A Friend in Love Read online

  “Yeah…,” Yarra began.

  She could hear Avice’s anticipation increase in his loud exhale. “Well? What will our lives be like in the future?”

  Yarra was spared the need to answer him as her mind was flooded with a flurry of multiple visions.

  In them, she saw strangers dressed in red and black walking outside the corridor of her apartment. In another simultaneous vision, she strangers in the same red and black attire killing off the people designated to keep watch over her.

  The last vision was of the front door of her home flying open to reveal a tall lady with straight, white hair. The clock on the wall in her vision showed 8.52 p.m.

  She returned to reality to check her wristwatch. It was 8.50 p.m!

  “Avice, I just had a vision! People in red and black, and they killed my bodyguards!”

  “Fuck!” Avice exclaimed. “Fuck! Fuck! It is the Bloodlust Clan!”

  “I don’t have time to explain, Avice. They will be coming into my home in two minutes!”

  “Yarra, I’m coming over now,” Avice said, and the line went dead.

  Yarra could not help but panic. He would take six minutes at least to reach her dorm. Then, there were her roommates to worry for too. How would she warn them? Time was not of the essence.

  “Relax girl, relax. Use your powers wisely,” Yarra breathed.

  She tried to concentrate her precognition to think of a possible escape, but nothing came. She could not function under great duress. In a fit of dizzying apprehension, she got out of her bed, but stopped when she heard a loud bang coming from her front door.

  “They’re here,” she thought to herself.

  A loud scream ensued. Yarra closed her eyes and shivered. They would have found Melanie, her innocent roommate who could not understand what these pale humans were doing, dressed strangely.

  “Who are you?” Yarra heard Melanie raise her voice.

  Immediately, the sound of her voice was squelched. Yarra dared for a second to peek through the narrow slit of her room door to see a white haired woman in a red dress with black lines sink her teeth into Melanie’s neck.

  The poor girl had stopped struggling as the Bloodlust member sucked on her blood.

  Yarra breathed out. There was only one of the Bloodlust member in the apartment right now. If she played her cards right, she could escape. But how?

  The white-haired woman, satiated after drinking her fill, threw Melanie’s now dead body towards the wall.

  Yarra watched as her roommate flew and crashed against the mirror on the wall. She landed with a sickening crunch, the two puncture marks on her neck still oozing blood.

  Melanie was long dead even before she could have comprehended what happened to her.

  Yarra suppressed a sob as the vampire moved quietly into the kitchen and then into another room. Thankfully, her other roommates had gone out for the night.

  She went into her room and tried to reach for anything, a weapon, anything sharp… anything heavy to swing not if, but when, the vampire entered her room.

  Vivid visions flooded her mind once more. There were many outcomes to many paths. In her mind, this was what she saw:

  In one possibility, it saw her exiting the room and running into the vampire. The white-haired lady snarled at Yarra and effortlessly dispatches a roundhouse kick onto her solar plexus.

  Yarra lands on the floor and the vampire kills her with a dagger straight to her heart.

  In another possibility, Yarra barricaded herself in the room, but is no match for the assassin’s superhuman strength. With just two slams against the wood, the vampire barged in, and smiles evilly at Yarra.

  In an attempt to protect herself, Yarra swung a baseball bat, which hits the lady on the head. Instead of damaging her in any way, the bat broke cleanly into two. The Vampire lunged at and kills Yarra.

  A few more possibilities all saw Yarra dying, except one.

  When she returned to reality, she knew which one she had to choose.

  Just as she made up her mind, the door to her room snapped open and there stood the vampire with a satisfied leer.

  “Hello, dear sweet Oracle,” she said, licking her lips. A small trail of Melanie’s blood flowed from her lips to the apex of her chin, a scarlet trickle signifying the end of an innocent life.

  Yarra knew that she would not stand a chance against the vampire. She had to choose the best possible outcome to her survival, according to her visions.

  So she jumped out the twelfth floor of the apartment window.

  Before she plunged into the darkness, her eyes managed a quick glance at the white-haired Bloodlust Clan Vampire, who seemed equally surprised with Yarra’s decision.

  She was then greeted by a free fall straight to the ground. She was not so sure if her vision would come true.

  Sometimes, it didn’t. In her mind, she had earlier seen a finished assignment submitted for Mr. Cavaler, but that would not happen now. There was no need to worry about the assignment.

  In the darkness, she could not distinguish the dark concrete ground which would serve as her tombstone, or black sky sparsely speckled with white, glimmering stars.

  Only the psychedelic glow of the orange pavement lights served as an illumination, becoming bigger as she approached the ground at breakneck speed.

  ‘I am going to die,’ she said, though not out of panic. For a strange moment, she felt an eerie calmness. ‘The Oracle lineage will die with me.’

