Daywalkers

December twenty-fourth is not the best day for Christmas shopping, admittedly. But, this had become our tradition, my twin sister Anna and I’s, to do all of our shopping the night before Christmas. Maybe it was a weird teenage rebellion that we held onto into adulthood. Our stepmother always had her shopping done in October, usually finding things in back-to-school sales, but we were insistent on being nothing like her. We both ended up like her in other ways, mind, but early Christmas shopping was not one of them.  It was the closing hours of the last store open before they closed to let their employees go home for Christmas with their families, but the store was still fairly busy. It usually was. Cheery elevator music inspired versions of Christmas carols piped over the speakers could be heard over children begging for toys and disgruntled shoppers complaining about the lack of cashiers on such a busy night. We had almost everything.  “What about this?” I ran my hands over a push blanket I randomly picked up. I didn’t actually think it would be perfect for grandmother, she’d always just been so painfully hard to shop for. It had devolved into grabbing something kitschy off a rack and sticking both our names on it.  “Penguins are black.” Anna scoffed. “She always says she hates black. Remember that time we got her that nice umbrella?”  I did remember. She’d returned it the next day.  No one was nearly as good at returning unwanted gifts as our grandmother. We’d once driven her to the florist to return some flowers she didn’t like that hadn’t even been purchased in that shop. Somehow, she’d talked the poor girl behind the counter into returning them. But the blanket was different, it was soft and blue with penguins on it. That had to be allowable. It wasn’t like grandmother had anything against men in tuxedos. She might... I never asked.  “Fine.” I sighed, setting the blanket back into the mesh bin of holiday throws. “Maybe I’ll buy it for me instead.” This was, of course, a lie. I’m not one to buy things for myself. I just... don’t need things as much as I want to give other people Christmas gifts. Most of this year's Christmas gifts were bought with this year's birthday gift cards from earlier in the month. It's what I always asked for just for this reason.  When we finished shopping and headed for the car, loading the plastic bags into the trunk. Closing the lid, Anne suddenly announced she’d forgotten something. I thought she must be going back for something for me, so I would be there when she purchased it. Probably that stupid blanket. I'd been mostly joking when I said I wanted it. I was always better at lying than my sister. The gift I had for her, a perfect boxed set of the children’s book series she secretly adored, I’d told her was for our younger sisters. She probably believed me. It was more appropriately aged for them. She tossed me the keys and asked me to start the car. So I got in and turned it on, All I Want for Christmas is You blasting as I scrambled to turn down the radio and up the heat. It was cold in the middle of Illinois in the middle of winter.  Head bobbing along to the music, I watched Anne go through the automatic doors of the store not realizing it was the last time I would see her alive.  I expected it to be like, five minutes before she knocked on the window asking me to pop the trunk, but the digital clock numbers slipped up, and up, and up. Normally, I wouldn’t worry. I’m a pessimist by nature, but Anne was the smart one, she always had been the smart one; she could handle herself. But as the lights began to flicker off in the store and employees started to filter out, bidding each other a Happy Holiday, I got really worried. I waited a few more minutes, but nothing.  Turning the key and removing it from the ignition, I stepped out, glancing around the now-empty parking lot. It was almost silent now. Only the snow crunching under my boots as I ran up to the door. The high street lamps illuminated the vaguely shoveled parking lot. It had started to snow again in the time she’d been gone. By the time I made it to the doors, they were all locked, and there was no sign of my sister.  “Anne?” I called out, honestly worried for her safety for the first time since that one afternoon when we were seven and she accidentally stabbed herself in the thigh while we were helping mom in the kitchen. There had been a lot of blood then. And, though I didn’t see it at first, there was blood on the snow now. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I clicked the flashlight app, illuminating the now obvious red pool on the ground. Complete with drag marks. I’m no cop, and I never have been, but I watched a lot of SVU, okay, and I knew it was stupid, and I should have just called nine one one there, but I followed the trail anyway.  Two dark figures were hunched over something on the ground. At first, I couldn’t think about it. It couldn’t be Anne. It was just... Something. Something on the ground. Something bleeding. Something dead. Probably. But the Something was wearing skinny jeans tucked into Anne’s favorite boots. The kind that was cloth, with no heal, and sort of frumpy looking. The Something had to be Anne.  Someone was screaming. A terrified scream, the kind that a cat makes when you step on its tail or the blonde bimbo makes in horror movies as the sports ball jock gets his head cut off in front of her. I didn’t realize the screams were mine for a solid thirty seconds  I didn’t even know I could make that kind of noise. I was neither blonde nor a cat. The dark figure's red eyes were illuminated in the light when they turned to face me. One lunged to attack me, but the other grabbed it. I couldn’t see many details, maybe I didn’t remember them because of the shock, but the hand that grabbed the other stood out. The well-manicured nails were impressive, they had little rhinestones in them that caught the light. It seemed like an odd detail for some sort of robber murder thug who attacked my sister to have. But the manicured hand stopped the other, and they both turned and disappeared. I thought maybe they ran away but were just so fast I couldn’t see them but wrote it off as probably just the shock.  “Annie!” I ran to her side, almost as quickly as her attackers had fled, dropping to my knees in the snow drift her body was draped across. “Annie it's me. It's Alice, and I’m calling... I’m calling okay for help. Don’t go to sleep.” Though her eyes were closed, I didn’t know how to find a pulse. I’d never been able to find my own in health class, I’d always just pretended I could totally feel it. Sort of regrettable at that moment. My hands shook as I dialed, it took me three tries to get out the three little numbers.  