Chapter Two: Surprises
The pieces are still.
The storm is about to strike.
The knight makes first move.
The scorching summer weeks passed by quickly for Luis Medina. He was excited to have someone that he could actually refer to as a friend. Luis and Luna spent much of their vacation in the library and she was a big help in his enrollment to Montwood High School. For the first time at all that year, Luis wasn’t wishing he could skip over the rest of his high school experience.
In mid-August, school began on a cloudy morning.
“Hurry your ass up, Luis,” Ashley, Luis’s sister, yelled from the outside of the bathroom door.
Two seconds later, the door opened, revealing a fully dressed Luis. He had no specific fashion or purposeful coordination when it came to appearance. His hair still seemed wet and messy, and exhaustion was flowing through his body.
“Why’re you in such of a hurry anyway,” Luis groaned as he passed by his sister. “You still have another week to go before your classes at the University start.”
Ashley slammed the door in her brother’s face without saying a word to him. Slightly annoyed, Luis returned to his room to finish up getting ready for his own classes. He was sitting down on his bed, which tempted him to want to lie back down and sleep the entire day away. The idea was quickly tossed out of his mind when Luis noticed exactly what time it was. Luna had informed him that it would be best for him to arrive about an hour before school officially started.
His father had already left for work, his mother was still asleep and his sister was occupied in the shower, leaving Luis feeling alone. Luis was used to not talking to anyone before he left to school, but he had gotten used to his new friend’s caring attitude towards him.
Luis’s walk to school wasn’t too bad; August weather was indeed much nicer and much more enjoyable than it was in the middle of summer. To pass the time, he hummed along to the song that was currently playing on his iPod. Luis wasn’t someone who would casually blast his music through his headphones. To him, listening to his music was a completely happy, private experience.
When Luis reached the school campus, he understood exactly why Luna warned him to come to school early. A complete sea of students crowded the outside of the school building, some of them acting more frantic than others. Luis knew that he didn’t have too much to worry about because he had completed everything that needed to be done at pre-registration a few weeks before. The only thing that he needed to do was pick up his school schedule.
Luis broke through the crowd without too much effort. There were a few incidents where he almost tripped over someone else, but he would grab onto someone else’s bag before he even hit the floor. After that, there was another large group of people he had to go by. After fifteen minutes of waiting, he finally was able to grab his senior schedule.
Before Luis could even breathe, he was met by a familiar, friendly face. Luna had attacked him from behind in a playful manor, acting like a child who wanted a piggy-back ride. The first thing Luis noticed was that Luna had now added pink highlights to her long hair. It would only be something that would work with her kind of attitude.
“When did you get those highlights,” Luis asked as Luna climbed off of him.
She let out a small belly laugh. “Last night. It took me forever to convince my dad to let me get them.”
“That’s so cool,” Luis commented, and he indeed meant it. Luna’s free spirit was something Luis very much admired.
“I have a question for you,” Luna said in a matter-of-fact sort of voice. “You’ve had my e-mail address and phone number for weeks now. Why haven’t you tried to message me at all?”
Luis was frozen in shock. He had been a bit frightened to call her. To him, it just seemed a bit embarrassing, to call someone that he really liked. Every chance he got to call her, he chickened out at the last minute.
“Give me your phone,” She told him in her playful, demanding voice.
Luis handed her his phone without hesitation. He was at least smart enough to have her number saved in the phone’s memory, if that was what she was looking for. Luna searched the phone’s data until she found her destination.
“Got it!” Luna exclaimed in a victorious tone.
What Luna was specifically looking for was Luis’s phone number. With her light blue eyes, she stared at the ten-digit code and melded it into her own internal memory. Near perfect photographic memory was something Luna gratefully inherited from her mother.
Luna Estrella was the middle child of her family, being the younger sister of the Star Brothers, twins who played on the school’s varsity football team the previous year. Both of them were also enrolled at the local University with football scholarships. For the past three years, she had been known mostly as Rick and Phil’s younger sister.
Although her family was very athletic oriented, Luna could very much care less about sports or activities of those kind. Even her younger sister, Kira, was slowly being transformed into a sports fanatic. In reality, Luna was more of an artistic kind of person, although her body type portrayed her more like a tennis player.
Because of this, Luna and the rest of her family didn’t always see eye-to-eye on most things. Neither her mother nor father believed art was something someone could really be successful at, no matter what. It took a bit of convincing (and begging) for them to allow Luna not to play sports at all during her high school years. She didn’t want to waste her time working on the field, she wanted to have fun and enjoy some normal human experiences. Sports just didn’t interest her as much as art, music, and theater.
Even in her walk, it was very obvious that Luna was care-free kind of girl. She was seventeen years old, but had the spirit of a young, innocent child. Such a notion didn’t mix well with her fellow peers however, making her an outcast by most of the student body. That didn’t matter to Luis though. To him, Luna was a huge breath of fresh air.
