Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

55 - Chapter LV: The Curse of Silver

It was here that one would expect events to take their course. An enemy. A hunt. A reason to scale the walls of this domestic prison. With his back to the pouring rain, his hair and clothing starting to cling, Lucian mounted the iron railing, knowing that he would not slip. Waiting for a head to pass below him before he dropped from the turrets, lending his body to the air for the two and half seconds before he landed. Like a stray cat on his hind legs.

Glancing to the right and left before ducking into the murky shadows, entering the main hall in search of an arsenal for his hunt. Knives, guns, bullets, blood rations. The bare minimum of what he would need before leaving for the safe-house which he had no intention of entering.

Instead he found himself face to face with Bess. She was a silhouette in the servant's hall, her eyes red and the hair falling from its knot. Always, she had a way of finding him when he least wanted to be found.

He pushed his way past her. Too far gone to hear anything but the hunt. The trail. The scent drawing him forward. Hundreds of smells. Blood, fire, dust, rain, ash, vinegar, salt, wine...thousands of trails leading deeper into the house. Down the stairs. Towards the outdoors. Towards an edge that no one else could see.

She called out to him again. "Luka," she said then. Luka please.

She had not called him Luka in over thirty years.

And so he stopped.

Turning his head to look at her. Regretting the act for it left him wide open to knowledge that he had no desire to hear. Words that made the blood rush into his head, as though he were seeing the world through a red mist. His control unaffected by what she was saying. Words that existed without meaning, separate from the sentences that harboured them. Through logic alone, he deduced that something 'terrible' had happened. That they had looked 'everywhere.' That 'she' was gone. 'Missing' from the household. 'Missing' from the roll call. That no one had seen her 'since sunset.'

It occurred to him afterwards that in spite of the topic having much to do with his missing ward, it was his name that he found most relevant. The use of it. The strange thought of Elizabeth Fulligan being distraught enough to call him anything less than 'Mr. Kerr' in front of the household staff.

One would think this might have compelled him to move. Surveying what havoc Fate had decided to make of his world. This chaos that would not stop, when in the midst of that chaos, he began to wonder why Bess was speaking German when she so often preferred English these days. Why she was surrounded by her boys, the three lycans who kept her safe in the household. James, Thomas and Liam. Surrounding her as though they feared what he would do. These boys, now men, whom he had charged to keep her safe almost three decades ago when she returned to him with a married name.

The chaos failing to make sense as he looked upon the others. Those who were standing beyond the boys and behind Elizabeth Fulligan, these guardians who were so willing to let this distraught woman take the fall for the disappearance of his ward. A weeping governess. A stoic riding instructor. A tutor hanging his head. No silver in their eyes, barely any lycan in their blood; for they were nothing short of excellent in their references. Their faces pallid, these people he could barely name let alone recognise. How could he have left her with them, he wondered.

Sabine.

Small, grey-eyed Sabine whose hair was red. Whose mother had died far from home in a vampire raid with a silver knife speared through her eye. The body burned by the Lycan Registry before the blood was dry. The daughter of his daughter, for how could she be anything else when their smells were so closely matched. Though he had fought it...though he had avoided referring to her as anything other than his ward, Sabine was of his blood.