  And it was just a ten or so feet from the cold, hard ground that she felt warm, familiar hands wrap around her body.

  The plummeting feeling sinking in her stomach gradually stopped, as her descent towards the ground slowed considerably. Her body, earlier weightless, was now pressed against the strong arms and chest of someone. His smell was enough to drive her worries away.

  “Caught you in the nick of time,” a warm breath of air rushed into her ears, whispering words of comfort.

  Yarra cried out tears of relief. Avice had rescued her.

  Chapter-7

  One Month Ago

  The attack by the Bloodlust Clan and her narrow escape had left Yarra reeling for weeks. Melanie’s death served as a reminder as to how the enemy vampires viewed the preciousness of a human life.

  “They look at you as blood bags, that’s all,” Alicia Selleck said, when Avice brought her home.

  Yarra nodded. If she were to remain alive, and to keep such undesirable forces at bay, she would have to help the Keepers of the Blade.

  As the weeks after the first attack progressed, so did her capabilities. She could summon visions now, though it left her exhausted.

  Alicia squeezed the spongy receptacles of her mind for future visions until Yarra could do no more. In the end, Avice had to step in to stop his mother from driving her into irreversible fatigue.

  “She is helping us get a lot of intel,” Alicia said in a huff.

  “Even so, mom, she has to rest.”

  Yarra kissed Avice appreciatively on the cheek when Alicia left the room. There was a distaste in his mother’s mouth that she did not like.

  “She does not approve of us, does she?” Yarra asked.

  He sighed. “I guess there is no hiding it from you. As much as mom loves that you are helping us, she is prejudiced towards your powers. She says that it must be contained. And it isn’t like her to believe in inter-power relationships.”

  “A vampire must marry a vampire,” Yarra breathed. She had heard of such prejudices. It was in fact, the very reason her clans-people had died in the first place. They were deemed too powerful to survive.

  “I think that is bullshit, though,” Avice said. “We should be able to choose who we want to love, and who we want to spend the rest of our lives with.”

  ‘Werewolves had it lucky’, Yarra thought. If they wanted to accumulate more followers, all they had to do was bite a human. Vampires had lost that ability to transmute their traits onto another person through a single bite.

 
; Pressing her hands on his tattoo, she smiled. She traced a finger along the tip of the shaded grey of the blade on his chest. It served as a good namesake of his clan.

  Protectors, warriors who believed in the sanctity of the human life.

  Yarra, though not one who wanted to contribute to war, felt that she was aiding in vanquishing an evil force, and that justified her actions.

  “You don’t have to fight in this war if you don’t want to,” Avice reminded her.

  “But I want to. For you,” Yarra said.

  And so she did.

  *

  The war fought against the Bloodlust Clan proved to be a victory for the Keepers of the Blade. With Yarra’s ability to see the future, Alicia was able to maximize her limited army and choose the best possible outcomes.

  War was not Yarra’s strongest suit. In her visions, all that she saw were images of people killing each other. This was not the life she was made for. Even if Alicia maintained that the Bloodlust Clan deserved to die.

  “You have exacted revenge for the demise of your people,” Alicia said, after the last member of the Bloodlust Clan was killed.

  Yarra did not feel happy. Only self-disgust enveloped her heart. She had helped perpetuate death. She had assisted in the massacre of many, but for what good? Was she now a good person, because the bad guys had been killed? She did not feel so.

  Even when Avice and she had celebrated that night, the sex felt short-lived. All she could think of was those people whose death she had helped made a reality.

  As her lover entered her, the earlier wave of pleasure gave way to the number one vision that had been plaguing her from the first day she had met Avice; the one where he would kill her.

  “You seem subdued tonight,” Avice said after they had made love.

  Yarra could not bear answer him. Instead, wrapped a leg over his body and rubbed her hands along his delicate stubble. The war had made them both characters lacking in empathy.

  Avice’s apathy was fuelled by the blood he had removed from his many enemies. Yarra’s indifference came from the knowledge that the man she loved would kill her in two months.

  She just did not know why.

  Chapter-8

  One Hour Before the Present…

  In any such war, there would often be scapegoats. The war between the ‘Keeper of the Blades’ and the Bloodlust Clan was no different.

  Yarra was made the symbol of blame, the Joan of Arc to be held culpable for starting a two hundred year old war between them. All because she was the descendant of the Oracle.

  No one cared about evidence, or about direct accountabilities in the grand scheme of things. It only mattered that she shared a particular trait; that she were of the same gender, or race, or origins as the original Oracle.

  All that mattered to Alicia Selleck was that a war would not happen between the vampires anymore. And that was by eradicating the Oracle.

