Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

60 - Chapter LX: Fuel for Matches

Meanwhile...

In her dream, Reinette was crawling through a tomb, a dreadful forgotten tomb filled with a wave of screeching rats, all of them creeping up her back, fleeing a great beast lurking behind them. Hrafn, aid her...for there was blood on her hands. Blood streaming onto the stones like water.

She could not breathe, her neck craning against some unseen force, her teeth fighting for purchase. She could not possess it. She could not flee it. An iron hand forcing her to look up from the stones, wrenching the harness on her back. Pulling and scratching her eyes until she could no longer see what the darkness fled. Not the sun...nor the moon.

The eye of a demon.

Black.

She woke with a hoarse cry, trying to sit up. But there was no harness. No rats. Instead, a thick rope holding her down. The all-to-real sensation of a harness jerking painfully at her neck. Panic rising, fear that it was not a dream.

What had he done to her...

Desperate as the night of her awakening, she struggled, trying to feel what had changed, if anything. Her hair white in the corner of her eyes. Her hands still wrinkled. Her skin sweating beneath the light of a thousand torches, while the fabric beneath her head itched like lice. It felt like her head was on fire. She strained against the rope and then lay back again. The pain in her head getting worse beneath the heat. Pounding and swelling as though she'd been sucked into a furnace.

Focus, she thought. Escape first. Youth did not matter...

...only escape.

She remembered the layout of the room. The butcher's table upon which she lay, the fire gaping at the far end of the right wall, but not all as precisely as it had been. There was a torn rope swinging from a hook in the ceiling, a smear of blood leading to the door. Sabine, she thought. Blood, let them not have caught her. Her attention wanting to steer towards the door, but her fears lingering on the fire. Petrified that she would see a child's corpse burning among the ashes.

It had a cavernous aura. If she squinted, she could see flames licking the small fragments of bone that would not burn. The scent of acrid smoke melding with burning flesh. Old blood streaked across its stones as though many a throat had been slashed before it. The same blood soaked through the back of her dress. Too much blood to be her own... The memory of Sabine tearing down the corridor making her heart start to beat faster.

She had to get out. She had to move before he came back. She craned her neck beneath the rope that held her down, searching for something sharp: a knife, a piece of glass, anything with which to free herself. Everything out of reach, save for a box of nails on the table. Her eyes now seeking the shadows, the dark, the hole through which the monster had dragged her. Was he still in the room, she wondered. Waiting for her in one of the corners.

The battered wooden door taunting her with hope. The sight of scratches on its surface, the thought coming out of nowhere: that she could be hopeful at the scratchings of a lycan. Even so, the scratchings were timeless. Impossible to discern how old they were, making her wonder if she was lying to herself. Had years passed since her kidnapping...Had she fallen into another sleep... Had another decade of her life vanished like a half-remembered dream?

Adrenaline, born of fear, making her eyes Change, making her head pound even louder. Her mind tearing forward into the unknown. Conscious that there was a wound in her skull trying to heal. Conscious that perhaps it was not the blood of others soaked through the back of her dress, but her own life force bleeding out.