Nameless Ghoul

Update Chapter: Welcome Home

*** Update chapter, approximately nine months after Santos.***

Itzal glanced at the other ghouls, who were seated around the van. The atmosphere was tense and he was so ready to get home after the last few days. He was barely holding on to his emotions and he could feel his old friend panic stalking him, ready to pounce at the earliest opportunity.

It had been a couple of months now since the last time he’d completely lost it. The time between the panic attacks had been gradually getting longer, and his bad dreams were getting fewer and fewer. He no longer woke every single night in a cold sweat with a scream lodged in his throat. Some weeks there were more peaceful nights than there were broken ones. But this mission had tested his limits and all he could think about now was getting home to Sunshine and curling up in bed with her.

Secondo and his team had been in Spain tying up the loose ends from the Santos mess earlier that year. They had infiltrated the Santos family stronghold and neutralised the one remaining threat left behind—Lucia.

All the ghouls were shell-shocked, but what they had found had hit Itzal especially hard. He looked over at Quinn, who was cradling a small, blanket wrapped form in his lap and sending a steady stream of quintessence energy towards it.

Itzal wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. He had to look away and concentrate on the world outside the window of the speeding van because the last thing they all needed was him having a full-blown meltdown right now. Two vans had picked them up from the airstrip to take them home, and Secondo had given him the choice of which one to travel in.

He realised now that he had made the wrong decision.

The other van that was being driven by Omega carried Secondo, Earth, Fire, Seren and Lucia Santos. This one, driven by Mountain, held Itzal, Quinn, Water, Air...

And the tiny ghuleh on Quinn's lap.

He should ridden with Lucia. It would have been less stressful.

The Santos family mansion was situated outside of the village of Aramaio in the mountains of Spain’s Basque country. The hoard of magical and occult treasures they had discovered there would keep Secondo busy for years. Primo’s team were there now, packing up the items that Secondo wanted to transport back to the Abbey. Some things they found would have to be destroyed. They were either too dangerous or too unstable to allow them to carry on existing.

After they had breached the wards surrounding the property, Seren had gotten to Lucia and had subdued her with one of her supercharged binding spells. When the ghouls had searched the rooms of the house, they had found a warded room attached to the main suite where Lucia slept. 

It was a small room containing a bed, a chair, a sink, and a toilet. The apparently adolescent water ghuleh had hidden under the bed, huddled from the sounds of struggle that she had heard. Quinn had coaxed her out and she had thrown herself at him, sobbing and shaking. He'd scooped her up and taken her outside. 

She hadn’t wanted to leave his company in the twenty-four hours since.

She was slight of form and silver-haired, with large, haunting, brown eyes. When Itzal first saw her, it transported him back to his own early years of captivity; especially when he noticed the collar around her delicate neck.

She couldn’t have been older than twenty seasons, the same age he had been when Santos summoned him. In fact, she looked much younger than that. It was hard to tell because she was so small. 

Fire had taken Itzal outside to get some air when the situation threatened to overwhelm him.

None of them had expected the Santos’ to have a collection of the collars used to enslave ghouls, let alone to have a ghuleh kit stashed away. They had destroyed the collar Itzal had worn, and the other one that almost became Sunshine’s was long gone as well. They hadn’t found any more amongst the artefacts they’d sorted through so far, but who knew what might turn up when they looked through them in more detail?