The vampire’s hideout wasn’t some kind of hidden castle carved deep into a mountain side or was something that was cut off from the rest of society. On the contrary, Alexander believed that the best hiding spot to sustain his lifestyle was in plain sight, in one of the hottest places in the world. No one would really expect a vampire to live somewhere it was sunny almost all year round. It was the perfect hiding spot.
Dark curtains covered the windows of the studio apartment which were illuminated by soft, florescent lights. The sun was their natural enemy -- get caught in the sun for too long and a vampire’s skin begins to burst into flames and leaves behind only dust and ash. Cremation was the only permanent way to kill off a vampire. Cutting off their limbs wouldn’t help whatsoever; the limbs would mealy reanimate themselves and move on their own accord until they were reattached to the owner.
It was lucky that the trio were the only ones who resided in the entire building. Alexander, who acquired much wealth under different aliases, bought up every single room in the entire complex. The whole building smelt of old, rotting blood and severed human limbs. If a human being were to even move into the building, they would most likely call the proper authorities and the vampires were either doomed or had to move.
Since vampires didn’t have the need to sleep anymore, Alexis occupied her day time by watching the small television that was in one of the rooms on the top floor. Before the three of them officially moved in, Drake had cable installed inside the building to keep an eye on the news of the outside world. It took Alexis no time to take over the television though. She truly was the newest member of their “family”.
Drake, seemingly slightly frustrated, snatched the remote from Alexis’s hand and changed it from a daytime soap opera and to the news.
“Hey; I was watching something,” Alexis complained.
“You’ll get over it,” Drake informed her.
In protest, Alexis left the room as Drake kept his focus on the local news station. The headline at the bottom was clear, written in b
old, flashy font. SOLO IS FOUND NOT GUILTY FOR THE DEATH OF DAUGHTER-IN-LAW. A small smile appeared on Drake’s face and his tongue licked one of his fangs.
“Antonio Solo, accused of murdering his son’s wife, as well as the two children she bore, has been found not guilty this morning by a jury of his peers. Many say that much is to blame on the prosecution, focusing more on attacking Solo’s character without acquiring sufficient evidence of his guilt. People are paying credit to his defense attorney...”
While the female reporter commented on the story that was currently unfolding, footage from outside of the court house appeared on the television screen. Antonio Solo, a pudgy man who looked as if he was homeless, was surrounded by people holding up cameras and microphones to get a statement. He and his lawyer were being led by four security guards, leading him to a limousine down the road.
Drake could tell by the look in Solo’s eyes that he was absolutely guilty, without a shadow of a doubt. His crime made him the perfect target for the next feeding attack. Of course, if Solo did die the day of his not-guilty verdict, there may be an investigation by various authorities. The lawyer, Drake thought as he zoomed closely to the screen. He was a clean cut man who chose to defend this scum of the earth and ended up winning the case. This man has no right to be alive in Drake’s eyes!
“Find Alexander,” Drake called out to Alexis. “Tell him I found our next target.”
“I don’t know where he is,” She yelled back, taking a drink from her blood bag. “I’m not sure if he came back before sunrise. Do you think he was with her?”
“No way,” Drake answered, slightly frustrated. “Why the hell would he want to go visit her after she left us?”
Returning to school was an amazing experience for young Luna Estrella. After introducing Luis to her two friends, she felt a small sense of pride within herself. Ever since she first saw Luis in the public library, she had an ingrown instinct to help him out.
It was her final period of the day, Pre-Calculus, and she was sharing it with Luis. She walked into the classroom, noticing that Luis was already sitting in one of the seats in the front row. The classroom was a dimly lit portable placed a while away from the main school building, and it was also incredibly warm at this time of day. All Luna cared about was to not fall asleep in the middle of the class. As she took a seat to the right of Luis, the bell loudly rang, signaling the start of the final class period.
“Welcome,” said a tall, red haired woman who was wearing large glasses on her face and looked like she was dressed in a lab coat. Even if the students were standing, it seemed that the teacher would tower over all of them. “My name is Ms. Ramirez, your Pre-Calculus teacher for the year. I welcome my students to ask me for help when they need it; there is no such thing as a stupid question; especially in a class this difficult. I stay much later than most other teachers, so that means we have all the time in the world to talk if you’re ever struggling in this class. Will you two,” she said, pointing at Luis and Luna, “please hand out the syllabus to each student?”
“Yes, ma’am,” They both answered, standing up in unison.
“Thank you, Ms. Estrella,” Ramirez whispered.
After pacing around the front of the room, passing out stacks of paper in each row, Ms. Ramirez began with her lesson. Being the first day of class and being the final period, most of the students paid very little attention to what was going on. Some students played with their phones while others simply decided to take a nap in the middle of class. Even Luis wasn’t interested in the first day’s lesson, so he began whispering to Luna behind her teacher’s back.
“She knows you,” He whispered in a curious voice.
“She’s an old, family friend,” Luna replied. “She knows my dad, which is the reason why I’m in this class in the first place.”
“Did they use to date or something,” Luis asked.
Luna began to snicker at the notion. It took all of her energy to not burst out into loud laughter. “No, it was nothing like that. They went to school together, and they were friends. There’s no way that they’d be like that.”
