A Walk Through Cliffcoast

“Is Melissa Pickles moving?” I asked my sister Dawn as we were walking past the park on our way to Jane Bennetti’s house so we could go together to school. Jane and her mother had moved to a new condo further into the center of town, selling their house to a family that needed the extra rooms.

Dawn lifted her red-ringed eyes, tired from a night of internet trolling and messing around on YouTube, to the coral stucco home across the street where there was a huge moving truck parked on the curb. “I never heard anything about it.

“Her parents did get divorced and her mother had talked about moving to San Francisco,” I wondered out loud, lifting the sunglasses that usually masked my orange eyes, so I could see unobstructed. “Melissa seems really depressed lately, too.”

Dawn shifted her eyes to me, hefted her backpack higher on her shoulder and sighed. “Who knows?”

And we continued past. But I noticed that boxes were not being taken into the truck, but out. And to the house next door to the Pickles’s… which was creepy because everyone believed the house owned by Mrs. Bale was haunted. No matter how often she repainted it, it just looked shabby. She had been trying to sell it for years as a fixer-upper, but nobody ever sealed the deal, and nobody ever stayed for long. Everyone in town hurried past it with shivers. Even I avoided it. My life had been pretty normal for over a year since the day I had been kidnapped by (and rescued from) a coven of witches who had taken me eastward for their nefarious purposes—and I didn’t want that to change.

Dawn was dragging her feet now, clearly exhausted, while I marched along to get to my best friend’s house, my hair still wet from my morning surf. The water dripped on my shoulders and soaked the top of my backpack.  

“Eve… stop walking so fast,” Dawn groaned. “Why do you have so much energy?”

I smirked back, saying nothing while I took in the fall scenery (I really liked the fall. It was the end of the second month of the school year and the leaves were just beginning to turn. Also, both of our birthdays were coming up soon, mine first as I was born in October but adopted in November). Most people who saw us as we walked together stared as Dawn was all curly blonde with peaches and cream skin and bright blue eyes, dressed in Goth clothes, while I was pale as death with stick-straight midnight black hair, orange-eyed, and wore sporty clothes. As always, we were like a salt and pepper shaker set. The McAllister sisters. But we were never more opposite than this morning.

“I mean, you go flying every night practically,” Dawn muttered under her breath so that we were not overheard so much, “You were almost up as late as I was last night.”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I take naps?”

She rolled her eyes. I did take naps though. But it was also necessary that I go flying at night also. After all, I was a nocturnal being who wasn’t human.

Everyone in town knew I was adopted. That was no secret. Some suspected I wasn’t human. But not everyone in town knew what I actually was until my freshman year of high school. Long story. To shorten the story, let it suffice that I am a vimp. That’s an impossible cross between a vampire and an imp. And that’s an even longer story.

“I take naps, but all they do is leave me feeling more tired.” Dawn groaned.

I shrugged. What could I say? I had a different physiology. I was meant to be nocturnal. It came from my vampire parentage—my birthfather. The fact that I had adjusted so well to living in the daylight was the real mystery.

“Flying invigorates me then,” I finally replied with another shrug.

She shot me a dirty look. Her eyes said it was also not fair that I had wings. She could not see them right then as they were inside the peculiar birthmark in between my shoulder blades underneath my backpack. These wings came from my imp parentage—my birthmother—and they sprout out whenever I want them to (and sometimes when I don’t want them to, like when I am startled), and can go as big as I want them to go—which can be quite gigantic. Dawn is jealous of them. She’s jealous of a lot of things my imp parentage has given me—including the ability to go invisible and walk through walls. Even my ability to hear the naughty things people think—though I keep telling her it was not a thing to envy.

I hear imps shouting all day. They scream temptations to the people they hover near, though no one but me can see or hear them at their real decibel—and their chatter can get so deafening sometimes that I have to find a quiet, alone place to get away from people and therefore them. Dawn’s imps were currently shouting at her to call me a few choice four-letter words which would get our mother mad at her. She didn’t say them though. Instead, Dawn changed the subject. “Did you get an email from Rick this morning?”

