|
Eli grew up on a ranch in Montana. He had heard about Incursions, Breaches, and the Titans that came through those breaches to slaughter some people and capture others. To him though, it had always been something that happened far away to other people. His life was forever changed though when a Breach opened near his home, everything he knew was destroyed or taken, and he ended up Altered.
Chapter 19: Ainslee Amethyst |
Author's Note: Here's chapter 19 of Altered. It's an extra-long chapter from a different PoV. As always, a big thanks to my readers and Big Closet for your continued support. ~Amethyst.
Chapter 19: Ainslee
Ainslee Mackenzie smiled at her reflection in the mirror on her vanity. There, she was freshly showered, and her makeup was done about as well as she could get it. The lessons that her younger sisters had been giving her were really paying off. Now she was as beautiful as she could make herself, which should hopefully satisfy her compulsion for the night. She was also wearing a beautiful green dress that showed off her slim waist, wide and soft hips, and an ample amount of her generous cleavage, yet had a long enough hem to hide her hooves.
It had been a little over three years now, but finally, she was starting to recognize, and perhaps even like, the beautiful girl being reflected back at her in the mirror. Intense, green eyes with slit pupils gazed back at her, set in a pale face with splashes of freckles adorning her cheeks. Delicate eyebrows arched above those bright green eyes, the same bright red as the hair that hid her pointed ears and cascaded over her shoulders and down her back past her plump and tempting butt. Her nose was slender and proud, and her lips were plump, pouty, and shaped in a cupid’s bow.
It was warm enough outside still that she wouldn’t need a jacket, at least not where she was going, so she put on her comm ring, slung her purse over her shoulder, and left her bedroom to be on her way. Hunger was gnawing at her, and she still wasn’t very comfortable with feeding, so she would rather get this over with so she could get back to living a somewhat normal life for another week. She had just made it to the bottom of the stairs, and was heading for the front door, when her sister’s musical voice called out, “Ainslee, wait! I just got the most amazing news!”
She turned to look at her very damp sister, who had most likely just gotten out of the pool. Not that that was a surprise, seeing as the twins were both Mermaids now and liked to keep their skin and tails damp, especially when it was hot out like it had been lately. They needed to spend at least eight hours a day in the water, usually using that time for sleeping, but they needed to shift their legs back to tails and get them and their skin wet every so often as well. That was the reason why Mom had bought a house with an indoor pool and let the twins use the poolroom as their bedroom, so they could swim or just take a quick dip whenever they felt the need.
The twins were still very much identical, making it difficult for most people to tell them apart, but she knew that the twin who had just called for her attention was Sammie. Not only was it Selina’s turn to help Mom in the shop today, but Sammie had very faint flecks of green in her amber eyes that Selina didn’t. It took a trained eye to notice them, but such was the benefit of being both their sister and a Fae with sharp vision.
“What’s up, Sammie?” she asked, curious about this ‘amazing news’ despite her desire to go and get her feeding done for the week.
“You are never going to believe who popped into the store just now!” Unwilling to play guessing games, Ainslee motioned with her hand for Sammie to get on with it and her kid sister needed very little prompting and excitedly squealed, “Kelly Pierce!”
Ainslee’s eyes went wide and if her jaw had dropped any further, it would have likely hit the floor. “What?! How?!” Then she rapidly shook her head and protested, “No, that can’t be… I saw her that night. I saw the Titans take her through the Breach…”
Thursday, April 22, 2038
4:07 a.m.
Aiden couldn’t sleep. His thoughts kept drifting back to earlier today and what he had unintentionally learned, and every time that he thought about it, it was like someone had thrust a massive icicle into his chest and pierced his heart. Every time his mind drifted back to that moment, he felt like curling up into a tiny little ball, bereft of hope.
It all began during the activities meetup. All the kids in and around Boulder Creek did their schooling online, it was just easier that way, but since the school district felt that they still needed physical activity and socialization, there were activities meetups twice a week for the high school kids and three times a week for the younger children. Today, the high school meetup was at the local swimming pool for an afternoon of free swimming, something that Aiden had been looking forward to all week.
