1
The part-time convict, fulltime asshole, and sorry excuse for a father hung grievously over the tiny, newborn baby girl held lovingly in her mother's arms; a venomous glare hardly restrained his rage as the two lovely ladies slept exhausted in their hospital bed. The color of the baby's skin alone mocked that of his own paler flesh while the poisoned words of his other lover echoed through facets of animosity in his mind.
"You know she's not yours," she'd told him. "You can see the hidden deceit in her mother's eyes; feel the buried lies in her touch..." And flashes of that dishonesty rattled through his thoughts while the memory of her voice continued to fuel his anger. "Take this..."
He held the tiny vial of vibrant poison in his hands in the hospital room, its consistency excited by the wrath saturating his sweaty palms.
"Inject it into her IV; pour it into her water... Whatever method makes you happy. It's tasteless; untraceable. It doesn't even really exist." Her wicked smile poisoned his thoughts as she placed the vial in his hands to carry out an end to her means. "It'll paralyze her just long enough for me to come have one last chat with my beloved big sister...before I let you kill her." And he had asked her, "What about the baby?"
He unscrewed the top of the slender glass container while looming over his wife in the hospital room, extracting the paralyzing liquid with a syringe.
"Killing her now wouldn't further my cause. I can't take the blood of my victims before they've matured. A child's life is of no value to me," she had answered while caressing her own belly – no doubt a sarcastic gesture since, really, she felt nothing for his seed growing inside. "After you kill her, I'll only need the life of one other victim from my bloodline. Whether it's her child or mine...we'll just have to wait and see."
The clear liquid laced with vivid swirls of mystic-red slithered into the syringe as though it had an agenda of its own. He glanced behind him, inspecting the hallway through the room's window to be sure no one could see, then slyly pricked the plastic IV tube to covertly pollute his wife's stream, her veins swelling and stiffening with the venom gifted to him by the aunt of his eight-year-old boy.
The young child, Marty, left unattended in the hall, clutched at the tightening in his gut, feeling the betrayal of his mother being drugged in her sleep. He quit fiddling with his NHL action figure to peek back into the room at his father stewing over her and his new baby sister. The sight of his back to him – his hands concealed by his big body and square shoulders – was ominous; fiendish. Marty couldn't help but spin around, propping to his knees, and maneuver his head across the bottom of the window to find an angle that could uncover his father's plot.
He hadn't missed his father while he was gone. Him being locked away for a brief six months gave his mom her first taste of the freedom a life without him offered. And since he'd been back, the boy was just now getting old enough to realize how much happier she'd seemed when the lumbering blowhard wasn't around. He'd blatantly told her he wished his father would just leave, but she'd hushed him with a loving embrace and promised things wouldn't always be so bad.
His innocent, oak-brown eyes, striated with uncertainty, peered through the window into the dimly lit room, resentment coiling in his belly. He didn't know why, but he knew things would never be right between his mother and father, and that it'd be up to him to watch over the tiny baby girl, newly named Alexzandra. The thought of that responsibility turned his young stomach...but a more pressing sensation soon washed over him, diverting his thoughts and allowing him escape from his future woes—
A ghostly tingle electrified the air and buzzed through the hospital hallway, jumpstarting his pulse. Lights flickered and a static feedback hissed over the building's intercom that froze him in his seat; he didn't know if what he was feeling was real or just his imagination struggling to make sense of a headful of conflict. There was a presence seeping into the halls that he could sense but couldn't see – and that got closer with every deepening beat in his chest. The ground hummed under his feet, and the nurses and patients walking through the corridor were brushed aside as if by some invisible brute with no regard for order. The air then thickened to a stagnant soup that was hard for him to breathe – stale and stifling – and the walls broke into an anxious sweat...
His breaths shortened.
He dropped his toy and gripped the chair's armrests, grounding his shooting angst with fingers turning red and white. Reverb from some arcane source smothered his ears and squeezed at his heart as disorientation from the approach of something – or someone – he didn't know existed stabbed at his nerves. He tried swallowing the swollen egg in his throat to breathe...
Whatever it was that walked in plain sight without being seen was so close now he could almost feel the heat radiating from her fiery soul.
Cloaked between seams of human awareness, an unseen thing weaved her way through reality to reach her hand toward him. His eyes rattled in his head as he tried desperately to spot what he knew was there... And with only the mere threat of her approaching touch he was pushed from consciousness into a dream, arms and legs falling loosely over his perch.
This obscure mistress – rose-colored, flowing dress pressing like silk against her curves – retracted her hand from above the boy and brushed her full-bodied, black hair over her shoulder (the resemblance between her and the young mother in the hospital bed not a coincidence). Hand slithering toward the door handle, her touch erased the entire room from the perceptions of any who might pass.
Even though the boy, Marty, was out cold, swimming in a future that would haunt him, he could still sense what was happening now. It was almost as if his mother's awareness and his dreams were linked, and the amulet she'd given him, clinging to his neck and soul, glowed under his shirt with that connection as the aunt he never knew he had erased the door between them.
This young, brazenly arrogant woman – this silky, enigmatic phantom – strolled devilishly into the room and put her hand on her accomplice's shoulder, dismissing him from her sister's side. She was barely in her twenties, but her body language hinted at a much older soul that demanded his obedience. So he yielded to her touch and took a step back as she leaned over to lift the sleeping baby from her mother's tender arms.
