“Tony…Tony, we have to go…Tony…” Bea coaxed the boy, one who had officially transitioned from that to something much darker, stronger. She while her hand remained outstretched to seventy-six living students and eleven chaperones, her eyes shifted to towards the only person resistant to her psychic abilities, yet in a mental haze of his own.
The boy’s own eyes were beige where they should have been white, decorated with bloodshot tie-dye. The pupils nearly made a total eclipse of bronze irises. The two eyeballs were some of the few luminaries in the cloak of night over the yard of the school, shining like those of wolves. His face was elongated forthright, also like wolves, as if to close the gap between his teeth, better than an inch longer than they should be, and whatever prey he sought. His musculature was compact and dense, rippling under a fairly thin coat of auburn fur.
The fur and skin of the boy’s right shoulder closed in as it mended itself, spitting out a .38 from the service pistol of Sheriff Baldwin, who didn’t anticipate dying at his daughter’s eighth grade Halloween party by a bite to the neck. The boy’s mouth and claw-equipped hands were crimson, a color supplied by the sheriff and the six other empty vessels that Bea sensed were abandoned by their souls. Oddly enough, his appearance was abnormal even for her, as Tony, if he were to access his animal form tonight, should have completely transformed, not be caught in a state eerily similar to her natural enemy.
Her only baby was no longer one…he wasn’t a baby, he was now her progeny, and, as far as she knew, the youngest male in a clan of hunters, biped predators capable of moving across a town in the blink of an eye, or soaring above their prey. Chryslers and Lincolns obstructing his path would likely get tossed to the side. On the later side of the spectrum, three days after his thirteenth birthday, Bea finally saw the night she wasn’t sure would come; her blood taking precedence over her husband’s.
“Tony, I can’t keep you invisible much longer.” She called out to him, roughly thirty feet away. Jenny Baldwin, the sheriff’s daughter and admirer of the withdrawn Tony, began to look lively, as if her hypnosis was fading. Having been in that spot bending the school’s memory of the last ten minutes all while attempting to soothe her son’s mind for the last five, Bea was growing weary.
“ANTOINE!” Bea barked his full name. Tony’s head jerked in her direction, and as he saw the fear in his mother’s eyes, he let out a cry; not a howl expected of a wolf or being close to it, but a grave, echoing roar similar to a lion’s. In one bound, he covered half the distance between them, and the next was a leap, directly towards Bea. Watching him descend upon her as time seemed to slow for them, the mother knew not to attempt to fight her child and was prepared to die by his hand. A vampire or dhampir’s onset, especially for boys, was a preview of the power they would see in their peak roughly a half-century later—and Tony’s energy was awfully close to her grandfather’s. Bea closed her eyes and let go off her hold of the crowd’s minds, and used her split second to find peace.
A few seconds later, Bea would open them, ready to see her grandfather George on a throne of steel and bone levitating amongst a sea of stars, the same setting she had experienced in a past trip to the afterlife. She missed Papa’s throne, however. Instead, she laid on the floor of her living room, witnessing smoke clear, fur molt; a snout became a human nose and mouth, with teeth shrinking back into that mouth, and eyes clearing as the irises they bore expanded to normal size and returned to their darker, soulful bister shade.
“Did they hurt you, Mommy?” Tony asked, his young voice rich with innocence that contrasted the blood around the mouth it came from. Bea hoped his father’s genes would alleviate the onset’s intensity, but it may have amplified it. While most people like them even with a botched memory realized they were forever changed, she could see it in his eyes—Tony had no idea what he just experienced; not the good music, not dancing with Jenny, the pretty girl he didn’t know how to talk to, or first kiss; not Oscar Pfeiffer, the school bully who Tony himself hadn’t feared since fourth grade, getting jealous, or the remark about Bea being a witch that awakened Tony’s rage and power and caused him to punch Oscar across the gym and into a concussive impact with the wall.
Tony didn’t know he mistook the disco ball for the moon and howled at it before gashing his English teacher’s face with claws rivaled in hardness by steel, or killing and drinking the blood of his crush’s father to expedite the healing of the bullet he took to the shoulder. He didn’t realize his friend since kindergarten Matthew Ponce was among the seven that quenched his hereditary thirst for blood...Tony did not know he was half-vampire.
“Oh, my God! Baby!” Bea sobbed as he jerked Tony down to the ground with her and held him vigorously, as if she were trying to squeeze her legacy out of him and revert him back to the gentle, aloof, athletic, history-loving boy she dropped off to the school.
“The old man…” Tony vented, muffled by his mother’s shoulder. “The old man with one eye said a knight in blue would take your heart out of your chest. He said to protect you!”
“No one’s taking my heart, baby. You’re my heart.” Bea assured as she pulled Tony’s clouded head back into her bosom, his foggy troubles blowing from his mind into her heart, only to be eviscerated by her maternal warmth and strength.
As Tony lifted his head again to look at the most beautiful woman he’s ever known, he feels a large, icy hand cover his neck, and throw him across the room and through the wooden bannister of the stairwell, his hundred and ten-pound frame putting a hole in the wall. Upon looking up, Tony saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with a metal arm clutching a kneeled Bea by her neck, a navy blue hooded cloak looming over his face to only show eyes of the same steel blue as his left arm, though the left eye was a little hollower. They lit up, however, at the sound of a rapid series of cracks and tears, as the hooded man snapped Bea’s neck. Tony stared at the scene, too shocked to scream or cry.
“Your father was better off trying to make this his true home,” The assailant uttered in a raspy, perhaps machine-influenced tone. “Now he can’t stop me from taking her heart.”
As he found himself understanding his new reality, Tony put his hands in front of him, knowing that they had changed but not how, to see that they were surrounded by an aura that shifted through the color spectrum, softly hissing and crackling. In a language Tony never heard before, his mother’s killer raised his voice.
“Alti Il Vy Amiv!”
Somehow, the words unlocked a burning clarity in the boy, a focused fury driving him to break his enemy. For a normal human, the speed at which the hooded killer lunged at Tony put a viper’s strike to shame. But Tony could see the two strides taken before the lunge, and as he manifested the reflexes and strength to make his own leap, his gut jumped with him out of his mouth in the form of another primal, booming roar.
Dude you seriously gotta give me a commission piece or something..
