by Thais Lopes
THAIS LOPES
A Death’s Sanctuary Short Story
Copyright © 2015 by Thais Lopes
Cover design by Thais Lopes
Model: Mirish (http://mirish.deviantart.com/)
Wolf: Amber (http://hotnstock.deviantart.com/)
All rights reserved. This book or any portion of thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
1. Camila
“Did you see the news?” Luiz asked, from the kitchen’s door.
With a resigned sound, I raised my hand, asking him to wait while I finished eating my cheese bread. Obviously agitated, he took a mug from the cabinet and headed for the coffee pot.
“Don’t even think about it!” I almost screamed, with my mouth still full. “No coffee for you! Once was enough!”
“Hey, I deserve it today! It’s going to be a long day.”
“No way! I’ve seen what happens when you drink anything with caffeine.” I finished eating in a hurry, knowing there was only one way to make him forget the coffee. “What was that about the news?”
He immediately put the empty mug on the table, getting a chair. His eyes were shining, and I knew for sure he was going start talking science. Probably another crazy idea.
“I told you about the living tissue samples that were being studied, remember? The ones that had been frozen for ages?” He waited until I nodded, smiling. “There are news about those studies. Unbelievable news!”
I froze. That wasn’t what I expected. One quick glance around was all I needed to make sure that Felipe was listening. My other roommate had stopped just before the door, and was completely still. Our eyes met, and he nodded lightly, a worried expression on his face, before turning and going back to his bedroom. I took a deep breath before facing Luiz, who had a large smile on his face.
“What did they discover?” I asked, praying to all the powers that it wasn’t what we feared.
“There is an anomaly on the DNA that would give a regeneration capacity to the body that, until now, wasn’t even imagined.” He didn’t even try to hide his excitement about it.
With effort, I forced myself to appear curious. What I really wanted to do was run to my parent’s home and wait for my next orders. We weren’t ready for that… Not now. It was hard to stay in the character I had created years ago, but somehow I managed. “Right… And what does that mean?”
He sighed. “Imagine you cut yourself, and in seconds it’s healed. Now, imagine the same thing working not only on your skin, but on your whole body. It’s the greatest discovery of the century!”
Yes, it was. But he had no idea of what was really going on. I could hear the faint noise that was Felipe typing on his computer, and the fact that he hadn’t come back to the kitchen was the only confirmation I needed. If they had found out about the regeneration capacity, it wouldn’t be long before they figured out the rest.
“Yes, it seems to be.” I answered, going back to my breakfast and pretending I had no idea of what he was talking about.
Luiz made an irritated sound before getting up. “I really don’t know why I still try to talk about this stuff with you or with Felipe. You have no idea at all.”
“You’re talking to two math students, Luiz.” I laughed.
Shaking his head, he left the kitchen, and few minutes later I heard when he closed the apartment’s door. He was probably going back to college, where he would be able to discuss the news with his classmates. My smile disappeared, and I let my worry be visible. Leaving my coffee mug, I went to Felipe’s room.
“So?” I asked.
He didn’t even take his eyes from the screen, his shoulder length blond hair hiding part of his face. But I could see the worry lines that marked his expression. Not a good sign.
“Exactly what Luiz said. They didn’t release anything besides the regeneration capacity.”
“Yet.” I added.
“Yet.”
With sharp movements, he closed the browser’s window before turning off the computer. Sighing, Felipe faced me. There was no need to say anything, we both knew what was at stake.
“I’ll give you a ride to the road.” I said, before going back to my bedroom.
I dressed for work in a hurry. The beginning of a headache seemed to tell me it would be a long day, but there was nothing I could do. I needed to hold tight to the life I had built. I couldn’t let anyone suspect anything.
Felipe was already waiting when I left the bedroom. Without a word, we went down to the garage. My car was a popular model, dark gray, and with the darkest film allowed on the windows. The less anyone could see inside, the better.
There were two ways to get to my work by car. The shorter one, through the city, was an everyday bet. I never knew if I would get lucky and arrive in twenty minutes, or if I would get stuck in traffic and need two hours. The longer way was through the road just out of the city, a huge detour, but there was almost no traffic. And the long way was also near one of our properties.
Felipe jumped to the back seat as soon as we were out of the city traffic, and I heard when he started taking off his clothes. A few seconds later the sounds of the transformation started.
In less than five minutes a huge white wolf jumped to the passenger seat beside me, facing me with Felipe’s hazel eyes. His stillness was the best indication of how worried he was. He usually asked me to open the window right away, and stuck his face out like an overdeveloped dog. But not today.
“I’ll leave half past five.” I told him. “Call if you need a ride.”
I swallowed the words on my mind. I didn’t need to tell him to call if there were new orders for me.