I shook my head, knowing Dawn had a crush on our east-coast friend Rick Deacon. “I haven’t been on the internet this morning.”

“And why not?” Dawn snorted, having already checked her social media on her cell phone to see who had responded to her night tweets and comments.

With a shrug, I replied, “It’s not safe to bring a cellphone or computer with me into the ocean. I might drop it in the water.”

For a second Dawn stared at me to see if I was being facetious. Then she choked on a laugh. It was a running gag in our family that I never sacrificed my surfing time for anything—not even catching up on the news with our cool rich friend from Massachusetts, Howard Richard Deacon III. And I wouldn’t. Rick was great, but surfing was better.

“Besides, Mom’s rule on no morning internet hasn’t been lifted,” I said more clearly, knowing Dawn broke that rule all the time since our mom finally let us have our own cellphones. She let us have our own cellphones since my kidnapping. It was a safety precaution.

“Did you put on enough sunblock?” Dawn changed the subject, peeking at me to see if there were any streaks on my skin or red patches on my ears. She had gotten a little kinder this year also—less indifferent to me.

I checked my arms and touched my ears to see if I had, nodding. “I think so.”

Another problem with having a vampire for a birthfather is that I burn in the sun too easily. I have to either wear clothes with long sleeves and pants and a hat to protect myself, or I have to constantly slather on an SPF so high that it almost reaches triple digits.

As we continued on, two young men in white shirts and ties wearing black name tags rode past us on the road on two matching bicycles. Their backpacks looked heavy on them while their helmets mashed down their short cut hair with matching goofiness.

“There they go again,” Dawn muttered when she spotted them approaching. “Why did they move into our neighborhood?”

I waved at the duo as I recognized them. “Probably because Cliffcoast in a nice town and they just had a church built here.”

The pair of young missionaries waved back when they saw me, smiling.

“Oh no! Don’t do that!” Dawn grabbed my arm to stop me. “They might stop to talk!”

But they rode past, still smiling, apparently on their way to an appointment. Besides, I knew it was against the ‘rules of their mission’ for them to linger with young girls as it might lead to flirting. Flirting as well as dating was not allowed for them while in the service. They also weren’t allowed to go swimming or go hiking in our nearby mountains—the last one a particular local rule by their ‘mission president’. The other rules I thought were a little silly, but that last rule I understood. Everybody in the area knew that hikers went missing in our mountains almost all the time. Most just didn’t know the reason why.

I knew the reason, of course. So did a few others. There was a vampire colony somewhere in those mountains. I assumed it was where my birthfather lived though I was never quite sure. I just knew he had left me with my adoptive family at Cliffcoast as a baby due to convenience of location. But to be honest, I never really wanted to confirm if it was true. There was no reason to provoke them. So I gave the local vampires a wide berth, and they avoided our town also—not quite for the same reason. Besides me, our town also had a retired ‘monster hunter’ who was currently teaching History at our high school. But for the record, he was brought in to watch me.

 “Why do you always do that?” Dawn snapped at me after the two ‘Elders’ rode by us, bringing my thoughts to the present.

“Do what?” I watched them go, smirking.

“Wave at them?” Dawn said.

Rolling my eyes, I answered her, “Mom said we ought to be kind to people of other faiths. She takes in Jehovah Witness tracts—”

“Which are gathering dust.”

“So?” I then huffed, hearing Dawn’s imps griping over how weird ‘Mormons’ were, calling them a cult. “Look, Jane’s mom joined their church and we ought to be polite.”

Dawn rolled her eyes, thinking some critical things about my best friend’s mother, as she was a single mom of Italian descent and a former Catholic. Dawn didn’t think it right for a person to leave the faith they were born into. I was of the opposite mind. I didn’t see why a person could not choose whatever faith suited them best. I honestly didn’t like the idea of being ‘stuck’ into some ideology simply because of an accident of birth. It was unfair. It was like saying I was doomed forever simply because I was born a demon. I figured if there really was a God (which I believed considering I saw tiny devils daily flying around and I had seen an angel once), and that if God was just, he would give everyone a chance to find truth and follow it. You know—free will. The real question was: What was the truth?

