by Dave Ferraro
Chapter Five
Shanna couldn’t breathe. She looked around her, trying to make sense of her environment, but it was completely black. Everything was black.
She shifted, trying to draw air into her lungs again. She felt the air enter her lungs, but it was like it had no effect. She was suffocating.
Reaching an arm up, her fingers grazed something cold and smooth. She paused, and ran her fingers in front of her again. She frowned and touched her own body, finding herself wrapped in cotton. In a dress.
Her lungs inflated uselessly as she took another breath, and her body tensed as her chest began to grow heavy. Panicking, Shanna reached up again to touch the smooth surface. This time she detected small grooves in the surface. She ran her fingers along it, and found it covered her in every direction. She arced her arms overhead and found the surface stop at a wall. Pausing, she ran her fingers down the wall.
A coffin, she suddenly realized. I’m in a coffin.
She lay there for a moment, letting it sink in, when her chest began to burn. She was suffocating. She’d used all of the oxygen in the tiny space. Summoning all of her strength, she pushed up with both arms, the cover giving away easily. It splintered overhead with loud snaps. Sharp edges cut into her hands, but she hardly noticed. Dirt was falling into the coffin. She had to…dig.
Tirelessly, she worked her hands, one handful after another, pulling it from overhead, depositing it beneath her, where it would sink into the coffin, filling the space where she had lain. What was going on? How had she been buried? Was she dead?
It took what seemed like hours of grueling labor before her hand reached up for more dirt and felt nothing. She squinted as a sliver of dark light filtered down through a small hole. Responding to the burning in her chest, she began to dig with renewed vigor, pushing herself up and out of the hole she’d dug, out of her grave. She gasped for air as she surfaced, slumping onto the ground to one side.
She lay there motionless for a moment, staring at the starless night overhead. Clouds rumbled threateningly from somewhere in the darkness, but she couldn’t make them out. A strong wind was pulling at her hair, and throwing some of the dirt she’d dug up back into her face. But she didn’t mind. She enjoyed the feeling. She enjoyed being out in the open again, with the air. She tried to fill her lungs again, yet they still burned. Why couldn’t she catch her breath?
Pushing herself up on her elbows, she looked around. Old trees groaned on either side of her, bare limbs reaching overhead. Lightning suddenly lit up the sky, temporarily illuminating her surroundings. A graveyard. Shanna swallowed hard and stared at the tombstone at the head of the plot she’d dug herself out of.
With careful, slow movements, she got to her knees and leaned forward to get a better look. Only a name marked the white stone. Emma Lawson.
“Emma,” Shanna murmured. She looked down at her body. She was filthy, dirt caked beneath her nails, stained over her white dress. Her hair was snarled and tangled, her fingers bleeding. This body seemed to belong more to an animal than a person.
Shanna knew this feeling. It was more than a dream she was having. It was a vision.
“You have awoken,” a man said, smiling, from beyond the tombstone. He stepped out of the shadows and regarded her with a smile on his red lips. “Welcome to the world of darkness, my child.”
“No,” she choked out, stumbling backward, one of her legs falling back into the hole she’d dug herself out of.
“Be careful now,” the man said, stepping up to her and pulling her out of the hole by the arm. He lifted her as if she were made of nothing. “You don’t want to be going back in there.”
Shanna recognized the man. She’d seen him behind a grate in a fireplace, where she’d been hiding from him…as Emma, in a previous vision.
Emma seemed to realize this too, for she pulled away instinctively, and backed up. Shanna found her own actions were becoming indistinguishable from the girl whose eyes she looked through. She had become aware, and now merely observed, instead of participating. It was strange, watching idly while the body she was in was shaking and reacting so violently. She could feel her chest burning, like it was literally on fire, as if it was her own.
“You can hardly breathe, can you?” he asked, watching her.
Emma froze and swallowed hard, looking first left, then right, then at the man. “How did you know?”
