Pitch Black

“Leave her be,” I snapped at Niall, who had made his way towards the bedroom where Ashling was sleeping in. It was early in the morning, and most of the residents of the small hideout were awake. I was sitting in the living room, cleaning one of my knives when I saw the blonde boy make his way towards the door to check on her. Ash had sleeping in Niall’s room for the night, and he on the couch. I had made sure of that. “Ash will come around when she wants too. She had her own way of dealing with things, so don’t interrupt that.”

Niall gave me a hard look, but I chose to ignore it. It was clearly he had taken a fondness to my sister, since she had saved his life from my hands. If he kept it up, I was going to take out his heart and feed it to crows. “Don’t you think you should be consoling her? She’s upset.”

My hands stopped what they were doing and I folded my hands, looking up at Niall. He had come into the living room, crossing his arms and looking at me. Harry had strolled in, looking between us with disinterest. “Sure, please tell me how I should go about treating my sister. After all, you’ve known her for an entire 48 hours. What’s that too a lifetime?”

“She’s got you there, mate,” Harry said from their makeshift kitchen, drawing water from their faucet that they had. It startled me to hear him agree with me, but I looked back to Niall, who still looked doubtful. “Who cares anyways. Let her mope.”

“She’s not moping,” I bite back, picking up my knife to clean again. Harry’s tone irritated me. In fact, both of them were irritating me. Louis was showering though, so I had no back up in the empty living room. “She’s struggling with her own personal issues.”

“Wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?” Ashling’s voice caught my attention and I glanced at the hall where she had come from the room. Her red hair was braided out of her face, and her face was washed clean, hand bandaged.

“No-“ Niall began, but I cut him off.

“Yes.” Niall blinked in surprise, but he didn’t understand the way we worked. When Ashling went into those moods, I did not treat her any differently. She needed to know that I thought no less of her, that I expected her to perform as she always had. I wanted her to know I had high expectations and that I thought she was strong. “We were. Are you feeling better?”

She paused before nodding, lifting her hand a little lifelessly. “I think it may be fractured.”
I nodded, pocketing the knife and standing. I dust my pants off, getting the dirt off of them and gave her a soft smile. Niall was still standing there as if he wanted to do something for her, so I ignored him. “Well, stop trying to take out the walls then, huh? Or at least shoot it, not punch it.”

Ash gave a soft grin, and I knew I had gotten to her. “Alright, well Ash, you can do something easy cause your hand,” Niall said, giving her a grin of his own. She smiled back at him. “You, Sam and I can do laundry together today. How about it?”

My irritation flickered. “And you,” Harry directed towards me, taking a swig of his water, “Can come with me to do perimeters.”

I frowned. “If I was dangerous, that would be a really bad idea, you know?”

He gave me a smile that was anything but friendly. “I want to know more about you and your little family. And if I suspect anything… well I’ve got a gun too.”

Ashling gave me an alarmed glanced but I smiled, my lips razor thin as I shoved another knife in place. My eyes connected with his green ones, and though his gave me shivers, I glared. “We’re on the same page, then. Let’s go.”

*

Hot sun beat down in waves from the sky. The dirt beneath my boots crunched as I walked alone, letting Harry lead me around the small, shambled town. It seemed everything here had died ages ago, which it probably did. Everything in the buildings was wiped clean and presumably in their makeshift home.

Passing fallen homes and broken down, rusting cars, I began to wonder what it was like to live here. It seemed like one of those smalls towns Louis always talked about, the kind that you couldn’t get away with anything because everyone knew everyone. In a weird way, that’s how our group was; no privacy, no lies.

Licking my dried lips, I reached for a canteetn. The movement made Harry flinch and face me. I rolled my eyes and picked up the canteen, shaking it in front of him obnoxiously before taking a sip and resealing it. “I’m going to have to as kyou to relax. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

“You know,” he said, continuing our walk. “You keep saying that, and yet I feel like killing me would not come that easy for you.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy. But it wouldn’t be impossible.”

They continued walked, turning to skim alone the outskirts of the west side of the town. A breezing picked up, making the back of my sweating neck a bit cooler. The blazing heat outside was something I was already used to, but it never made it bearable. “How many run ins have you had with vamps?” Harry asked, stepping over a fallen chimney of a house. “With the group you have now, I mean?”

