The Beast I Am

Chapter 6

His blood pounded through my heart, my Beast's protests louder than ever to my anxieties. Willing my legs to follow after him, one lead-filled step at a time. My eyes burned with the same ferociousness as the hopelessness roiling off the brick walls.

A dying light flickered to reveal the bottom of a damp circular room. The dusty red walls climbed further than the old light could reach, leaving us like two children at the bottom of a well. Rhazien stood before one of the white embroidered passageways, the old sewer filled in with a sharper rusty stone. The system that still ran underneath the city, the historic tunnels now bricked in from disuse and future flooding concerns.

Rhazien's fingers brushing stone prickled my attention, my Sire withdrawing a pocket knife from his trousers, which he proceeded to use to aggressively chip away at the grout between two of the bricks.

My feet were a flurry to him, the words a hushed hiss, "What are you doing...?" The caulking snowed onto the damp concrete, the residual lingering scent of mildew and wet dog thicker near the wall. I held my breath, the words enough to nearly gag me.

"Knocking." Rhazien freed one of the bricks, handing it to me, the back of the stone oddly smooth. I frowned, the weight nearly toppling me in surprise, much heavier than it was supposed to be. I glanced suspiciously at the blank spot against the wall, smooth and unassuming concrete. Why the bricks if it was already filled in...?

My mouth salivated instantly as he drew the silver against his palm. My lips burned from how my fangs ached at the smell. Rhazien tightened his fist, the blood already pooled and dribbling down his sleeve. Black on black.

Of course, he planned ahead.

He flipped the brick in my palm, revealing a polished granite underside, his finger deft as he wrote a single word in cursive,

'Miriam.'

A small noise.

A grunt of discomfort.

Not from the cut, already trying to repair the damage done by its master, but as if the word sucked the joy out of him. The hair on my neck tickled my spine, reminiscing the chill of the old sewers to the ice that had wrapped around my skin like an unwanted present not an hour before. Rhazien's shoulders were stiff as he finished, licking his palm of the residual red and pressed the brick firmly back into its place. An electricity tickled my skin, the hairs on my arms rising in salute.

Rhazien stepped back from the wall, his arm outstretched before me, guiding me back with him, positioning his body in front of my own. The brick wall groaned, dust shimmering like broken stars around our shoes. Rhazien handed me a handkerchief, the cloth doused in his cologne, the kind that made him smell like a rainforest. I swallowed back the pool of drool under my tongue.

"Take it... You'll want it." Tighter than a harpsichord, the emotion the notes in between the strings.

The wall boomed below our feet, the sewers like some beast awakening and opening its jaws. The bricks retracted into themselves in folding tumbles like a shower curtain, the clanking of stone rubbing against stone sent a shiver down my spine. My eyes unblinked in pure awe as the passage opened before us.

"An illusion?"

Rhazien took a deep breath, quickly securing his own cloth over his nose, muffling the words, "Something like that."

It was unease, I heard. The emotion so unfamiliar in our interactions. We were seeing someone who made my Sire anxious.

Something even Valentine didn't do.

My spine stiffened, the smell a tsunami on the senses, assaulting me with rot, sickness, and greed; a symphony of sweet car oil mingled with decaying animal corpses. The archway now shadowed by a dark, looming tunnel. The walls still dripping with wet, each splash against the stone reminding me of her....