“At least I don’t have girly man hair,” Kaden whined as he followed Yanis inside.
IV
Reysa spotted a very bruised, frail and troubled looking Yasmine on the couch. Resting on her lap was a cub that looked to be only a few years old. Yasmine looked so thin and weak. So unlike the vibrant woman with the dazzling smile that everyone had come to know and love. Reysa vowed at that moment to destroy everyone who had caused the light to dim in Yasmine’s vivid hazel eyes.
Reysa ran to her and pulled Yasmine into her arms careful not to disturb the sleeping cub. Yasmine returned the hug as she cried on Reysa’s shoulder.
“Are you alright Yas?” Reysa knew that her friend was far from okay. “What happened to you? Where have you been?” Reysa asked as she held Yasmine in our arms.
“They took me, Reysa,” Yasmine whispered softly.
Yasmine sat back and surveyed the room of strangers. She wanted to go home where there were no cages, no chains, and no experiments. Her tearful eyes focused on the vampire sitting across from her with such brilliant blue eyes. There was something calming about this stranger; something safe and right now, safe was what she needed. She took a deep breath and focused on the mysterious stranger as she told Reysa, “It started with a vision that Madeira was going to die and I had to save her before it was too late.”
The vision clawed at her mind with such a force that she nearly passed out from the intensity. Her visions had always been painful jolts to her senses, but they were crippling when it impacted someone she loved. This last one had caused the most mind splitting agony that she knew immediately it involved Maddie.
Images had flashed before her of her sister’s broken and bloodied body fighting with her last ounce of strength her brutal attacker. Maddie collapsed in a pool of her own blood while the creature watched as if admiring her handiwork. The creature continued to stare proudly until Maddie took her last breath. Her hazel eyes no longer full of the life and passion that was Maddie. They were distant, empty, lost.
Yasmine knew that she could not alter her visions. She was a seer and the fates that revealed themselves to her could never be altered. She tried so many times to stop that which was destined to happen and each time she failed. With every failure, she bore the weight of disappointment from her helplessness. This time, she had to succeed. She had to try again. If not she would lose the person who mattered most to her. Maddie was her constant, her family. Yasmine could not imagine surviving without Maddie by her side. Yasmine would find a way to alter destiny this time.
Yasmine’s visions were unpredictable. She didn’t know exactly when death would strike Maddie, she just knew how. She needed to reach her sister. Keep her safe and pray to the gods that death would pass her by.
She didn’t know where to look. She tried calling Maddie, but there was no answer. She called Reysa and everyone they knew at The Lore hoping someone had seen her, but no one could find her. After precious hours of time wasted, Yasmine thought her prayers were answered when she received an email from Maddie. At least she thought it was from Maddie. She should have been suspicious considering Maddie rarely used email, but Yasmine was too desperate and anxious to find her sister that she embraced any small hope that Maddie was reaching out.
“The message stated that Maddie was in Chicago at a club called Serenity. She was visiting a friend in trouble. She claimed she needed my help. That was a red flag I ignored. Maddie never asked for help. She was too stubborn to admit that she needed someone else. I should have known the email was not from her, but I couldn’t get the vision out of my head. I kept thinking that if she were visiting a friend in trouble, then that could be the trouble that leads to her death in the vision. I had to go to her. I sent her an email promising I would be there soon.”
Yasmine rushed to the airport and boarded the first available flight to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. She hailed a cab and gave him the address for Serenity that was included in the email. The cab driver was visibly taken aback by the address and asked Yasmine to confirm this is where she wanted to go. He warned her it was a dangerous part of town in the Southside of Chicago. Not the kind of place for a girl like her. Yasmine didn’t care about the danger to herself. All that mattered was finding Maddie.
The cab driver pulled up to an abandoned house. Windows were boarded up as if the house had once caught fire, but no one bothered to rebuild. Next door were several men sitting on the stoop of a house that looked just as withered minus the wooden boards. The human men were boldly shooting heroin in plain sight as if daring the cops or anyone else to stop then. One had a small firearm bulging from his right pocket. All of them were focused on the taxi probably wondering who would be crazy enough to come to this part of town.
