Burning Road

The Price of Friendship- Part II

Khouri awakened to the sound of Cali snoring quietly, but he didn't bother opening his eyes.  There was nothing he wanted to see.  Chi Chi was dead, his best friend, his first love.  Thinking her name brought images, and images brought pain.  Tears spilled down his cheeks and he savored their fleeting heat because he was cold inside.

Grief was exhausting, and it wasn't long before he accepted sleep's deceptive invitation.  Instead of a momentary release from the pain of his present, he was taken to his past...

Khouri was little.  Mom and dad were late for a meeting and no kids were allowed, so he was told to go play in the yard.  Shepherd and Chi Chi were playing with the other kids.  She was the only one his age, everyone else was older and meaner.  They never let him play along unless Shepherd was there.  He was the ringleader.  Dad had said more than once that Shepherd Castle was a natural leader who'd make guildmaster one day.  Khouri didn't care about that, Shep was his friend and stuck up for him when the others bullied him.  When Chi Chi saw him coming she smiled and waved

Seeing Chi Chi smile filled him with relief.  They'd gotten into a fight over a movie the other night, and she'd declared they were no longer friends.  He didn't care if she wanted to be Princess Leia and wield a lightsaber, not anymore.  She was his best friend and she could be the hero sometimes if she wanted to. Chi Chi was holding Shepherd's hand, but she was smiling at Khouri, and that's what mattered.

She gave him a huge hug and kissed him on the cheek.  The warmth he felt inside boiled forth until the side of his face burned.  A blistering wind swept over the yard and everything suddenly changed.

It was no longer morning time.  The sun gone and heavy clouds filled the night sky.  The guildhall was on fire, black pillars rose like beams to support the darkness above.  Around them the sounds of screams and gunfire intertwined into a choir of chaos.  The landscape wasn't the only thing to change.  The kids had changed too.  They were no longer children accompanying their parents to guild gatherings.  Khouri and Charlie were high school seniors, madly in love and inseparable.  Shepherd was no longer a friend but an active hunter and leader of the most decorated Hunter Response Team in the tri state area.

The vampire lord Saul had been captured by The Order and his minions mounted an attack on the church that had always acted as their safe house. That was the incident The Order called The Long Night, but Khouri remembered it differently in his waking hours.  More fear, more blood, embers from the burning church steeples falling to the earth like fiery rain.  In his dream Charlie was the focus.  A pack of gravelings loped into the yard lead by a female vampire with talon-like claws and eyes like bottomless pits.

Shep Castle unleashed a flurry of bullets, cutting into the monsters with uncanny accuracy.  He created an opening and through it Charlie rushed forward, her sword glinting in the light of the building burning at their back. Khouri watched her wade into the enemies with confusion. In reality he'd stuck by her side, killing dozens of corpse eaters so that Charlie's sword could slay the vampire.  As he watched the dream, a graveling jumped onto Charlie's back and bit into her shoulder with festering teeth.  She stumbled but dislodged the monster before she could be dragged down.  The gravelings surrounded her and Khouri merely looked on unable to raise a finger.

Charlie had trained her entire life to hunt monsters.  She put all of that training to the test and for a moment she seemed not to need him by her side. Then Castle's guns clicked empty.  If the dream had followed the course of true life events, Charlie would have slain the vampire then. To Khouri's horror a second pack attacked from their flank, called by their undead master. He wanted to help, but his legs had turned to concrete slabs.