Twenty four

Alexei Boyarov
July

"Four... Five... Six... Seven", Sergei's face was red with exertion and his biceps almost burst as he lifted Mila up in the air with the strength of his arms.

"Three more!" she urged and tensed her body a little more until she was as stiff as a plank.

"Eight... Nine... Ten!" He gently put her down and sat up on the bench press, flexing his muscles despite the tiredness from the work-out.

"You're getting heavy!" He winked at Mila, who slapped his arm in return. Sergei was a friend of Mila's; short, bulky and with an impressive tan after six months of working in Greece.

"And you're getting fat", she countered.

I chuckled. "The heavier the weight, the bigger the training."

Mila glared amusingly at me and Sergei flexed his muscles again. He'd been a personal trainer for almost five years and was no stranger to the secret and tricks or building muscles. His neck was thick as a bull's and his arms was almost the size of Mila's calves.

"Can you do more than me?" he asked, growing cocky from his achievement of lifting a fit woman in the air. "Those arms of yours look a little tiny."

I snorted. "Of course I can." I felt a little smug over the fact that I might not look as bulky as Sergei, but my Dhampir genes made my physically stronger.

He made a gesture at Mila and patted the seat of the bench press. "Prove it."

I rolled my shoulder a few times before I laid down on the bench press. After some trouble and impressive acrobatic movements from Mila, I held her tensed body almost as one would hold a barbell. She wasn't that heavy, despite her amount of muscles, and using her as a bench press wouldn't be much of an effort.

"One... two... three... four", I counted as I lifted Mila up and down. When I passed 10, Sergei's smug face faded a little and when I passed 20, he looked almost annoyed. I could hear Mila snickering, though she made a good attempt to stay straight and tensed so that I wouldn't drop her.

"Show-off", he mumbled, taking a large sip from his bottle of water. Since he had lost interest, I carefully put her down on her ground.

"I think that I have filled my quota for today", she said. "Are you two coming out for coffee after this?"

"I need to get back to work", Sergei said. "I was only able to take a longer lunch."

"Alexei?" Mila asked with pleading eyes.

I considered it for a second. "Sure, I have nothing else to do today."

Her face shone up. "Perfect! I'll hop into the shower and I'll see you outside!"

Mila and I found a small table by the window at a café a few blocks away from the gym. It was shortly after 1 pm and several customers came and went after buying a coffee to-go and a sandwich for lunch. Most of the tables where occupied by young girls that skipped the class after lunch or women each bouncing a baby on their knee while sharing a lonely muffin.

Just as we had placed our coffee cups down on the table, my phone vibrated.

"Sorry", I excused myself and hauled the phone up from my pocket. I felt my heart skip a beat as I saw that it was a MMS from Mirabel. Opening the message, a photo of Mirabel and Gregory filled the screen.

He was smiling wide into the camera, curled up in the corner of the sofa with a bright green toy crocodile in his arms. Mirabel was sitting next to him, her arm resting against the top of the sofa. She was also smiling into the camera, although a light smile with a playful rising of those beautifully arched eyebrows.

"What is it?" Mila laughed. "You're grinning like a fool."

I glanced up at her. "I got a picture from Mirabel."

"Oh really?" Mila asked and leaned a little over the table. "You know, I have heard very little about your girlfriend. Do you have a photo of her?"

I hadn't talked much about Mirabel to Mila, mostly because we rarely talked about casual things at the gym and we didn't hang out that much outside of it. On the contrary, Mirabel knew as much as I did about Mila. She hadn't been so keen on me spending time alone with another woman, even if our intentions were nothing but friendly, but she had assured me that she trusted me. Of course, I had been a little nervous that she was right and that Mila really had a romantically intent. But as the weeks turned into months, I couldn't detect anything romantically.

I turned my phone around and showed her the picture that she just sent.

Mila raised her eyebrows. "Wow! She looks great! Who's the little guy?"

I cleared my throat. I hadn't told her about Gregory yet and I was a little scared about what she would think if she knew that I had a two year old son.

"That's my son, Gregory", I admitted. "He lives with Mirabel in America."

Mila's smile slowly faded. "I had no idea that you had a son. How old is he?"

"Two and a half years", I said. "I haven't seen him since the day he was born."

"Oh my god", Mila exclaimed and leaned even more over the table, catching the attention of some of the girls a few tables away. "Why haven't you told me this?"

I glanced at her, trying to lighten the mood with a small smirk. "You didn't ask."

She rolled her eyes. "That's not a reason. I had no idea! What happened between you two?"

"Nothing", I said, looking down at the surface of my coffee. "I wasn't allowed to stay in America anymore."

"You were studying there, right?"

I nodded. "Then I worked for half a year before I was… deported, for a lack of better word."

Mila cupped her hands around her own cup. "I assume that you are trying to go back to them?"

"As soon as I can. But I have my job here now and... And it might take a while before I can return."

Mila only nodded, not asking any further questions about why I couldn't return - to my luck. "He looks a lot like you", she said. "He's really adorable."

"Thank you", I smiled. "I have to teach him Russian, he's a bit behind on that."

Mila laughed. "That sounds good. I hope that everything works out for you two - - three."

"Thank you", I repeated, taking a sip of my coffee.

November

I almost always spent an hour or two of my day off training with Mila. It was a perfect combination to maintain somewhat of a social life and a way to keep up my physical strength.

Tonight however, I had been training on my own. Mila had been caught up at work and couldn't spend her evening lifting weights with me. The time had passed much slower than usual.