Why wouldn’t he be looking forward to it? It was a chance to see Kelly in a bathing suit after all. Kelly was one of the kids that lived on the big cattle ranch next door. Aiden and his little sisters had practically grown up with Kelly and her younger brother Eli and while Eli was probably Aiden’s best friend in the world, Kelly was complicated.
At first, she was just a very good friend, like Eli was, but now… every time he saw her his heart would skip a beat and lodge in his throat. He had it bad for her. She was pretty, smart, and fun to be around, but every time that he tried to talk to her lately, to ask her on a date or tell her how he felt, the words just kept tripping over his suddenly errant tongue. So, he remained quiet for now and looked forward to times like at the pool.
Kelly had not disappointed, wearing a black two-piece that made him have to stay in the water to hide the reaction in his trunks the moment that he saw her come out of the girls’ changing rooms. It was while he was quietly watching her that he noticed it. She was watching some of the other girls batting a beach ball around in the pool and when that new girl in town, he thought her name was Allie or something, broke the surface of the water at the shallow end and stood there for a moment in a skimpy two-piece bikini shaking out her long blonde hair, Kelly stood there utterly transfixed.
That wasn’t the kind of look that girls normally give other girls. She was looking at Allie like he knew he was looking at her. And just like that, any hope that he harbored that they could ever be more than friends was shattered. She was gay, very gay going by the expression on her face as she watched the other girl, and that meant that he had no chance with her.
Aiden let out a long sigh as the memory once again played through his mind. He needed a distraction, something to help him sleep. Trying not to think about Kelly, he activated the holographic screen on his comm ring and started looking for a movie to watch, eventually settling upon Titanic. It seemed appropriate now that his hopes were sunk as surely as if they too had hit an iceberg. It wasn’t that sappy romance movie either, but rather the more recent historical recreation.
He didn’t get more than a few minutes into the movie before the hologram suddenly vanished, leaving him in the darkness of his room. Somehow it felt darker than before, a suffocating void from which there was no escape. He tried reactivating his comm ring in torch mode, but nothing happened, it was like the damn thing was dead. Damn. The stupid piece of shit was supposed to be guaranteed to work for at least a decade of normal use.
He tapped the bedside lamp, but that was dead too. Fuck, that wasn’t good. Was it some kind of power outage? Those happened sometimes since Boulder Creek wasn’t exactly a thriving metropolis and the infrastructure was pretty old, but that shouldn’t affect his ring. Just great. Now he was stuck in the dark and couldn’t sleep, and his only company was those little flashes of light in the window… Wait. Flashes of light? A sense of dread started to well up inside his chest.
Aiden carefully got out of his bed, making his way cautiously through his messy room toward the window to look outside. There, out in the yard and less than thirty feet away from the house, little arcs of blue-white electricity snaked through the air to hit anything nearby that was made of metal, and at the center of it all, there was this little circle of light, the source of the flashes of electricity, a circle that was slowly getting bigger.
He had learned about this in school, plenty of people around the world (almost all of them Altered) had seen it up close before even if nobody had ever managed to successfully film the phenomenon. That was the beginning of a Breach forming, and those flashes… the electromagnetic surges had probably already fried everything in a fifty-yard radius, including his comm ring and everything else electronic in the house. Shit, he needed to wake everyone else up and get the hell out of here before that Breach fully formed, and from how fast that circle of light was growing, he probably didn’t have much time.
Racing toward the door of his room, guided by the brief flashes of light, Aiden managed to make it out without tripping on anything and immediately ran down the hall to start pounding on his parents’ bedroom door. “Mom! Dad! Wake up!”
Aiden counted the seconds as he pounded on the door, and far too many passed for his comfort before the door opened and his father’s drowsy face, just barely visible in the darkened house, showed itself. “Aiden, do you know what time it is?” his father asked blearily as he looked down at his watch, which was as dead as Aiden’s comm ring.
