Cold One

Ten: Bitter

Rome,

Everything felt cold. It was around December. Zoey, Lillian, and Theresa were on my sides, walking carefully inside the dark tunnels, just below an abandoned church. Charlotte and Beth were somewhere above, splitting with us.

We had finished our task, killing the head of Zachariel Clan in order to stop them from doing their sacred ritual with the hostages' corpses even though it turned out they had killed the hostages long before we even came here. I also took his magnificent pendant from him.

All we needed to do was to get back outside soundlessly before we get ourselves into trouble.

"What is that?" Theresa stops as her torch points toward a stair heading up on the right side of the tunnels. It was clearly not the stair we used to get down here.

"Sacris," Zoey muttered as she touched a symbol written on the wall next to the stair. "It means sacred. Something valuable must've been kept up there."

"Valuable means bad luck," Lillian said, clearly alert.

But Zoey ignored her words and turned to me. Bright blue eyes filled with wonder and hope. "Please, give me a permission to go up there, Rosaline. It won't be long, I swear."

I looked over to Lillian and Theresa who were both seemed contradict. But Zoey had always been the closest person to me from the beginning. I knew just how much passion she had for ancient history of vampires.

"If it doesn't earn us much, then we're leaving," I tell her.

Zoey's blue eyes lit up in instant. While the other two tensed a little, but they had been trained for this kind of thing so they went along prepared.

"On four," I command our formation. Zoey and I on the front while Lillian and Theresa were behind us.

Everything was alright as we walked up the stair, Lillian and Theresa watched behind us. We were greeted by the view of a very wide hall when we got into the end of the stair. It looked really dark that we couldn't even see anything inside if we hadn't use our torch. I tried to flash my torch to the end of the hall, but I nearly could see nothing but emptiness.

"There's nothing in there," I tell them.

"No," Zoey said as her blue eyes travels the hall very carefully. "Look." She said as her torch point toward an object.

"What is that?" I asked, I could see nothing besides the fact that the object was rectangular. "Is it a box?"

Her blue eyes widened as if she knew exactly what the object was, but didn't answer. Instead she walked deeper, a little hastily. Forcing us to went along.

"Zoey, careful," I demanded as her pace kept getting faster and faster that she started to be careless about her surrounding. So careless that she left us.

I stopped my pace midway, realizing that Zoey was out of her mind and I couldn't risk The other two's life for whatever could possibly be under the shadows around us.

"Watch on three," I commanded silently towards Lillian and Theresa, changing our formation into a more alert ones.

My eyes couldn't move away from Zoey as she kept running further from us. My torch switched from one side to another but I couldn't see a thing.

Zoey stopped somewhere far across me, her hands grabbed the object and observed the front part of it. And though I couldn't see her face from here, I could tell that she was really amazed by it just by the way she was frozen in her place.

She smiled at me, assuring that things were fine.

At least until I saw a shadow figure crossed my torch light behind her. My eyes instantly grew wide.