Please Note: This is a revised edition of the story. Some details have been changed. Any reviews have been deleted when the old chapters were deleted. Chapter 3 is completely new. I hope everyone enjoys the revised version!
Chapter 1
It was a struggle to open his eyes, to reclaim a grip on whatever dismal reality he had happened upon. Pain, physical and mental, crept over his awareness, sneaking out like hands grasping his muscles and organs, sucking eternal life from his wounds. Throbbing blood tore at his brain, tearing at the sickly grey lobes, cutting them apart with a hot, serrated knife. It was possible that only a demon could experience so much pain and go on living, if you could call it living. Certainly no mortal body would go on feeling as he felt.
Cold seeped from cracks in the cement ceiling, leaked down the unfurnished walls, pooled on the unstable, broken floor. The floor, how frozen it was. In some distant recollection of time spent in the bowels of Hell, the floor had never seemed quite so rigidly, horribly cold. It was difficult to think, difficult to sort out dream and reality. The bare scraps of clothing covering his pale, clammy skin offered no protection, no matter how he adjusted his upper body against the concrete. So consumed as he was by the jarring, seeping frigid floor, it took several moments to notice the scent of a living thing mere feet from him, and the swirling gasp of vapor that rose from her nostrils.
The darkness was complete and total, so utterly black that it was near impossible to peer through, even for a creature born of the night. Stretching his fingers reluctantly across the cracked and porous cement, he felt his way toward her. Bones cracked and popped angrily; he pushed his knees against the floor and crawled. Blood oozed from seeping wounds in his belly, leaving a rust-scented trail.
Her skin was prickled and cold, clammy beneath his tender, exploratory fingers. A large, stiff hand slid up over her arm, examining the solid tumor-like bruises, the deep and wet cuts in her bicep, and the slivers of bone that punctured her flesh. With a palm resting lightly on her cheek, he turned her face toward his eyes. Blood-caked blond hair framed her face; a few pieces of hair stuck to her chapped lower lip. The woman exhaled and another cloud of vapor streamed through the sweaty atmosphere.
The hand dropped pathetically, uselessly, from her face. It bounced on the concrete, a dead fish. A struggling sigh wobbled up from within his throat but emerged without a sound. Perched on his knees, Angel sat back, leaning his weight on his ankles. Slowly, he turned his head, leaning his chin briefly on the tip of his shoulder, allowing it to dip into a weeping pool of pus and sticky mucus. His chapped lips screwed up into a scowl and his head snapped back, whirling around one hundred-eighty degrees to the other half of the room. The walls reared up out of the darkness, offering a vague focal point, a boundary, an enclosure. Otherwise, the room offered nothing, no hint of an explanation, no where or why or how or when. Confusion fell upon his shoulders, the globe at Atlas' back.
The wall lurched toward him as Angel stretched out his hands, zombie-like, in front of his torso. Equally cold, damp in some places, slick and sticky in others, the wall gave him something with which to gauge the room. His bare feet shuffled across the floor, barely lifting from the brittle mixture of ash and water, shattered or cracked in places. Several times, his shoe would catch on some object and attempt to tear him from the goal. Somewhere, somewhere in this crypt, there had to be a source of light. If he kept searching, he was certain to find it.
Struggling to cross the empty wall, devoid of nails, decorations, a single object that might lead him to a clue, Angel made his way through the room. Every few seconds, his head would toss back in the direction of the small cloud of vapor, watching with abdomen pulled tight until the cloud swirled into the air and dissipated. It was the single sign of life in such a barren environment.
Shock caught him in his progress as a hand seemed to snake up his leg and pull him savagely toward the floor. Again, sound failed to protrude from his lips and down he fell, crashing to the frozen cement with a deaf smack. Legs above his torso, bent back painfully toward the sky, skull bleeding from a crack at the temple, Angel choked and exhaled a meaningless sigh. Pressing his palms against the floor, he struggled back up to his knees, kicking out at the blackness, feeling for whatever had dragged him down to the floor. There was a loud crack of indistinguishable origin as it slammed up against a harder surface. Had he really felt a hand? Or was it something far less sinister, a blockade in the dark.
Without a definite answer, he spit a mixture of saliva and blood onto the floor and fought his way back to his feet, hands slapping the wall without much of a response. Grunting with frustration, he resumed the trek along the edge of the room. His brain danced with questions as his sweaty palms streaked the wall, searching for an answer, any answer. What was this place, and how had he ended up here? What day was it and how long had he been asleep? It couldn't have been long for his wounds were still fresh, still bleeding and damp. He had been dead, really dead, and this was not that place, not that dimension.
At last, his fingers fell upon a plastic switch embedded in the wall. There was no plate, only an empty hole where the concrete had been drilled away. Quickly, his head turned, back into the open room, back to the small cloud of breath that rose from the cracked lips of a small blond woman, a vampire Slayer. His still heart rose into his throat until at last she exhaled. His thumb flicked against the switch and yellow light resonated suddenly from every dark corner. A fierce shudder jumped excitedly up the vampire's spine. Screams of horror filled every ounce of his soul, but his mouth remained silent. The jaw had dropped, and the tongue hung slack and lifeless over his pale lower lip.