Breathe Under Water - Shadows of the Night 1

Chapter 1

Another breath. A long glance up and down the street. No sign of Maria.

If I wanted to find her in this jungle of contraries, it would take more than a pair of human eyes. I'd have to see past the maze of people and concrete, peel back layers of reality and make it bend to my own will.

There's a spot every witch has, a place deep inside that governs magic. I closed my eyes and reached for it. Pushed by the adrenaline in my veins, second sight snapped into place. Fast. Hard. The world around me was drenched in gray except for the colors of living beings in between. I could see the auras and read people's 'nature' with ease. My vision was sharp and clear.

The street was packed with translucent flickers, which was the way humans looked like in other sight. There were the occasional flickers of light red in there – maybe a handful of less powerful witches or shape shifters.

However, it was not their color that jammed a splinter of ice into my lungs and knocked all the air out of me. Because within all that translucence and redness I saw the one color that made me want to turn around, run, and never look back. The black spots were all over the place, saturating space with a darkness I had no name for. Their presence lingered behind and around me like looming shadows. I knew whom or what these auras belonged to. I knew their taste and their reading as much as I knew their nature. There was only one type of being that wore this color. Vampires.

I fisted my hands and forced the range of awareness to widen, while my senses fell deeper into the gray depths of second sight. I moved forward into the street, staying close to the club. If Maria was there I'd find her. Minutes passed as I moved and searched, searched and looked. A solitary, fading red aura to the left of Tamuré Club made me stop dead in my tracks and tear my eyes open.

There was a deep, inexplicable certainty that I knew whom this aura belonged to. There was this feeling I would have known that aura even if it were drowning in a sea of magical red. It was Maria's. And she wasn't alone. She was with a vampire.

I sprinted forward without thinking, panic distorting the interplay of consciousness and perception. The world shook and moved in time with my feet as I bolted into the next side street. Shaky hands drew out the gun tucked into my jeans. The item felt alien and heavy. Whatever little knowledge I had about guns was gone – just like common sense bowed out an instant ago. I didn't know what I was doing, couldn't think past the rising panic. There was only one thing I was sure of: I had to get there in time.

Gun in both hands, I set one foot in front of the other and rushed further into the deserted side street. I couldn't make out anything apart from noises coming from the main street and my own heartbeat. To top things off, I was blind as a bat. Somewhere in the back of my head the information registered.

I centered myself and called for my magic. The air around me came to life and something in my core shifted. There was structure and there was reason behind the element's makeup. There was power in the air. And it was mine.

I felt for the shapes and let invisible fingers brush objects and shapes around me. I was standing in the first quarter of the side street. An animal, probably a cat, was curled up, hiding behind a trash can about thirty feet away from me; a bottle of something – Alcohol? Beer? Did it matter? – lay abandoned at the corner to the backstreet.

It was there, right there at the very end of the street – a disturbance in the aerial landscape. I heard someone moving. I approached the noise, trying to think past the maze of panic. That was when I started hearing the sucking sounds.

I cocked the gun before I even realized it. The hollow sound of my feet pounding on the pavement was like a quickening staccato. My pulse went crazy in my veins. Together with an unhealthy dose of fear it threatened to knock my knees out from under me. I jumped sideways from behind the corner and right into the next alley, gun raised. The wetness pooling in my hands made holding the gun virtually impossible, but my fingers were ready to pull the trigger and shoot.