Volume 1.5: Desperation

Type: Series

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Rating: M

Characters: Sonja, Cadence, Samuel, Ava, Bjorn, Melissa and Olivia
Word Count: 2145

Glossary: 

Warning: nudity, adult situations, coarse language

Somebody help me through this nightmare

I can’t control myself

Somebody wake me from this nightmare

I can’t escape this hell

Animal I have become-Three Days Grace

The drive back home was unusually long; Sonja had to drive slowly since the roads were slippery from the light rain earlier in the evening. Also, she didn't realize just how low she was on petrol until she had passed the only filling station in town.

Her car stalled a few times as she drove up the long windy road. She panicked when it came to a complete stop at the top of the hill. She cried and slammed her fists on the steering wheel, cussing wildly. For a Witch, she had an extensive library of swear words, as extensive as her spells.

She saw a flash of movement in her side mirror. Her instincts told her to lock the doors, but her reflexes weren't quick enough.

Before she could even blink, they were already out of the shadows, surrounding her car. There were five of them, one on each side, two at the back and one in front.

"Hand over the Star, Sonja!" The five hunters yanked at the doors, they tried to pry them open and reach for her, but they couldn't get to her, the protective shield around her was impenetrable. If it wasn't for the protection spell she had cast with Cadence before she left for the gathering Sonja knew it would have been the end of her.

She was in a jam, there was no way she could outrun them, and no way they’d leave her alone. She reached for the bag with the Star piece under her seat and clutched it tightly to herself.

She closed her eyes, and slowly counted to ten, she wouldn't be able to orb if she was an emotional wreck; she had to calm down if she wanted to make it out of there alive.

“Pass me through another dimension that connects this place without convention. Take me to a point I’ve selected. Let only the air be affected.”

Sonja forced herself to chant the words to the Magivestium spell, all the while imagining herself in her living room, safe and sound.

Cadence was just nodding off to sleep in her room when she felt the slight tremor followed by the loud commotion in the living room.

She jumped out of bed and reluctantly made her way to the source of the noise; on her way out she grabbed her witch's broom just inside the door in case trouble was waiting for her on the other side.

It was dark, and she could barely see a thing. She fumbled with the light switch on the wall. She cussed when she tripped and almost fell onto something soft and fragile.

Eventually she found the switch and the lights came on. She burst into tears when she saw her mom sprawled on the floor.

“Mom, what happened?" she asked as she picked Sonja up from the floor and helped her to the sofa. 

"I had to orb from the hill, they were after me Cade. They wanted my piece of the Star!" Sonja cried incoherently.

"You're not making any sense. Who's after you? What's a Star piece?"

Before she could reply, Sonja slipped into a trance, her eyes rolled back in her head, her body convulsed and she began chanting, switching between a variety of languages.

Through all her babble, Cadence managed to pick up some lines in English, but none of it made any sense.

Cadence hated leaving her alone in this state, but she had to. She dashed to the altar room and quickly collected the reagents she’d need for the spell to break Sonja’s trance.

She was shocked to find her sleeping soundly on the couch when she came back with the jars of reagents.

She placed them on the floor and knelt in front of  Sonja. She wondered if she should take her to a hospital or call a doctor. But what would she say, where would she start about orbing and the rest of the weird things in her life?

She sighed as she draped a throw over blanket over her mom’s sleeping form. For a long time she watched her sleep, silently praying she hadn't suffered some head trauma when she landed.

In her room, Cadence took out her journal and wrote some of the things her mom had said in her trance. She couldn’t remember everything, and most of it had been in a foreign language, but she’d caught a few lines in English.

“They live amongst us

Walk in our dreams, 

And see right through 

Our deepest desires.

They hear our thoughts 

And prey on our fears.

Their soft voices

Echo in our minds

with promises of forever.

Darkness falls, 

They heed the call of thirst.

The night belongs to them

Eyes burn red with hunger

It’s our blood they crave

and it’s our bloodline 

They wish to enslave.

When the birth of a new day

Peaks over the horizon

and our shadows rise up to meet them

They retreat to their sanctums 

And seek solace in dark spaces.

In the sun we find comfort.

In the light they disappear.

They are The Forsaken...” 

She said the words out loud over and over, trying to make sense of them. After a while she stopped trying.

She rushed to the altar room and leafed through her grimoire, looking for any creature or being called The Forsaken. She wasn’t surprised when she found none. She’d gone through her grimoire back to back a million times in the past, she would have known if there was such a creature.

It was 3:00 am, the Witching hour, when she finally put her grimoire down. She was tired; her eyes were red and heavy from sleep and she really wanted to hit the covers, but she went to the living room to check on her mom again.

Sonja was still sleeping peacefully on the couch with her arms folded on her chest in a prayer-like pose. Cadence kissed her cheek gently before returning to her room.

As tired as she was though, she couldn’t sleep. Her mom’s words kept her awake...

In their cabin in a secluded part of the woods, Samuel and his small band of vampire hunters were still reeling over their failure. They all scurried to their corners and busied themselves with cleaning their weapons, getting them ready for the approaching war with anyone who dared to stand in their way. 

