Between the Shadows

Chapter 22

"Oh my...  This doesn't look good"

"I don't think they are coming back"

"What gave that away?"

"Don't be so snide about it"

"Don't worry.  The chances that he got away aren't very high either"

"I hope you are right about that"

"Well if he did...  He'd hopefully die of his wounds"

He was floating in darkness.  At times it felt like he couldn't breathe.  For a while he tried to fight against the darkness until the darkness slowly started lifting.  Tie didn't exit in the darkness.  

He could hear voices.  They were yelling sometimes and other times they were just whispers.

A blot of pain shot through Shadow.  

For a moment it felt like the the darkness was trying to smother him, before it suddely disappeared.  Shadow's eyes snapped open.

The sharp light in the room, forced him to close his eyes again.  For a  second he almost didn't want to open them again.  The darkness was winking at him, calling him back.  Shadow opened his eyes more slowly this time. 

He stared at the ceiling for a while before letting his graze drift across the room.  The room was unfamiliar to him.  Keeping his breathing calm, Shadow took in everything around him.  It didn't look like any of the rooms at the white domain, so it was reasonable to believe that he wasn't caught.  

In fact the room looked very...  Homey.

It was a strange feeling for him.

Closing his eyes again, Shadow took a calming breath, trying to get his heart to stop hammering against his chest.

When his heartbeat finally calmed down, Shadow opened his eyes again and slowly sat up.  Waves of pain shot through him and he had to stop moving.  When the pain finally subsided a bit, Shadow sat up.  A new wave of pain washed over him, making him double over.  Everything turned black.   Somehow Shadow managed to claw his way out of  the darkness and blinked a few times to clear his vision.

Voices rang clear through the air.  At first he couldn't make out what they were saying, but after a while they started forming coherent sentances.

"Hey...  I'm not going to warn you again!  Get your ugly faces of my property!"

Shadow sat frozen as he recognized the woman's voice.  She sounded angry, furious in fact.  Getting up from the bed was harder than he thought.  With every small movement he made bolts of pain shot through him.  When he finally stood up, the world around him tilted and he grabbed the bed post to keep him from falling.

A low mutter of voices pulled Shadow back to what he was doing.  He pushed the pain into the back of his mind and stumbled out of the room.

"I swear, if you don't leave right now, I'm going to forcefully kick you out of my property!  And I'm warning you it will not be a pretty site"

This time she sounded a lot angrier, whatever the other party said to her was clearly the wrong thing.  Shadow shook his head slightly and started making his way through the house.  In the back of  his mind he noticed that the pain got even worse as he moved, but he ignored it.

That voice belonged to somebody he had contact with and if the guild were going to go after her, he wasn't going to just stand by and watch.

There was already enough blood on his hands.