Page 16 of The Vampire's Storm

She hadn’t meant to hide it; it had just happened.

But if it wasn’t for her, he may still be alive. Certainly if she’d done the right thing when she found it that day.

But she hadn’t.

Her mind drifted back to that day, when she was nearly five years old, and how she’d found the little bottle in the grass. Brad was swinging on a swing, so she quickly picked up the nose spray and climbed the ladder into the tree house.

She wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Her parents waved her away every time they were talking about it. “It's not a toy, Brooklyn. It’s your brother’s.”

She wanted one.

She understood he was sick and had diabwetes as they’d both pronounced it back then, but there was a feeling of being left out. She was never allowed to go to the doctor’s appointments, and no one would tell her what the little bottle was for.

Now she knew.

It was a nose spray essential to keeping her twin brother alive should he have a seizure. A spray that would be required urgently in the moment.

Sitting in the treehouse Brooklyn had sat looking at the forbidden item and sprayed it into her doll’s face.

When her mom called out to them for lunch, she had nearly leaped out the treehouse window in panic. Quickly shoving the spray under her doll’s blanket, Brooklyn climbed back down the ladder and let out a sigh of relief at not being caught.

Running through the grass, Brooklyn planned to put the spray in her brother’s room after lunch.

She forgot.

Her uncle and aunt showed up with early Christmas gifts and stayed for dinner. In the middle of the night, when she was woken by her parents screaming, Brooklyn scrambled out of bed.

They were in her brother’s bedroom.

“Where is it?” her mom cried, pulling open drawers as her father searched the floor.

Oh, god.

Her mouth had fallen open, and terror filled her little body as Brad flailed and shook on his bed.

“Brook, where is your brothers spray?” her father cried. “Have you seen it? God, he’s going to die!”

He phoned an ambulance, and her mom began giving him CPR.

Brooklyn ran downstairs, dragged a chair across the kitchen to unlock the back door, then raced out of the house and up into the treehouse.

When she returned with it in her hand, panting, they were still doing CPR, but her brother was still.

And dead.

“Here! It’s here!” she yelled, thrusting it into her mother’s hands.

The look on her face still lingered in Brooklyn’s memories heavily. It was laced with questions and judgment. Then her mom had blinked it away.

Her father grabbed it out of her hand and sprayed it up her brother’s nose as the medical people came flying into the room.

Brooklyn was pushed aside and sat crying in the corner on her knees.

Not long later, they announced that Brad was dead.

And it was her fault.

She’d never told her parents what she’d done, and it weighed heavily on her every day.

---