Eyes shooting open at the absence of her child, her heart jumped against its cage when recognizing her younger sibling. And when she realized she couldn't move or even speak, those same eyes shrieked in knowing horror, and the young witch giggled at the unheard sound.
"Do you like the poison I cooked for you?" She knew her sister couldn't answer but asked anyway, just to tug at the loose threads scarcely holding together her composure. "It's the same one I used to paralyze our parents before I slit their throats." She pet the sleeping baby's head, caressing her soft cheek with her finger. "But you already knew that, didn't you. You've always known more than you've ever let on."
It was all the young mother could do to follow her sister's movements with her stare and hope she didn't have the temerity to hurt her child. The fact that she couldn't move would be infuriating if she wasn't so terrified for her baby's safety. She had always been immune to her sister's tricks in the past. How she'd gotten the best of her this night, she'd likely die without ever knowing.
"So...does that mean you know what I am?" She had a playfully curious twist to her brow. "And what this is?" Her eyes gestured toward the infant she cradled. "Hmmmm..." she smirked teasingly. "So many questions and so little incentive for me to really care." Her sarcasm was antagonizing. She enjoyed tormenting her older kin.
"You know...you were supposed to be my equal." A tsk escaped her tongue as she shook her head. "So disappointing."
Glancing to her coconspirator, she gave him the go-ahead-nod to kill, and the young mother's eyelids peeled back in her skull.
"After you're dead..."
As she spoke, he moved toward his victim with an insultingly apathetic stare, casually reaching for the pillow behind her head that would end her life.
"...there won't be anyone left alive to protect sweet little Alexzandra."
With wide eyes buried under deceit, the mother's lungs fought for life through the suffocating fabric while the red-dressed-terror continued to mock her. Their triumph was almost too easy. And, secretly, the murdering husband wished his cheating spouse had put up more of a fight.
"Have a sweet, sweet death, my dear sister." She smiled softly. "Don't worry. I'll keep an eye on our little princess for you." A chuckle bubbled from her throat like a burp at the thought of Marty lying unconscious in the hall. "I'm not sure how much hope I'd hold out for the boy, though," she warned, feigning a considerate tone.
Only seconds had passed after the mother's life was snuffed away when the newborn baby peeked open her pretty dark eyes to cry in her auntie's arms. She hushed the babe with a maternal bounce and gently set her in her mother's expired bosom, quietly wondering if the child's tiny weeps were the last thing her sister's dying mind had known...
Then she strut from the room the same way she came, unseen and unheard, deeply invigorated by the death that would bring her one step closer to her endgame. And as she left the room, she glanced back toward the young boy draped over the chair behind her, a strange sensation picking at the back of her mind.
The amulet the boy wore sat glowing under his shirt in a soft green hue but dimmed before she could glimpse its shine. His eyes fluttering beneath their lids, Marty twitched uncomfortably in his sleep – but nothing she saw gave the witch any reason to harbor a doubt. So she turned and left the hospital halls and the children's lives as evasively as she'd entered...until the time would come when it'd suit her to reappear.
2.
The entire hospital scene faded like a reflection in a pool as the undead, fully grown man named Marty began to recognize his surroundings. His dried skin hid behind long strands of hair curtaining a gritty visage, and his magically fulgent, gleaming green eyes regained their flare as he came to. He wasn't sure where he was at first...until the room took shape and a man's voice from a face he knew broke through his haze.
"Marty... You in there, boy?"
His environment grew more familiar with every second, and he realized he was in his coach's home, looking up at him and a few of his closest friends. He remembered he was dead – a towering corpse of a man – and that the world around him was no longer the one he remembered.
Digging through the freshly instilled, hospital memory, probing for some tangible understanding, he found another image overlying the entire experience: an image of the Spirit Fortress he'd seen in the center of the graveyard where he'd dug himself back into the world, but in a more solidified form than before, like hardened, structured flames burning in the distance. He saw two lengthy rows of undead US veterans with their bristling red eyes and muddied flesh outlining a path to the burning citadel. And Alex, his younger sister, being escorted to its forty-foot door by a demon beast of a creature with yellow eyes and a ferocious wolf-like snout...
"Marty, God damn it, are you with us?" His coach's aged face was one of strength, but the worry in his eyes was making itself known. "Marty! Come on back now, boy, we got work to do." He gave him a good shake before calling to him again. "...Marty!"
"Yeah, Coach... I hear you..." His response was soft but still boomed with the numinous strength of his bloodline.
"Where the hell'd you go, boy? You find some happy place in oblivion to run off to on us?"
"I... I don't know... I was..." The faint images of what he'd seen were still there in his mind, it just took a moment to realize they were more than just the fleeting frames of a dream. "Fuck..." He looked into his coach's eyes, still sifting through it all, finally beginning to make sense of it. "Fuck! ...She's...she's my aunt!"
"What? Who is?"
"The...the queen! The demon witch who's behind all this! She's my fucking aunt!" The glowing green in his stare grew hot and every muscle in his mammoth body tensed. "And...and...I think..." His large fists clinched at the thought of his endangered kin, his voice burning with enmity. "...I think the evil bitch has my sister..."