Blood Bound: Chapter One Extract

I didn’t believe in vampires until my brother came home from college as one of the undead.

Not only was that sort of thing just simply not believed in, even if it was true something like that was not supposed to touch my small, simple family.

My family has lived in Wyoming for several generations – my great-great-great-or so grandscestors were some of the earliest settlers in our town, Hillson. It’s a town that survives on the hunting business. We – that would be the locals – also enjoy the sport, and it’s difficult to find someone past a certain age who doesn’t know a thing or two about hunting in general. If the hunters were to go away, the money would dry up, and the town would die. I know our family business is dependent on hunters staying with us while on a quest to find that legendary big game kill.

My family owns and runs the King’s Inn, the largest (and only) hotel in town. It was built by my great grandfather, who passed it onto my grandfather, who passed it on to my dad… and that’s where we are at now, really. But I am getting way too into the past here, and I really need to talk about the present, about Charlie. What you need to know is this: I live in Wyoming with my grandparents, parents and three siblings, and we all pitch in to run the family business.

It happened about three years ago. I was fifteen at the time, still in high school. Adam was twenty-five and lower down on the police pecking order than he is today. Bridget, twenty-four, was working full time at the Inn, putting her shiny new business degree to good use.

And Charlie?

At twenty-two he was still at college, having a great time and occasionally studying.

At least, that was what we thought.

 
“What do you mean, you haven’t seen him in a month?”

Mom shooed me out of the office as she wandered in with the cordless phone pressed hard to her ear. Her tone was anxious, and her expression was strained. Something was horribly wrong, and while I had my suspicions that it had something to do with Charlie (after all, he was the only one in the family I hadn’t seen in more than a week, a day even) I had no way to confirm it.

Since it looked like Mom was otherwise occupied, that meant I had to find a new source of information. I checked my watch; Bridget was currently on duty at the front counter, and since she probably answered that phone call she’d be my best bet. I waited patiently in line behind a new guest Bridget was checking in at the front counter. After they had finally sorted out their information, they hurried on their way, leaving Bridget and me alone.

“What’s got Mom is such a whirl?” I asked, leaning over the desk. “Is it Charlie?”

Bridget bit her lip, then nodded. “No one’s seen him for a month.”

So the phone call was about Charlie. “What? How about his roommates?” Then again, from what I knew of Charlie’s roommates, they might not notice something was up until they could no longer ignore the smell of a decaying body.

Maybe.

“You know Charlie,” Bridget said. I did; Charlie was my favorite sibling. “They thought Charlie had packed up for one of his road trips, or gone off with a girl.” That had happened before. “And then when that lasted more than a week, they thought he had come back up here for a while.” That had happened too.

“And so they finally decided to check?” I asked, all at once annoyed and worried. Charlie’s choice in roommates and friends tended to be the ‘not the sharpest knives in the drawer’ type, which was a shame, as Charlie was very, very smart. He just thought he had better things to do with his life.

Bridget nodded again. “And that’s where Mom took off with the phone…”

“… And kicked me out of the office,” I finished for her. Another nod. “Who else knows about this?”

“Just you, me, and Mom so far. I tried calling Dad, but he’s turned off his cellphone again. Grams and Gramps are on their way back from their afternoon shopping trip.”

It was my turn to nod this time. “What about Adam?”

“On-duty.” Ah, the joys of actually having a job outside of the family. “I left a message, though.”

“So what do we do now?” I asked. I was the baby of the family, I followed their leads.

Bridget shrugged. “We wait,” she said, before putting on a smile and greeting a new arrival. Knowing that she would use work as a distraction, I headed up to my room to find something worthy of distracting myself.

In the end, all our wild speculations were way off base, but Mom’s idea – that he had been murdered and was lying in a shallow grave somewhere – was the closest. Just not quite there.

 
Charlie showed up about a fortnight later, looking a little pale, ragged and tired, yes, but otherwise fine. Somewhere along the way he had lost his wallet, but did we care? Of course not. Adam, Bridget and I had our brother back. Our parents had their son back, my grandparents had their grandson back. The family was reunited, and all our worries could be over.

We couldn’t be happier.