I had spent almost the entire day off in the city for a change. Even though it was only November, I had already started to shop for Christmas gifts. I needed to plan this carefully, since I needed to ship them to Mirabel and have them arrive before Christmas.

At this time of year, it began to go dark at 4 pm. The short hours of sun were almost depressing, at least until the snow arrived and brought some light and winter-feeling to everything. However, there were flickers of light to give zest for life.

Almost every building in town that I passed was lined with lights, regular as with colorful lightning. Trees cornering the roads were heavily decorated, lightning up a glowing silhouette. The town square was occupied by a fair, salespersons yelling out their merchandise to catch someone's attention. I took a short turn around the fair, inspecting some homemade cups of wood some lady had made and got a knitted scarf propped up in my face as someone tried to make me consider to buy it. I bought a large take-away cup of mulled wine from a heavily bearded man who only charged me 60 roble for it.

I stepped aside for a moment, far enough so that someone didn't bother to see me as a customer, and sipped on my mulled wine. The chatter around me was comforting to listen to, even if it was desperate calls from salespersons or customers trying to haggle over the price.

When I had finished my mulled wine, I threw the cup into a trashcan and headed back to the car with my purchases.

It didn't take many seconds after I stepped inside the Zeklos house that I realized that something was wrong. Very wrong.

The small table in the hallway was knocked over and the lamp that had stood on the surface laid in a thousand pieces on the carpet. An eerie silence rested in the air, almost like the calmness after a storm, although not in a calming way.

All my senses sprung into high alert. A light smell of something thick and metallic hit my nose. I tried to register any movement that I saw and any sound that I heard. But I heard and saw nothing.

A curtain blew gently in the wind that wheezed in from the broken patio door in the living room. That curtain lightly grazed the lifeless foot of a body lying beneath the window.

It took all my willpower to turn away from the body and enter the kitchen before I found out who had been killed. Had there been a sign that the person was still alive, I might have considered shortening my scan around the house and helped. But the longer time that passed and then longer the eerie silence continued, I feared that no one that had been present in this house had been left alive.

Every room on the bottom floor was empty, all left as I left it this morning. Not a single cabinet was touched; not even the liquor cabinet in the living room, which made me think that this definitely wasn't a regular burglary. I had already considered Strigoi, but there was still a chance that regular humans had made an attempt to steal something valuable and knocked the residents over when they put up a fight.

I didn't put my stake away as I walked over to the corpse by the window, but I wasn't on high alert anymore since I knew that I was alone here. There was surprisingly little blood around Mr. Zeklos's body, though he had been bleeding from his nose. All Moroi was pale, but there was something about the grey, chalky paleness of a blood-drained corpse. I no longer had a doubt, Strigoi had been here.

I found Guardian Pavlik and Mrs. Zeklos on the top floor. She had also been drained, thrown upon the bed sheets that only had a few red drops on them. Guardian Pavlik had been left untouched, his neck twisted almost 180 degrees. The skin had broken in a few places on the neck and throat and his face rested in a moderate pile of blood.

I found myself waiting. Perhaps even waiting for one of them to stand up and nothing would have changed. I hadn't seen many dead people and I was always stunned by the silence and the stillness of them. I had only known them as alive; walking, talking and sometimes even laughing. This stillness, this deadly silence, was almost deafening.

I managed to get out to the top floor hallway before my legs gave in beneath me and I had to hold onto the staircase banisters to keep me on my feet.

All my thoughts and self confidence that I was a good guardian left me as if someone had knocked the air out of my lungs. Had I been a good guardian, I wouldn't let my assignment out of my sight for even a second. I promised to do my best to protect them, but I hadn't even been here to try. I would have died trying.

I sunk down onto the floor, desperately clutching the banister as if my life depended on it.

What would happen now? How low would I be in the other guardians' eyes when they found out that I failed to guard another assignment? I was 22 years old and had already had - and failed - two assignments. A good guardian wouldn't have been sent away, dismissed from their service, in the first place.

I sat on the floor so long that my legs went numb, although a striking pain went through my stiff limbs as I tried to move them. I tried to think forward, what should I do now? Someone had to know about this, someone must know what do to in times like this.

Except that I had no phone numbers, no information on who to call or what to do in situations like this. Did I call another guardian stationed in Russia? Did I call the Guardian Headquarters in Pennsylvania and they somehow magically sent someone in Russia here to help out?

The only possibility I had, at least the only one that came to mind, to contact someone was through Guardian Belikov's email. He had helped me before, with giving me the number to Mirabel, so he might be able to contact the right people.

Afterwards, as a handful of guardians discreetly took care of the tragic mess in the Zeklos house, I was impressed and surprised that Guardian Belikov reacted so fast to my email. Somehow, he managed to get them to send one Guardian, who had an assignment nearby, to validate my information and that Guardian had a whole team here within half an hour. I reread the email later and it was slightly incoherent and the letters misspelled (probably because I was shaking), hence my surprise.

"Guardian Boyarov?" Someone tapped on my shoulder and I flinched from the unexpected touch.

"Y-yes?"

It was a female guardian, perhaps in her mid 40's. I could see that she was shaken and tired, but she still smiled gently at me. "I'm going to drive you to the airport. Do you have your things packed?"

"The airport?" I asked. "Where am I going?"

Oooh, where do you think that he's going this time?

My Beta asked if I was trying to make Alexei depressed when she read this chapter (again, thank you for being amazing!), but I can assure you that's not what I'm trying to do!

Have a good weekend!

Love, Zeraphime