Fade Into Black - Shadows of the Night 5

Chapter 1

Hi!

I don't know if you noticed, but I have new covers! Special thanks to NoelleElizabth - thank you for making them, I absolutely love them :-) 

Now back to the story. It begins. Some things may be different than they seem. This book will be different. I hope you'll like it.

Lara

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Chapter 1

I made my way through the tunnel in silence. Shadows played hide and seek with the pale strip light above. The tubes flickered incessantly, a nervous tick the dark void of the tunnel couldn't seem to get rid of.

The draft was cold and wet, crawled over my skin like bony fingers scraping on soft wood. The never-ending chill. One of the many things I had to get used to in these past weeks. Awkward circumstances and oddities I had to accept one after the other. It felt like the more I got used to them, the farther away I got from who I once was.

I passed another rogue witch, acknowledging her grim smile with a casual shrug. Yeah, they did even that. Let me walk around alone and acknowledge my presence. That the Inri Brotherhood allowed more freedoms than the Lumenis during my stay in Italy? Pure, bloody irony.

I learned one or the other thing about the Inri Brotherhood, some of it the hard way. They were attentive and meticulous. Ruthless. And I was one of them now.

The rogues were careful, watching me, observing every step I made. I knew how Medici slipped under the Circle's radar so easily. They sealed off our various hiding places as soon as we got there, had dark spells and magical artifacts up their sleeves that cost a fortune on the black market.

The Inri Brotherhood was better organized than I thought, and their numbers were far greater than I suspected. Three dozen in this group alone. The three witches only knew how many more were out there. There could be a whole army of rogues, hiding somewhere in the city, and the Circle none the wiser.

They didn't keep me in chains, but there was no teleporting out for me. The hiding places were more tightly guarded than a Russian high-security prison. Besides, I guessed Medici trusted my own survival instincts.

Thanks to the flashy stunt he pulled in that street, there were about a dozen pedestrians that saw me leave with the Raven willingly.

He probably drew the attention of witches within a three mile radius. There was no way the Circle didn't know I went with the rogues. Raphael knew it, I knew it: Going to the Circle and Brown was out of the question. So why bother?

Aside from that, I might have been forced into this, but when it came down to it, the choice was still mine. I went with Medici that night, sealed our pact with a golden handshake that yanked me into a dark portal that had no emergency exits or safe routes. My decision. My bad.

The first two weeks with the rogues were a test, a mental assault course Medici set out to examine my motivations, find out if I was playing a double game. At some point in time he must have made up his mind. What followed were week number three and four.

I was not going to think about week three and four.

I shook my head, blocking the array of memories, moved on. I took yet another turn to the left. It was an old maintenance shaft, no longer used by a nameless company underneath one of the many faceless buildings we'd occupied.

Not that I really cared where exactly we were. There were enough spots in the city that had just the same ring to them. Old. Filthy. Abandoned. Places and niches, recesses and zero spaces no one noticed – they were reserved for those that didn't fit in: drunks, beggars, criminals. And other things that liked to hide in the dark. Other, more deadly things.