Mystery Noir

Sins and Lies Part 7

After a shower and the painful job of getting dressed one handed, I stepped back into the principal part of my room to find Penny texting while sitting on the small love seat that was across from the television. She had somehow scrounged up a large first aid kit from somewhere, possibly the back of an unsuspecting ambulance judging by how extensive it was. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, much like I now was, and I could only assume that she had gone to her room to shower and change as well.

It was quite amazing just how much time was eaten up when you only had one hand to work with and the task of avoiding angering a body riddled with darkening bruises. I paused to look in the mirrored doors of the closet, frowning at the hand impressions already visible on my caramel coloured skin.

The whites of my eyes had several red splotches where blood vessels had burst, and I shuddered when I finally let myself contemplate the fact that I had nearly died tonight.

To change that line of thinking, I walked over to grab a drink out of the mini fridge, handing a second one to Penny as I sat down beside her and murmured. "So. You gonna tell me how you got a sword?"

"Ver says they have someone who's going to deliver enough blood to hold those two over till morning, but the contacts here are skittish so the guy is just going to drop them off at the door in the next half hour. We'll get a text when he's gone." Penny offered as she put her phone down and moved to take out what looked like an inflatable splint from the pile of bandages.

I gingerly offered her my arm and turned my eyes away, clenching my jaw as every slight movement or brush against the swollen flesh of my wrist sent shocks of pain racing along my arm and numbed the tips of my fingers.

"I put the humans into a cab and when I turned around, there was a group of.. actors, or advertisers, all dressed up like knights. I grabbed the sword, was surprised that it was solid metal. I was gone, what... five minutes?" Penny asked seriously.

I glanced back to see her giving me a serious look. "Name anyone who could fight off a vampire with a knife."

Penny rolled her eyes. "You didn't give me a chance to help though. It's like the caves, you keep making me leave you to fend off certain death."

"If we had tried to fight, those humans would have gotten in the way." I shrugged, clenching my jaw to prevent myself from getting too defensive.

She was not wrong. And I knew that it had to be incredibly stressful to run away from a friend and hope that you can get back in time. The survivor's guilt that Penny would struggle through if she ever had to come back to find me dead. I would not have enjoyed running away from the fight, whether or not it was the logical thing to do, either.

I nodded after a few moments of silence, sighing softly. "I'm sorry, that's a shitty thing to put you through."

"I get it, Nina. I do. I don't know how we could have solved that issue safely any other way. You just have horrible luck. How have you survived this long?" There was humour in her voice now, though the smile that graced Penny's lips was worried.

"I have gone years without so much as spraining my ankle. I know you look at the time you've been with me and think that the job is all me rushing into danger to save the day. But honestly, it's usually boring, long hours. The biggest danger is getting fat on too much junk food and not enough exercise." I forced myself to laugh.

Even as the hollow sound left my lips, I felt a chill of dread slither down my spine and cause my hackles to rise. I don't know what had changed, but suddenly I felt something like a rabbit hiding in plain sight as a wolf stalked nearby. Some small, weak part of me told me to run, to hide, to shore up any defences I may have.

Penny's nostrils flared, as if she sensed something as well.

Silence stretched.

Three loud, frantic bangs shook my door, and I was on my feet, grabbing my knife off the tv stand as a voice I did not recognize called through it. "Ver sent me. Safe word Rockafeller. Let me in!"

There was panic in the man's voice that caused a deep primal fear that seized my heart as surely as whatever feeling that had preceded him. I reached the door and looked through the eyehole, seeing an empty hallway stretching behind a young man dressed in jeans and an 80s hair band t-shirt.

"That's Ver's contact." Penny's tone sounded concerned. "That's an emergency code."

I nodded and pulled open the door, unable to fight the feeling that whatever danger was lurking, it didn't come from the non-human who nearly fell through the doorway in his panic to get inside. He was clutching a cooler bag tightly with one hand, his blond hair falling into his features as he closed the door behind him and started locking the door frantically.

"What's going on?" I asked, stepping back from him and lowering my knife-wielding hand to my side.

Ver's contact shook visibly, his eyes wildly glancing around before he rushed to the window and pulled the drapes closed completely. His features had become more refined, sharp incisors showing, though his vampire side was reacting out of fear and not aggression.

Penny stood watching him, holding two knives in her hands, though I noticed she had her phone in her back pocket. She must have picked it up in case we needed to call someone for help.

"Hey!" Forcing my voice to come out loudly reminded me that my throat still didn't like me, but it worked its magic and caused the vampire to turn to look at me, bewildered.

"There's a dead vampire in that other room... and there's something else coming. I've... I've sensed nothing like it before, but it's evil. It had been in the hallway shortly before I got there, I smelled its traces all over the walls and in the air. Then it started coming back from wherever it was. From all directions but the hallway that led to your doors..." He looked terrified out of his wits, though he sat down on the couch, putting the cooler down on the table and hugged himself once he finished speaking.

Not that I spent a great deal of time with vampires in stressful situations, or any supernatural creatures for that matter, but I had never seen one so afraid. In a primal part of my being, I understood that fear, if it was anything like the terror still racing through my body right then.

But I needed to understand it.

"You say you've never sensed it before, why do you think it's dangerous?" I asked idly as I walked back toward the door, frowning as the dread built in my chest with every step. I pushed against it, fighting my own urge to run to the far room as I stubbornly continued my path.

It had to have been my imagination running away from me. How could I sense some unknown danger so completely? Without picking up anything consciously? I knew that what we call our 'sixth sense' is often our body processing various cues that our conscious mind doesn't acknowledge. We pick up the danger naturally with our senses, but our logical, mammalian mind does not recognize the signs for what they are. But this wasn't a sixth sense.

This was pure, illogical horror.

Had I heard something? Was I smelling something in the air my mind wasn't processing?

"There are bad creatures, terrible monsters, in this world. And then there's... Evil..." The vampire mumbled, before hissing at me. "Stay away from the door!"

But I was already looking through the viewing hole.

The hallway was empty again, though far brighter than it had been moments before. And as I watched, the light continued to grow from a point in the middle of the hallway, directly in front of the door belonging to the two vampires we had recently brought back here.

With the growing luminescence, my terror continued to grow until I was frozen in place, my mind stalling as it got locked into the ancient 'fight, flight or freeze' response that left me utterly helpless.

The light had begun to take a concentrated shape that I swore looked almost like a humanoid form. There were no distinguishing features, no eyes or anything to tell me what exactly it was doing or where it would have been facing. Despite the insubstantial ambiguity of its form, somewhere in my subconscious I understood that it wasn't 'looking' toward me, that its attention was elsewhere.

I took in a sharp breath and whatever it was turned toward my door, changing that.