Breathe Under Water - Shadows of the Night 1

Chapter 4

Hi!

This one is dedicated to BlackSwan101 - a great writer (who by the way almost gave me a heart attack when she told me she was going to dedicate one of her chapters to me).

So, as promised another chapter - and, oh, I really love this one! Please let me know what you think!

Lara

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Chapter 4

"Wait here." Within a blink the two vampires were gone.

And here I was, right in the middle of a vampire lair. Alexander requested us to come to the Blood Line Hotel in the Crimson District and come we did.

The hotel was only one among the vamp-friendly business ventures that mushroomed out of nothing in the last few years. The Revelation reshuffled cards and turned the tables in ways humans never thought possible. It messed up their world and tore down whatever action patterns and comfort zones they had been living in. Majorly. But some things never change, I guess. After all that happened, human companies were still eager to increase business ventures, even if their new target customers didn't have a pulse.

When people first learned about vampires, they did what human nature forced them to do. They doubted it. They questioned it. When that failed they questioned their own sanity. Confronted with the unknown, they tried to explain and rationalize it. Good luck with that when a two hundred year old corpse is baring its fangs to you.

I still remembered it. A cool October night, three years ago. What an irony that a video on YouTube would change the world we had known. Somebody managed to film a young vampire drinking blood from a victim outside a club – in HD quality.

It had to have happened before. Many times. The Vampire League probably had enough skeletons in their closet to populate Antarctica. This one time, however, they couldn't brush things under the carpet and pretend everything was just dandy – or that they didn't even exist. By the time they had cleared the collective minds of the witnesses, the video was already on the Internet. The rest was history.

Accepting the existence of vamps was hard for the human population. Accepting that there were shape shifters and witches in this world and that they were as real as the vamps just about pushed them over the edge of sanity. Three years had passed, and people were still struggling with it.

I eyed Brown from the side. By all appearances he didn't mind that we had been led into a private apartment on the first floor of the building only to be dumped like two garbage bags. I let my eyes wander over the furniture, exploring the room's mysteries bit by bit.

I had expected majestic chandeliers, gold-framed paintings, and opulent tapestries, things I had seen when we entered the Blood Line Hotel. Not so here. The apartment looked more like an office to me. Its unexpected modernity struck me as being at odds with the general design of the building. Clean and sharp angles, furniture splashed with a touch of the futuristic and design that without a doubt was born in the twenty-first century.

Brown took a seat in one of the black leather chairs facing the dark granite table in front of us, while I remained behind, close to the door and the only exit.

I looked around. The room was saturated with shadows and filled with a sense of gloominess I couldn't lay a finger on. A solitary desk lamp braved the darkness, throwing off an orb of yellowish light that didn't even illuminate a third of the room. Black, shades of gray, and darkness. There should have been more light in the room. My eyes brushed the floor-to-ceiling window behind and I realized my mistake. The dark-tinted glass turned the city lights into smudges of yellow and white. There was no-