Fangs and Fairytales: Orphans

Orphans -- Chapter the Eighth

Jared could feel a terror awakening in his chest like a dark cavern, a void that swallowed up the air and light and threatened to pull him down into it as well. He was surprised that his fear, that fight-or-flight response seemed to be working pretty much as it always had. His breathing had sped up, his muscles were coiled and ready to spring into action and the blood in his veins seemed to animate. He looked at the figure behind Silas that was getting larger with each passing second. It still looked somewhat like the elder vampire that they had brought in but it was distorting as it grew, dark crevices erupting on its surface, places where the light seemed to distort and the space around them seemed not to belong there anymore.

"Go!" Silas repeated his urgent plea. "I'll try to hold him off here to give you time to get the girls out. Hurry!"

Jared quickly sped back to the small magic annex where Klara was still working, bent over the broad wooden table with her back to the door. "Come with me, we have to take the girls and get out of here."

"What now?" Klara asked, whirling around, not even bothering to hide her annoyance with him. When she saw the fearful look on his face, however, she knew now was neither the time to argue nor ask questions. She grabbed a few things from the table and followed him.

"What's happening?" she asked as they sped to the bedroom where the banshee sisters were waiting.

"It's Davrosh. But he wasn't Davrosh," Jared tried to explain. "Whatever it was it woke up and started changing..."

"Changing how?" Klara demanded.

"He seemed to be growing, swelling up sort of. And his skin was cracking and there was blackness where it cracked...."

"Shit. Did he feel different to you?"

From the way she was asking, Jared had a pretty good idea that Klara knew what was happening. "Yeah, actually, he did. Like he wasn't the same person we brought in..."

They rounded the corner into the small bedroom to see that the sisters were still tucked soundly in their beds. Klara quickly pulled a pillowcase loose and filled it with the objects she had carried from the magic annex and then scooped up Keera. Jared already had Addy in his arms, and the pair were starting to awaken now that they had been disturbed. "What do we do now?" Jared asked.

"If that's what I think it is in Davrosh, then we need to get the girls away from here. I don't know if Silas can defeat it...."

"Shouldn't I go help him then? Should I find Shannon and Masha?"

"Help me get the girls to the car first."

Jared noticed she hadn't answered his question. "What do you think it is Klara?"

She was already heading out the door, Keera's arms around her neck. "A leyak. They hide themselves in something-- a person, a supe, an animal - and then consume them and shed their skin before striking. So that was Davrosh when we brought him in but if the Leyak has awakened he is gone now. They are very powerful and..."

Two things happened almost simultaneously. There was a bellowing shout coming from the room that the creature they had taken as Davrosh had been sleeping in. Jared was unsure if it was Silas or the leyak. The second thing that happened was that Keera, the first of the sisters to fully awaken, screamed. Jared knew the sound was coming from her because he was looking at her when her tiny mouth opened and her head fell back. If he hadn't been looking at her he never would have associated the sound with the slight little girl with the tangly hair and fox-like eyes. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, a shrill, ear-splitting shriek that echoed off every surface and told something in the primitive survival portion of his brain that very bad things were happening.