Daegelus | Book 1

Chapter Five | Bounty

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A blaring alarm woke Elijah from his sleep. He flinched and opened his eyes, and when he saw the empty, white walls where he spent the past thirteen years of his life, a cold shiver of dread flooded through him.

Red light pulsed through the darkness in beat with the alarm, and the yelling guards echoed over the noise. As the thick, silver door to his room opened, Elijah sat up.

He looked to his left, and when Haru sat up in his bed across the room, he set his dark brown eyes on the demon. "Eli?" he asked worriedly.

Elijah wanted to go to him, to find comfort in the deafening noise.

But then it stopped.

His room was gone, Haru was gone, and he wasn't in bed anymore. Now, he found himself standing in a long, dark hallway. It smelled of rotten blood and chemicals; claw marks were all over the black walls, and moonlight crept in through the small, barred windows.

A voice.

A whisper.

It called his name, ricocheting off the bricks and pounding against Elijah's ears. He tensed up, his heart thumping in his chest. He knew this was a dream; it wasn't the first he had of this place...but it was the first where he stood in this hall, a hall he'd only seen once in all the time he spent in Lyca Corp.'s lab.

He stared at the doors at the end of the hall, and when a dark shadow moved past the windows on the other side, Elijah extended his claws and scowled. Someone was here with him, and he planned to find out who.

Or what.

The demon prowled towards the doors, and when he reached them, he slowly pushed one open.

A whisper came from behind. Elijah turned around and set his eyes on an open doorway. Red light flashed from inside, and as he moved closer, his body tensed up more. His instincts stirred and told him to turn back, but there was something inside him urging him to keep going. A part deep inside pleaded that he went in...so he did.

Elijah went through the doorway and followed the corridor to its end. He emerged inside a hall—another place he'd never seen—and as he stared at the rows upon rows of liquid-filled, seven-foot-tall cylinders, trepidation gripped him tightly.

What the hell was this place?

A low growl travelled around the room.

Elijah searched for its source, gradually moving closer to the first cylinder. Another growl rumbled towards him, and a shadow shifted past the space between two objects up ahead.

Something was in there with him. He tried focusing his ethos to search for an aura, but there was nothing.

Footsteps.