New Beginnings

1. Carmilla

"You're right Carm, Florence really is beautiful. Though, this dusty wine cellar hidden under Italian Knockturn Alley, maybe not so much!" Laura said loudly so she could be heard over the sounds of Carmilla frantically shoving the heaviest objects she could find in front of the wine cellar's creaky wooden door.

"Yeah well, this 'dusty wine cellar under Italian whatever dumb reference that was' is the only thing keeping us from being full of small holes with bits of metal in them." Carmilla replied, hefting yet another barrel of wine against the door.

Laura may have responded back if she hadn't started coughing from the floating dust their hasty entrance into the wine cellar had kicked up. Instead she found a wall to lean on and rest. Carmilla had spotted the cellar out of the corner of her eye as the two were running down quite possibly the shiftiest alleyway in all of Florence. The dilapidated wooden door proved easy enough to wrench open which she followed up by forcefully pushing Laura in ahead of her before scrambling into the cellar herself.

The Cellar was tiny, barely bigger than the dorm room they had met in what felt like an age and for one of them literally another life ago. Wine barrels lay scattered randomly and were coated in thick layers of dust. Clearly no one had felt the need to get drunk from the wine in this particular wine cellar for some time. They were safe for the moment but Carmilla could hear the heavy boots of their pursuers outside the door in the distance.

"You could always help me with this." Carmilla said, as she realized she no longer had any barrels in easy reach and that her now very active heart was beating at around a million miles per hour from her exertion.

Had wine barrels always been so heavy? She swore she could remember a time in France, was it Lyon, or maybe Lille? When she and Mattie had 'liberated' what must have been a city full on Bastille Day as some kind of prank. It had been so easy then, what had wine gotten heavier or,

Oh right, not a vampire.

She supposed the adrenaline spike from being shot at could really scramble one's short term memory. Encourage them to fall back on old habits of the three century variety. She would have to put a stop to that, forgetting she wasn't nigh invulnerable and possessing supernatural strength and speed in the middle of firefights would be rather dangerous.

Dangerous, kind of like having a reverie of old times with Mattie when she should be focusing on keeping Laura safe from the armed arschgesichts chasing them through the cobbled streets and dark alleyways of the city. She winced as she rubbed her hand across her stomach and realized she'd been nicked slightly by a bullet or perhaps some shrapnel. Maybe she should try keeping herself safe as well while she was at it.

In the end though, it was Laura who snapped her back to the present.

"Ah, I could, but you do realize the door swings the other way right?"

She paused and didn't say anything for a moment.

"Yes," No. Damn it you idiot. What's next Betty Crocker stress cleaning? Get it together. "Trying to... put up a barrier between us and them in case we can't find another way out of here before they find us."

Fortunately, if Laura thought that Carmilla was lying she gave no indication of it. Carmilla knew there was at least a chance Laura had taken what she had said at face value. Laura had proven to be exceptionally smart and quick witted but her trust in Carmilla was about as absolute as it could get. Instead she directed Carmilla's gaze towards an opulent looking red and white mat lying alone in a back corner.

It looked out of place compared with the dingy and dusty everything else in the tiny cellar. It's expertly crafted stitching marking it out in the room as much as a bright light would have. Laura stopped leaning on the wall and walked towards it.