Not wanting to waste any time, Aiden hurriedly hissed, “Wake Mom up, we need to get out of here! I… I think there’s a Breach forming outside, in the front yard. EM surges knocked my comm ring out, and probably everything else in the house too!”
His father was suddenly very awake. “Go wake the twins and head for the back door,” he instructed, and Aiden didn’t even waste time responding before crossing the hall and throwing the door open to his sisters’ room. Maybe, if they hurried, they could make it to the cover of the trees out back before the Breach was fully formed.
“Sammie, wake up,” he hissed, almost afraid to make a sound as he shook his sister as if it might cause the Breach to form fully and draw the Titans toward them. Only once she was sleepily sitting up in her bed and asking what was going on did he go to wake Selina as well. “C’mon, Selina, wake up! We need to go!”
Selina tiredly protested but he managed to wake her as well. “What’s wrong, Aiden? It’s still dark out and…”
“We need to go, right now. No time to grab anything, we need to go to the back door and run for the woods,” he told the girls as he all but pulled Selina out of her bed. He could hear his father and mother talking in hushed tones as he ushered the girls into the hallway and called out quietly, “I’ve got the twins, we’re going.”
The telltale sound of a shotgun being pumped and primed sounded out from his parents’ bedroom and his father said, “Go! We’ll be right behind you!”
Aiden hurried down the stairs and toward the back door, keeping his sisters’ hands held tightly in his own as he pulled them along quietly. He was half afraid to tell them what was going on, worried that they might panic. They had just made it to the back door, and he was opening it and pushing his sisters through when the noise started. A high-pitched whining keen that almost brought him to his knees from the pain in his ears that promptly accompanied it. He could see one last flash of bright blue-white light in the night sky before it stabilized, shrouding the entire backyard in the shadows of the house.
The Breach was open. On the heels of that realization came the thumping of gargantuan footsteps. He practically shoved his sisters ahead, whisper-shouting to them, “Run!” Their hands held tightly in his, he made a run for the small, wooded area behind their home, glancing behind him as he ran, half-dragging his sisters into the night.
The blast of a shotgun firing rang through the night air like a violent bell, announcing the arrival of the Titans, and possibly their doom. Behind him, Aiden could see his mother through the back door when the darkness erupted with violent violet-white light, exploding through the front end of the house even as the rest collapsed atop his mother. She didn’t even make it out the door. “Mom!”
Over the fallen wreckage of their home, Aiden could see a constant stream of metal behemoths pouring out from the tear in space-time and moving out in all directions, including several that were heading straight toward him and his sisters. Did his call for his mother get their attention? Or were they just spreading out? Either way, they were heading right for them and even though he hadn’t stopped running, Aiden wasn’t sure that they would make it to the cover of the trees in time. The Titans’ feet shook the ground, and with each step, the tremors shook him more as terror clawed at his chest.
A pair of Titans stopped, and he pushed his sisters onward as a red beam of light swept over the trio, followed by another as whatever sensors were built into their heads looked them over. Then, as quickly as the Titans had looked them over, they looked away, seemingly ignoring the trio as they marched off into the night in search of other prey. Aiden’s knees gave out and he knelt there, arms wrapping his crying sisters in a protective embrace as Titan after Titan continued to pass them by as if they weren’t even there.
And then they were gone, moving off into the distance and leaving Aiden alone, still clutching his sobbing sisters to his chest as his heart raced within it. “B-back to the house,” he said, his hands trembling and legs shaking as he pulled the twins back to their feet. “M-Mom got buried when the back of the house collapsed. I gotta find her.”
