Bathe In Fire - Shadows of the Night 2

Chapter 7

Hi!

Another chapter. I'm eager to know if you like it! Oh, and don't forget to check out the next book cover I posted and tell me what you think about it! :D

Lara

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Chapter 7

Red. Everywhere. The intensity of the color was suffocating. My face was just inches above the surface. I fought for air once more. Eager and unforgiving, the blood tried to enter my body, crawled up my lips, slowly rising, and found its way into my nostrils. Coppery bitter exploded in my mouth, drenched my pharynx in bloody red to travel further southwards.

Just when I finally felt like passing out, black absolution within reach, my body began humming with more pain. Eyesight winked out. Surrounded by fleshly darkness, I panicked as my vision exploded into azure blue.

Eyelids tore open in time with a shuddering gasp. Hiccup-like, hungry intakes of air – they disturbed the nightly silence as I let my eyes roam my bedroom. I stared at the ceiling wide-eyed, chest heaving up and down. There was no blood. No tainted vision of azure blue. Finally I realized that it had been a nightmare. The other nightmare – the one about how I killed Michael. It was back again.

The second meeting of the new task force was already nearly a week ago… as was the conversation I had with Alexander. To my utter surprise the nightly calls had stopped abruptly. That in return made me wonder, whether the vampire had finally given up. Very unlikely, but definitely an appealing possibility.

It should have put me at ease, and yet I still felt exhausted and drained, my mind like a restless insect during the day. The nights were another matter altogether. That I would relive the night I staked Thomas Burke came as no surprise, but now the scenario of Michael’s death had wormed itself into my dreams again, with the slight difference that I had been trapped in a distorted vision of blue this time – a finishing touch I would have well been able to live without.

Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me that I still had not come clean with myself. I had killed another being, another witch. Claiming that it was self-defense, that it was either him or me, hadn’t really helped. Lately I had thought I truly believed that, but after last night I realized that I hadn’t. Nightmares pulled me in and devoured me each single night. They went hand in hand with sleeplessness, wakeful dark spent with wondering what Brown would do if I told him the truth. The whole situation was simply a mess and I had no idea how to get myself out of it.

* * *

The elevator doors opened with a low buzzing noise. Gray sterility punished the eye wherever it looked. Clearly, the new TF3 headquarters lived up to my expectations. I should have anticipated as much after passing through the security system, which not only sported the latest human technology, but also some of the nastiest magical wards I had ever encountered.

I stepped outside and found myself in a big outer office, wide open, barren. The architectural dullness, the lack of interior design, was so affronting and outrageous, I didn’t even notice the guards at first. Placed beside the elevators and close to a small corridor to the right, two exemplars of black-suited heavy-muscle did their best to perform the task they were being paid for.

Annoyed at my slip, I walked up to the female receptionist. It took me two seconds longer than necessary to categorize her appearance. The familiar neatness of a person I knew too well. Debbie, the former receptionist of the headquarters of the Circle. Apparently she had claimed the dark-gray block of a reception as her own already. She looked up, attired in her usual manner that practically reeked of correctness.