And then, when we asked what had happened, he told us.

It turned out that he had been on his way up when he had last been seen by his roommates. Coming up for the weekend, he told us. A surprise, he said.

“So what happened?” I asked. I knew the trip back up shouldn’t take more than a few hours, so what on earth happened to make it take six weeks? “You get abducted by aliens?”

All of us laughed, except for Charlie. He solemnly shook his head. “No, no aliens.”

“Well what then?”

This is where, if things had been normal, that Charlie would have blushed. We’re all horrible when it came to that; our faces go bright red at the most inconsequential things. Of all of us I was afflicted the worst, though. I could be sitting in class and for no reason at all be flushing hot as an oven, bright red as a tomato.

“There was a woman.”

We laughed even harder than before. That was so like Charlie, getting distracted by a girl walking past. As a little girl I had witnessed him walk into a good many things because he was too busy looking at a girl instead of where he was actually walking. Once he tripped and fell into still-wet concrete when we were doing renovations, leaving an imprint of his open-mouthed face for all eternity. Dad had the concrete cut out (and replaced), and now it was displayed in the foyer. He claimed that he could have paid a fortune for something just as ridiculous, so why not get something cheap and had an actual story attached?

“Don’t tell me, Char,” Bridget said, “she turned out to be a he?” Another roar of laughter from the family.

Charlie growled, which shocked all of us into silence. We had never heard him make that sound before. It was more animal than human. Our laughter stopped and we sat there in awkward silence. What on earth had happened to our Charlie?

“She,” Charlie said finally, pausing as he tried to phrase it best, “turned out to be a vampire.”
Adam snorted. “A vampire? Pull the other one, Charlie.” He stood up. “Look, you’ve made all of us worry – do you know how much stress Mom has been under, worrying about you? Not to mention what the rest of us have been feeling like, thinking our little brother-”

“Or big,” I interjected.

“Yes, yes,” Adam said, brushing my comment aside with a gesture. “I don’t care if you’ve been off with some woman for the past six weeks, or whatever, just don’t lie to us.”

Charlie leaped from his seat before I could blink. First the growl, and now he was moving faster than I had ever seen him before. This was not right. This was not good. Something was seriously wrong.

My dearly loved big brother, Charlie, was on drugs. He had to be.

He picked Adam up like a ragdoll and threw him across the room as if he weighed nothing. Mom shrieked as Adam went flying, striking the wall hard. The only movement in the room was Adam, sliding heavily down the wall and not getting up from the floor.

Oh god, oh god, oh god…

“Are you insane?!” I shrieked, my voice the only sound in the room aside from Adam’s groans of pain. “Are you on drugs?!” I jumped from my seat and ran to him, grabbing onto his arm. I tried to pull on him, but he was far too strong for me. I could have hung from him and he still wouldn’t have moved an inch. “That’s Adam!” I hung on for dear life, still trying to move him. He just wouldn’t budge.

“No,” he said, finally turning his face down towards me. I tried to read his expression, but his face was hard. Cold. Just like his skin, I realized. It was warm in the room, so why was his skin so cold? It wasn’t like ice, exactly, more like he had been out for a walk in the cold wind and only just come inside.

“What do you mean that’s not Adam?” Dad demanded, but unlike Adam and me he was smart enough to stay in his seat.

“Put your sister down, Charles,” Mom added. I glanced at her, and saw she was as white as a sheet. Her hands were clasped tightly together, her knuckles white. She held them to her chest, as if praying.

“I’m not insane,” Charlie said. “And I am not on drugs.” He swore, and Dad shot him a look. Normally, I would have laughed. My brother had just thrown my other brother across the room, and Dad was telling him to mind his language? The second part that made it so ridiculous is that Grams was in the room; she was Dad’s mom. For a little old lady, she had a few interesting curse words in her repertoire, I can tell you.

“Put your sister down,” Dad repeated, trying sound calm but failing. He had already seen one son attack another, and now his baby girl was hanging off the crazy son’s arm. It looked like a recipe for disaster.

Charlie laughed, and for just an instant he sounded like his old self. “She’s the one holding on to me, Dad.” He shook his head, smiling with his lips closed. It was an action so out of place in the scene, much like his laugh. “But if you insist…” He turned back to face me, and grinned.

