Failed Warning Signs

When his little sister Rebecca had disappeared from her crib just after her first birthday, Devlin Neru had felt like he had been driven into the depths of madness. She had been a surprise to his parents - a new child in their late-thirties/early-forties when they already had a son that was practically an adult - and he had fallen in love with her the moment he had seen her. He had been delighted to stay up nights with her to help his parents sleep, often forgoing his own comfort to make sure that she had hers. If it hadn't been known that Sarah and Tomas Neru had had a daughter, people in the clan would have thought she was his.   And then she was gone.   They searched for a year for any signs of who could have taken her. Devlin had torn the house apart, then run himself ragged hunting down and interrogating every vampire he could find in a hundred-mile radius at the time. His parents had searched but...after a year they stopped. They just...went back to their lives.   That should have been his second warning sign.

— Flashback, 2004

  Wheezing and choking on blood (and what he was fairly certain was a broken tooth), Devlin dragged himself into his best friend's bathroom while she scrambled to find her first aid kit in her apartment. He blinked blearily at his reflection in the mirror and barely recognized himself through the blood and already purpling bruises covering his face. Blond hair hanging in matted, bloody tangles. Eyes with so many blood vessels shattered from the punches that had blackened both eyes, the blue of them was stained red. Leaning heavily on the counter, he coughed and managed to spit the broken tooth into the old porcelain sink alongside spatters of blood.   Thank fuck he was a hunter, or he might have needed a hospital. It still hurt like everything, but he could feel the telltale sensation of his body healing itself already.   His best friend, Colleen Sangel, came into the bathroom and set her massive first-aid kit down on the top of the toilet seat. As she snapped it open and started digging for things, she asked in rapid, angry German, “Who do I have to kill?"   Devlin choked on a bitter laugh and replied in English, “You don't, Col.”   “Dev, don't give me that macho fucking bullshit,” she spat and then stopped when he held up a bloodstained hand to stop her. After a moment, Colleen huffed and took hold of his hand, beginning to wipe off the blood with an alcohol swab that she dug out of the kit. “Talk to me, shithead,” she hissed under her breath, switching to English as well. “I know I'm not supposed to know clan politics and all of that shit, but it's too late for all that now. So what happened?”   “My uncle and grandfather,” he replied, face twitching as she ran the swab over a barely closed laceration on the back of his hand. As it started to bleed again, Devlin looked at her and said, “They...fuck, Colleen, they took her. They took her and they made her a monster.”   “Took who? Dev, you aren't making sense.”   “Becca.”   Colleen's eyes went wide at that, and her head jerked up to stare at him in surprise. “You...you're not joking?” she said after a moment, her eyes darting back and forth across his face before she spoke.   “God, I wish I were,” he growled. “I kept looking after everyone else stopped, you know that I did. Kept digging. And one day, someone idly commented on how Uncle Wictor and Grandfather were always disappearing, so I started following them. They...they were slipping away from the village and off to an old bunker. You know, one of those damned ones from World War II that are still scattered around.”   “The one us and all the others kept daring each other to go into when we were kids, but no one ever had the balls to? Miles outside of the village?”   “That one,” he confirmed, surprised she had remembered it. Colleen's family had moved away when she was eleven, finding the village strange…and it was for one of the few families that wasn't connected to the clan of hunters that made up most of the occupants. They had reconnected when Devlin had moved to Berlin for college, taking a break in his hunter training to get an education at his parents’ insistence. He had only received a year of that education before returning home when Rebecca had disappeared from her crib.   Devlin turned his head to spit more blood into the sink before continuing, “They turned it into a training center, all focused on one thing: making a perfect hunter. And she was there, all of seven.”   He remembered the cold way that she had looked at him. The dispassionate way that she had spoken about hunting. About killing.   “Give me your other hand,” Colleen urged, and Devlin did automatically. He then coughed, closing his eyes as they itched like mad (likely some of the burst blood vessels starting to repair themselves), and continued talking.   “She was cold, Col, so cold,” he said hollowly, seeing that tiny face again in his mind’s eye. “She asked me how I would kill a mortal protecting a vampire. And then explained to me how she would do it when my answer didn't satisfy her.”   Colleen hummed quietly and then asked, “And you're certain it was her?”   Nodding, he replied quietly, “She had the same birthmark on her left forearm just inside the elbow, almost like a star. It's why I always called her kleiner stern. And she had Mom's eyes. Uncle Wictor also confirmed it was her when he told me that I didn't have a sister anymore.”   “Shit.” He heard his best friend toss the alcohol swabs into the trash and then her grabbing the first aid kit, opening his eyes to see her pointing at the toilet seat. “Here, sit down and let me clean up your face as much as I can. You've got a gash across your nose that needs some butterfly bandages, too. Hunter healing or not, it’ll scar worse if we don’t close it up.”   