Bathe In Fire - Shadows of the Night 2

Chapter 34

Hi!

Since I won't be able to post this weekend, I decided I had to post earlier. I pulled something coming close to an all-nighter and edited the next one for you. I LOVED writing this one! Let me know what you think, and, sorry for the cliffhangers.... Thank you so so much for following this series!

Lara

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Chapter 34

I got up and started pacing up and down my cell. It had to be nightfall. I had practically felt the first stirrings of the undead in the otherwise silent building. Silence. Restlessness. Boredom. All packed together in a confined room that stank of mold, dirt and awful things I didn’t even have names for. The need for action, for something else in this wasteland of isolation, had me in its grip and it wouldn’t let go.

The room they had locked me up in was small enough to feel claustrophobia scratching on my already shaken mind. The stone walls smelled of dried blood, the bed of other, less pleasant things. Yeah, there was no mistaking it. I knew what this room was: a prison. Hadn’t it been for the smell, something in the shocking practicality of the layout, the apparently sound-proof door, and the fact that the room had an inbuilt toilet, would have long made me believe that I was not the first magical creature – or human being – that had been kept prisoner here.

Sanity was hard to hold on to. I dragged my wobbly feet over the stone floor, trying to readjust my thoughts. Whatever Gina did to me, there was this certainty that she came close, very close, to breaking my mind. Had she done anymore, I would have been a case for the nuthouse.

Even at this point in time it seemed hard to think. Getting my head around all that had happened more than twelve hours ago? Still busy with that one. Searching for promising escape ploys? Forget it.

Still, there had to be a way to-

A sudden sharp pang in my head brought me down to my knees, gasping. A train of thoughts and images, wild and iridescent, tore into my mind like claws. Past mixed with present and imagination, things I had seen on TV and things I had seen in long, restless nightmares.

“No,” I moaned. “Please, not again.”

I looked up, blinking. There were shadows and things with me in the room that by rights shouldn’t even have existed. Hooded, hunched figures, moving in eerie ways – parting shadows with the grace of predators. Blood and… I gripped my head and closed my eyes. My pulse was erratic and too fast. I felt the dampness of cold sweat on the back of my neck. I gulped in air as if it was the only thing that could keep me alive. It took me minutes to calm down enough for the visions to stop. I crawled back to my bed. I had to be careful, or else my mind would break.

Minutes passed. More stillness. Boredom settled instants before a dark feeling of disorientation set in. It came before the one I hated the most. Fear. Succeeding cycles of one and the same thing. And the only questions that mattered: Would they ever end? And if they did, what would come after?

* * *

The sound was high, an unpleasant clinking that tore me out of the numbed state I was in. The door to my cell was pushed open, forcing out a creaking sound of the metal frame.

Alaric’s face was hovering above mine when I opened my eyes, my reaction too slow to do anything. Since my walls of air, and my mind-shielding were non-existent at this point in time, his vampiric power was beating against my skin without a single filter. He jerked me onto my feet and steered me out of the cell wordlessly. My feet kept refusing to work properly, limbs and muscles like stumps of pricking rubber.