Because nothing had happened at all the day I heard the voices outside of the garden Tessa decided it was okay if she left to go to work. I tried to stop her, but I knew we needed the money just as much, so I let her go. I was on high-alert as soon as she walked out the door, though, sitting right beside the thick bushes that divided our garden from the street so I could hear if anything bad happened.

I was just about to dose off in the pleasant sunlight for my afternoon nap when I got a strange feeling. It wasn't exactly pain or anything bad like that, but more like… loneliness. As if Tessa had gone somewhere without planning on coming back. I knew that was ridiculous and shrugged it off, settling in for my nap among the soft grass and delicate flowers Tessa had planted in the spring.

Tessa wasn't back yet. It was now nighttime, the stars out and the moon shining, but she still wasn't back. She had never been this late before ever. I tried my best to blow it off and ate a quick dinner by myself, but the nagging thought that something bad had happened to her wouldn't leave me alone. I wasn't able to sleep at all that night.

The next day when it turned out Tessa still wasn't back I began to panic. Something had happened to her. She was never this late before. She had always made absolutely sure to come home before too long because she knew how worried I could get. I couldn't take it anymore, so I threw on a hoody to hide my hair and my long pointy ears and left the house after forcing down some food, knowing Tessa wouldn't like it if I forgot to eat just for her. She was so parental.

I walked all over the city in a wild pattern, getting completely and utterly lost, but I never found a single thing that pointed to Tessa getting kidnapped. That just made me angry, though, because I knew something had happened to her. She wasn't home yet, for God's sake!

It was late and my feet were starting to drag a little bit, but I refused to give up. I was going to find my sister tonight if it was the last thing I did. I had to. Suddenly I was attacked out of nowhere and forced to the ground, someone shoving their knee between my shoulder-blades. "So you think you can get away with over ten cases of murder scot-free, hmm?" someone hissed in my ear, and a terrible pain exploded behind my eyeballs before I feinted.

When I came to my head was killing me. I opened my eyes and then immediately shut them again, the bright light too painful to stand. I took a moment to access my situation and didn't like it much, discovering I was hoisted up off the ground and chained to a wall, unable to move anything but my head.

"You awake yet, Demon?" someone asked, sounding as bored as I was panicked. I forced my eyes open a tiny bit and saw a gruff man with even gruffer hair staring up at me, his large shirt giving up in even trying to hide the huge mass of muscles that seemed to cover him all over. I almost decided to force myself unconscious again and act like I had never really woken up to begin with, but then a terrible burning pain blazed into being on my stomach and I howled, my teeth growing a bit as well as my nails. It was a defense-mechanism that made me more dangerous to whatever was bothering me, but since I was chained to the wall it didn't do much more than make me a little heavier and my mouth a little more full.

"What have you done with my sister?" I choked out through my tears, glaring down at the man with as much anger as I could muster through my pain.

"Don't talk to me like that, Demon." he scowled, and stabbed me in the stomach with the fiery thing again, making another howl in pain rip through my aching body.

"I just want my sister…" I whimpered, and something that almost looked like pity flashed across his flat features before the pain returned, almost worse than before if it was possible. My screams made my own ears ache, and they seemed to come from somewhere inside of me way beyond my lungs and raw throat. I knew it was a stupid idea, but I thought that maybe they were coming from my… Soul.

"Emma!" the last person I thought I would ever see again wailed, and the pain suddenly ended, leaving me limp and almost unconscious. I forced my eyes open again through the haze of pain, and saw Tessa struggling through a few ridiculously buff men to get to me, tears streaming down her face. She looked like she would kill to get to me, something that had never really crossed my mind before. Wasn't I supposed to be the overly-protective one, not her?

"EMMA!"

When I woke up I felt weak and tired, my head feeling like it was full of dust bunnies and mud. I coughed softly as I tried to clear my dry throat and mouth, forcing my eyes open as much as I possibly could without making myself go blind by the blazing light around me. When I decided that my throat was just going to have to deal with being dry for a while I turned my head to the side and looked over as passively as I could at the guy I had sensed in the room with me before I had even woken up all of the way. He just stared back at me for a while from where he was sitting across the relatively small room, and then he smiled and stood up.

"It's good to see that you are conscious again. I was beginning to wonder if you were going to die." he chuckled, not sounding at all like if my death would have bothered him in the least bit as he walked over to stand above my head. Now that he was close enough for my tired eyes to process him I noticed with a slight twinge of alarm that he was a Demon, his long pointy ears and slit eyes giving it away almost as much as his fangs and claw-like hands. He looked to be about my age, maybe 17, and he seemed to be made up of almost completely angles. His chin was sharp, his eyes were sharp, and his frame looked almost knife-like under the casual clothes he was wearing.