“Come,” he said, nodding back in the direction he’d come from. “I will not hurt you. Not anymore.”
She hesitated as he began to walk away from her, but she slowly began to follow in his footsteps, keeping a safe distance between them.
Shanna was wary. She knew that she couldn’t be harmed by what she witnessed here, but she wanted to wake up from this vision. They seemed to take hold of her for a time and let her go when they were ready to. It was out of her control. She was a prisoner to whatever it was trying to show her. But why her? Because she shared the face of this girl who would become Diana, the vicious vampire from the past? Or because somewhere deep down she was Diana and these were memories from a past life? She tried not to think about it as she was led by the man to a small crypt at the back of the cemetery.
The man pulled open a door and ushered her inside. She swallowed hard and obliged, slipping past him quickly. Immediately, she smelled something that made her mouth water. Something warm in the air, something enticing.
The door closed behind her with finality and a match was struck. As Shanna watched silently, the man lit three candles on a candelabra. He smiled at her when he’d finished.
“You need your strength,” he said. “And you need to oxygenate your blood.”
She frowned as he moved to the back of the crypt, lowering the candelabra to illuminate the two forms that lay there, bound by the ankles and wrists. Emma’s mother. Emma’s younger brother. Shanna’s mind flashed to the young boy hiding in the fireplace with her. He’d been terrified then, but nothing compared to this. And she’d known this would happen. She’d seen it in a vision. She was going to kill him. Feed from his blood. And she was going to do it without a care.
“Drink deep from them,” the man pressed, watching her with cold eyes. “Do this, and you sever all ties to the mortal life you leave behind.”
Shanna felt Emma nod, her eyes on her young brother’s throat, where she could see his blood pumping furiously, in terror, at the base of his throat. The sight drove her mad. The blood singing to her from the cut on his forehead beckoned irresistibly. Her body screamed for her to end its burning, its suffering.
She ignored the sounds of their sobbing, and as she drew near, her mother opened her mouth with shaking lips, her eyes wide. “Vrykolakes! Vrykolakes!” With one hard look from Emma, she ceased her screams, muting them to a whimper and hugging her legs.
Unable to wait another instant, Emma rounded on her brother and leapt at him. She shoved aside his head, breaking his neck with the inhuman power that she didn’t even know she possessed. Then without a second thought, she lowered her head to his neck and, without waiting to figure out how to use her new fangs, tore open his neck without discrimination, pushing her mouth over the steady spray of life blood that poured out of his broken body.
Shanna’s eyes snapped open and she sat up in bed with a cry. She still couldn’t get enough air. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, blood pounding in her ears, drowning out the sound of everything around her.
She took a moment to compose herself, taking deep breaths and looking around the bedroom of the safe house. Her bedside alarm clock read 12:00. Midnight. Everything else was swathed in shadow, the night sky touching everything lightly with the color of moonlight.
“Do you have nightmares often?”
Glancing over at the other twin size bed in the room, Shanna spied Quentin sitting up, watching her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
He
hesitated, but lay down again.
As Shanna’s heart rate began to even out, she heard him shift on his bed. She turned her head to see him looking her way again.
“It doesn’t get easier, does it?” he asked.
She gazed back at him for a moment before clearing her throat. “It does, with time. It just never goes away.”
“Your parents were killed too?”
“Yes, years ago. And then my best friend, Kelly, just a few months ago.”
“This is a dangerous profession,” he observed.
She shrugged. “If you want, you could always be on the research end of things, be a scholar like the other two here. You don’t have to be a hunter.”
“I want to be,” he said.
She nodded in response.
“My friends call me Quinn,” he added.
She smiled. “Nice to make your acquaintance, Quinn.”
He turned over and neither of them said anything for awhile. After about ten minutes lying in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, Shanna heard his breathing deepen.
She sighed. The nightmare, the vision…it had unnerved her. She doubted she would be able to fall asleep again. The taste of blood in her mouth was strong, the feeling of digging herself out of her own grave, beyond haunting.
