DOFAB#3

Chapter Eighteen- Part Two

~ KINLEY ~

It's been two hours and thirty-nine minutes since Talrek tore me from the museum where I last saw my sister and Tristan. Blood is still caked in my hair and my loral is ruined. No matter how much soap I use or scrub, its delicate sheer white material is pink now. I've desecrated my loral and a spelled-Tristan has found his sword.

"You want some help with that?" Azlan warps into my bathroom. Maya insistent her guardian check on me every thirty minutes when she saw Talrek and I enter the Veltan's crowded lobby, each covered head to toe in the stench of rotten death.

"It's beyond saving." I give up, letting my pinked-stained loral lay soaking in suds on the bottom of the shower floor.

"It's all over the news."

"What are they saying?"

"That a radical faction of the hunters planted a pressure-activated toxin under one of the panels on the dance floor."

I'm almost afraid to ask, but I have to know. Is Nadora going to come for me? Will I be delivered a swift justice or is the VCS buying Tristan's lie?

"But there were some survivors." I get up off the floor and grab a bar of soap, the white of my fingernails a dark ruby red.

"It was chaos. The few vampires that managed to get out or lucky enough to survive the blast, there's no way they would know the difference. The mortal students can't remember a thing. A memory incantation was inscribed at the museum's entrance. Once the mortals stepped foot outside the museum, whatever took place inside was lost to them."

"How many are there?" I scrub harder, the clear water turning the color of my ruined loral.

"I told you, I was able to rescue all of the humans by recruiting help from a few fellow guardians. I didn't tell them anything besides something was going down and there was a possibility of mass human casualties." Azlan's form appears behind me, her amber eyes drops of sunlight I don't deserve to feel the warm compassion from.

My skin becomes raw as I continue vigorously washing the sticky red from my forearms.

"How many vampires, Azlan? How many did I get killed?" I throw the rag in the sink, my stomach threatening to spew the acid churning as I grip the countertop, unable to look at myself in the mirror. At the lives that ended because I was stupid enough to think I could beat a god of destruction.

"There were forty-four devils that survived."

Two-hundred and fifty dead. I drop to the tiled floor. "The blast wasn't supposed to be that big. It was supposed to have a smaller radius of infection. I didn't mean...I didn't want..."

"The gods know your intentions." The outline of glimmering wings wrap around me as Azlan folds me into her embrace. "Light beings are called to make the tough decisions for the greater good because we are the only ones who can."

I come apart as Azlan consoles me. There was no greater good served. Tristan's lie will stir the underbelly. The fragile peace we've fought to maintain will splinter and fester, an open, infected wound that will spread until it becomes the cancer Tristan says he's put on this earth to cut out.

As my tears rapidly fall, petalflies hatch from their seeds. They flutter around the room, settling themselves on the sink, the lights above the mirror, and the glass enclosure of the shower. I should never have come to Nadora. I should have stayed at temple. The flame was wrong. I am the wilted leaf holding my sister back.

Three beeps sound, the front door to my one-bedroom apartment unlocking.

Neziri.

I race out of the bathroom, through my bedroom and into the living room. It was over an hour ago that my sister left a message on the phone line tied to my room that was coming to get me. I know she's alive, but all I keep seeing is Tristan's sword sticking straight through her chest. Neziri can turn me into mulch if she wants. Long as she's safe, I don't care.