I let go of Charlie like he had suddenly burst into flames. Since by that point I’d been quite literally hanging onto him I fell down ungracefully, landing on my butt with an awkward thud. If he had intended on scaring me into letting go, his plan worked flawlessly. The second his mouth opened, revealing long, well, vampire fangs I felt like I had been smacked in the face with the horrible truth.

I sat there, still awkward with my hands on the floor behind me, staring up into his face. I tried to blend the two images together – vampire fangs in my favorite brother’s face – and I just couldn’t. It was just not possible. It was wrong, like a human face on a… on a giraffe or something.

I started screaming.

Charlie was on me faster than you can say ‘Dracula’, scooping me up in his arms and hugging me. “Dee, Dee, I’m sorry,” he said, trying to sound soothing. I could barely hear his voice over my continual screams. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

This was a switch in personalities. Here was the real Charlie, the Charlie I knew and loved, and who protected and loved me like any big brother should. But why the whole… whatever had happened earlier? When they were younger, any scuffles between Charlie and Adam could be passed off as simply ‘boys will be boys’, but they were grown up now. It wasn’t right for one man to throw another man across the room.

“Put the girl down!” ordered a voice. It was Adam. Somehow he had managed to get up from the floor and was now pointing his gun at Charlie. He had just come off duty and gone straight to us as soon as he heard the news that Charlie had returned, so he was still in his uniform. I would have taken offense at being referred to as ‘the girl’ by my own brother, but it was clear that Adam was in cop mode now. He didn’t see his brother and sister; he only saw a man that had assaulted an officer and now had a potential hostage.

Charlie let go just as Adam fired.

For a moment there was silence. The only movement came from Charlie, whose hand flew to his shoulder, and he staggered back a few paces. Amazingly, he stayed upright. Looking back on it now, of course he stayed upright – he was a vampire, after all – but right then it was just insanity.

And just like in some movie or cartoon, everything sped up to normal speed and started again. Mom looked like she was going to have a heart attack, Bridget was screaming, and Dad and Gramps were trying to calm them down. Charlie was swearing up a storm, with Adam as the target of his anger.

Not surprising, though, since Adam was the one who shot him. If I was shot I would not be happy with the shooter, too. Of course, if I was shot I would probably be down and whining like a baby, not standing with my hands in the air, cursing at the person holding a gun.

I’m a wuss, so sue me.

It was then that my grandmother chose to step in, like some white-haired and wrinkled superhero determined to save the day. Despite being in her seventies, Grams is one incredible lady; she is the strongest, bravest woman I know. Although she no longer helps run the family business, she is still very much in charge of the family. She stands at the same height as me – 5′1” – and it tickles me to know that when she was my age she looked a lot like me, with brown hair and a nice smile. When I’m her age I hope to be just as strong as she is – even now I wish I could be just as confident. Not to mention have kept my looks (well, what looks I have); she has aged gracefully, and constantly criticizes people who have decided to use plastic surgery rather than be content with what nature gave them.

She was the one that set the chaos to order. While Bridget kept screaming and the rest of the family was in a panic – I was still on the floor, Charlie had his hands in the air and Adam’s gun was still pointed squarely at him – she stepped in and started putting things to right.

“Charles Geoffrey Richards, what on God’s green earth do you think you are doing? Vampire or no, you do not fight with your brother!” Despite being a foot taller than Grams, Charlie appeared to shrink as she told him off, until you could have sworn that Grams was seven feet tall. She was good at that.

“And you,” she said, turning on Adam. It was his turn to shrink in size. Faced with an angry grandmother, he had no choice but to lower his weapon. “I cannot believe that my own grandson shot his brother! I do not care how or why you are fighting: in this house we do not shoot family members.”

See why I love my grandmother? She doesn’t care who is waving a gun about or who is now a member of the blood-drinking undead, so long as there is no fighting in her house.

I couldn’t help but giggle at these two grown men; one a cop holding a gun, and the other a (seemingly) superhumanly strong vampire, cowering at the wrath of a little old lady.

It was beautiful.