His curiosity peaked; Luis didn’t ask Luna another word about their relationship. She didn’t really feel like going into detail about her relationship was with Ms. Ramirez, especially to Luis. Luna cared about Luis very much, which is why she kept certain aspects of her life a secret. There were some things that no one was allowed to know about.
When Luna got home after finishing school, her head was slightly pounding. Although it was just the first day, some teachers insisted on giving their students homework. One of these classes happened to be Literature, where she had to read through and attempt to comprehend the first few pages of Brave New World. It wasn’t starting out as good of an afternoon as she had hoped.
“Welcome home, Luna,” her mother, Emily Estrella said. “You’re father needs to talk to you about something.”
“Alright,” Luna said, crossing across the living room and into her father’s office.
Luna never had to question her mother when she said that her dad needed to talk to her about anything. There was always only one thing that he would ever want to talk with her about. She honestly couldn’t remember the last time that she had an actual serious one-on-one conversation with her dad that wasn’t about their family responsibility. Luna was deathly afraid of her father.
Victor Estrella was a tall muscular man with bright red hair and dark brown eyes. Luna’s twin brothers could be simply seen as perfect clones of this man, and carried out the same kind of intimidation wherever any of them went. He was sitting in his large, leather chair, facing his small television screen.
All Luna had to do was read the headline and could figure out the rest without either her or her father saying another word. SOLO FOUND NOT GUILTY! WHOLE WORLD SHOCKED!! The Antonio Solo case was a local investigation that caught the attention of virtually everybody in the entire world. Everybody could tell that Antonio Solo was truly guilty of the murders from the very beginning of the trial. However, faulty evidence, lack of warrants, and a bit of hate speech made by the prosecution had created enough reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds to find him not guilty in the court of law. Luna knew something that Antonio Solo didn’t know though. She knew that there were some people in El Paso who could punish him without the interference of criminal justice.
“Do you think the vampires are going to go after him,” Luna asked to break the silence with her father.
“Alexander’s not that foolish to do it now,” Victor told his daughter, still focusing on the television. “Solo’s going to be a pretty protected person for a while, so there’s no way that they would be able to get to him, especially tonight. Still, something doesn’t feel quite right. I’ve noticed it in the air -- something’s changing, and soon.”
Luna had felt it too; something was telling her from the inside of her body to be extra cautious and take light steps everywhere she goes for now on. It was an instinct that she had inherited from her father, and had grown to trust it whenever she felt it. The first time she ever felt this feeling was when she was thirteen years old and she met a man named Alexander with two other followers, who introduced themselves as vampires. That was when her abilities were beginning to blossom inside of her, and she has now learned how to channel them properly.
Luna was a werewolf, and it was her job to make sure that vampires were kept in line. It was all political between vampires, werewolves, and spell casters. Luna’s father was a strong werewolf who passed down his ability to all of his offspring. Emily was a very gifted spell caster, and it appeared that Luna was the only one in the family to have acquired her mother’s unique powers.
“So, what do we do now,” Luna asked her father.
“The only thing we can do is sit and wait,” he answered in an anxious voice. “Alexander’s clan needs to feed soon. As long as they’re still sticking with that Code of theirs, we have nothing to worry about. They haven’t messed up and gotten
noticed so far.”
While Victor didn’t think that it was okay to kill another creature to reach one’s own greedy needs, he also knew that vampires had to feed on a human’s blood in order to stay alive. Vampires also had their own reasons to live as well; no one would stay alive just to stay bored for the rest of their existence. With Alexander’s Code, Victor saw it a bit differently than the vampires did. He saw it as taking one person’s wasted life to help someone else extend theirs. Victor and Alexander were mutual men, and met every month, to see that both sides were in check.
“Oh, dad; whose patrolling the city tonight,” Luna asked as she slowly walked out of her father’s office.
“Phil and Rick are going to be taking over for a while,” he answered, still keeping his focus on the television. “They have a lot of time on their hands now, and it’ll be easier for them now that they’re in college rather than in high school.”
Luna left her father’s office on that note. The last thing she wanted to do was get into another long winded discussion on her brothers. She did not feel like transforming into her wolf form tonight anyway, although she that the werewolves in this generation resembled large coyotes than actual wolves.
Luna collapsed on her bed as she walked into her room. She didn’t really feel like doing anything tonight, especially useless homework. Her backpack was thrown into an empty corner away from her bed, and that’s how it was going to stay until tomorrow morning. Although she did feel exhausted, those with werewolf blood running through their veins no longer needed the reason to sleep. Luna had figured that this was because a werewolf needed to stay up late into the night to keep an eye on vampires, back when there was more of a racial difference than a political one. Luna reached for her cellphone and noticed that there was one missed message in her inbox. She opened the letter and was slightly surprised to see the name of the sender.
“Luis!” Luna gasped.
She read through the short message he had sent her. “Hey Luna. This may sound really stupid, but I was wondering if you wanted to go out on a date with me tomorrow night?” Luna had to read it over several times to make sure this was real. Her afternoon had suddenly been salvaged.