After Lillian died, Father spent the rest of his life living in the past. He was so dangerously engrossed in getting some sort of peace by killing all and every monster in his vicinity that he forgot about us. He was so busy playing God that he neglected his own children. In a way, Dean and I are like kindred spirits, with the absent fathers. But I never had it in my heart to hold Dad responsible for the way we were raised. After experiencing the horrors that I have, I can irrefutably conclude that ignorance might be bliss, but, it is likely to get you killed, in the most gruesome of manners. I'd much rather take the upbringing of a warrior that Aidan and I had, than choose to live a vulnerable apple-pie life. Dad did his bit, by teaching us to be afraid of the dark, because unimaginable evils lurk where your eyes don't see. But, I really wish, in rare moments of reminiscence and regret that he took us to a baseball game once in a while, or was there long enough for us to share what we did in school that day. He was always, always away on hunting trips. Dad, to us, was a scarce presence in our lives and in his best moments, he was only slightly tipsy.
Aidan raised me. Although older than me by only 5 years, Aidan assumed the responsibility of being my guardian and my protector. While Dad was tirelessly obliterating a significant monster population, it was with Aidan that I killed my first mockingbird and shared my first celebratory beer. It was Aidan who taught me to hotwire a car, any car whatsoever, and clicking all sorts of locks with paperclips and credit cards. He taught me how to hustle at pool and cheat in poker games. We played poker every night for a month till I was giving Aidan a run for his money, literally. Aidan drilled in me the importance and basics of research, and call it Aidan's paranoia or his chronic need to keep me safe, I started carrying salt and holy water in my back pack since I was 8.
I had it easy, because I had Aidan. Aidan had no one but his drunk, ignorant father to look after him and teach him the ropes of the game.
Aidan was a very sincere, dedicated student who paid attention in class and learned everything that was taught. Even after a physically draining training session, he would pour over whatever big, fat Latin books he borrowed (read, stole) and with his characteristic steadfast tenacity, attempt to memorize all the nuances of the dead language.
It was with him that I went on my first hunt – a Wendigo in Pine Island, Minnesota. I saved a little redheaded girl with a sweet bucktoothed smile that day. I was never prouder of myself. I also experienced my first failure on a hunt with Aidan. We were hot on the trail of a lone werewolf when a woman was caught in the fray and got bitten. We did what was right. We had to kill her before she could change. I cried that day.
We used to have a 'gourmet' dinner every day – a packet of chips as the hors d'eoeuvre, greasy beef hamburgers with a side serving of oily, deep fried French fries, and if we were feeling particularly extravagant, we'd share a bar of chocolate as dessert and a bottle of cheap beer to wash it down.
But, then that bastard died on me.
Dad, Aidan and I were on a hunt for a vampire who had gone rogue and was carelessly leaving behind a bloody trail of bodies. But, things went horribly wrong. We walked right into an elaborate trap laid by the vampire who caught wind of us following her.
We were knocked unconscious by a blunt force to the back of our heads. In spite of my brain shrieking a refrain, "You cannot pass out now, damn it! Don't pass out now", my mind succumbed to darkness. When I woke up, I found myself bound to wooden posts in a dungeon, dimly-lit by fluorescent light bulbs. I looked around to see, much to my dismay, my brother and father in various states of unconsciousness.
Right before my eyes, the vampire drained Aidan to the last drop. I remember the silent gaze of his glassy eye, inert, unmoving, lifeless; a washed out imitation without the spark.
My father did not experience a quick, merciful and kind death. I watched with a clinical curiosity as the killer sunk its ravenous teeth into my father's carotid and drained him. Dinner was interrupted, though, when a man stormed in with a stake. The way blood was spurting out from the matching holes in my father's neck arrested all my attention and I kept observing the redness of blood painting an abstract picture on the canvas of the floor. Meanwhile, a brief tussle between the man and the vampire was going on. It ended with the beheading of the creature. It laid in a pool of its own dirty blood, as the stranger untied my hands and set me free.
I would never be free though. Free of the memory of my family dying in front of my very own eyes.
I think I heard the man ask if I was okay. I did not reply. I just sat there and stared and stared at my father's corpse, as if it would disappear if I looked away for a second. Maybe it was masochism, or maybe, I just wanted all that to be a nightmare I could wake up from, in the familiarity of my bedroom, and go downstairs to see my father passed out on the couch. My brother would be sleeping peacefully in his room, with the door ajar. The barrel of his favorite .357 Magnum would peek out innocuously from below his pillow.
My brother had fallen over his side. He could be asleep now. I knew better because the lackluster gaze of his dead eyes reminded me that I was an orphan, again.
AUTHOR'S NOTE : We have used our literary license and changed the physiology of a vampire. They have two sets of retractable fangs, like the more traditional vampires.