The wolf gave no sign of hearing me. I sighed while parking and stretched to open the passenger door. Felipe jumped in the middle of the high bushes by the road, and two seconds later I couldn’t see him anymore. I closed the door and went to work.
2. Felipe
The path between the road and the farm was an old friend. We’d been in the area for so long that the small animals already avoided that spot. A pity. But I wasn’t going hunting anytime soon, anyway, I was too worried and knew that there was a lot of work ahead. When the scientists studying the anomaly in those samples figured out what they had… We all would have more problems than we could imagine.
Carefully, I avoided all the traps – magical and mundane – that surrounded the property, before running to the main house. In a couple of minutes I could see the parked cars, and almost stopped when I recognized the smells. What was the alpha of the cats doing there? And not only him – it seemed that almost all the alphas were there, along with a human servant of the Master of the vampires in the city. Even more worried, I approached the door.
The door opened just before I got there, and Dara came out. The tall woman was a half-breed – her mother was a werewolf, from the same clan she now leaded, but her father was a demon. Without saying anything, she threw me a pair of gray sweatpants and a simple shirt. I bit the clothes, being careful not to make any holes on them, and went to one of the cars, using it to hide my body while I changed. Five minutes later I went back, in human form and dressed.
“What’s going on?” I asked, skipping the niceties. Only an emergency would have brought all the alphas together.
“Inside.” Her voice was cold, and her dark eyes seemed to shine in different colors. “Ivan is already waiting for you.”
Even more worried, I nodded, going str
aight to the big meeting room. With effort, I hid my surprise when I saw who was there. I had expected the local alphas, and they were there, but taking secondary positions standing by the walls. The alphas from the Clans’ Council, the ones who had territorial authority, were sitting at the big table. The vampires’ servant was there, too, an older man who seemed harmless but could probably survive a fight against any shapeshifter. And beside him was an unknown woman with bright red hair. The hair was enough to tell me what she was, but I made sure to catch her smell. A witch.
All the eyes turned to me, and I took a deep breath, searching for my alpha. Ivan was standing by the table, almost beside the wolf alpha from the Council.
“Got anything for me, Felipe?” He asked, facing one of the men sitting on the table.
“Not much. I just wanted to make sure you knew that the media already knows about the regeneration capacity, and see if there are any new orders for me or for Camila.” I answered, not sure about what to say or why Dara had told me to go there. I had no place in a meeting like that.
“And your roommate?”
“You know he is fascinated by genetic therapy. He is following all the news and by now is probably doing everything he can to get an internship in one of the labs studying those samples. He was the one who told us that it was already on the news.”
“This means they are really going ahead with that. They’re not bluffing.” The witch said, sounding tired. “I told you.”
Dara touched my shoulder, pointing to one side of the room. I nodded, going with her. I wouldn’t waste a chance to see firsthand what was going to happen.
“For those who didn’t realize what is going on, our existence is no longer a secret.” One of the Council alphas spoke, looking around the room. “Most governmental agencies around the world already know we are here, and now they want to use us. Meetings like this are taking place in all the territories to gather the local opinions, and then we will decide what will be done.”
“What do they want?” The local rat alpha asked.
“Volunteers for their experiences and tests.”
No one needed more details. We could imagine exactly what the human government interest was: our abilities, such as the shapeshifters’ regeneration capacity, the longevity of the witches and elves and the near immortality of the sidhe and the vampires. And we also knew what would happen to the “volunteers”. No one would survive.
“What are our options?” The vampires’ servant asked.
“Disclose our existence to the public, in our own terms.” A new voice spoke, startling everyone.
Claws and fangs appeared around the table even before the person who had said that crossed the door. Of medium height, with skin that had a bluish tint, long dark hair in a braid and golden eyes that were too apart for a human, he looked around the room, shaking his head and smiling when he saw everyone was ready to attack. His eyes, when they appeared, were as sharp as a vampire’s fangs.
A sidhe.
“Avés.” The cat alpha of the Council broke the silence, and everyone relaxed.
The newcomer nodded, as if he had been there since the beginning of the meeting. “The only thing the agencies and companies have on us is the secret. If we show ourselves they will lose their only option for blackmail.”
“Yes, but the repercussions can be worse than the threats.” The witch’s eyes were distant, as if she was seeing something different. A Seer.
“It’s up to us to keep the repercussions under control, then.”
3. Camila
Two months later.
It was strange to see everyone going on with their lives, as if it were just another day. But it wasn’t. That was the day when our world would be turned upside down, and humanity would get to know that what they called fantasy wasn’t that far from reality…
And my head was throbbing with pain.
The worst was that I had to work even knowing what was about to happen, but I had to take care. Unlike the fairy people, I wasn’t optimistic about people’s reaction. Many would love to know that we were real, right. But others… I feared even thinking about the possibilities.
