Formation

Formation: Chapter 4

By the time I finally came to, it was because of all the noise.

My nose wrinkled at the stink of blood in the van, and my brows furrowed in confusion. Where the hell was everyone? Pulling myself onto my feet, my entire body ached as I stepped outside.

"What the hell?"

Houses. Kind of like the ones you see in photographs, except they were all...broken. None of them looked anything close to the Ripper Mansion. A pang burned through my chest and I inhaled sharply, already searching for a distraction.

Venom grunted as she struggled to pull something forward, "Welcome to the suburbs," She huffed, narrowing her eyes at me in disdain, "Are you going to help, or stand there with that stupid look on your face all day?"

"Suburbs?" I repeated, helping lower the scraping metal that hung above us. It was so stiff I almost thought it would snap, "People used to live here?"

The garage clanged hard against the cement ground and Venom hissed through her teeth, "That's the rumour before everyone was holed up behind the city borders," She muttered, hooking a heavy padlock through a latch hole, "Mostly just stragglers out here now. There's not a lot of resources to live on."

"Where's Theo?" I questioned, gesturing to the empty van.

Rolling her eyes in annoyance she nodded towards the door, "Basement," She muttered jamming a key into the padlock, "Better catch your breath first because you're in for a shock."

"What does that even mean?" I demanded, already sick of her. We should have just risked dying out there, it would have been more bearable, "Did you figure out why his bullet wound didn't heal?"

Dark blonde brows almost disappeared under the newly cut bangs, "Oh, wolf bitch," She snorted, stalking past me with a low whistle, "That is the least of our worries now."

Through the door was the entrance of what I think used to be a home. Truthfully, it was pretty hard to tell. The floorboards were so cracked that one wrong step and I'd be through them in a heartbeat.

Slabs of wood were hammered haphazardly across the windows and even the front door. It wasn't exactly what I imagined a 'suburban home' to look like. I'd seen pictures of them before, in magazines in the doctor's offices, or in framed photos that were yellow from age.

Not many, but enough to get a vague idea of what they should look like.

"How far from the city are we?" I asked following Venom through a doorway beneath the stairs. She waited until I was inside before snapping shut a series of locks.

Annoyance painted her features, growing every time I spoke, "Twelve miles, give or take," She muttered, suddenly kneeling and she hooked her fingers around the edges of a door on the ground, "Lucky we even found this place- so don't go blowing it to shit."

"Excuse me?"

"You have a tendency of getting caught."

My fingers curled into fists by my side, and I felt my temper spark. If it wasn't for the scent that suddenly snaked around me, I probably would have launched. Confusion trickled through me as I tried to figure it out, too focused to even notice Venom watching me.

Following it led me down a wobbly set of wooden stairs, inviting new scents. But this one took every inch of my attention. Because I recognised it, but at the same time, I didn't. And it didn't make sense at all, and I hate things that are impossible to understand.

And this was one of these things.

"- how many fingers am I holding up?" I heard Wayland's voice ask, followed by a heavy sigh.