Devlin sat with a huff and closed his eyes again as he let her work, occasionally hissing at the sting of alcohol in the cuts. As she was dabbing at the gash across his nose - a gift from his uncle and a spiked knuckleduster - Colleen asked quietly, “What are you going to do?”   “I can't do anything,” he replied, voice cracking on the last word. “Robert Neru himself signed off on it. I saw his signature. The clan agreed to let them do that to her. Our parents agreed to it, Col. They let them take her. They let them.” And suddenly, everything that had been holding him together to drag himself out of the underbrush he had been dumped into by his uncle and drive - shaking and half-blinded by blood - the hour or so from the village to Berlin slipped from his grasp. Devlin inhaled shakily and the first sob came, rattling his bruised ribs. Then Colleen's arms were around his shoulders and he wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his face into her shirt and sobbing.   She didn't try to stop him. Colleen just ran her fingers through his filthy hair and hummed what sounded like Rammstein songs until he slumped against her, spent and empty of...everything.   Her fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, and she whispered, “You can stay here as long as you need, Dev.” Then she pushed him gently away, tilting his chin up so they were looking at each other, and said, “Let me finish cleaning up your face and then we'll get you into the shower, then bed, okay?”   “Okay,” he answered. Then, after a beat, Devlin said, “I don’t…Col, I don’t think I have the energy to even stand up in the shower anymore.”   Colleen’s fingers - warm and steady - curled around the back of his neck and she bent to press her forehead to his. It was a gesture that stole his breath because that was a clan greeting specific to his own clan. As he shakily lifted a hand to lay it against the back of her neck to complete the gesture, she spoke in a firm voice.   “I have you, Dev. Just like always.”   In another life, Devlin might have decided to marry Colleen Sangel on that gesture alone. In this one, all he felt was gratitude to have her by his side when his entire life was falling apart around him.   After that, Devlin just let his body follow her gentle commands and gestures to get him undressed, his mind adrift from the rest of him. He mechanically sat on the edge of the tub as she gently rinsed blood and grime from him with a rag and the shower head. And leaned into her as she patted his skin dry with a towel that felt criminally soft, Colleen not seeming to care one bit that they were practically naked together (having thrown off her own shirt and jeans when she had wrangled him into the shower.   He came back to himself a bit more when she entered the bathroom - when had she left? - with a tall pile of clothes that she sat on the counter, removing boxers first and holding them out to him. “Ex left all of these behind after I kicked him out,” she explained. “Everything might be small on you, but it’s the best I can do until we can get something else. You think you can manage?”   Nodding, Devlin managed to smile thinly and said, “So long as you don’t care about getting a glimpse. I don’t think I can stand and do it.”   “I’ve seen a dick, Dev. Hell, I saw your dick when we were kids and went swimming in the creek.”   That, at least, made him laugh and Devlin managed enough energy to get his soaked boxers off. Once he got the new ones on, Colleen helped him get the sweatpants on. They left what felt like miles of his legs showing, but that was the difference between Colleen’s five-foot-six boyfriend she had been dating and Devlin’s own six-foot-two frame. Clothes were clothes, though.   Between the two of them, they managed to get clothes on and out of the bathroom. Colleen tucked him into her own bed like he was a child - a gesture that reminded him far too much of his mother - and he slipped a hand out of the blankets to grab her wrist. “Stay,” he breathed, not wanting to be alone.   As Colleen slid into the bed next to him, Devlin reached for her hand and entwined their fingers together before leaning his forehead against hers. “I don't know what to do,” he whispered. “I hate them but...they're my family.”   “Shh,” she hushed him, kissing his forehead. "We can worry about that tomorrow.”   “We?”   “I'm not leaving my best friend alone to deal with this shit.” Then she squeezed his hand and said, “And, if worse comes to worst, I'll be your family, Dev. Always thought of you as my annoying big brother.”   Devlin squeezed her hand back tightly and smiled as tears ran down his face. "I always did want an annoying little sister," he said before the sobs came back with a vengeance, dragging him back into the depths of what felt like a gaping hole in his chest. And Colleen pulled him into her arms without hesitation, as if she could protect him from the pain that had thrust itself into his life with all of the grace of a hunter’s blade.  

“I always wanted a little sister,” Devlin said with a smile as Rebecca stood up in her crib, grinning up at him with that gaping smile that children had. He bent down and scooped her up, cuddling her in his arms, before he thumbed her nose to make her giggle. "So, don't you worry, little star,” he continued, “I'm going to always be there to look out for you.”   As he turned around, he found their parents watching them from the doorway and gasped theatrically. “Oh, look, there's Mom and Dad!” he exclaimed as he lifted one of her hands to wave it. “You have to say hello when people show up, Becca! Like this.” She giggled in a high-pitched tone and began waving in wide sweeps, hitting him in the face several times but he didn't care.   He noticed that their parents looked slightly sad while watching them, but didn't chalk it up to more than losing sleep from having a toddler around.   That should have been his first warning sign.

— Flashback, 2004