Something strange was going on.
Ever since that night I sneaked out and went to Kyle's house, I started noticing that my dad would go out to council meetings more. A lot more than usual.
After my incident occurred, my dad was relegated to mandatory meetings only in the council and his rank as a moderator in the Obsidian council was revoked and given to someone else.
The council was a crucial part of our community. It was the backbone that kept everything from crumbling, kept every Obsidian vampire safe. They as the superior Obsidians used a greater part of the ritual power to mask our existence in this little town of Oak Lake, to make sure that it seemed perfectly normal and that no one ever found us or bothered us.
From what I had gathered from my reading in my father's study, an Obsidian synergistic shift, which consisted of channeling raw power was a dangerous task which required part of the group to be quelling the energy's ferocity (moderators) while the others channeled it raw and untainted (the superior Obsidians).
Besides this, the council remained a mystery. Any other one of its functions was kept between its members and us as the public were kept on a need to know basis.
Every day after work, my dad would stay for dinner, have our usual awkward at-the-table conversation that mostly consisted of me asking questions and never getting answers. Asking about my future, what was going to be next and being met with some endless drivel about how the community was there to keep me safe, another word for prisoner, by the way.
After that grueling half hour, he would then shift on to the meeting all hurriedly and vague. Even mom seemed frustrated and confused which made it seem much more shady than I had anticipated.
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Besides that, he'd pass weird comments at me about how I was a bit reckless and had been different and sneaky lately and that was all I needed to think that he knew that I'd been hanging out with Kyle. If that was the case, I was totally screwed. Rapunzel in that tower would have nothing on me.
My immediate instinct was to lay low, not do anything suspicious because of how tense the atmosphere had suddenly become, but there was a problem.
Hanging out with Kyle had been the best thing in all of this, it was the one thing that made my confinement much more bearable and I was not sure I could give it up anytime soon. Plus, Kyle was also getting used to having me around and I didn't want to jeopardize it in any way. He'd also planned something for my 18th birthday which was only a week away now and I was curious about what it was.
My existence was a lonely one, but the return of my best friend had been the best gift ever. This newfound paranoia about my dad and what he knew, what all the elders were upto, it was something that really put a wrench in the works for me.
I wasn't ready for this bubble to burst but I was also not ready to deal with my dad and the terrible lecture that would come if he ever found out that I was sneaking away right under his nose and had spent the past almost three weeks with the person I had harmed all those years back.
I heard noises in the living room just after midnight while I was already in bed and working on a sketch. He was later than usual today. Much later and in no time he was shuffling up the stairs to their bedroom. I heard murmurs that slowly escalated, though still just muffled sounds that I couldn't really make out, but I didn't need to hear what they were talking about to understand that they were arguing. Suddenly the chatter went completely silent, just very abruptly, probably mid sentence too, I would know because I was straining myself trying to make out what was happening.
I'd never heard mom and dad argue like that, not ever. I didn't know what to be terrified of the most, that or the fact that it had just gone quiet almost immediately. A part of me wanted to get to the bottom of this, to figure this mystery out as soon as possible, but I was afraid of what I would find. Deep down I knew that somewhere, somehow it would all come back to me. I was the origin of all the inconveniences in our lives and in that moment it really struck me that it could all be worse, that maybe what I'd been worried about all this time was just a piece of a very big puzzle that was much more terrifying that I could ever fathom.
My mind did not have much time to function, I immediately thought I should go and try to eavesdrop, but we were vampires, if you couldn't hear anything it probably meant that there was nothing to hear and there was no changing that. Plus, me leaving this room or showing any sort of suspicion would make them more alert than they had been, taking away any chance of me finding out what was really going on here.
I was grinding my wheels trying to connect all this, dad's sudden nightly disappearances, mom's frustration, now the fighting...what did it all add up to? I searched deep and far into my mind to look for any more pieces of the puzzle that could help me figure out why the atmosphere in this house had suddenly soured, but there was nothing except for me