Drown Under Earth - Shadows of the Night 3

Chapter 59

Hi!

I hope you all had a great Christmas week. Mine was great, and I'm not even talking about the presents here ;-)

Okay, we're coming to the final chapters. Fasten your seatbelts. Read, vote, comment! I hope you like this one!

Lara

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Chapter 59

We searched the whole slaughter house and found zip, zilch, nada. Not a soul in there, apart from us. The remaining Brotherhood members had either used a portal, or vanished by some other means – magical or not.

The canon of sirens heralded the Circle’s forces’ arrival with a shrillness that sent my nerves into overdrive. The noise tore me out of the state of numbness I had been thrown into and prompted a spell of thoughts and questions I’d rather not have contemplated, less faced. I wasn’t even sure what exactly happened.

No matter how hard I tried, I kept seeing glimpses of white fangs, pale skin, and blood. The smell of burned flesh had seeped into my pores and permeated my core on a cellular level. Underneath it all a slumbering behemoth – one of the worst emotions a human could have. Guilt.

At this point in time I was Alexander’s human servant in the narrowest sense of the word. Lying to Alexander, who practically lived and breathed in deception, was one thing. No honor among thieves. Lying to Brown and the Circle – everything I once used to believe in, no, everything I still believed in – was quite another.

My latest dance with death opened my eyes. It seemed I couldn’t shut them anymore, couldn’t neglect whatever needed neglecting. For the first time I began to feel the repercussions of my actions. For the first time I felt like I had been looking away for too long, that I couldn’t look away anymore.

How was I going to face Brown and the Circle? How was I going to face the truth? Magic society was tolerant, but not tolerant enough when it came to power and knowledge. A witch of the Circle couldn’t be a vampire’s human servant – basic rule number one in magical 101. No arguing against it. No loopholes.

The only way out? More lies.

So, no, the arrival of the cavalry wasn’t necessarily a good thing. After all we still had an already disintegrating vampiric corpse and three dead rogues to account for.

Not to forget that we had to come up with a logical explanation about how we found said subjects to begin with. If word got out that Cole bugged the coven houses we visited while on TF3 business, and that I knew he did it, we were toast. Hell, even Andy would have a hard time wiggling his precious backside out of that one. So, naturally, all three of us agreed to do the only reasonable thing: Take the lesser evil and lie.

We were going to face Brown and tell a set of lies agreed upon beforehand.

We decided to stick to the truth as much as possible, which basically meant that our version of what-really-happened only differed from the original in two details. One, why Cole went into the Red Zone to begin with. Two, why I and Andy joined him, despite me being the current TF3’s pariah and under suspension.

The first one was easy. Cole got an anonymous tip from an equally anonymous and mysterious informant. The second one was trickier. We settled on coincidental fate. Andy and I met in front of Joe’s Pub in the Crimson District and then accidentally ran into Cole, who’d just gotten the anonymous tip. Not wanting to leave me alone after the Inri-Brotherhood-incident, Andy took me along on the spur of the moment. End of story.