There didn’t appear to be a club in sight. This was suburbia, albeit a very dangerous part. The driver pointed to an alley next to the abandoned house. “At the end of the alley is the address you seek, but I wish you would change your mind.” His midnight almond shaped eyes pleading with her to not get out of the cab. “This is no place for a lady. Only death looms here.”
That’s exactly why Yasmine need to get out of the cab. To prevent death from finding her sister. Yasmine nodded in understanding as she gave the driver a fifty and jumped out of the cab. He paused briefly before pulling off the sound of his tires scraping the pavement as he anxiously fled the danger surrounding this neighborhood.
As she approached the alley, she heard the human drug addicts calling out to her. She ignored them, but they persisted. She heard their footsteps. They were coming. Yasmine summoned her power. She reached for the sky and began to chant. By the time the men reached the alley, Yasmine had disappeared.
At least they thought she had disappeared. Yasmine had cast a spell of illusion, allowing her to become invisible. She heard the men curse in frustration trying to figure out where she went. Eventually they gave up and left the alley.
Yasmine remained invisible until she reached the end of the alley just in case other unsavory characters were lurking in the shadows. There was nothing there but a brick wall spray painted with gang signs and threats.
She was literally at a dead end. She pounded the wall and suddenly the ground beneath her gave way as she dropped below. She landed on her rump in what seemed to be a dimly lit sewer.
Unlike other immortals, she could not see in the dark nor cast a spell to create light, but she always carried a lighter in her pocket thanks to her mother’s survival rules. The first thing she noticed was the intricate markings on the wall. They appeared to be an old unfamiliar foreign language. As she marveled at the etchings, they reshaped until the words were in a very familiar language, English. This was a spell. The words flashed “Immortals Only – Straight Ahead.” An arrow appeared and Yasmine walked in the direction that arrow pointed.
Rats. She could hear the sounds of their tiny feet as they tapped the surface. They were close. She tried to stifle the fear. She truly hated rats. She never recovered from the trauma of being bitten by several at her mother’s apartment in Rabat. She felt the onset of a panic attack as the sounds grew closer, too close. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. She would survive this. She had to. Maddie needed her and she would be damned if a rat phobia stopped her from saving her sister. With that sobering reminder, she found the courage to continue even as she felt the rats’ presence.
She walked nearly a mile before she reached a door with another inscription. As before, the words unscrambled before her eyes. “Welcome to Serenity”. As she read the words, the door opened and she was thrust inside a small intimate lounge. It was empty. “I knew I was in trouble. There was something so disturbingly evil about this place. I felt the hair on my arms stand up as soon as I entered. I had this horrible feeling that I needed to flee. I almost did until this warlock stopped me. He said his name was Franco and he was here to help me. His words were kind, but his eyes said otherwise.”
Yasmine tried to pull away from him, but his gr
ip was too strong. She pleaded with him to let her go. That she had made a mistake. She was in the wrong place. “You are where you belong. At least you will be soon,” he told her with a confidence that caused her stomach to clench.
She kicked him in the groin forcing him to let go of her arm. She ran around him to leave, but she heard him chant something. “After that, everything went black and when I woke up, I was in a cell locked in with several other witches and a couple of sages.”
Most of the others had been confined for days. No one had any idea who their captors were or where they were being held. They were all brought in by Franco. He was the collector. “It was like an episode of the Twilight Zone. We were just strangers who were trapped. We didn’t know why, how, where or anything else. We just knew we couldn’t get out. They bound our hands with an enchanted chain that blocked our ability to perform spells. I couldn’t even cast a spell to free myself.
“One day, a man and a woman appeared in front of our cell. They called themselves Adam and Eve. They looked more like Lucifer and Lilith to me. The odd thing about them was that I couldn’t detect their immortality. That had never happened to me before. They must have been masking it with a witch’s help or a warlock like Franco.”
