Red String {EDITING}

The Birth of the Red Devil

"Are you sure we gave her the right antidote?" Finar glanced at the fading purple veins.

"Trust me." Blythe sighed. "I know that poison very well."

"Who the hell would want to poison a little girl, though?"

"Rogues."

"How the hell would they even get their hands on one of the Poisons of the Apocalypse?!" Finar went to the window. "And why would they waste it on a girl like her?"

"It was probably that group known as Extalia." Blythe said, sitting down on the bottom bunk bed on the other side of the room. "The Rogues that rival the Rogue Queen's group: Libertium... and they were probably using the kid as a test run to see if the poison worked properly – there are a lot of fakes out there too."

"Tch." Finar shook his head. "I'll never understand Rogues."

"I know." He said, wandering over to the door. "The kid will be fine for a few minutes, so why don't we go and check in with Leo..."

"He'd have told us if he'd found the last boy with Alpha Eyes." Finar wandered out of the room, closing the door gently behind him just as a pair of red eyes snapped open.

"Danger." Lyra whispered, staring at the forest that was suddenly surrounding her. "Thorn's in danger." She said, knowing instantly that she was looking through Thorn's eyes as she stared at the group of Rogues standing around the boy. Red lightning sparked around her while she clambered onto shaky legs, her hands pulling out the needles buried in her skin as she made her way over to the window, pausing only to grab the knife she always kept under her bed. "I'm coming, Thorn." She mumbled between deep breaths. "Don't worry."

That was why, when Finar and Blythe came back to the room a short while later, Lyra was gone, and the window was wide open.

"Uh oh." Finar muttered, staring at the empty twisted sheets.

Blythe's eyebrows twitched. "You can't leave brats alone for five minutes, can you?!"

"We need to go after her." The brunette sighed. "She's in no state to be running about... In fact, it could reverse all the work we just did..."

"I'll grab Zen." Blythe grumbled. "You start tracking the brat." He said, hurrying back down the stairs as Finar leapt out of the window.

"She should be bleeding..." He mumbled, more to himself than anyone else.

"If she pulled a couple of needles out of her arm, then yeah. She should be." A white-haired man strolled to his side, inhaling deeply. "But all I can smell is drying blood. Nothing's that fresh."

"It's the only lead we've got, besides the trail she's left behind." Finar said, hurrying into the woods without a second thought, blissfully unaware about the battle going on ahead...

Well, at least until the sound of metal crashing against metal reached him.

Red lightning arced across the small clearing, a small red flash darting around, her eyes glowing red as black horns formed on the sides of her head in swirls of black mist.

"So the mother has wings, but the daughter has horns..." The blonde woman standing in the middle of the field grinned. "How odd." Her hand closed around Lyra's throat in the next second, yanking her to a halt. "That poison was the real deal, you know." She said. "You should be dead by now... but I suppose I can finish the job right here and now."

"No, you won't."

White arrows of lightning burst out from the forest, slamming into the woman, sending her skidding backwards. Strands of shadows wrapped around Lyra, pulling her into another set of arms, this time belonging to a familiar black-haired Alpha.