Trying to keep as quiet as possible, she slipped out of bed, her bare feet cringing as they met the cold hardwood floor. She glanced over at Quinn’s bed before she tiptoed over to the bedroom door and slipped outside, closing it slowly behind her. As soon as the door had closed, she let out a sigh.
A light was burning downstairs, and Shanna leaned over the railing to find the source, but saw that the light came from a room to the left. She crept down the stairs, pausing on the last step to gaze at the front door. It was bolted and locked, and she could see the steady light of stars through the window that arched over it. The night could be very beautiful.
“Shanna?”
She turned to regard Felicia, standing in the doorway of the next room. “Hey, Felicia.”
“Couldn’t sleep either?” Felicia guessed.
“Not really.”
Felicia nodded. “After seeing the horrors of that place, it’s little wonder. I doubt Quentin would be able to sleep either if he hadn’t been exhausted from the extent of his ordeal.”
“Quinn.”
Felicia raised an eyebrow. “Making friends, are we?”
Shanna shrugged, walking into the sitting room with her. “He doesn’t say much. He mostly just stares.”
“He’s in shock. He’s been through hell.”
“I know.” Shanna sat down across from her. “Is he going to be alright?”
“He’ll be fine with people like you watching over him.”
Shanna smiled thinly. “What did Valor say?”
“About him joining the hunters? She said the more the merrier, but she needs to test his reflexes, see him in action, before she makes anything official. The last thing she wants is a loose cannon on the team.”
“That’s fair,” Shanna agreed.
“Cup of tea?” Felicia asked, gesturing to a pot in front of her.
Shanna nodded, taking in a big whiff of chamomile. “Smells good.”
Felicia walked over to a cupboard and pulled out a teacup. After pouring the steaming contents into the cup, she glanced up at Shanna. “Milk? Honey?”
“It’s fine as it is,” Shanna told her, accepting the cup gratefully.
As their fingers touched, Felicia stiffened. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open.
Shanna pulled away and set the cup onto the table next to her. “Felicia?”
Felecia’s eyes looked far away, like she was seeing something else that wasn’t in the room with them. Then they shifted to Shanna’s face. “Rachel. Perimeter. Now.” Then she slumped forward, slipping off of the couch.
Shanna cried out and caught her before her head hit the floor. She pulled Felicia back onto the sofa and stared at her anxiously. “Felicia? Felicia, can you hear me?” She considered slapping her lightly.
Felicia’s eyelids fluttered, then opened all the way. She looked around for a moment, like she didn’t know what was going on. “Shanna? I blacked out.”
“Do you remember what you saw?”
Putting a hand to her head and adjusting her sitting position, Felicia slowly shook her head. “No. Everything just went dark suddenly.”
“You said something about Rachel.”
Felicia met her eyes. “What did I say?”
“Rachel, perimeter, now.”
Felicia watched her for a moment, then grabbed her phone off of the table. She pulled on a strand of hair anxiously as she dialed and held it up to her ear. “Rachel?” Glancing up at Shanna, she smiled. “Thank god. You need to walk the perimeter of the mansion.” A pause before she scowled. “Yes, now. Just…I know what time it is. Just do it, okay? And arm yourself.” She nodded to herself. “Thank you. Bye.” She hung up the phone and sighed.
“What do you think it means?” Shanna asked, watching her.
Felicia shrugged. “I don’t know. My psychic powers work in strange ways. But since it’s Rachel specifically, our resident vampire hunter, I would assume something to do with a vampire.”
Shanna swallowed hard, Damien fluttering through her mind. “That would make sense. Do you always speak like that when you’re getting all psychic?”
“No, not really,” Felicia admitted. “Usually it’s just images that I have to sort out. Rarely does this happen, like I’m channeling something.” She peeked at Shanna. “A little unnerving, huh?”
Thinking of her own vision, Shanna smiled tightly. “Could be scarier.”