“Did they say anything about who they were or what they wanted?” Reysa inquired.
“They claimed we were not prisoners despite the bars and handcuffs. We were their saviors. They needed us and our gifts. One day we would be heroes. It made no sense to me at the time, but I later understood.”
The following day, they came for Yasmine and escorted her to small room with a table, TV monitor, and DVD player. “They showed me picture after picture of butchered lesser immortals like us. They were gruesome. I’ve never seen such barbarianism. There were pictures of slain babies, their tiny bodies covered in fang marks. Women and men who had been raped and tortured sadistically. Then they showed me a video of what they called “The Chase.” It was vampires and lycans hunting innocents both human and immortal for sport. When they caught their prize, the things they did to them were pure evil. It’s hard to believe such evil still exists.” Yasmine trembled as the memories of those images flashed her mind as if she were still in that room seeing them.
Julian rose and pulled out a bottle of water from his backpack. Yasmine watched him warily as he crouched in front of her. “My name is Julian. I’m a friend of Reysa’s.” Yasmine looked over to Reysa for confirmation who smiled in acknowledgement. “Please drink this,” he spoke so gently that her anxiety subsided from the warmth of his words. “If it’s too cold, I will have it warmed for you.”
Yasmine struggled to respond with those piercing blue eyes watching her so closely. Such concern this stranger showed for her. She could not trust this. He was a pureblood vampire, and after the atrocities she had seen, she could never feel safe in their world. Of course, after what she experienced at the hands of her own kind, she would never feel safe with them either. There was no peace for her anywhere anymore.
“I prefer the cold,” she responded as her voice trembled.
“Me too,” he smiled as he abruptly stood up and returned to his seat across of her. Something about him rattled her unsteady nerves. She couldn’t worry about this now. She had to tell Reysa everything. She needed their help.
Yasmine quickly drank the water as the coldness numbed away her fear. “After hours of looking at pictures and video clips of the attacks, Adam and Eve explained that they were part of a movement to stop this—to stop the purebloods from destroying us. They wanted to save people like me from becoming another victim. They called themselves ‘ELM’, the Equality and Liberation Movement. Their mission was to end the tyranny of the purists and to help the rest of us rise up against out oppressors and free ourselves from their enslavement.” Yasmine smiled bitterly as she recited those words. So often they preached those words to her. They had been permanently etched into her memory. She would never be able to cleanse them from her mind.
“The funny thing is, I felt like they were my oppressors and they were enslaving me. I knew they would not let me go unless I helped them. They weren’t asking for my support they were demanding it as if there was no way I could possibly refuse after what they showed me. They kept saying this was war and that I needed to join my people and save us from our oppressors. I didn’t know what they wanted me to do, but I could sense they wanted evil and I would take no part in that. I refused them, at least for a while.”
Yasmine’s stubborn refusal to join was not without consequence. “For several days, they tied me to a chair in that little room and they kept replaying the images over and over again until they were all I could see but I wouldn’t break. Then they started drugging me. I don’t know what it was but I had never felt such unbearable agony. Despite that, I still didn’t break, but they wouldn’t give up either. Eventually they found my weakness and I had no choice but to give them what they wanted.”
After two weeks of Yasmine’s failure to submit, her captors showed her a different video—a video of a lycan who had ripped his own flesh from his bones in a fit of rage. There were others. Vampires and lycans suffering from some type of madness destroying themselves. They were all subjects in a lab. This lab Yasmine realized. Each day of their insanity chronicled for the amusement of ELM. Yasmine would never forget that sickened feeling as she saw the smiles on Adam’s and Eve’s faces as they watched this video with her. They were so disgustingly pleased with themselves. So proud of what they had done. So proud of their kills. They had helped create a drug that could kill vampires and lycans. Something that seemed virtually impossible had become a reality.”
