Lights Flicker And Fade : Kol Mikaelson [3]

272: Even The Purest Souls Are Drawn To It

2007

On the edge of Chicago, looking over Lake Michigan, there was a supposedly abandoned warehouse. If you managed to climb the maintenance ladder, then awkwardly skirt across a slight windowsill, you could look through glass panes twice the size of any person, rustic bars outlining every panel, and stare at the emptiness. The brick inside was faded, white paint grated over the material, battered column's placed across the light grey floor...

Except, as Mira Jung Floare-Ruiz clung to that window, something changed.

She'd followed a vampire earlier in the week, an attempt at a stake pressed into her palm, only to find herself scaling the building to watch as he crept inside.

Watching as he called out into the nothingness.

Watching as a woman appeared, crouching down as the vampire sobbed at her feet, spouting words MJ couldn't hear with a fond smile. A hearing spell was something she needed. Maci had warned her that avoiding magic wouldn't work, and she'd been proven right, but even now MJ wasn't avoiding it, how was she meant to learn it?

She was fifteen-years-old, homeless, and trying her best.

She was carving stakes out of furniture, abandoned down alleys, living off school meals, and sleeping in her car. But – but – but. After Christmas, she'd finally made progress. She'd managed to start a fire without a match – she'd started working out how to cloak herself. She wasn't brilliant at it, but it meant she could risk what she was about to attempt.

The vampire had followed the woman out of sight, and when MJ had tried to enter the warehouse, she'd been blocked by a spell.

Today, she clung to the ladder, closed her eyes, and began to chant.

"Abierta Para Dakai."

One hand pressed against the cool glass.

"Abierta Para Dakai."

The warehouse was anything but abandoned that night, a whole new universe beyond a simple window, like a rabbit hole waiting, or some black hole trying to suck her up. The floor was barely visible, stuffed with people, the centre three columns converted into a fight ring, metal grates caging competitors in.

"Abierta Para Dakai."

MJ did not want to enter the warehouse, but she didn't really have a choice.

People were going missing, and she was homeless! She might be next! And, her initial assumption that it was a vampire? The man she'd followed? The man she'd been prepared to stake? Hell, MJ hadn't just been prepared to stake him – she'd been staking them. She'd been going out, every night, following anyone who acted anything like the men who'd tried to bury her...Like killing them would stop the hiss of fangs from sending her back to that park, and that bench, and the feeling of dirt in her lungs.

Like staking them would prove she deserved to survive the encounter.

Yet, this man?

He'd collapsed inside a warehouse now being used for a Fight Club?

"Abierta Para Dakai."

The window clicked open.

MJ stared at it.

Was she really about to do this?

Was her vampire hunter quest not enough?

No.

The tomb under New York had been a problem for the whole supernatural community. People had died – she'd almost died. And now? The same thing was happening, but people were coming together to punch each other instead of stop it? They were enabling it? While she'd been staking potentially innocent vampires over it?