A/N: Hi guys! Generation 7 is (obviously) up and running now. Elijah has taken over as heir, and his occupation will be Journalist. Since school has started up for me now, I probably won’t post as often but hopefully I can still manage a chapter every now and then! Once more, thank you for sticking around and reading my story 🙂 Hope you enjoy!

~Raymond

The bunk bed trembled in time to Carmen’s sobs. Her gulps for air were muffled beneath a feather-stuffed pillow, but the room still awkwardly carried the sound down to my ears below her. Fighting against gravity, I lifted my eyelids and peered at the harsh red numbers blinking in the darkness. 3:16.

Silently I let my eyes close. You don’t care about Carmen, I told myself, not anymore.

Wind howled outside the window and my ears gratefully honed in on it. Just because I didn’t care didn’t make listening to her crying any easier. With a sudden burst, the wind violently spun, slamming a tree branch into the glass.

Carmen let out a wail and dug her nails against the starchy sheets.

The branches scratched against the window pane, drawing forth another scream. “Stop! Go away! S-stop!” The intensity in her voice began to crescendo with the wind. Slamming the pillow tightly over her head, she cried out again.

“Wake up.” Abandoning any hope of sleep, I reached up and lightly slapped the side of her bed. “It’s just the wind.”

You don’t care about her, I told myself once again. You are just annoyed she woke you up. That was a lie. Maybe it was because we were twins, but I had woken the second her nightmare started.

Stifling a sob, she slowly flopped on her back and tightly balled her fists against her eyes. “It was the werewolves,” she hiccupped.

“It was not werewolves.” I suppressed the urge to groan. Werewolves didn’t scratch at windows, they would just break them. “You were dreaming.”

The shadows covered Carmen’s face, but I sensed her pouting. “I wasn’t!” she snapped. It was scary how fast she could go from being sad to being angry.

“Were to.”

“I wasn’t!”

“I have bad dreams all the time… It’s normal.” That was my attempt at a truce.

Her teary eyes still glaring, she dangled her head over the edge of the bed and asked, “About what? Werewolves?”

“No.” I thought back to years ago, when the nightmares had stopped. Ok, I didn’t exactly have bad dreams all the time, but I used to. “They were of this… guy, named Matt.”

“Is Matt bad like a werewolf?” The fire was gone from her eyes. Carmen generally seemed curious about this, her own bad dream forgotten.

I didn’t really remember much about Matt, but I said what felt right. “He’s bad, but I don’t think he knew about unicorns. He never wanted to hurt them.”

“Then why is he bad?”

“I don’t know! He just doesn’t like our family,” I grumbled. Matt never really had explained why he hated my ancestors. “Anyway, he’s dead.”

Carmen let out a long breath, then said, “Well that’s good. I wish all the werewolves were dead…”

She didn’t understand. She didn’t know dead people can haunt you in your dreams. The only thing my sister was scared of was werewolves.

***

That was understandable though.

A couple of years ago, before we moved into the palace, a werewolf found our house. Dad had warned us that even though the forest was dense, there was still danger from werewolves. If we saw one, we were immediately supposed to run inside and hide. Supposedly, werewolves didn’t want to hurt people. They wanted the unicorns.

But when the werewolf came, Carmen didn’t run inside. I did. But she tried to pull Viar inside with her.

Our unicorn refused to move.

Viar later said that going inside would have just drawn the werewolf closer to us, but Carmen stubbornly insisted on protecting him. The werewolf had growled, trails of spit running down the fur on the sides of his mouth. Jagged pointed teeth flashed menacingly.

With a push from his hind legs, he leaped. Carmen and Viar were pinned underneath him.

I didn’t even think to scream, or run, or help them. I just stood there, my pale knuckles tightly gripping the fence. After Carmen shrieked, dad came running outside closely trailed by mom.

But by then, Viar had stumbled to his feet and aimed his glowing horn at the werewolf, killing it in a flash of blood-red light.

***

Ever since, all Carmen could think about was werewolves.

“I hate werewolves,” she stated, effectively breaking my train of thought. I grunted in response. A moment of silence prompted her to ask, “Are you scared of anything, ‘lijah?”

I knew my answer in a second, but pretended to take some time to think about it. “Death,” I said. Death had taken our grandpa, and was probably going to take grandma any day now.

Amid his ramblings about how our ancestries were intertwined and blabbity blah, Matt had mentioned death too. He warned me about it.

Death will not solve anything. It ends nothing. People can still come back after death and haunt you even worse than before.

But I wasn’t really scared of death.

I should have said I was scared of losing people because every one I liked has died, or almost has. Like Carmen. Like Viar. And grandpa and uncle Tony. Like mom, when she accidentally knocked over the fire pit and set the grass on fire.

And that was why I’m trying to not like anybody.