Rosary

Dimitri

This move was a farce. A complete joke. I watched the dark and dreary landscape pass by, piles of snow piled high on the sides of the road, illuminated by the moonlight. I slumped down further in my seat, making my contempt of this move known. Just because someone had suspected—suspected!—we’d had to uproot our comfortable living situation and move to the middle of the continental U.S.

We’d been living in northern Siberia for nearly twenty years, and no one had really bothered us. Then again, neighbors were few and far between in the recesses of the cold arctic wasteland that made up Siberia. Then one all of a sudden got suspicious, and had come snooping around. So, of course, we had to move halfway across the fucking world.

“Sit up,” Avery, my adoptive mother who still appeared to look no older than twenty-eight, snapped from the passenger seat, glaring at me in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were an iridescent blue, and changed with the light; paired with her ebony hair, I’d call her incredibly beautiful if she weren’t such a bitch half the year.

I grunted, and stayed put. Not a second passed before Avery had turned around in her seat and grabbed the collar of my shirt, forcibly yanking my ass off the sleek leather seat. “Boy, don’t give me that. Remember, I killed you once. I’ll have no problem doing it again. I can always leave you out here till morning to burn.” Faster than it happened, I was back in my seat, and Avery had turned back around, acting like she hadn’t just threatened to kill me in one of the most painful ways imaginable to my kind.

I fidgeted with the hem of my shirt, careful not to piss off Avery again. She was going through one of her depressive stages, where her tongue was sharp as a knife and she was all too quick to anger. I just hoped it’d pass by the time we made it to Columbia Falls, Montana; the last thing we needed was Avery convincing all of our neighbors she was bat shit crazy right off. That was the problem with moving somewhere new: neighbors got one look at you and decided straight away if you were sane or insane, friendly or unapproachable, etc. It was one of the things I hated about moving. Even though I’d been doing it for nearly fifty-seven years. And I was seventy-five.

“We’re here,” a voice suddenly invaded my consciousness. I wasn’t even aware my eyes had been closed until I opened them and saw white everywhere. The entire place had been painted with snow just before we’d rolled into town. I got out of the car, and Avery threw a jacket at my face, snapping for me to put it on so we could at least try to act normal. I grinned and shrugged into the unnecessary piece of clothing.

Pulling my hood up, making the most of it, in case some of our weirder neighbors were actually up at three a.m. in the middle of a blizzard, I jogged around the side of the truck and grabbed a box, then dashed inside with it.

“Up in my room,” I muttered as I read the name written in big, block letters on the top of the box. I, naturally, being the first one to choose, got the second largest bedroom in the entire house. Well. It was a mansion, really. Old Victorian style, wrap-around porch, creepy dead trees surrounding the estate, the whole works. Avery had really gone all out on this place when she’d had it built for herself hundreds of years ago. I walked into my new room, and whistled. The walls were dark half paneling with the same type of wood making up the bottom half with some type of wooden bar going across, separating the two. The closet could double as a bedroom all by itself—hey, now there was an idea—and it even had its own private bathroom. Sweet. I sprinted back down the stairs and out the door, bypassing Avery, who shot me a glare as she carried a box into the house.

“Dimitri, help me with this here,” Lucien said, hoisting up the end of a rather large dresser I knew had to belong to either Avery or Andromeda, my sister. I knew he could lift it all by himself; again, trying not to arouse suspicion this time. We actually had to “err on the side of caution,” as Luc preached too often. He could shove his quotes up his ass, because, quite frankly, I didn’t care, something I often repeated back to him when he started his lectures with me. My adoptive father would just sigh, and remind me that it was my funeral when I got a stake in the heart and garlic shoved up somewhere I didn’t really want to think about anything being.

“Luc, I doubt there are neighbors staring at us. It’s, what? Three-thirty in the morning? Normal people would be PTFO’d by now.” Lucien laughed at my choice of words, and we carried the dresser inside.

“Second door on the right,” Andromeda said as she swept past us out the door, her wide milky white eyes watching the dresser like a hawk to make sure we hadn’t damaged it. Today my sister’s dark red hair was snapped up in a tight knot on top of her head, with a few strands hanging down for effect, and she’d gone heavy on the eye makeup and hooker-red lipstick. Her clothes attested to her lifestyle; red and black striped stockings, a lacy black skirt with an equally lacy top to match. She wore her Mary Jane’s, too, as she stomped out in the snow and effortlessly picked up a mattress with one hand.

Avery rushed out to help her, to keep up appearances. Andromeda nearly threw it at our adoptive mother before thinking of the fact that Avery would tear her into tiny pieces and cook her into the next batch of beef stew she made.

Lucien let me carry the dresser up now that we were in the safety of our newly acquired home, while he went out to bring more things inside. Finally, an hour later, everything was inside, and the U-Haul we’d rented closed with a big bang. Avery set to making the kitchen looking presentable, while she set me on the task of dusting everything. It took nearly two hours to dust the entire downstairs, to make it look even remotely presentable to anyone we might have over. This place had been abandoned for hundreds of years, ever since Avery’s human life had ended the day after the house had been finished. Andromeda got to decorate the downstairs. Lucien just kind of took on the role of supervisor, and became our step-and-fetch bitch for the next few hours.

Avery looked at Andromeda somewhat wearily as the sun began to creep in through the places in the windows not covered with the black curtains she had put up. “Really, An, are you trying to make this house creepy?”

“Creepier than it already is, you mean? I can make it look worse, Ma,” Andromeda shot back as she laughed and glided up the stairs.

“Don’t call me, Ma, Andromeda!” Avery shrieked up the stairs. “I look young enough to be your sister!”

“Old enough to be my great-great-great grandma,” Andromeda reminded her as we heard the slamming of a door.

“Chill, Avery, she does it to provoke you,” Lucien said soothingly as he walked up behind Avery. Avery was tiny, barely topping five feet, and as a result didn’t look very threatening. Which was a real advantage over the rest of us. Andromeda, despite the fact that she was only a few inches taller than Avery, could spook anyone with those white eyes of hers. She’d been born blind, with those milky white eyes, and when she’d been turned into a vampire by our adoptive mother, her sight had been restored, though her eyes hadn’t changed. Andromeda and I were real blood siblings, twins in fact. Our adoptive mother had left us a week after she’d turned us and come back a month later, surprised to see we weren‘t dead yet; we’d been eighteen. We never did know why she’d left. Andromeda and I both openly expressed our hatred for the woman.

Lucien and I were both nearly six feet, though we didn’t quite make it there. Lucien and I looked a bit alike, despite being born during drastically different time periods across an ocean from one another. I was a Russian boy at heart, born seventy-five years ago in Vladivostok during the late thirties, 1937 to be exact; my accent was still with me, though not as strong as it had been when I’d first been turned. Still detectable, though.

Lucien had been born in what was now Fairbanks, Alaska, nearly a hundred years before me. Our eyes were both dark, though mine were a touch darker, by Avery’s say-so. My eyes were red; his were green. My hair was black and somewhat curly if I let it get too long, which I tended to avoid. Lucien let his dark brown hair grow out until Avery held him down and cut his hair against his will.

“We’ll enroll you in school tomorrow,” Avery said dismissively. Then she turned around and kissed Lucien, a signal for me to get out before they started breaking in the house.