Surviving Chapter 2

Shorter than the last one by request!

"She told me to leave her to die," Finn says, covering everything else up under a half truth.
"Yeah, I know, I was there,"Adair replies, and there's something spikey in his tone. He didn't like it any more than Finn did. I'm about to get hell for it, but at least I know there's no chance my wee brother would ever try to kiss me. That would not be cool.
"I was buying you time to get the fuck out of there!" I tell Adair.
"Buying us time with your life? " It's obvious Adair doesn't think that was worth it, "We could have got you out of there!"
"And run the risk of you falling into the Legions hands? Maybe you don't remember this, since it's been a whole month already, but didn't Dad die just to make sure that wouldn't happen?" Ok, now I am seriously pissed off with both of them.
"I'm not a fucking kid any more, Catriona! Without Dad around, you two are going to have to let me pull my weight!"
I'm about ready to start yelling at Adair now, demons in the street be damned. Well they are actually already damned but, whatever. I jump to my feet and close the space between us with a couple of angry steps, but Finn is right behind me. He puts a hand on my shoulder and steps in between us. I kind of leap back at his touch - I really can’t take it right now. He doesn’t react, but then he wouldn’t now that Adair is here.
"She only did what she thought was right, Dad only did what he knew was right! You'd better get that chip off your shoulder Adair, because one thing that won't change is us putting your safety first,"
From the very beginning, from Day One itself, I've been putting Adair's safety before everything else. He was just a baby when Midnight struck, just over a year old. I remember being woken up with a blinding flash of light and hearing Adair wailing so loudly even I, at five years old, knew something was wrong. I dragged myself out of bed, calling for my Mum, because sometimes the baby alarm wouldn't work properly. I thought she was downstairs, but when I went passed their bedroom, I saw the light was on, so I knocked on the door but there was no answer. As I pushed it, I felt for the very first time my sixth sense kicking in. I could feel the evil, feel it like shivering cold up my spine, making my hair stand on end.
My childhood ended when I looked into that room. There was blood everywhere, and my father was standing over my mother's body with a kitchen knife. He looked at me and I knew. He wasn't really my father anymore, he was something else altogether. I could feel it, and the knowledge turned my skin to ice. I started backing out of the room, which was when I heard my mother.
"Run, Cat, run and take Adair!" It barely even made sense to me that she could speak when there was all that blood, but I did as she told me. I ran for Adair's room, scooped him up out of his cot while he screamed and wailed, and ran for the stairs.
But the thing that had been my father was standing at the top of the stairs, waiting for me with that knife, an evil grin and that coldness wrapped all round him. I screamed and ran back for my bedroom, with no idea how I might escape from there. The thing followed me, laughing now.
"Come on now, little one, come and join us," I heard him say as I backed myself up against the big windows of my bedroom, clutching Adair tightly against me.
"Leave her alone, whatever the hell you are!" I heard someone behind the Thing say, and it turned and found itself face to face with Finn's dad, who was already drenched in blood. I heard a gun blast, the Thing folded in half and Finn's Dad leaped over it and grabbed both me and Adair.
"It's ok now, Cat, I'm going to get you out of here,"
My calling him Dad started within a couple of hours of that, as he took the three of us out of the City and got us to relative safety in the countryside where his own parents had lived. They didn't survive Day One either, but then, not many people actually did. Of course, Dad knew no better than anyone else what was going on, but he soon started digging. There was no internet any more, no mobile networks and no tv networks. All of them had died at the stroke of Midnight. He had to look for books instead, which was how we started raiding. Of course, that meant Finn being left looking after me and Adair. The three of us spent a lot of time together, even after Dad settled all of us in Refuge, which he did once he realised the danger Adair was in.
You see, there was a reason we got our powers at Midnight, a reason for everything that happened on Day One in fact, because, as I already said, anyone who survived Day One had powers, however small. Not just anyone, because any of the animals that survived also had powers. Dire Rats, for example, have a bite that poisons humans and Legion alike, making the victim hallucinate.
It quickly became obvious that the Legions were hunting for those of us who were particularly strong, and Adair proved at a very young age he was strong, kind of scary strong. After all, he was the first in our house to pick up on the thing that killed our mother and possessed our father, but it was way more than that. He could feel evil from very much further away than I could, and as we worked with Dad to hone our senses (something which Finn used to get jealous about when we were kids) Adair discovered he could get inside their heads and find things out about them, and that he could even control some of them, and of course there were the dreams that gave us all a heads up about what the Legions were up to. But there was a down side to that, and that was that once the word got out among the Legions, then they wanted him badly. He also would get some pretty serious headaches if he did too much, headaches that would leave him curled up in pain for days, sometimes.