He led the girls back to the remains of their home, where he had them hide in the old root cellar under the house. He wanted them out of sight when the Titans returned to the Breach, just in case, and while the cellar had mostly collapsed, the cellar doors were still accessible and there was just enough room for the girls to hide in there if they didn’t mind getting very close. Aiden kept calling his mother and sifting through the wreckage of their home, eyes constantly scanning the darkness for danger until the first wave of Titans returned.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but it felt like far too little, and he hadn’t found any traces of either of his parents yet. The first wave to return came from the direction of the Pierces’ ranch and he kept low, trying to stay out of sight until all the Titans were through and the Breach closed again. He could see people slumped and unconscious in the colossal fists of the metal giants and one young woman, fighting and screaming against her captor. Aiden recognized that voice and, even in the dark, he recognized that face, distorted in pain and fear though it was. It was Kelly.
He half-ran toward her, screaming her name, only to freeze when the barrel of a weapon swung toward him, humming dangerously and glowing violet with the promise of death. His stop had been instinctual, and he scrambled backward in terror, away from the weapon, only to see it swing away once more as the Titan made its way toward and into the Breach with Kelly still in its grasp as Aiden collapsed to the ground in a heap.
Just like that day, over three years ago, Ainslee’s knees threatened to buckle as the memories burned through her mind. She, or rather he, had stayed there, stiff and frozen with fear until the last Titan passed through the Breach and it closed, and then he tried to focus on anything else. He was still trying to find his parents in the wreckage of their former home when the Vanguard showed up.
Their father was dead, but their mom had lived, though she spent several weeks in the hospital here in Amethyst Harbour after the Incursion, recovering from surgery and the injuries she had sustained. During that time, Aiden and the twins had started to change, the twins into Mermaids and her into a type of Fae that the doctors called a Baobhan Sith, a creature from Scottish folklore. Their whole lives had changed since then, but there was one lesson that Ainslee had taken to heart in the aftermath of the Incursion. She never wanted to let fear stop her from helping those she cared about ever again.
“A… are you sure it’s her? How is that possible?” she asked her sister, her voice tremulous.
“Yeah, I looked through Sil’s eyes, it was her, though she’s some sort of white fox girl now,” Sammie insisted. “Mom seems to think it’s her too, and that’s not all.”
“What do you mean, that’s not all?”
“Eli was with her,” the mermaid told him with a huge grin, “though she’s a tiny little Water Sprite and going by Lily now. She’s even got a Fire Sprite girlfriend.”
“Eli… too?” Ainslee was completely flummoxed at the news, confusion and disbelief warring with the joy that filled her heart near to bursting.
“Yeah, if she’s a Sprite, she probably hasn’t been back in the world of the living for long though,” Sammie said thoughtfully, with a distant look on her face, before nodding. “I heard they can be in their cocoons for years. Yeah, it sounds like they’re both just getting out of the hospital. Maybe you can help your old bestie get used to being a girl. It sounds like they’re going to be staying with us for a while.”
“I… wow… holy shit, this is wild. I… I need to go feed, Sammie.”
Sammie winced but nodded. “I’ll tell Mom that you’re out if they get here before you. I don’t know how you can do that.”
“It’s not like I have a choice,” Ainslee retorted with a long sigh before hugging her sister and heading out the door.
Ainslee looked tiredly at the receptionist as she sifted through files on her computer. “Any preference for blood type?” the woman asked.
“No,” the redheaded girl said with a shake of her head. “I just… want to get this over with.”
Ainslee had gotten used to having hooves instead of feet, even though they hurt like hell when they were changing, and she couldn’t walk for weeks. She had gotten used to being a girl too with help from her support group. Periods sucked, but honestly, she didn’t see how people like Breeze had such a problem with it. She didn’t have problems being treated and addressed like a girl. This was her body and once she got used to it, it was no more or less horrible than being a guy was, if she was being honest with herself.
One thing that she didn’t think she would ever get used to was feeding though. It made her feel like a monster. She could still eat regular food like everyone else, but once in a while, she needed to feed on life force, by way of blood. If she was injured, she would have to feed for her body to fully regenerate and heal, but even without any other reason to do so sooner, once a week seemed to be the longest that she could go between feedings. That was why she was here, at the Blood Bank.