  So much for indebtedness.

  All was explained the hour before Avice sneaked into her apartment that night. She was getting ready to sleep, combing her hair in front of the mirror, when the vision came.

  In the vision, Alicia was sitting next to Avice. She had the demeanor of a ruthless general, with the upper curve of her lip, not in a warm smile but a cold leer of victory. It was the look one worn after a deliberate and triumphant victory over an enemy in a war motivated by greed and power.

  Alicia Selleck looked at Avice, who did not have the heart to meet his mother’s gaze.

  “Kill her, tonight.”

  “But mother,” Avice tried to cajole her, but Alicia was quick to slap him across the face.

  “You are a Selleck. A member for the ‘Keepers of the Blade.’ Which is more important to you? Your status, or the love of a dangerous girl?”

  “That girl helped us win a war,” he said quietly. His hand touched the bruised spot where his mother had just slapped him.

  “She did, and now she is collateral damage.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that,” Avice said, horrified. “Is this how we repay her for helping us vanquish the Bloodlust Clan?”

  “Yarra is an Oracle. Her kind is too powerful to be kept alive, Avice,” Jared Selleck said. His voice was softer than Alicia’s, although just as resolute. “There will come a time when she might turn against us.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Avice said, stepping back. “You are just the same as the Bloodlust Clan. You don’t care about all lives, just the lives of those weaker than you!”

  Alicia spoke up. “Everything we do is for the survival of our clan. And Yarra, as much as she has helped us, is detrimental to our existence.”

  “But I love her!” Avice exclaimed.

  “Does she love you?” Alicia said quietly.

  “All these years of being together, and she has not had a vision of you?”

  “Not even once,” Avice echoed softly, looking thunderstruck.

  “Kill her tonight,” Alicia said, pressing a small handgun into Avice’s hand. “Only then will I know that you are a worthy member of our Order.”

  The vision vanished in a dazzling flurry of broken images, like butterflies flitting away from a meadow of flowers.

  When she returned to reality, Yarra stared at herself in the mirror. She did not recognize the girl who looked back into those accursed eyes. The brush hung prematurely in her hand.

  The hair was brushed long, and messy in its unruly curls, just the way Avice had loved them. And tonight, he would be coming to kill her.

  Chapter-9

  Back To The Present…

  Yarra lied awake, her eyes staring intently into the wall. The shot from Avice’s handgun did not come.

  Avice’s cologne still lingered in the air. His presence filled the room, creating a tense atmosphere within them. His breath was short and harsh.

  She understood now why the Sellecks wanted her dead. She was used goods. What was worse, the power that she harbored was one that was feared by Alicia Selleck. And those who were gifted with such potent superpowers did not deserve to live in her eyes. And she could also comprehend how Avice had been coerced into killing her. Family came first, to many people.

  He had also been convinced by his mother that Yarra did not have his heart.

  “I do love you,” Yarra spoke out suddenly.

  A small but audible gasp came from behind her. She heard the rustle of his clothing, but did not turn around to face him.

  “You knew I was here?” His shallow breath came out, hoarse.

  “I knew all along, Avice. I knew that this would happen from the day that I first saw you. From the moment that we sat down on our first date together at that café across the street, I knew that you would kill me. I just did not know why.”

  Avice did not speak. She took the opportunity to wipe her eyes. The white walls became blurred from the tears welling up.

  “You often asked me of our vision together. For months, I could not answer you, Avice. Because, it was this. This was the only future I could foresee for us. And in those visions, it always ended up with you killing me,” Yarra said, sniffing. “How was I to tell you such a morbid prediction?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  He too, had started crying. There was a loud metallic thud on the floor where the gun was dropped. Running to her, he grabbed at her shoulder to make her face him. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this?”

  “Because I do not care, Avice. Even if you were to kill me, I would die knowing I enjoyed every moment spent with you in the past year?”

  Avice sobbed and smiled weakly. “Even with the war and all?”

  “War and all,” she nodded. She reached up to wipe the tears from his face.

  They held each other for a while, neither one knowing their future destinies. Avice leaned in and kissed her on the lips, procrastinating on the need to worry about what will happen.

  “I know why your mother wants me dead,” Yarra said, the moment his lips parted from hers.
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br />   The bewilderment in his eyes could not be contained. “How…?”

  “She is right. I am starting to get better control of my power. I can not only foresee the future, but see that which has transpired. I am a demon, Avice. Not an Oracle who holds answers. My Eye sees too much, it can know too much, it can pervade all.”

  “Baby…, I…, I…,” Avice stuttered.

  “I will not hold it against you if you kill me now,” she admitted. It pained her to see him in such a bad way, torn between choosing the expectations of his family and matters of the heart.