Ruins A.G.A. 2nd Novel in the Ruinsaga series

Chapter 26 .

Darren

There wasn't one of us that didn't have blood and gore over us. My stomach rolled and lurched as I looked around at my companions. Gunnor and the weres were unfazed, but the others all looked horrified as they looked at themselves and the rest of us.

Monica desperately tried to rub it off her coat, but she only spread it around more. "I can't get it off," she said with a frantic edge to her voice.

"It's alright," Richard said. He gently took her hand when her movements to get the blood off became even more urgent. "Maybe there's a stream nearby that we can wash off in."

"There's not," Liam said.

Liam shifted into new, clean clothes. The other weres followed his lead.

"What are we supposed to do?" Monica asked. "We can't just use magic to clean our clothes or change them like you can."

"And it got on Molly too," Arthur said.

"Why are you freaking out so much?" Mason asked. "You've gotten zombie blood on you before."

"A few splatters of zombie blood is a lot different than a girl that just exploded all over on us," Monica said.

"There are working showers back at my house," Gunnor said.

"It will take days to get back there," Lily pointed out.

"I guess we can use our water to wash it off," Richard said. He started to pull out his canteen.

"No," Grace said. "That's our drinking water. Hunter and I will make it rain."

"Good idea," Lily said. "Monica, you have soap we can use."

"Right," Monica said. She slung her backpack off her shoulder and dug out a bar of soap.

Grace and Hunter stepped next to each other. The color of their eyes changed to the color of storm clouds. The sky was clear, but clouds started to form above us. They were light and fluffy at first, but began to change to darker grey and hung lower in the sky. The rest of us congregated around them. The clouds broke and rain began to fall. It wasn't light gentle drops, but fast heavy drops. It didn't take long for all of us to be soaked. The soap was passed around as we each took a turn scrubbing the blood off us. We helped each other get blood out of each other's hair and the back of our clothes that we couldn't see.

When we were through, the clouds faded away and the sky was clear again. "Thank you," Monica said to Grace and Hunter. The Sangs nodded to the acknowledgement.

I looked at Lily. She ran her hands through the tangles of her wet hair. "Wait," I said, "I thought magic doesn't work on Lily and Tanner."

"The lightning we used on the venefici wouldn't have worked on them," Hunter said, "but this magic was only used to form the storm clouds we wanted and then dispersed them. The rain was real. Like when Victory and I created the hail when we were running from all those zombies. It was magic to create the type of weather we wanted, but then the hail was real. Like the venefici couldn't have hurt Lily with their magic, but they could have used their magic to hurl real inanimate objects at them and those objects would have hurt them."

"I see," I said. I kinda understood, but I assumed the more I learned about magic and the different types of magic, the more I would understand it.

"Alex," Liam said, "you need to make a decision and you need to make it soon. You cannot drink the vampire's blood again until you decide and I can smell the zombie slowly taking over. So, you can remain part of the pack until you die - I promise I will make a quick end of it once you turn into a zombie - or you can take this vampire up on his offer and become a hybrid and be cut off from the pack and your family and friends. I will give you some time to think about it." Liam crossed to the other side of the camp. He sat with his back against the trunk of a tree and closed his eyes.