Stained

2 : Vision

Ylla

There was a man coming. A man that I am destined to meet.

In my mind’s eye, I could see his harsh, angular face, his stormy gray eyes. His expression was marred with anger, and I flinched involuntarily, responding to an image that was conjured out of nowhere.

Who was this man? Why were our paths bound to cross?

I didn’t like him one bit. His aura was sinister… lethal. He was a man brimming with darkness. He reeked of death.

And death he would bring to the men who took me.

Slowly, I rose from the flimsy excuse of a bed and held onto the cold bars of my prison. My appointed guard went instantly on his feet the moment he heard my movement. He was a big, burly man of Native American descent, and his black, beady eyes steadily glared at me.

I wish I could speak to warn them of their impending doom, but the moment I opened my mouth he let out a furious growl. More guards flooded the hall, and the sandy-haired man who seemed to hold an important position stepped out of the crowd. His blue eyes flitted to me before shooting a quizzical look to my guard.

“What happened?” the sandy-haired man asked through their mind link, a conversation meant only for their kind. A conversation that by some twisted joke of fate I had access to.

“My brother’s murderer tried to escape,” he spat in my direction.

“How so?” Again, the sandy-haired man glanced at me. “She hardly did a thing.”

“The filthy leech was shackled! She couldn’t have moved from her spot!”

I turned around to see the broken pieces of chains behind me. I didn’t remember breaking them, let alone being shackled in the first place. Should I even be capable of that? I was asleep, and it was the vision of the gray-eyed man that woke me from my deep slumber.

 The sandy-haired man studied me carefully. “We don’t know yet if she’s what you claim her to be.”

My guard exploded in barely contained madness. “Who else but those leeches have enough power to murder three wolves single-handedly? Look at her! Just look at her! See that paleness? What else can she be if not one of those disgusting vampires?”

“Ethan,” the older man rebuked. “Calm down. The investigation is still ongoing.”

“Beta, we have proof! She smells of their blood. What else do we need to persecute this female leech?”

Beta… Was Beta a name or a title?

“Don’t forget she has a beating heart.”

“It doesn’t matter!”

“Yes, it does.”

“She’s a killer! She must have used a trick of sorts…”

“Clarissa is yet to wake up,” his… Beta said, referring to a badly-injured woman resting in a white room. From his memory, she had been lying on that bed unconscious for more than a week. “Once she does, we’ll know surely what happened.“

“I can’t – “

Everyone in the underground prison stiffened as a scent hit them so strongly, I was knocked off from reading their minds.  In a flurry of action, the men ran outside, leaving me alone again with the guard named Ethan.

He sneered at me distastefully. “Another of your kind has come to help you, leech. Don’t get your hopes up. Our Alpha will take care of them, just like he did to your first batch of rescuers.”

Rescuers? I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Truth be told, I was confused to wake up in this dimly lit cell, alone, dirty, with no memory or recollection of what happened to me. They badgered me questions that I couldn’t answer – like why I was in the forest, or what kind of creature am I or even where I came from.

There was a commotion outside, and by the sound of it, a fight was about to ensue. Snarls and growls echoed loudly, reaching even here underground. Out of curiosity, I tried to listen to them, to pick up a wave of thought. To my utter surprise, I found out that all the ruckus above was being caused by a single… vampire.

The gray-eyed man had arrived.