If only she knew who I really was…

I walk down the stairs from the attic and halt even before I get to the bottom. Silena’s there, sitting on the loveseat between the tall exotic vases our mother had specially made for some ridiculous occasion. She glances up at me when I finally make it down the stairs and I take a moment to take in her outfit of red track pants and some shirt with a cornfield on it that she calls her ‘crop top.’ When I look up, her eyes are on mine as she takes a swig of whatever is in her wine glass. The ease between us is gone. Ever since the Incident, I cannot look at her without falling into despair.

                                             

Five hundred days ago

Silena grinning at me adoringly was just a little less scary than finding out you’ve been sharing a room with a vampire. I felt her tense up, and I immediately went on the defensive, but I relaxed when I figured out what had caused her to tense up. It was just our neighbor’s dog, out for a run around the woods behind our property. Following closely behind was its owner, Ms. Thonia. Nobody actually knew how old she was, but I know that she had looked the same way for as long as I had known her.
“Oh, Hi kids,” she said as she drew closer to us.
“How’s everything going?” Silena grunted and jumped off the low branch and stalked deeper into the woods. I don’t know why Silena always got into a huff when Ms. Thonia was around. I stayed and chatted a little with Ms. Thonia until I noticed that her dog was nowhere in sight.
Ms. Thonia suggested we look around for the dog and honestly, even though I would rather be doing anything else, I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach because I didn’t know where Silena was and because the sun was about to set and I really didn’t trust that the little dog was smart enough to find its way back home.
Hearing a rustle in the trees right beside me, I made to investigate, but Silena stepped out of the woods, her dress bloody and her expression guilty.
“I had no idea it’d be this bloody,” she deadpans.
“Silena Corinne Meier!!” I cried shrilly, injecting as much judgment into my tone as humanly possible.
“How could you?”
“How could I what??” She had her jaw set and her eyes were shooting lightning bolts in my direction
“How could you kill them?”
“Kill who?” She had the gall to look amused after murdering people.
“Silena… just… I can’t do this.”
“Do what!?” She screams at my back as I turn and run all the way back to the house, like running away would erase the sight of my sister, daredevil, now murderer.

                                              

Five hundred days later

I set my timer for an hour and it has been fifty-nine minutes of Silena staring at me from behind her wineglass, and me pretending to ignore her. The tension in the room is so thick you’d need a chainsaw to cut through it.
It’s been an hour. I’m going back to the attic, and there I will put on the mask of monster, the one that feels like a second skin. The thrill is in stalking the prey. When you know them inside and out, the capture is relatively easy. When they awake, they awake to darkness and restraint and a feeling that they will drown which is because they’re lowered into a tank filled with liquid, which freezes over in less than a second. Thanks to science, we have handy contraption- cables in the ice, electrodes attached to monitor heartbeat and respiration rates and needles to extract the good stuff straight from their veins.
It’s so handy to live in a town that has a high crime rate. People rarely pay attention to yet another missing persons report.
It’s an addiction. Can you call something an addiction when it’s all you’ve ever known? When you cut your teeth on it and it’s as much a part of your DNA? We need the energy, their energy. Some days we fight our thirst for the energy and win, and on other days, we fail, and people die.
I know she wants me to kill him, and not only for the energy, but for me to prove myself to her. I have nothing to prove. Not to myself, not to her, not to anyone.
I make my way slowly up to the attic and she follows silently behind me, like a cat. I want to step in, but I also do not want to. My mind wills my feet to move, but my feet don’t respond. I finally gather the strength to step in. She stops the door as I try to close it and hands me the dagger. She nods at me like that would get me to actually do what she wants me to. I keep expecting her to leave, but she moves into the shadows and stands there, like an instructor supervising a practical class.
I nod back, weighed down by her expectations and walk over to him. I hold the dagger to his neck with both hands. I see his eyes widen, but I ignore it. Everything around me is quiet-even my thoughts are quiet.
I slide the blade over his neck, enough for it to nick his skin, and slide it slowly in.
“No! I can’t. I’m not you, Silena.”
I drop the dagger and stride over to the window while my hands rake through my hair in a mixture of anger, frustration and guilt.
I hear her growl behind me, and in the next second, she screams my name with so much fear it puzzles me. Before I can turn around to see what is going on, I feel the pain. White-hot searing pain that feels like someone thrust a fiery sword into my chest.
It’s hard to breathe.
I know it was him, but how did he manage to break free?
My vision is blurring. I hear Silena scream with so much rage and something thuds to the floor.
I hear the sounds of a scuffle and I want to call out to Silena but I can’t form the words.
Everything has gone black.
I realize that nothing is stronger than my fear of death.