“We’ll get it next time,” he kept telling the other four. He was referring to the piece of the Chaos Star they’d tried to get from Sonja. But even as he said the words, he knew he didn’t sound convincing. The Youngbloods’ magic was proving to be more powerful than either of them remembered.

They’d heard rumors floating around town about Luca’s return and his plans to free his brother and they knew the vampire would need the Chaos Star to break the seal. Rather than tempt fate and leave the Star in the hands of the Witches they were taking matters into their own hands. They already had Carmella Long’s piece, they just needed the rest and the idea was to destroy it before Luca got his hands on it.

“We have to get it soon. Word is Luca plans to be out of Twinbrook ASAP. We don’t have much time,” Bjorn frowned as he gently kneaded his nape with a tired hand.

“I still don’t see why we can’t just storm Luca’s nest and get rid of him,” Ava added from her lone position on the arm chair. She kept playing with her weapon of choice, a custom made handgun enchanted by Luann.

Samuel watched her for some time as she passed the gun from hand to hand and twirled it in the air before she let it drop in her lap.

She was agitated, and he wished he could make her feel better. He understood her feelings of anger and anxiety all too well. But storming Luca’s nest was a bad idea for so many reasons. For one, they didn’t know just how big his alliance was, (if he even had one), or how prepared he was.

The most important reason though for not attacking Luca outright was the pact they’d made with the elders of the community when they were granted permission to get into the hunting business. They couldn’t attack without provocation.

Samuel closed his eyes, and laughed as he suddenly realized this wasn’t what he’d wanted; the rumbling from deep within his chest was the bitter sound of disillusionment and regrets.  His reality was way too off from his dreams. In fact all their realities were not what they had envisaged.

They were not always hunters. But the night of the Delacroix Court twenty years earlier had changed all their life plans when they suddenly found themselves in a war they were ill prepared for.

There were hundreds of them, from Twinbrook to Appaloosa Plains, men and women just like them, dedicated to the Course of exterminating blood drinkers. But the course wasn’t limited to just Vampires. There were reported cases of Witches and Weres being hunted in some parts, but so far, Twinbrook just had a single enemy, and they all had to stand together to fight him.

“You know we can’t do that. We have to wait for him to attack first. We can’t just go after him,” Samuel explained and it wasn’t something they all hadn’t heard before.

“Yeah, yeah, the pact with the Witches,” Ava hissed before she ran out of the room, leaving the other four with worried frowns on their aging faces.

“I’ll go talk to her,” Melissa volunteered from behind her laptop, but she didn’t make any attempt to leave for some time. And when she finally did, Samuel stopped her. Going after Ava wouldn’t do. He knew his wife wanted to be alone. She was taking Luca’s return harder than all of them.

They all lost someone that night, but Ava had lost the most, her entire family had been wiped out, and she was only fifteen then. If it wasn’t for her quick thinking father who’d hauled her up the attic when they’d heard the chaos outside their home, Ava would have been ripped from limb to limb like her parents.

Days after the attack on the town, Samuel had cried when Ava described in great detail the horror she’d witnessed when she’d watched from the attic fledglings feed on her parents and rip apart their limbs. He’d never felt such fury as he did then, and looking back now, he knew it was Sarah’s devastation that had pushed him into hunting.

An hour passed and the others retreated to the table for a game of poker. Samuel wasn’t in the mood, so he excused himself and he went in search of Ava. He found her at the firepit, warming herself up.

Wordlessly he joined her and wrapped his arms around her.

“It’s okay. Nothing will happen to you, I promise,” he told her over and over as he held her close to him.

She cried and shook in his arms, her fearful thoughts came out in spurts and stutters and he listened patiently, and allowed her to get it all off her chest.

“It’s happening again. I can feel it. Luca coming back like this means he’s ready to open that door. We can’t let him. We don’t know what will come out of there,” she cried on his chest and he agreed, Luca couldn't win.

“Listen to me, we’ll do everything in our power to stop him,” he promised her as he kissed her.

“Including Cadence?” She asked, searching his face. Samuel hesitated. Cadence wasn’t part of the deal. They couldn’t touch Cadence; the Youngbloods would unleash hell on earth if they did.

“She is the last piece of the puzzle. Luca can’t have her blood,” Ava grabbed his face and forced him to look at her.

He knew what she was asking him, and he didn’t agree. Like her, Cadence was just an innocent by stander in all of this. But at that moment, with her gazing up at him with such high expectation shining in her green eyes, he couldn’t refuse her. He would have given her the moon if she’d asked.

“Of course,” he told her as he claimed her lips once more.

It wasn’t long before they were sprawled on the ground, their bodies glistening with sweat under the moonlight, grass blades and fine grains of sand grated Ava’s back as she accepted Samuel’s carnal thrusts. They clung to each other, reaffirming their promise, wishing they could stop the train wreck, but all the signs were pointing to a cataclysmic end, it was unavoidable.

_______

AN: See I told you I like shiny, sparkly things, I wasn't lying.

I wanted to say something funny, but I can't think of anything right now, except thank you for reading, and to show my appreciation for your continued support, here's a poster of Luca. I made this for Jazen since she's so gaga over him.

Credits: all the hunters were created by Aussie Karima so Pixx and Maddie blame my assignment failure on her, she just can't make ugly sims.