Licking my dry lips again, I contemplated. We had been together for so long and survived so many run ins that I couldn’t really guess. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, shrugging my shoulders. “Too many to count, over the years.”

“And you’ve survived them all…” His tone wasn’t suspicious. In fact, it was someone amazed and impressed. I knew that it was something to be impressed about. Bands of humans never last long, whether because they couldn’t survive the attacks, or they died of natural causes. “How is that? We haven’t had many run ins, only a few.”

My shoulders shrugged again. It seemed like the most appropriate response for many of his questions. “We’ve all become extremely talented at killing things. Sometimes better than we need to be.”

Harry cast a glance at me. “You’ve killed humans before too, haven’t you?”

Though I wasn’t sure why, I trusted him with the information. Harry struck me as someone like me, someone who was very brave and logical. He knew what it was like to lead and protect. “I have,” I admitted slowly, nodding my head. We turned to head back towards his home. “But Ashling doesn’t know that. Only Louis and I have that knowledge. It was a last minute decision. They wouldn’t come with us, but they had already seen us. We couldn’t risk them being caught and giving up information there were more humans.”

Surprisingly, he nodded, clearly in full agreement. At the time, Louis and I had run into a band of four humans, all boys. They were hard headed and very wary to trust us. We had suggested over and over for them to join us, but they were too flighty, too nervous. When they refused, saying a big group would get us caught, Louis and I knew what we had to do.

Killing the four of them had been no problem. Louis and I were trained in killing in silence. We had cut through them like paper. Afterwards, we had buried the bodies. We weren’t savages, and we didn’t want the bodies lying around to attract and ferals.

That thought made me think of something. “Where you live, it’s close to old subway tunnels, right?” He nodded at my question. My throat tightened. “And you’re not worried about the ferals that usually stay there? Almost every subway station we’ve ever come across holds signs of them living there.”
Harry was shaking his head before I could finish my sentence. “They never come as far as where we are, and we never go near them. They don’t know what it is on our end, but they know that there are triggers all through our tunnel that sends UV light bulbs on. They tried once.”

It was smart. I would give him that. But UV lights and the threat of traps would only hold them off for so long. Ferals would venture into the sunlight, if they were starving enough. And they were terrible in their own right, with claws and fangs that protruded from their lips.

“That’s a very unpleasant thought,” I murmured absently. “To know they’re close.”

For the first time since we had met, Harry gave me an actual grin. It looked beautiful on his face. “Don’t worry, the ferals won’t get you as long as I’m around.”

“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

“Somehow I knew it wouldn’t.”

Conversation came to a lull as we neared the building that was our own. We made care to cover our footsteps as we near the door way. My lips curved in a bit of a smirk when I noted how well Harry and I worked together. It was while I was smiling that I heard the click, so soft but sounding exactly like the click of a safety being taken off of a gun.

My body moved faster than I could have thought. Harry heard the sound too, because we both dove to the ground as a single gunshot rang out, soaring over our heads. It sounded like thunder echoing over the empty buildings, but I ignored it, rolling to my feet and pointing my gun where the sound came from.
It was obvious that the vampire who was standing in the shade had not expected us to dodge the bullet. I also noticed that he was obviously not from the city, for he had no black out suit on and was dressed in rags. A vampire turning feral, it seemed.

The vampire shot at us again but I was already moving, taking off around the corner of a building. He couldn’t move through the light. I heard Harry asked what I was doing, but I rounded the corner and went wide, circling another building. My legs pumped faster than most could run, so it didn’t take long for me to come around the back of the building the vamp was still firing at Harry from.

Without a second though, I came wheeling around the corner, gun raised. It took two shots, ringing loud and clear, the gun kicking slightly in my hands to take him out. He hit the ground, lifeless hand falling into the sun. The UV rays instantly set it into a burning pile of flesh, making me grimace as the smell hit my nose.

Harry trotted up then, looking from the dead vamp to me, his brows raised. He scratched the back of his neck and shook his head, laughing ruefully to himself. “I really thought you had left me to die.”

Staring at the corpse of the vampire, I shook my head. My heart was pounding, and I realized that for a moment, I actually had been scared that he would die. “No,” I said slowly. “I won’t let you die. Not if I can help it.”