This article is a part of Spooktober 2024 and is still a work in progress.
Written for the Depths prompt.
Flashback _ 2003-2004
When his little sister Rebecca had disappeared from her crib just after her first birthday, Devlin Neru had felt like he had been driven into the depths of madness. She had been a surprise to his parents, a new child in their late-thirties/early-forties when they already had a son that was practically an adult, and he had fallen in love with her the moment he had seen her. He had been delighted to stay up nights with her to help his parents sleep, often forgoing his own comfort to make sure that she had hers. If it hadn't been known that Sarah and Tomas Neru had had a daughter, people in the clan would have thought she was his.
And then she was gone.
They searched for a year for any signs of who could have taken her. Devlin had torn the house apart and run himself ragged hunting down and interrogating every vampire he could find in a hundred mile radius at the time. His parents had searched but...after a year they stopped. They just...went back to their lives.
That should have been his second warning.
Wheezing and choking on blood and what he was fairly certain was a broken tooth, Devlin dragged himself into his best friend's bathroom while she scrambled to find her first aid kit in her apartment. He blinked blearily at his reflection in the mirror and barely recognized himself through the blood and already purpling bruises covering his face. Blond hair hanging in matted, bloody tangles. Eyes with so many blood vessels shattered from the punches that had blackened both eyes that the blue of them was stained red. Leaning heavily on the counter, he spat the broken tooth and blood into the old porcelain sink.
His best friend, Colleen Sangel, came into the bathroom and sat her massive first aid kit down on the top of the toilet seat. As she snapped it open and started digging for things, she asked in rapid, angry German, "
Who do I have to kill?"
Devlin choked on a bitter laugh and replied in English, "You
don't, Col."
"
Dev, don't give me that macho fucking bullshit," she spat and then stopped when he held up a blood-streaked hand to stop her. After a moment, Colleen huffed and took hold of his hand, beginning to wipe off the blood with an alcohol swab that she dug out of the kit. "Talk to me, shithead," she hissed under her breath, switching to English as well. "I know I'm not supposed to know clan politics and all of that shit but it's too late for all that now. So what happened?"
"My uncle and grandfather," he replied, face twitching as she ran the swab over a barely closed laceration on the back of his hand. As it started to bleed again, Devlin looked at her and said, "They...
fuck, Colleen, they took her. They
took her and they made her a
monster."
"Took who? Dev, you aren't making sense."
"
Becca."
Colleen's eyes went wide at that and she gasped, "You...you're not joking?"
"God, I wish I were," he growled. "I kept looking after everyone else stopped, you know I did. Kept digging. And one day someone idly commented on how Uncle Wictor and Grandfather were always disappearing, so I started following them. They...they were slipping away from the village and off to an old bunker. You know, one of those damned ones from World War II."
"The one us and all the others kept daring each other to go into when we were kids but no one ever had the balls to? Miles outside of the village?"
"That one," he confirmed, surprised she had remembered it. Colleen's family had moved away when she was eleven, finding the village strange - and it was for one of the few families that wasn't connected to the clan of hunters that made up most of the occupants - and they had reconnected when Devlin had moved to Berlin for college. Devlin then turned his head to spit more blood into the sink before continuing, "They turned it into a training center, all focused on one thing: making a perfect hunter. And she was there, all of seven."
He remembered the cold way that she had looked at him. The dispassionate way that she had spoken about killing. About hunting.
"Give me your other hand," Colleen urged and Devlin did automatically. He then coughed and continued talking.
"She was cold, Col, so cold," he said, eyes staring off into nothing as he spoke, seeing that tiny face again. "She asked me how I would kill a mortal protecting a vampire. And then explained to me how she would do it when my answer didn't satisfy her."
Colleen blinked and then asked, "And you're certain it was her?"
Nodding, he replied quietly, "She had the same birthmark on her arm, almost like a star. It's why I always called her
kleiner stern. And she had Mom's eyes. Uncle Wictor also confirmed it was her when he told me that I didn't have a sister anymore."
"Shit." His best friend then tossed the alcohol swabs into the trash and grabbed the first aid kit, pointing at the toilet set. "Here, sit down and let me clean up your face as much as I can. You've got a gash across your nose that needs some butterfly bandages too."
Devlin sat with a huff and closed his eyes as he let her work, occassionally hissing at the sting of alcohol in the cuts. As she was dabbing at the gash across his nose - a gift from his uncle and a spiked knuckleduster - Colleen asked quietly, "What are you going to do?"
"I
can't," he replied, voice cracking. "Robert Neru himself signed off on it. I saw his signature. The
clan agreed to let them do that to her.
Our parents agreed to it, Col. They let them take her.
They let them." And suddenly everything that had been holding him together to drag himself out of the brush he had been dumped into by his uncle and drive, shaking and half-blind, the hour or so from the village to Berlin slipped from his grasp. Devlin inhaled shakily and the first sob came, rattling his bruised ribs. Then Colleen's arms were around his shoulders and he wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face into her shirt and sobbing.
She didn't try to stop him. Colleen just ran her fingers through his hair and hummed what sounded like Rammstein songs until he slumped against her, spent and empty of...everything.
Her fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck and then she whispered, "You can stay here as long as you need, Dev." Then she pushed him gently away and said, "Let me finish cleaning up your face and then we'll get you into bed, okay?"
"Okay," he breathed and just let his body follow her gentle commands, his mind adrift. Devlin mechanically rose when she was done in the bathroom and put on the clothes she gave him that her last boyfriend had left behind - they were too short for his over six foot frame and left skin showing. When she tucked him into her own bed, he grabbed her wrist and softly asked, "Stay."
As Colleen slid into the bed next to him, Devlin reached for her hand and entwined their fingers together before leaning his head against hers. "I don't know what to do," he whispered. "I hate them but...they're my
family."
"Shh," she hushed him, kissing his forehead. "We can worry about that tomorrow."
"We?"
"I'm not leaving my best friend alone to deal with this shit." Then she squeezed his hand and said, "And, if worse comes to worse, I'll be your family, Dev. Always thought of you as my annoying big brother."
Devlin squeezed her hand back tightly and smiled as tears ran down his face. "I always did want an annoying little sister," he said before the sobs came back with a vengeance, dragging him back into the depths of what felt like a gaping hole in his chest. And Colleen pulled him into her arms without hesitation, as if she could protect him from the pain that had thrust itself into his life.
Flashback _ 2004
"I always wanted a little sister," Devlin said with a smile as Rebecca stood up in her crib, grinning up at him with that gaping smile that children had. He bent down and scooped her up, cuddling her in his arms, before he thumbed her nose to make her giggle. "So, don't you worry, little star," he continued, "I'm going to always be there to look out for you."
As he turned around, he found their parents watching them from the doorway and gasped theatrically. "Oh, look, there's Mom and Dad!" he exclaimed as he lifted one of her hands to wave it. "You have to say hello when people show up, Becca! Like this." She giggled in a high pitched tone and began waving in wide sweeps, hitting him in the face several times but he didn't care.
He noticed that their parents looked sort of sad while watching them but didn't chalk it up to more than losing sleep from having a toddler around.
That should have been his first warning.
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