She pushed open the heavy oak door as the lock clicked open. The house was oddly quiet. Typically Tom would be doing something loud, playing guitar or video games, talking with his friends. She assumed he’d be home, he hardly did anything other than school since Weston.
      “Tom! I’m home!” she called. Shrugging her backpack off her shoulder onto the bench just beyond the foyer, she jogged up the stairs two at a time.
      “Tom!” she yelled again. No reply. Usually, at least, he’d grunt an answer. Something was off. Curious, she headed to his room in the right hallway.
     The door was slightly ajar.
      “Tommy?” she said grinning slightly, he hated being called that. She pushed it further open, it creaked slightly. Her heart clenched, and her smile faded into a look of arrant horror.
     Tom laid in the middle of the room, a deep crimson blood pool around him. A strangled scream escaped her. Instinctively, she rushed towards him, grabbing his limp wrist. Determined to feel a pulse. His wrist was covered in dried garnet blood; He was dead, and no amount of checking his pulse was going to change that.
    Tom’s face was pallor and his eyes were closed. His skin was translucent and his veins, a dull blue covering his hands and arms. His once vibrant lips had turned to a sickly shade of gray; cracked and dry.
      Tears streamed down her cheeks. The shock thundered through her body, alarming each nerve and sensor that something was terribly wrong.
        Her trembling hand went to her left pocket pulling out her phone, she stared at the screen. She knew she should do something…call someone, but all she could bring herself to do was clench the phone in a death grip.
       His blood shrouded the glowing screen.
       She cried, all she wanted was for it to be over, for Tom to next to her, alive; smiling. Calling the police and having to say the dreaded, horrible word of death, would be a rotten sort of closure to his short life.
      “Tom—” she choked, her voice barely a whisper. With one hand holding the phone and the other holding his hand, she dialed the emergency number. She sobbed lightly into the phone as it buzzed. Suddenly, someone picked up.
      “Willesden district police station, what is your emergency?”