“At least they are not witches,” I added. As the last outsiders who had come into town who had been ‘friendly’ to me had been those witches from Middleton Village—the ones who had later kidnapped me. “They don’t have any ulterior motives.”

“What do you call proselytizing?” Dawn asked me with a sneer.

Taking off my sunglasses to clean off the fingerprints, I blinked my orange eyes at her, replying, “That motive is not ulterior. We know full well their intention is to convert everyone to their religion if they could.”

Dawn gazed at me, her imps calling it silly, and she repeated to me what most of our neighborhood friends had said about the ‘Mormon’ missionaries when they came into the area. “I hear they are a cult.”

“They are not a cult,” I said with a groan. “They are a Christian church. It says so in their actual name. Jane told me. They aren’t the ‘Mormon church’—their real name is the Church of Jesus Christ of—”

“They believe in a different Jesus,” Dawn cut me off.

I stared at her, pulling back as I said, “What does that even mean? There is only one Jesus. He’s in the Bible.”

“Pastor MacDougal says so.”

I groaned more. Him. “Pastor MacDougal just hates them because he is losing parishioners, and that means he is getting less on the collection plate. He’d say anything to slander them.”

“Take that back.” Dawn halted on the walk, staring gape-mouthed at me.

“That’s the truth.” I replied, blinking back at her.

Dawn stared at me, taking in my orange eyes as if she had just remembered that I could hear all the wicked things everyone was tempted with—including those naughty thoughts everyone in our church entertained. She knew I could see and hear imps. I used to catch them and show her they were real. I only stopped doing that because the tiny little devils freaked her out.

Putting my sunglasses back on, all cleaned, I continued on walking, leaving Dawn on the sidewalk as she had not moved from shock. I said, “Don’t you ever find it weird that a man gets paid to talk about God? But the Bible says the word of God is supposed to be without money and without price?” I shook my head, walking backward. “Honestly, I think he should get a real job if he really is sincere about being God’s servant. He should be preaching for free.”

“You just don’t like him because he called you the devil’s spawn when we were kids,” Dawn snapped, marching after me.

Which was true. I didn’t like him. But that wasn’t the only reason. Something tightened in my chest whenever I thought of that man. Indignation swelled within me now, as back then Pastor MacDougal had been generally impatient with me. He had never liked me, and I never really thought he was particularly ‘Christian’ for a pastor. He had too much pride and spite. He was often smug. Arrogant. He was too proud of his college degrees, and he always assumed he knew spiritual things better than anyone who did not have a divinity degree—even some of those sweet elderly ladies who studied the Bible daily in the church’s scripture group… and they practically had the Bible memorized, as well as all the church hymns. And hearing the imps of those old ladies, I trusted them more than the pastor. They at least tried to live their religion.

And they gave me cookies.

Lifting my chin, I said, “I wasn’t doing anything naughty, and he was picking on me. Besides, it’s inaccurate.”

Dawn snorted, nodding. She knew I was right. I was technically the spawn of a vampire and imp—not that Pastor MacDougal knew that. He was merely prejudiced over how I looked. He could not get over how pale I was along with the combination of my straight black hair. My orange eyes freaked him out. And it freaked him out more when my eyes turned red whenever I got hungry. And when my sharp canines kept growing back in… well, he had secretly tried to exorcize my father and mother—to no avail of course as I wasn’t that kind of demon and they were not possessed. And to top it off, he called my peculiar bat-wing shaped birthmark, which was in the middle of my back between my shoulder blades, sinful—as if a birthmark could be sinful. So yeah, I looked like something that could have been spawned in hell—but a true Christian would have looked for the good in me. You know, the way my parents did. The way my family did.

But honestly, though, I was glad our pastor did not know the complete truth. The truth would have freaked him out more, and he probably would never allow me thought the doors of the church ever again if he found out about it. I am, after all, the result of an ancient witch curse. Long story.

