#dareclue

They called them the immune seven. Nobody mentioned that there were eight of them. Nobody mentioned Marcel Ross had been the only one who did not drink. They called them the immune seven as they lay on the ground surrounded by salt, blood dripping into glasses that would touch young lips. They had been told they would consume eternal life and into a trap they had fallen, the thirst to live forever leaving them weak. Seven cups, crafted carefully, seven pairs of eyes nervous and excited, seven sets of hands clasping as they consumed the blood of a man that was meant to, supposed to, lead them through adulthood but would eventually lead them to their death. Seven pairs of eyes and not one pair of ears that listened to the only person who knocked the cup away. The eighth goblet was left untouched. 

“This is wrong,” Marcel Ross had protested, his eyes bluer than the ocean, bouncing with electric as blood spilled across stone wall. And each of them had turned their gaze, their eyes filled with doubt. If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right, their eyes had screamed. Marcel had not left. He couldn’t. Instead he had stood against cold brick as he watched the people he had once thought were his family drink from the river of Satan. God would not help them now. He knew that even as he clasped the crucifix around his neck that his Mother had gifted him on her death bed.

It would be a year before they would understand the dear price they had paid for their interest in the darkness of Orson French’s mind. A cult, some might say. As disease spread through the school they had once attended, they were liberated, they were spared. They had rejoiced, their brains entirely corrupted with sheer thanks to their creator. They grew to be geniuses, their potential maximised to such a point that they could not control their racing thoughts. Smarter than anyone in the world, brighter. They did not know yet, they would not know for many years, what price they had truly paid. 

Bethany White had been the first to entirely lose her mind for the sake of love, her hands had became harsher and as she fought with the enigmatic Emily Rose, heavily pregnant with the child of James Trent, a child that would later become the Hazel of the next generation, she had pushed too hard, pushing the woman to her untimely death. Or at least. That was what Bethany had thought. That was what everyone had thought. Nobody knew that Emily survived, nobody would know in time to stop the cycle of events that her ‘death’ would begin. 

Emily’s brother was outraged, he was horrified, his heart broken and his moral compass with it. His sister had spent so many years of her life sold to the highest bigger and in return, she had died. Her love too great. Too well known. Howard Cross would run across the school yard that night, placing a deadly bout of poison, much faster at it’s job than the blood of the immune seven, into Orson French’s goblet. To avenge his sister, he would do anything. Orson had died that night, Charles left to believe, as his head lay on the ground and his own hand wrapped around the axe that had caused it that he had been the reason. Only Howard Cross knew different. He didn’t breathe a word. He was too busy beginning his plot to alter the dynamics of space and time. He would become the villain of the story for the next twenty years, his love for his sister inspiring a hate for the world more bitter and tasteless than anyone had ever seen. He would make sure his children became the exact image of he and Emily, and when he was done, they would retell his story. The way he wanted it to have been. A tale in which they both lived.

The immune seven went on, the knowledge that they had been atop the roof the night Emily died imprinted upon their mind. They felt no sadness. It had not been their fault. None of this had, right? So corrupted they did not understand their very own wrongs, they would live a life that was justified by random acts of karmic relief, beginning with them losing their minds. 

Charles French knew about the immune seven. Harrison French had married one of them. The French’s were insane but they were not poisoned by the same blood as Orson, each driven out of their own skulls in their own special way, a different experiment designated to each child. They were not extremely strong, extremely smart, extremely uncontrollable, not like the immune seven. They thirsted for death but the immune seven, Charlotte French, her thirst was much greater. A thirst for literal blood.

Yes, the immune seven had grown up, they had aged, they had each had children of their own but a very strange thirst, a vampiric state of being had taken ahold of their bodies. They could not survive without the taste of human blood upon their tongues. Orson was gone, instead they drank each others and when eventually that was not enough, they had drank Marcel’s. The man was afraid. He was afraid for their children, for their lives. Amos Harpe had began working on a cure but it would not be finished for months, possibly for even longer. Their cups were never full enough, his body was never strong enough, they drained him of his life but they were his family. He would die for them. He would die with them. The immune seven did not know what was happening, their minds were gone, they tore at their bodies, they tore at the emptiness they felt, they dressed in clothes that looked the same and plastered on smiles. They held their children in their arms. That did not erase the terrible ritual they could no longer resist.

The more time passed, the more their own children exhibited signs of being special. At least in their crazy minds, minds that were more restless than ever before. Sarah Ross pushed her son to his limits and Marcel watched, losing blood and losing his own mind, he thought only of himself, what these children could do. They had the blood of the chosen. Why were they not showing signs of being anything more than children? 

