Bereft: Demise

59 | Of a Shadeborn's Folly

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Through the haze of my sleeping mind came that incessant sound. At first, it didn't matter. It was just a sound—but soon that sound was demanding more and more of my attention. It trickled and flowed and just didn't stop.

Drip. Drip. DRIP.

I woke with a gasp that pulled me from the hard floor. The cold assailed my lungs and sent splinters of pain spiraling through my blood, but otherwise I felt whole. Alert, whole—and freezing.

It was dark, but somewhere in my vicinity there was a covered window letting in just enough effulgence to outline blurred, hulking shapes. My fingertips skated over the gritty floor, finding unfinished concrete and lines of metal. Touching the frigid metal burned my skin, so I carefully avoided the curved lines as I sat up.

I decided I couldn't be dead, not with that damn dripping noise. Even death wasn't that cruel.

Glazed eyes glittered in the dark, watching me.

Meeting those eyes raised the hair on my arms. A hand brushed my back and I started with a cry.

"Sara!"

I recognized that voice before I could lash out. It was my father.

"Papa?"

The hand reached for me again, and I followed its arm to my father. My shoulders slumped with relief as I hugged him, and the familiar scents of home washed over me. He always smelled a bit like the astringent soap my mother preferred to buy, but also something fresh and green, a scent like an earthy cologne that was wholly my dad.

"Are you alright? Are you hurt?" I released him and patted his arms, his chest, then his face. I noticed he recoiled when I brushed his cheek. "Where's Eleanor?"

My mother's cold, thin hand found mine and gripped it tight. "Sara."

Lights were turned on and, despite not being overly bright, we winced at the sudden illumination. Luc and Eleanor were huddled together, the former sporting a large, congealing cut on his cheek while the latter had a swollen bruise across her throat. It had been so long since I'd last seen them, and I hadn't thought we'd ever have a chance to meet again. I hated that this was how we were forced to see one another. I hated that they'd been drawn into this catastrophe.

Together, we sat upon a slab of stained concrete with whorls of metal welded into its surface. The whorls came together and were met by the edges of a large ring that was about ten feet in diameter. Runes as big as my hand and as small as my fingertips were set in the concrete as well, all positioned along those long rungs and twists of iron.

It looked like a construct—but my rushed education had taught me enough to know it wasn't a construct. The metal whorls were a template, not unlike the lines on a piece of paper, and that template was being used to align the runes into a script. My soul held no sway over runes or scripts but Cage had urged me to study their meanings.

I spotted marks meant for caging. For imprisoning. For binding.

That was all I saw before I heard footsteps.

Bare lightbulbs buzzed with paltry, wintery light, revealing a disorderly storage room stacked with half-rotted crates and barrels. Two vampires skulked in the available shadows and held their heads between their knees with dirty fingers scrabbling at their temples and ears. Against a wall of cinderblocks were a medical table and a rolling stool.