Almost everyone from my team was already sitting at their stations when I arrived, something rare, as I usually was the first to get there. Sighing, I sat down and opened the system, typing my passwords and preparing psychologically for the daily dose of curses. That was the routine for anyone who worked at a call center.
“Did anything happen?” Marina, on the station beside mine, asked. “You’re never late.”
“Not really.” I answering, putting on my headset. “I just had to give my cousin a ride.”
She nodded, and I changed my status to available before she could start talking. The first call of my turn came on almost in the same second, and I tried to focus on the work and forget my worries.
It was around two in the afternoon when I realized there were no calls on queue. Looking around, I saw that everyone was idling. No calls? In the middle of the afternoon? One glance to my cell phone showed me the reason: Luiz had sent me a lot of texts, all of them starting with “you won’t believe”. That could only mean that the plan had worked, and right now the existence of the Otherworld was becoming public.
Quickly, hoping my supervisor didn’t look my way, I texted an answer. “Working, talk at home”. This way he would at least until I arrived to start talking. I couldn’t stop wondering what would be his reaction when he realized that his two roommates were part of the “you won’t believe”.
“Camila?”
I turned, surprised, and saw one of the guys from the beginning of our line calling me. A girl I always saw around there was beside him, looking worried. I had never talked to her before, but my nose told me she wasn’t human.
Shrugging, I typed the pause code and got up. The girl met my eyes when I got near, and then turned around and went to the doors, where we could see if anyone was around us. That meant we could talk without being heard.
“Do you know what’s going on?” She asked in an urgent whisper. “ I can feel something different, something big. My family is in alert. But I have no idea of what it is.”
“Do I know you?” I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t going to say anything without being sure that she was really from the Otherworld. She didn’t smell like human, but that was all I knew.
“Elf.” She sighed. “I should have imagined you wouldn’t recognize my smell, wolf.”
I nodded lightly. Few among the shapeshifters had any kind of contact with the fairy people, so it wasn’t a surprise that I didn’t realize she was an elf. But it was a surprise that she didn’t know what was going on.
“They disclosed the Otherworld’s existence.” I told her.
“Today? Already?”
“You didn’t know?”
“We were only told that it would happen.” She shook her head. “No one talked about when. But this explains what I’m feeling from my family... Thank you.”
She turned and ran to her supervisor before I could say anything else. Shaking my head, I went back to my station, and saw when the elf left, almost running, and now carrying her purse. Going home. My headache seemed worse, somehow, the first sign of my worry. I didn’t want to imagine what that girl had felt from her family if it made her run like that.
I changed my status to available again, but we still had no calls. Thoughtful, I started wondering what might be happening. I only knew the plans for Belo Horizonte, but there would be something going on in all the cities with an expressive number of people from the Otherworld. The witches’ Seers had reunited and made a list of anything that we could use, and here it would be a robbery with hostages. The plan was that the shapeshifters and the witches would openly interfere, playing the roles of heroes. The local vampires and fairy people weren’t happy to be left out, but they would show up later.
How far would that go? What would I find when I left work? I had no idea. I didn’t even know if Felipe would be at home – he ha
d been called to help with the hostages’ rescue, and there was always some risk. A bullet wouldn’t kill him, but I still worried. We did have a regeneration capacity beyond anything a human body was capable of, but we weren’t immortals.
By the end of my turn I was already pale. Too much worry, too much headache. And too many people around whispering and wondering if what had happened was really true.
I needed to see what had happened and what the reactions were.
And I needed to talk to Luiz, I remembered, seeing the cell phone screen light up with a new text. “Coming?”, he asked. “On the road”, I answered.
4. Luiz
I didn’t even move when I heard the jingle of keys outside the door. I was almost sure it was Camila, as Felipe had disappeared after all the madness this afternoon. And I didn’t want to stop watching the news. Every moment another creature I thought was only part of stories or myth showed up.
“What’s on the TV?” She asked, and I heard the door being locked.
“I’m waiting to see if any demons will show up.” I said, only half joking.
“Don’t wait, they won’t. They are too satisfied in the limbo.” Camila answered, going to her bedroom.
Surprised, I stared at her back while she kicked out her shoes. Was that answer another of her crazy jokes? Sarcasm, maybe? But it had told me something I had already guessed: Camila was one of them.
”What are you?”
“Shapeshifter, from clan wolf.” She answered, coming back to the living room and sitting on the other couch. “Third in the female hierarchy.”
I was sure that meant something, but I understood only the first part of her answer.
“Werewolf?”
“Yes.” She stared at me, obviously waiting for a reaction.
“I live with two werewolfs. Nice!”
She shook her head, a faint smile on her lips. “What happened in the afternoon? I know what they planned, but…”