I’m sure the dispatcher was nice, but honestly the minutes it took from the phone call to sitting in a police car being driven to the hospital to be with my sister... They might as well not have existed.  Lights and questions and fear. I was petrified, statuesque, and that’s an incredibly rare occurrence. I’m not afraid of much but losing Anne. Being without my better half; was unthinkable.  One of the EMTs tried to speak to me, but his words sounded so far away, spoken as if in a swimming pool of Jello. I’m pretty sure the words were about all the blood. I couldn’t help there. “We’re fraternal, She’s... O something, I’m not a match.” I told an EMT. Anne would have been able to donate blood to me. The irony that she would be the one in need of it, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything for her was not lost on me. I wanted to do anything to help her and all I could do was sit in the back of this police car, door open feet dangling out over the edge, like some sort of useless car lump.  Then we were driving to the hospital. And Anne was in the ambulance and I was not. They had to do too much work on her, I would have only been in the way. I had to be understanding, I guess. At the hospital, they wouldn’t let me see her till she was in a room.  She had always been pale. A lot of Norwegian blood in our family, Grandmother would say. Then she’d say something crazy about all the coffee our mother drank while pregnant with us that gave me my dark hair. But, Anne, with her stick-straight blonde hair and her pale blue eyes and her fair skin was the picture of what one expected. Somehow, with her hair splayed on the powder blue pillow case and the hospital gown and the IVs, she looked so much paler than she ever had before.  I sat in the chair by her bed, watching her chest rise and fall, unsteady with labored breathing. My parents had been called, they’d meet us here. And for a second I thought I saw one of them in the doorway when I looked up, no one was there. I stood. I’d already messed up once tonight by not investigating sooner, I wasn’t going to make that mistake again when something felt so wrong. I took a few steps out into the hallway.  There was no one but a woman. She was not dressed like a nurse on duty, she wore a dress and heels and a large hat and sunglasses, like she had stepped out of a classic movie into the hospital halls, the only thing modern about her was her nails. Perfectly manicured with little rhinestones. I started to call out but instead found a frigid hand firmly planted over my mouth and was drug into a side closet.  “Shhhh.” A man’s voice was heavy in my ear. “You don’t want to get in her way, trust me on this one.” There was no light in the closet, I struggled against his grip a little, but he held me tightly against his chest. His icy hand was pressed too tightly on my mouth for me to get a solid bite in. Not that I didn’t try, it just ended up being more of a slobbering all over his hand than an actual attack.  “I’m trying to save you.” He said again. “She would have killed you as quickly as anything to get to your sister.”   I thought that was a silly thing to think. The woman had been the one to stop the other from attacking me. Why would she change her mind here? It didn’t make a lot of sense. Was he the other one who attacked Anne, the one who would have attacked me? No that didn’t make a lot of sense either. Why would he attack first, and save later? Whatever was going on it was not something I  understood.  “Don’t make a sound.” He instructed and removed the hand from my mouth to part the blinds on the window slightly peering out into the hallway. When he pulled his hand back a way, the blind didn’t fall exactly back into place, letting in enough light I could see some of the closets we were in. A supply closet. Maybe a nurse would come by and save me. That would be too much to hope for considering how the evening was going.   “What is going on.” I hissed.  “What part of don’t make a sound did you not understand?” He grumbled, wiping his hand on his jeans.  “The part where you grabbed me and drug m-”  He cut me off by replacing his hand over my mouth. “I’m Jackson, Your sister is important To my mother. I’m. I can’t explain it all here.” He leaned over and peered between the open blinds again, I could barely make out the brown color of his hair, and the terrifyingly familiar red of his eyes. I squirmed harder against his grip, but he didn’t seem phased at all. “We have to wait for her to go in.”  I was not about to wait for her to go in with my sister. I squirmed, twisted, and wriggled, and every other emotion I could think of making, kicking my converse back against his shins, continuing my plan of drooling all over his hand in ineffectual biting motions.   “Stop it. You’re not making this easy.”  I wasn’t trying to. At least he noticed.  “Okay, we’re going to go down the hall, take the elevator, and go outside to talk. And we’re going to do it quietly. If you’re good, I’ll answer all your questions. If you’re not, next time I’ll let you rush at my mother in her territory and we’ll see how that goes.”  He let go of me, and opened the door and the minute he did so, I bolted for my sister’s room. He was faster than I was, had his hands around my waist and I was over his shoulder before I could make it three steps.  “Let me go.” I wiggled again, my converse beating against his kidney in frustration. It was bad enough that he drug me in a closet, but now to carry me out over his shoulders. And no one in the hospital seemed phased at all. One of the nurses even greeted him with a small nod as he walked past them. “What is this!” I demanded again, with less passion, as I decided to simply let myself go completely limp and be as much dead weight as possible. This hardly seemed a hindrance. I was by no means a skinny girl, and he had no trouble carrying me.  Once we were safely outside he placed me down on the ground, grabbing one wrist and forcing me to sit next to him on a bench.  “So now you’ll answer my questions?” I asked coldly.   He scoffed. “You were hardly what I would call good.” “Yeah, but you didn’t let me rush her, so I just assumed you were lying about the being a good thing too.” It seemed like a reasonable assumption to make. I wrapped my arms around myself. It was cold here. Even if he didn't notice. Now that we were out in the night air, I could get a better look at him, illuminated in the light coming from the hospital windows. I barely came up to his shoulders. He was thin, but handsome, even with almost glowing red eyes. He was terrifying but something about him was incredibly intriguing. If he hadn't kidnapped me in a hospital after possibly attempting to murder my sister, I would have probably felt more inclined to flirt. "So. Jackson… What the hell is going on."