I’ve got a lot of those, apparently.

When we reached Jane’s house, I knocked on the door while Dawn stood back. After a few minutes, my best friend Jane Bennetti opened the door with a grin, grabbed her jacket and her house keys, and went out to join us. As she locked the door, Jane said to me, “I’ve got an activity to go to this evening at the church…” Dawn rolled her eyes with another moan about the ‘Mormons’ since Jane was attending that church with her mother now, “…which you can come to if you want—”

“I think Sarah McDonald would freak if she saw me show up with you,” I cut her off with a wry smirk to prevent her from putting herself out on their behalf.

Coloring a little, Jane said while tucking in her keys, “Sarah is not going to freak.”

But I knew I made Sarah nervous. I always had. Sarah had been our lone ‘Mormon’ in school for years. Only recently other people from our town had joined her. But most people who went that church building were from neighboring towns. It was like a central location, apparently.

I had watched them one Sunday. Big families. SUVs. Clean cut almost out of the 1950’s kind of folk. And hardly a swear word out of them. It was like the exact opposite of high school, which was nearly pornographic in the level of trash talk that went on daily. Not that those in that church were perfect. Their imps tempted them with all kinds of things—the same exact things that temped the parishioners of my church. All the seven deadly sins. And when I had pointed it out to Jane, she just shrugged and a said a church was not a museum for perfect people, but a hospital for the sick and the wounded.

I had never heard Jane say stuff like that before. But it left me with a lot to think about since.

“Another hiker went missing again,” Jane said as we started down the walk. “It was on the news this morning.”

I groaned inwardly. “Why do people ignore the signs at the trail heads? The town obliterated the campgrounds in those mountains for a reason.”

Dawn glanced at me as Jane flinched. As they knew me, they also knew about the vampires and believed in them.

“Everyone seems to think rules are for dummies,” Jane finally replied with a shrug.

That was something my oldest brother, Will, sometimes said. I peeked at Jane with a furtive look. She and Will had been dating since February of our freshman year, less than two years ago. Since he had gone off to college a year ago, they had stayed in contact with a more long-distance sort of relationship. And whenever he was in town, they were inseparable. Though my mother did not approve, considering their relative ages and the risk involved with them possibly doing something really stupid together when they were alone, there was also very little our mom could do about it. The only thing she was grateful for was that Ms. Bennetti’s new religion promoted chastity before marriage. She just hoped Jane was adopting the same belief. My mom was not quite ready to become a grandmother just yet.

We reached the school grounds well before the first bell and separated off to our classes. I had PE first hour with Dawn for drill team and flags while Jane rushed off to Spanish. I did not see Jane again until the third hour when we had English together, and we separated once more until lunch. We had Chemistry together in the afternoon.

The entire day my classmates talked about those hikers who had gone missing (their numbers varied depending on who was talking). Their families (who were out-of-towners) were calling for a federal investigation as apparently they had done some research and learned of the disappearance rate in those mountains. I overheard they wanted our town investigated, as if we were the ones making the hikers disappear. People cast me secretly terrified looks in the hallways, shifting away from me.

While in my final class hour, American History with Mr. McDillan who was currently regaling us on the Aztec practice of ripping people’s hearts out and all their human sacrifice (he loved gory history and was our resident ‘monster hunter’) justifying what Cortez did to their king, I overheard Laura Sheehan whispering to Melissa Pickles.

“…rented out that house? Who are they?”

“I haven’t met them yet,” Melissa hissed back, watching Mr. McDillan who didn’t like it when people talked while he was lecturing. “But I saw only two people. A man and a girl.”

Their imps were shouting for them to pass notes rather than whisper, which Mrs. McDillan hated more. Apparently this conversation was urgent for some reason.

One of them saw me listening in, and Laura said to me, nudging my arm, “It looks like you’ll have to find a new future home. Your haunted house has been taken.”

Grimacing, I rolled my

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.11.2018
ISBN: 978-3-7554-7885-0

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