When he seemed to accept the fact that I had nothing to say to that he sighed and looked down at me thoughtfully for quite some time. I refused to be the first to look away first, though, my pride willing to kill me to stay strong even though I could feel the tight restraints on my wrists and ankles keeping me down. "What were you doing wandering that alley in the middle of the night, hmm? I know you haven't been the one killing all of those poor men." he asked me softly, and pulled up a nearby chair I hadn't seen and sat down right beside me so as to give me the illusion that we had some privacy.

"I was looking for Tessa." I answered, my voice heavy and tired just like I felt. Every part of me was close to vibrating with the desire to find Tessa and get the heck out of this place, wherever this was, but I knew struggling would get me nowhere. So I had to just suck it up and hope that I could talk my way out of the restraints and to Tessa before anyone else decided to try to kill either of us.

"Looking for Tessa…" he mused, leaning back in his chair a little bit. He looked me over slowly, from head to foot, and then he asked, "Why were you looking for her?"

"She didn't come home at dusk."

"And she usually does?"

"Tessa is never late. She is always home for dinner."

"But then she wasn't. So, what did you do?"

I closed my eyes briefly, trying to pull the memory of the previous night out of the sludge that was now my brain. "I waited. I thought she was just running a little late."

"But she wasn't. What made you realize that she wasn't going to be coming?"

"I felt a… loneliness. Like something was stopping her from coming." I answered, frowning a bit. I had no idea where the emotion had come from; just that it had not been pleasant and I had known that to end it all I had to do was find Tessa.

"So you went in search of her."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why?" I repeated, not quite understanding him. Why would I look for her? "She's my sister." I said, more force behind the words than I had expected.

Obviously more than he had been expecting, too, but he just covered up his surprise with a smile. "She's your sister. Something, something unbelievable and unnoticeable to the Human eye, ties you two together. Now, could you please explain that to me? Because obviously something must be amuck if you are a Demon and she is not." he smiled pleasantly, raising one of his blonde eyebrows slightly, making it almost disappear into the blonde mess that was his hair.

"Twins. We are twins. I don't know how it worked, and I don't care. I want to see my sister now. Unbind me." I snapped, and the smile fell away from his face as if I had just crushed his pet under my shoe.

"Twins are impossible, you know. Well, not dead, anyway. There are always dead twins showing up all over. It's because either one or both always die that makes them so common. Only one child is supposed to survive birth. Never two." he said slowly, as if this was all new to me. And then he leaned in very close to my face, his bright emerald eyes almost swallowing me whole, and whispered, "So, please help me help these poor Humans understand how a pair of twins could be born with both surviving? And somehow neither of them wants to kill the other one? It's not supposed to be possible, darling, and yet here you are. The perfect opposite half to the Miss Tessa. The dark to her light."

"I don't know anything. Do I look like a scientist or a doctor to you?" I said, almost shouting. Why on Earth would he think I would know the answers to such ridiculous questions? He was crazy!

"No, you look like a girl who has had more trouble than you would care to think about. How's your stomach, by the way? I heard it had gotten an awful burning before your darling sister could interrupt." he said, peering down at my torso as if he wanted to lift the shirt I was wearing to see for himself.

"It's not hurting anymore, thank you very much. Now, do you think you could release my arms and legs, please?" I asked, forcing myself to calm back down and think logically. There was no point in getting mad at him. It's not like he had done anything to be to begin with.

"Oh, sure. You seem calm enough not to try to kill anyone." he nodded, and reached over and started to unbind me.

"The sidewalk by the garden. That's where I remember your voice." I commented while he worked, finally pinpointing where I was sure I had heard his familiar lilt before.

"So that was you who seemed so keen to eavesdrop on me and a friend of mine?" he smiled down at me, now working on my wrists now that my ankles were free.

"I wasn't eavesdropping. You were just talking too loudly." I stated calmly, and he chuckled, his soft breath tickling my cheeks. It smelled like soft mint, strangely comforting and familiar. I had no idea where I had smelled something like that before, though, and decided it was probably just my mind acting up a bit.

"Mr. Vesperus, do you think it's very wise to unbind her? She is still considered a threat to the safety of everyone in this building." a low male voice stated, coming from a speaker on the wall across the room. It scared me nearly to death when it first started making a sound at all, but then I just got slightly annoyed by it.

"So that's why they sent you in here with me." I whispered to the guy they had to be speaking to who had just finished removing the locks keeping me trapped to the thin bed-like thing I was on, sitting up.

He laughed, unable to hold it in, and put his hands over his mouth, trying to muffle it a bit and failing. "Yes, I suppose you're right. Being a Demon myself makes me the one person they wouldn't be upset about losing if it turned out you really are dangerous." he sighed once he managed to get control of himself again, wiping a tear from his eye.

