Bathe In Fire - Shadows of the Night 2

Chapter 28

Hi!

Sorry for the long wait, I didn't have time to write this weekend. At least not as much as I wanted to. So here it is. A chapter that was tough to write, and even though I have mixed feelings about it, I really like it. I hope you will read it and say that this chapter was worth waiting for in the end... Let me know what you think!!

Lara

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Chapter 28

The attack was fast and hard, knocked my brain and limbs into a state of shock and catatonia. The darkness had robbed me of most of my senses, had rendered all but one of them useless. I lost precious seconds to react – seconds that on second thought could have cost me my life. My walls of air shook and swayed, like a cardbox-house in the wind. Together with my concentration, the mesmerizing sight of auratic gray-in-between shattered. There was no time to prepare myself for what there was to come.

I felt their power on two polar levels: the physical and the mental. I felt the attacks of heavy steel-like pressure on my outer shields, was thrown off balance. Staggering back, I fired without seeing – my silver bullets gone to waste and swallowed by the dark.

I had pulled the trigger three times, the echoes of the gunshots ringing through the deserted building. By the time I realized my shields had vanished into sheer non-existence, it was too late. I felt movement from beside and was thrown sideways. My head exploded on cold concrete.

I scrambled to my feet, holding the gun in front of me. The flat surface behind my back was cold, the sensation crowned by the impartiality of inanimate objects. Then a raise in the flat formlessness behind. The light switch? My hand felt for whatever I had brushed accidentally.

I pressed the button and was blinded by flickering neon light. Sudden and glaring, the light illuminated what I had seen in the shadow-lands of second sight. Five figures. Five vampires showing their pointy fangs like long-legged competitors of a small-town beauty contest. Five creatures with faces contorted into something I couldn’t help but call evil.

The neon tubes above shed enough light to flood the whole room. Somewhere behind, a crumpled shape was lying lifelessly on the floor, a pool of dark blood underneath. Another vampire. So my bullets hadn’t gone to waste. The fact that he wasn’t beginning to decompose already told me that he probably was old enough to have seen more than one century as a vampire. The fact that he hadn’t begun to heal, however, told me that he could not have been older than two hundred.

Good.

I was facing surprisingly real demons of my past. Vamps attacking me. The worst part: I was all alone. A drop of bitter adrenaline; a blink of the eye. The vampires were standing in front of me motionlessly, as if held by an invisible force. The silence was oppressive, leaving my fingers tickling for some kind of action. The shit was about to hit the fang.

Sometimes you think. Sometimes you act. And that’s a good thing. If I had been thinking back then I wouldn’t have made it out alive.

I drew deeply from the magic inside of me and rebuilt my walls of air. Milli- no, nanoseconds passed as I took in my surroundings. The front part of the room held a collection of old cardboard boxes that were stacked carelessly at the walls. Shards and pieces of broken bottles, bits and pieces of machinery, graced the floor in an indiscernible pattern of randomness. The cobwebs and dusty surfaces of the stored goods suggested that it hadn’t been used in a while. No exit.

“You shouldn’t have followed me, witch. Is that what you’re thinking now?” the vampire closest to me said in a low voice. It was the one who bit Goth-girl.