Shadow Prince ch 1

The Shadow Prince
Chapter One

April pulled herself out of bed, lazily rubbing the sleep from her eyes.  She stretched out her arm and felt for the button to silence her screaming alarm clock.
         “April turn it off!”  She could hear her mother calling from downstairs.
         “Ok, Mom!”  She called back.
         She made her way to her mothers yellow sea shell bathroom, not bothering to turn on the light.  Her nimble fingers scurried around in the dark until they found her hair brush, and she combed it back into a pony tail.  She flipped on the light, and squinted into the mirror.  Everything was blurry.  Her glasses had broken during the move to Michigan, and she wouldn’t have new ones until tomorrow.  She sighed.
         It would be hell trying to find her way around the halls of her new school being as blind as a mole.  She knew that she’d be squinting like a fool all day – not a very good first impression for a transferring high school student. 
         She had come from Oak Wood High School in California, to Green Ville in Michigan.  Her family had been forced to move because her father had transferred jobs in his engineering company.  He was promoted to something like a shift manager, instead of a regular employee. 
         April was happy for him, that was sure.  But she wished that she could have finished out the school year at Oak Wood.  At least the teachers there were nice.  She had no idea what it would be like at Green Ville High.
         She made her way back to her room and got dressed.  She had laid out most of her outfits for the entire week on her dresser, but for the most part, there were boxes of clothes, books, and fabric stacked on top of each other.
         April frowned.  Where was her back pack?  She peered around the cardboard towers and quickly gave up.  Her stomach grumbled.  Most of these boxes she could began empting out tonight.  She wasn’t sure if she could get to all of them though.  Her work load would be horrible … Especially with her trying to play catch up with school.
         April sniffed.  No workload was too difficult for her.  She could definitely handle everything tonight.
         She descended down the decadent emerald carpeted stairs feeling like a queen.  She grinned at her own optimism and laughed.  Her little brother David met her in the hallway downstairs and sneered.
         “I hope you don’t plan on wearing that on your first day.”
         April looked down at her plain blue jeans and purple t-shirt.  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”  Was there something wrong with the way that she dressed?  Maybe there was a stain on her shirt.
         “You look like a guy, for starters.”  David spat.
         “I do not!”  April cried,.
         “Yeah you do.”  David crossed his arms.  “And your shirts inside out.”
         “Oh no.”  April looked down.  He was right.  Not only was it inside out, it was backwards too.  She pulled out her shirt collar so that she could see it, and cringed at the tag glaring back at her.
         “You so skinny.”  David muttered under his breath and made his way to the kitchen.
         Well that’s not very nice.  April thought.  She hurried to the bathroom and composed herself properly, this time paying very close attention to the way that she looked.  Then she jumped the steps to downstairs and slid into the kitchen.
         David stood before the refrigerator like a zombie.  He saw April and passed her a Zebra Cake. “Eat this.  You’ll stop looking like a broom stick.”
         “Oh will you stop?  April pushed the Zebra Cake away from her.  “I eat a lot.  Its just sometimes I forget to because I’m working so hard.”
         She flipped her hair over her shoulder.
         “You need to get out more.  Seriously.  There is a lot more to the world than just studying all of the time.”
         April ignored him and opened the freezer side.  “Ah ha!”  She pulled out a box of Eggo Waffles and started unraveling the bag.
         “Don’t.”  David said.
         April seized a frozen waffle and began chewing on it.
         David turned his head in disgust.  “You’re gross.”  He opened the package of Zebra Cakes and went over to towers of boxes lining their kitchen.
         “You know,”  April said above the noise of her brother rummaging through the boxes, “Grades should always come first.  You shouldn’t be taking about going out all of the time.  Your GPA is a 2.5.”
         “Well at least I have fun.”  David pushed the refrigerator door closed with his bare foot.
         “I have fun too.”  April insisted.  She wasn’t about to let her little brother get to her this early in the morning.
         David opened another box.  He was making a mess, taking everything out and setting it on the counter.
         “Do you know where mom is?”  He asked.
         “Sleeping, probably.  The time difference is almost four hours here.  Even though our clocks here say 6:00, back in California it’s only 2:00.”
         “I don’t feel any different.”
         April yawned.  “Well I do.”
         “Go wake her up.”
         April put her hands on her hips.  “You go wake her up.”
David found a bowl and poured some Lucky charms into it.  “I need her to sign my eligibility for soccer.”
“Since when do you play soccer on a team?”
“Since Dad talked me into it last night.”
“Oh.”  April’s father was already at work.  He wouldn’t be home until later on tonight.  “Well I don’t want to wake her up.  She’s always so –“
“Bitchy?” David offered.
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Yes it was.”
“David you know I don’t swear.”
“But that’s what you were thinking.”
“I was going to say that she was difficult to deal with in the morning.”  April stared at her stupid brother.  The fuzzy images that she saw was giving her a head ache.  “So when do we have to be out at the bus stop?”
David checked his watch.  “In a few minutes.”  He said and began pouring the milk.
April took another Eggo, and threw the box back in the freezer.  She decided to go wake up her mom, but when she walked all the way around the house to her mother’s room and stood in front of the door, she felt her head tingle strangely.  It was almost as if the icy fingers of fear were pushing into her brain.  She didn’t know why she was so uneasy.
“Mom?”  She knocked on the door.  Nothing was heard from within.  She turned the door knob pushed it open.  The bottom of the door scraped against the green carpet.
“Mom?”  She asked again.  Inside it was pitch black.  April felt along the wall for a light switch, not sure why her heart beat was quickening.
She found the switch and flipped it up.  Light flooded the room and revealed the remains of a massacre, the killer still inside.
April was in the door way, her hand on the light switch.  She was now face to face with a boy about her age, with glowing golden eyes, shoulder length dark hair, and thick eye brows.  He held one of the kitchen knives from down stairs in his hand.  But the boxes in the kitchen weren’t unpacked yet.  There was blood smeared on his wild face, on his chest and all over the room. Blood was splattered everywhere, thrown about the room on the sheets walls and lamp shades.
An end table had been flipped over, along with a lamp that April had never seen before.  April wanted to see if it was her mother that lay in the bed of red, but the guy in front of her raised his knife, and he was going to kill her!