“Mescah.” Reysa explained what they knew about the drug to Yasmine and Yanis. There was no point in trying to keep this a secret any longer. The secret was out whether the Council wanted it to be or not. Mescah was destroying purebloods at an increasingly alarming rate.
“They boasted about their creation,” Yasmine explained. “This was just the beginning. They had sages and alchemists helping them develop even stronger, better drugs, using various herbs and unstable compounds, but that wasn’t enough. They needed help making these herbs and compounds interact. They needed magic, black magic.”
That’s when Yasmine learned what they wanted from her. They knew about her powerful spellbinding abilities. All witches had some degree of skill, but not all witches were the same. Only a small percentage could fully embrace dark magic, the black arts of death. Yasmine was one of the strongest.
She could not understand how they knew about her. Yasmine rarely used her gifts, but they somehow knew the depth of her power and that’s why she had been taken. “I was set up from the beginning. They had been looking for me for some time. My boring, invisible life in Las Vegas shielded me for years, but somehow they found me and they set this plan in motion. I stupidly fell for it.”
After watching the video about mescah, they removed her from the small room and took her to their laboratory. In the room were two cages both filled with traumatized children who had been kidnapped from their parents and clans. “They grabbed this little jaguar cub.” Yasmine stroked the cub resting comfortably on her lap. “They threatened to inject him with the drug I had seen on the video. They said that even though the drug was meant for lycans and vampires, it worked quite well on shifters, especially baby shifters. I couldn’t bare it for them to hurt this little guy.” Yasmine wrapped her arms around the sleeping cub like a mother protecting her child. “There was something about this little guy that tugged at my soul. I couldn’t let him be hurt. I gave in, Reysa. I agreed to help them as long as this child stayed with me. At least I could keep him safe even though there was little I could do to protect the others.
"The other children were part of another plan," Yasmine explained. "Some of those children were being trained as soldiers who would be expected to defend ELM against vampire and lycan reprisal attacks. They would be expected to kill their own brethren on behalf of those that stole them from
their families. And they were the lucky ones. The others, those not strong enough to fight, were being used as ELM test subjects for their drug experiments.”
Reysa struggled to restrain her temper. To experiment on children was unconscionable. At least these children were stronger than human young. Hopefully, their little bodies would survive long enough to give them a chance to find them before it was too late.
“Most were lycans, a few vampires and this little cub.” Yasmine gently pet the jaguar cub’s tiny body. Its claws clutching her jeans making sure she would not let him go. “The youngest looked to be about three years old, the oldest maybe twelve. They were just innocent babies.” Yasmine reached out to grab Reysa’s hand, her hazel eyes imploring her to understand. “I have to go back for them. I have to save them.”
“We will.” Reysa promised, “We will save them.” Yasmine relaxed her hand trusting Reysa’s assurance that the children would be saved. “First we need to know more. How did you get out of that hellhole?”
With the threat against the cub, Yasmine knew she had no choice but to convince Adam and Eve that she was a loyalist. She was on their side, supported their mission. She knew they would not fully trust her, but they needed her and that gave her leverage. After a week or so of convincing them that she was ready to join, they allowed her to work in the lab. Instantly she had befriended another witch, Sasha, who had been taken a few days before her. Sasha had pretended from the beginning that she believed in ELM and their mission. “You can’t fight crazy. You might as well act crazy too,” Sasha explained her “loyalty” to Yasmine.
“Sasha was a survivor. She would play whatever role needed to ensure her survival. She walked around spouting ‘death to the vampires and lycans’ whenever Adam and Eve were in earshot. Somehow it worked. They allowed her more and more flexibility.”
Sasha approached Yasmine about coming up with an escape plan. She used a spell that allowed her and Yasmine to speak without being heard by the others. “That was the one good thing about the lab. They had to undo the spell that muted our powers. They needed us to cast spells for them. That gave us an advantage.” Yasmine was closely supervised as she worked in the laboratory, but fortunately Sasha was not. “They couldn’t cuff us as we needed our hands for spells. We generally could move freely throughout the lab.”
We Shall Rise Page 18