Eyes of the Hunter.
-chapter one-
She dropped the heavy grey rock. Only this time, her second attempt did not look so weak or aimless. It landed directly on top of the harmless, delicate Blue-Jay bird, that was twitching in pain, half dead, before its cruel death. Its agonized tweets of increased agony ceased. I guessed it's heart would have no longer had room to beat its usual steady rhythm sandwiched between the icy ground and something easily six times it's own body mass.
I didn't realize till moments later that the bird was gone. I was stunned out of my shock as I felt the birds spirit flutter past me. I sunk lower onto my knees, and behind me, my little sister Lara cleaned her hands swiftly and put her woollen gloves back on. Mine lay still as the bird on the floor from when I'd taken them off in hasty preparation to heal the small bird.
"What did you do that for?" I spun around as I spat the words at Lara. "I could have easily used my powers to heal the leg!" A mental image flashed in my mind of just how unnatural the tiny birds' leg was twisted and deformed. For a second, I could have sworn I saw a gleam of scarlet shimmer over her hazel eyes. I blinked twice, but came to a short conclusion that the anger and frustration were becoming deluding.
"It's better off dead." She shrugged as the words rolled off her tongue. "Besides, this could have just happened again tomorrow, when you're not around to save it. You can't be a safety net all the time."
I decided I'd had enough and wanted to go home. I needed blood, and my mom stacked enough for a snack. Okay, so because I said blood, I'll make it clear that I'm not a vampire. I'm something that is apparently quite rare; I'm a wreller. I have extraordinary powers handed down through my parents. It's in my genes, and everything I can do so far is pretty awesome. I don't train my powers, they just come to me, depending what I want to use them for. Part of the powers that wrellers possess include the ability to wield all four of Earth's elements: earth, wind, fire and water.
However, I've only mastered the ability to do two.
The tales my parents tell me say that if you master only two, then you are destined to have a sibling who will master the other two, and together you are an invincible team against the evils that may come your way. But I can do all sorts, like heal living things and animate inanimate objects. That's just a few examples, but there's so much more, some unimaginable things that can happen with these powers. I experiment a lot when I come across something new. One thing I cannot do is fly though, or turn invisible. I'm not superman.
And then there's the condition. All wrellers must have blood in their system to keep their powers working properly. We eat food, like humans, but we only drink blood. I'm still learning about my race, because I've only ever met one other wreller so far, but I plan on meeting more. He explained a few things that I didn't quite understand about being a wreller, and some additional things to note. He explained how I can choose whether I live forever or die, I just have to go to the leader of the wrellers. There aren't any special ways to kill a wreller though, sadly, which is partly why our race is so rare. Our powers can use the blood quite quickly, depending on the power required to force out enough strength.
I've been drinking blood ever since I can remember. So has Lara. However, although we have blood tests to prove we are sisters, she does not possess any powers. My Dad says she could be a 'powerless wreller' if she has not specialized by the age of 13. I'm 14, and a few months if that needs to be counted. But Lara is 12, almost 13. Apparently I specialized in my powers at the young age of nine. So the question was obvious to all of us. Would Lara become a power-possessing wreller like me ?
That night I sat staring at my computer screen. The internet was being awkward and taking forever to load a page at a time. From the small bursts of information that my computer was showing me before freezing, I'd gathered my best friend Courtney was confessing to cheating on me with my boyfriend. She had also told me she was pretty drunk. She could hardly type as a result. I was heartbroken. I really liked him. I liked him so much I thought I might even… love him? I was so unsure. If this were a movie, I'd be crying and in tears, maybe even be in the arms of my mother by now, being consoled and comforted as I wept away tears of pain while my father swore he would show that boy a lesson.
But this wasn't a movie.
This was life.
And when life gives you lemons, you gotta make lemonade. But how could I make lemonade out of this? This situation felt like the most bitter lemon of all. But I felt no tears of pain. I felt no sadness. I felt nothing for a few minutes. I was absorbing it all in shock. Then a horrible pang struck me in the heart. My heart suddenly felt heavy, heavy like the rock Lara had used to crush the Blue-jay earlier on today.
"Leila? Could you come down here for a second please?" my father shouted from the living room. My pain was still there, still hurting and the feel of each heartbeat became dominant over every other sound and feeling in my body. I couldn't even hear the creaky stairs as I walked down them reluctantly, transfixed into a daze. I was barely aware that I had reached the living room until I walked in and glanced at my parents who looked nervous, my mother rocking backwards and forwards as my father paced in time to her movements. They were so in sync.
My sister's eyes flickered between our mother and father, each breath she took became more agitated.
"What's going on?" I broke the silence. The tension in the room hit me, and I forgot about the ache in my heart for the minute, the pain there, but I was only faintly aware of it. Everyone looked at me.
"You and your sister have to leave." My father said after a brief moment of hesitation. I was so confused as the words soaked into my brain.
"What?" I finally asked, breaking out of my daze so quickly that it shocked me when reality hit me. I saw my mother frantically dash to the kitchen and heard the shuffling of chairs. My dad walked over to one of his favourite antique cabinets that Lara and I were never allowed to touch or open because it was so precious.
"Be prepared for what you see now." My dad threw the comment over his shoulder like it was no big deal. Yet as he opened his cupboard, my heightened sight caught glimpses of a hallway. Lights flickered on inside, and it was no longer the large, old antique cupboard.
Instead it was a modern, neutral coloured hallway that curved off to the right. Bright fluorescent lights lit the way for as far as I could see before the curve cut off my view. Then I looked on the doors and the walls near where my father was standing, studying this mass collection of weapons that seemed to have lived in the cupboard for a while. But these where not the ordinary weapons that authorities like the army would use, there was a selection on crossbows filling the whole side of the left door, with a variety of sharp arrows, whilst on the other door, there were rows upon rows of chemicals of all different colours and sizes. On the inside, there were sharp swords with intricately patterned handles sitting patiently on the hooks in which they had been laid.
"Both of you come with me and I will explain everything in detail." My father hurried into the cupboard, and I started to wonder if he was going crazy and was trying to gain access to Narnia to visit Aslan.
Yet I still felt compelled to follow him.
-chapter two-
By the time I'd walked along the stretched corridor and down a few stairs, my Dad was just standing there with his hand pressed against his reflection in the shiny mirror that reached from floor to ceiling and was the length of the low ceiling to the white floor. The floor reminded me of the kind you get in hospitals: white, shiny, clean and artificial.
When I looked back up at my fathers face I saw him just staring into his own eyes, expression completely blank. An unusual clicking noise followed by a quiet electronic beep, and the sound of a door opening and letting out compressed air sounded. To my surprise, the mirror turned out to be a door, which my dad opened to reveal a large combination locker on a steel door.
"Stay there for a minute, and do not move." My dad didn't even look and us, but more or less twitched as he gave us the order over his shoulder. Witch each moment I tensed more and more and I felt the power of urgency build up in me.
The door opened before us and my dad stepped in.
I held my breath.
My dad stopped and turned to his right, where he found a white lab coat hanging ready. He turned to his left and found black tinted glasses ready and waiting upon the stand in which he seemed to have laid them from a previous time in which he may have come down here. And with my heightened senses I noticed the small black scuff mark on the bottom of the white lab coat, which intrigued me as my father was obviously not aware that something so white and pure was marked with a sign of mischievous impurity.
I was so fixated on this small black mark that I did not notice that my father had passed through what looked like a glass door, only to disappear…completely. I looked around frantically for my father only to find Lara standing about two feet behind me, with my mother at her side looking worried as she kept turning around and checking a small device in her hand.