Rose

Chapter 16. Packing up

When we got back to the apartment after a very long drive, mostly taken up with Edward complaining about the jeep’s miles to the gallon, the door was ajar.

We had been away for over a month in total and the fact the door was slightly open was very worrying. There could be a number of reasons and none of them were good!

Edward gently swung the door open, the apartment looked exactly as it had when we left.

Except it wasn’t, there was something wrong, out of place – it was in the air more than any physical object. I sniffed; the wolf blood had made me already good sense of smell even more acute. And somewhere in the very back of my brain I felt my hackles rise. The rash and prickle of the hairs standing up on the back of your neck belongs to a primitive reaction to danger, the subconscious processing what the conscious hadn’t grasped yet.

Edward slowly advances into the apartment “Grab what you need and go!” he says, “We don’t want to be here any longer than we absolutely have to.” I agree, Edward can come back and pack the rest of our things up and ship them to wherever we need them.

It took only a few seconds to whirl around the apartment collecting the knickknacks and the junk that meant something to me, Edward was stripping my wardrobe and draws of clothes, stuffing them haphazardly into a couple of large holdall bags. Within a few seconds my life had been grabbed and stuffed into a bag. Edward picked up the bags, I pick up a couple of boxes of things and we turned to leave.

We would have as well, if it hadn’t been for a humongous wolf stood in the doorway, behind him a vampire, tiny and dainty against the wolf bulk. Edward dropped the bags and I put down the boxes.

The wolf was wearing ripped denim jeans, big black boots, and a grimy t-shirt (it had probably been white once upon a time) and over that a leather vest with paint and patches, a wolf’s head snarling as it ate a motorbike, stripes of red and blue and other shapes and colours. His skin and hair were equally greasy. His hair tied back in a lank ponytail his eyes looking small and piggy in his puffy face.  

The greasy wolf is also holding a gun, a huge shiny thing, I know it is a gun, even though it looks more like something from a tv show. It is big, a cowboy gun, the barrel long and the chambers ready to spin, the hammer is c****d back so I guess it is ready to fire.

Beside me Edward laughs “Do you really think that will stop us?” he says, “We are filled with blood, rich, dark, wolf blood!”

As he says the last bit the greasy wolf snarls and shoots Edward.

The bullet rips through his shoulder and knocks Edward back into the middle of the room, the vampire behind the wolf sniggers, stepping forward he ducks under the arm holding the gun. As he passes, he absentmindedly patted the arm of the wolf, almost as if he were saying Good Dog! Well done!

I glance round at Edward, why isn’t he standing up? Edward is layed on the floor, not moving, the blood is seeping from the wound in his shoulder.

The vampire gives me a creepy smile, “Silver bullets” he says “filled with holy water or wolfsbane. No one is too strong now!”

And then the wolf points the gun and me and pulls the trigger!