Eight years came to pass, each with their own children circling their legs, Amos filled with cures that were temporary, eventually came up with one that would work. He had been so proud. How his dark eyes had danced with glee as he presented it to Carrie Sinclair, saving her from herself, looking her small daughter in the eye and promising a day would come that she too would be cured. He had thought of his son, Jesse, and as he had, some strange inkling had gotten to him, the possibility that this would come to a tragic end. Weeks later he had hidden notebooks, clues scribbled in the margins in his old office. Jesse would find them one day. He would find them and understand. 

The cure became known between the seven, Carrie first. The Fawke’s. Charlotte French. Bethany White. All of them were saved. All but Marcel’s wife, Sarah and Karen Bell, a woman who had gone so insane she was never seen again outside of the walls of an insane asylum. Marcel would learn on his way home that he had been too late, his wife was dead. Killed by her own hand. He had waited too long. His son was an orphan. His son was forgotten to the war that waged on inside of him and yet he had to remember, this had all been for the greater good. He had helped save them.

Behind his back, the immune, now six, gathered in frantic thought. What if Amos Harpe told of their thirst? What if their children were taken from them? What if Marcel was angry that Sarah had died? Oh, they had loved her, but he had never been an accomplice. He did not have blood on his hands. He could of black mailed them. They could not lose everything, just as they had got it back. 

Under pressure, Loretta Fawkes made a terrible decision. She called Howard Cross. In desperation, behind the backs of the other four, the Fawkes’ framed Amos as the origination of the disease, beginning Howard’s vendetta against Whittemore itself, not just the man who had ran it. It was Vincent French who stepped up to do something about it, his abandoned son sold to evil that would work to his advantage, together, they would engineer a plane crash that would not just kill the three people aboard that they knew were wrong but hundreds of others -- they would do anything for time. 

When Amos and his wife, alongside Marcel, boarded a plane of innocent passengers, in one last ditch journey home with the remains of their hope to share their new discovery with the rest of the world, something had gone horribly wrong. The plane was overridden, someone was controlling it. Marcel Ross was the only person on board with any piloting experience, enough technical knowledge to override an out of control motherboard and as he leaned forwards, to become a hero, he had typed in a key code that set the plan alight. It exploded. Breaking into a million pieces mid-air. That was the day Amos Harpe died. It was also the day that Marcel Ross woke up. 

They had promised Marcel they would not turn back to immortality. They would not seek it out. They would not harm others to protect their secrets. But they had. He climbed from the ruins of a plane that had been destroyed for the sake of eternal life and preserving a disturbing secret and he knew he would never return to his son. He would instead, avenge them. He just had to bide his time. Time which for him at least, was endless. 

10TH MAY 2016.

He had waited thirteen years for revenge. He wanted them to know it was coming. One phonecall would set off a chain of reactions. Had it been so when they had planned to kill him? To murder Amos in cold blood? Each one of them had been a part of this betrayal and it did not matter what Carrie said, he would not be stopped. 

As long as he could find them, he would kill them.

His movements were so precise that he anticipated each of their reactions, pleased that he would finally be able to do what they had to him. Take away time. All the time he had wasted helping them when he could of been with his son, his wife, doing anything but pouring himself both metaphorically and physically into them for nothing in return. 

Carrie was the easiest. She was the first. She took her death like a friend she had awaited on her doorstep. He did not want her to be afraid, he wanted to look her in the eyes he had once known as he killed her, and so he had. Swiftly, easily. She was gone. Her husband spared. He had played no part in these terrible affairs, not like the others. Marcel was angry but he was not insane, he would not kill someone who had no part in this master plan of deception. Wasn’t it strange? Being alive after all these years. He laid her body in her bed as if she were asleep and he thought of Sarah, how peaceful she had once been before they ruined her. 

He did not have to play a hand truly in the death of the Fawkes’, a careful accident. In their haste to escape their house, they had not expected for Marcel to take an easy route, to slice the breaks of their car as they had once sliced his skin. Both actions had been for the good of everybody involved, after all they had done, they deserved this end. He watched as the car failed to stop at a junction, slamming and smashing into a truck, crushed beneath the weight of their lies and their attempt to escape their fate. He felt nothing but satisfied. 

Bethany and Clive were his greatest accomplishment, the sickest of them all, for how they had treated their children had not gone unseen and as his boots crushed against plants as he led up to their reconstructed farm house, he wondered how anything could live surrounded by this evil. They did not fear him. Perhaps they did not even expect him to come. That was his favourite part as he lit a match, who lights a match in a house of wood? It amused him as he threw it, the door barricaded shut. They would die in the inferno they had created for themselves. Burn to death.

By 11.30am Marcel Ross sat in broad daylight outside a coffee shop in London, blonde hair swept back from his face and a twinkle in his eye that had not been there for years. 

They were gone.

Just like Sarah.