Well, that’s what people who needed to feed like she did call the place, but it was more commonly known as Amethyst Harbour Maximum Security Prison. It was an underground complex that held some of the worst filth that humanity had to offer. Mass murderers, serial killers, serial rapists… basically anyone in the world who had earned a life sentence, or the death penalty, was sent here.
It was said that those prisoners were being sent here to serve as cannon fodder in the Vanguard, but that was merely the story that the public was fed. They were here for a darker purpose. Vampires and the like need to eat, and this stopped them from feeding on the innocent.
“Just follow the guard to the… visitors’ room, Ainslee,” the woman behind the desk said with a barely suppressed shudder. “This one is a death sentence, so feel free to drain him dry if you need to.”
Ainslee nodded, feeling as sick to her stomach as the receptionist looked, if only for the reason that she was known here by name. Then she followed the guard through the doorway and down the hall toward her… meal. Death sentences were usually exactly that, meant to die for their crimes, and it was either someone like her doing the deed or lethal injection. She was well known here because when they had a death sentence here, it was usually her who did the killing, it had been that way since she first started feeling the Thirst three years ago.
She wasn’t allowed to drain Lifers though. They were there to suffer in prison for the rest of their natural days so those feeding on them were usually those who didn’t need much blood or who could spread out their feedings. They drained maybe enough to make those prisoners lightheaded and when they were recovered enough after a few days someone else could feed on them again. She too would have to feed on lifers sometimes and be careful not to drain them, though it was hard to remain in control while feeding and she would have to feed on two or three people to get what she needed.
The visitors’ room was dank and cold, made of stone with a solid steel door to give people like her some privacy during feedings, and to be extra secure in case the prisoners got any bright ideas about taking their visitors hostage. That had happened before, and it never worked out well for the prisoners. The guard let her inside once they were there and she found that the room already had an occupant.
The man was tall, probably close to six foot four, and very well-muscled. Muscled or not, he was still human and no match for the strength Ainslee could bring to bear if she needed to. The man’s eyes widened in surprise as she entered the room and the guard remained outside, locking the door securely behind her. His eyes roamed up and down her body and he licked his lips before smiling. It wasn’t a pleasant smile; this was predatory, there was a hungry look in his eyes, and she had a suspicion about just what he was in for. “Heh, looks like…”
Ainslee ignored him, all that mattered was that her beauty had drawn his gaze. That was why her kind had a compulsion to look as beautiful as possible after all, to lure in their prey, to get the man’s eyes upon her so that he would be easier to get under her spell. At least, that was the theory of the eggheads.
Her hooves had already begun to move beneath the hem of her dress, moving her body to her inner rhythm and tapping upon the stone floor. The tapping rhythm and the movement of her body were hypnotic, the man’s eyes beginning to glaze over before he could even finish what he had been about to say. He was caught up in her rhythm now, dancing along to it like a puppet on a string as she felt the geas that was a part of her take hold of him.
They always danced, and the dance would get the blood pumping, more lifeforce to sate her appetite but still never enough. She kept dancing, and he was too bound in her personal melody to do anything but try to match her ever-quickening steps until his clumsy human feet tripped him up. Then it was over, he collapsed from exhaustion, too weak to move and too weak to resist. It didn’t take long, he had lasted half an hour, longer than anyone else before him, but her rhythm always claimed her prey.
The man on the floor breathed heavily, staring up at her in a mixture of wonder and horror. Even if he wanted to move, he couldn’t now. He had lost the dance, and his life was now hers to do as she wished with. He didn’t, couldn’t, fight her as she leaned in to take her prize, her fangs sinking deep into his neck. The blood sang with life energy and power, like liquid euphoria, as it flowed down her throat, and she drained him dry. As delicious as that crimson ambrosia was, as much as the lifeforce it carried satisfied her down to her core, this was the part that Ainslee Mackenzie hated the most.
All Rights Reserved
Further chapters are available to the public on my Patreon page.
Comments
oh boy, a vampire!
interesting!
Close
But not quite. Ainslee is something a little different as we'll soon find out.
*big hugs*
Amethyst
Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3