Bereft: Foretold

4 | A Brother's Will

A cold draft chased the rain from the sky as I followed after the mage and left the heated diner. I felt the chill brush of the wind as I never had before, and the cold sank through the permeable layer of my skin, bypassing my jacket and t-shirt. I'd never known the cold to be so sudden, to be so all-consuming before. As a Sin, the cold had been naught but an inconvenience, a lack of atmospheric energy to convert and consume, something I would ignore and brush aside. As a mortal, the cold was more immediate. More pressing and insistent. 

I turned my face toward the black sky, eyes shut to the brush of raindrops breaking upon my cheekbones and forehead. 

A sudden recollection stole my breath as I remembered Cuxiel dying in the rain. I remembered the cold drops of water falling from the heavens and striking my face, the inexorable pull of grief upon my shoulders and the trickle of water upon my skin. Amoroth had screamed her terror and sorrow into the night. 

Real screams in the present yanked my awareness free of the torturous nightmare. I nearly stumbled from the curb as my head turned to the distant sound. Cage, too, standing below the awning outside the diner's glass door had heard the noise. Our eyes met, and without a word he started across the parking lot, moving with a swift gait toward the source of the sudden outcry.

Sucking air through my teeth to show my displeasure, I followed.

The slap of our feet against the wet pavement was loud despite the distant roar of motors on the highway and the sound of the rain splattering on the asphalt. Cage and I both hopped the chain barrier at the parking lot's end, landing in the knee-high brush of the abandoned lot situated adjacent to the dusty diner.

The scream that had summoned our attention had been strangled and singular. Cage and I moved carefully in the dark and checked behind each overgrown bush and prickly plant in search of the person who had cried out. I kept catching myself drawing in deep breaths and rolling the air past my tongue, desperate to taste the essence that would've directed my senses—but I tasted nothing aside from the bitter, acrid scent common in the desert after fresh rainfall.

I stopped searching after a minute, thoroughly irritated and now wet.

"This is pointless," I spat as I crossed my arms to stop my body's shivering and stomped back to the mage. "There is nothing here but fucking tumbleweeds and litter."

Cage sighed as he knelt in the brambles and dragged the hem of his coat through the mud. "Your lack of extrasensory abilities has dulled what little patience you have, boy." Before I could respond, the mage drew aside a twisted bush, revealing what lay beneath.

It was the teenager from the diner who'd left his friends in a rush. As I drew closer and crouched with Cage, I could see the boy was dead. His face held a terrified pallor, his eyes wide and unblinking despite the steady onslaught of rain.

I knew his death hadn't been natural. Something had sliced him open across the abdomen just above his groin, and though I didn't care to lift his ruined sweater to see the cut itself, I could smell that the slice was deep enough to splay open his bowels. My experienced eye roved from the obvious wound to the smaller one at his throat.

"Vampire," I hissed as my legs shifted beneath me. Before I knew what I was doing, I had adopted a defensive posture, my head swiveling as my eyes fixated on the shadows swathed around the kill site. Something innate in me sensed the eyes upon us and the boy. It was a predatory instinct so ingrained in my being it even acted upon my human psyche and drew my gaze in the right direction, fixing my eyes upon the denser shadows moving through the underbrush.

The vampires slithered through the dark with quick, jagged motions, like blades being drawn through flesh by arms too weak to complete the action. Dressed in ragged, torn clothing, their pale flesh was visible only in the briefest of instances when they stopped their circling to breathe or stumble.