In Our Image: Bloodline

Chapter Two

Redemption High school, it was built here in southern Alabama a few years after the epidemic to honor humanity. A symbol of survival and the spirit that carried us to victory, most of us call it 'bleh,' while we just do our time. I felt bad for burning out on mom like that but even she has trouble feeding still. I call it feeding because that's what I see it as, sure we're not draining human bodies or animals like other sects out there do but it still seems... wrong. It is wrong who am I kidding; I bet the kids in this class will go home to a meal. Maybe it will be mashed potatoes or green beans, or chicken or some kind of casserole. Maybe they will go out, sit down at a restaurant and order from a menu and talk about the day or whatever.

Me... I'll go home with mom, sit across the living room from her and drink blood from Uncle Oliver's bitch goblet and pretend it's normal while she questions me of anything 'strange' at school. No mom, there are no black eyed demons in my high school. No... here, the weird one is me... just me. If not for Harkyn, I don't know that I'd make it; I mean sure people talk to me. I'm not a total outcast but it's all fakery, all for show. Truth is, in a hundred years all these students will be dead. They will go to college, have careers, have families, grow old and me... I won't.

I ask mom all the time why we do it, why do we pretend to be them when we are so very clearly not. I wanted to leave, to leave this home that holds so many memories of dad and Uncle Oliver. I wanted to go to Egypt with Dendera and her sect; at least there we'd be mostly amongst our own kind. Mom clings to this though and I can't understand why. Maybe she hopes dad will come back, maybe she does it because it's the last thing she has of him.

She once said that she wants me to experience both sides, so that I know what it is to be human and what it is to be us. In this way I would appreciate them and not only see them as food or weaker. This has been my seventeen years on earth so far, playing both sides of two worlds; two worlds where I don't really fit in either.

So Harkyn is my saving grace, my best friend just a tad younger than me. He is the son of Elie O'Leary, one of mom's most dear friends from the war. Elie is a witch of the Irish O'Leary coven. She moved here for us and for protection. After the epidemic everyone eventually had to return home to rebuild and regain control of their own lives, sects and clans.

Elie however became pregnant on returning to Ireland and meeting a young soldier from the epidemic. This of course shouldn't have been an issue except she gave birth to a male and when it comes to covens this is not always seen as a good thing.

While female witches of the O'Leary coven almost all carry the flame within them most males do not, but every so often a rarity occurs. A male born into a coven with the abilities of that coven are called warlocks and are usually killed at birth. Warlocks can become frighteningly powerful and the covens which are always a matriarchy do not like to lose control and will leave nothing to fate or chance. Abigail the oldest of the O'Leary sisters, who is now in control of the coven, was under immense pressure.

She was not about to kill her sister's first and only child and with it her nephew, but she also risked an uprising within the coven if she didn't. With that Elie fled to America and moved down the road from us in Alabama. It worked out great because mom had the company of a dear friend and well... I have Harkyn. Money really isn't an issue, Uncle Oliver's many years with day trading and stocks accumulated quite a fortune. He sold them when the chalice that mom and Dendera touched revealed the prophecy.

That combined with the gold, art and items he had accumulated over three hundred years meant at the very least financial security. He had left it all to dad who of course thankfully left it to mom. In the end, we'd never go without because Dendera would give us whatever we needed. Mom bought a coffee shop in town called Midnight Brew, which she runs with Elie.