102 - A Message Made From Bones

Start The Fire: A Whitlock Story

Shancoom. One week later.

The first night at the Sanctuary had been surprising to Jay; the long, open halls of the castle were quiet when he expected everyone to be awake, voices traveling from one side to the other. He'd visited plenty of castles and palaces around home, and anticipated feeling small and insignificant against the history of power the intricate building of bricks and planks held... but this felt different from that, too.

He felt like he was having an out-of-body experience, not quite in control of where his feet took him.

Like his consciousness was still in his childhood home, standing over his mother's bed as she slept.

But she wasn't sleeping, and he had to go.

He had been trying to find the words to say goodbye. Nothing but white-hot rage filled his throat.

He didn't say anything. Only looked upon his mother's blank, dead face until he was told it was time to burn her on the pyre the two Slayers had built in the overgrown garden behind the house.

A heavy door closing shut snapped Jay back to his body, back to the Sanctuary.

Back to another night of strange quiet.

Quiet, because anyone who would be assisting in Slayer duties was, well, out doing so.

There were a handful of residents who couldn't be out this late: children who had strict bedtimes and older residents who enforced them. The children weren't sheltered from the reality of the world they lived in, but they also didn't appear to live completely abnormal lives; they had classes spread throughout the day, teaching them both basic education and supernatural, and they weren't kept from the demons and extradimensional beings who lived alongside them.

Admittedly, Jay found it hard, at first, to know there were non-humans living at the Sanctuary. He'd known of few demons to be good—but only a few. And he still didn't quite trust them entirely.

Jay watched Helen, the mother of the Slayer who resided here, as she sternly shooed three kids and a small horned demon towards their room. The demon wore the same innocent joy on its feminine face as the human kids, who snickered among themselves in their own childish language as they passed him.

Abnormal turned normal.

But it was Helen who unsettled Jay more than the demon child: her taut skin reminded him a bit of his mother's—neither seemed to have smiled enough in their lives to cause happy wrinkles, but Jay recognized the lines of a permanent scowl on her face. They briefly locked eyes as they passed each other; her irises did not need to be the same icy-blue as Lenora's for Jay to feel the same coldness.

He glanced away, swallowing the lump that formed in his throat, and picked up his pace.

Even in death, you still find ways to keep your claws sunk into me. He turned a corner to the spiral stairwell, the sound of giggling fading behind him as he ascended.

Jay despised his late mother, yet he saw her in everyone—his sister, the witches, and the Watchers-in-training roaming the castle—hell, even Lily Velasco sent him flashes of Lenora. All for different reasons.

He'd thought his anger would burn up with her.

If anything, it made him that much more livid that he was left with questions, and the answers might've died with her. Why Lenora had been willing to send him to his death; why she had chosen Kai over him—why a choice was even necessary.

Who benefits from my death?

He had been asking himself this for days now, having the downtime to ponder since the Doctor had taken him, and his mother... Trying to think of something that disproved any relation to the prophecy, but between his dreams, the series of events that had already occurred, and the infamous Buffy the Vampire Slayer confirming a prophecy...