"If you're a Demon and I'm a Demon, how come I'm considered to be impossible to be alive and you're fine?" I asked, frowning as I crossed my arms over my chest.

"Well," he sighed, sitting lightly on the bed-thing beside me, "I came from Hell to begin with, like all of the other Demons, so I'm pretty average. You, on the other hand, are not from Hell. Well, not really. Every unborn child has a Demonic side and an Angelic side, but they can't survive being born unless one of the sides surrenders to the other side. The born child then contains the mixture of both, the dominant features being that of whatever side had won. So the fact that both you and Miss Tessa survived birth together and had since then not tried to harm each other like what is considered the normal thing for any Angel and Demon to do, you're considered abnormal. Strange and extremely unnatural, but not exactly so that the Humans feel the need to kill you. Your sister has already threatened to kill herself if they continued to hurt you, and she is considered extremely valuable to them because of that special little talent of hers." he explained, and shrugged towards the speaker. "You know, your sister is a lot stronger than you take her for. She's a fighter for sure. Especially when it comes to you." he told me softly after a while, and the tears started streaming down my face.

He seemed extremely startled and bothered by this, because he jumped up to his feet and moved so he was standing right in front of me, his face mere inches from mine. "What's wrong? Demons aren't supposed to cry, especially when they aren't hurt." he asked me worriedly, leaning even closer. His minty scent was almost overwhelming with him so close.

"Can I just see my sister? Please?" I asked shakily, setting both of my hands on his chest, and pushed him back a bit so I could breathe.

"Sure. I'll get her right away." he nodded soberly, and blurred towards the only door that decorated the small bland room, going through it so fast I wasn't even sure it opened. I knew I had never gone that fast before, not intentionally at least, so it was a little shocking.

He was back just in time to keep me from beginning to feel crept out by the speaker that seemed like it was staring a hole into my forehead, Tessa right on his heels. He barely had enough time to move to the side before she rushed at me, wrapping me up in a hug so tight my ribs complained. I winced into her hair and hugged her back, being careful to be gentler than her. "Oh, Emma…" she sobbed, and I sniffled uncontrollably as I tried to bury my emotions away like I usually did. She suddenly pulled back from me and looked me square in the eyes; a blazing fire seemed to shriek from them. "I want to kill them." she whispered, suddenly hugging me again. Only this time she was shaking silently, her fear stronger than her relief.

"No, you don't." I whispered back, smiling weakly. We both knew she could never wish harm on anyone. That was my job as the Dark Twin.

"If you did, though, I wouldn't try to stop you. Seriously." she said, pulling back again and looking so innocent I almost laughed.

"You're okay?" I asked, releasing her so I could cup her face in my hands. Her skin was as soft as silk beneath my touch, and the gentle scent of her being rubbed off a bit at the touch, reminding me of home.

"I'm fine." she nodded, putting her hands over mine. And then she smiled, her eyes softening until they dissolved my prior worries into a mush that settled on the bottom of my chest. "I really didn't mean to worry you, Emma. I had planned to come home right before dinner, especially since you had seemed so bothered recently, but I was really needed here and you know I couldn't have just left hurt men lying in their pain if I could help it. And then they said I couldn't go home because a Demon was discovered around the house and no one would listen to me when I tried to explain to them that you've never even considered killing anyone! Except for Michael and Vesperus, of course. They believed me right away." she explained quickly, her words sounding almost breathless.

"We did, actually. Miss Tessa doesn't seem to be the one to lie about something like that." the blonde Demon pointed out, reminding me not so subtly that he was still there. "And please, just call me Ves."

"I personally like Vee, but Michael said I shouldn't call him that since he personally saved that nickname for you." she whispered in my ear, making me flush and scowl at the Demon who scowled back but ended up grinning. I had to look away in order to keep from smiling myself.

"Here you guys are! When you just bolted I figured something had happened." a stranger sighed, coming into the room. It was a guy around Ves' age, his hair a light brown and short. His voice was extremely familiar, and it only took me a moment to remember where. He was the one who had been talking to Ves outside of the garden that morning a few days before. When he saw me and Tessa embraced in a tight hug he stopped and looked silently for a few seconds before smiling and chuckling weakly. "Man, the resemblance is kind of creepy."

So... Chapter 2 is done. I'm starting to really warm up to this idea for a story, so expect more chapters in the very near future, because I'm 90% sure they'll be coming by the end of the week, when Winter Break starts for me. When that comes, I give you my full permission to complain as loud as you want if I leave this story hanging for a few days. Even though I like to consider myself a busy girl, I'll still have time to continue this story if you want me to. Reviews of any kind are appreciated.