Thanks for all the favs and adds guys it's appreciated. Would love some reviews to go along with them:D
( Four years later)
The blood that pumped vigorously through my body felt like lava. My legs heaved as the muscles in them clenched tightly in anticipation. The light, I kept saying to myself, just head for the light. I used a small indention in the stone to dig my boot into and heave my way up and landed on a surface that jutted only a foot from the hive wall. I saw black flashes of moving objects all around me, and wind caressing the back of my neck.
No way am I going to get beat this time.
Using my momentum I chimney jumped wall to wall until I was halfway near the top. It was just like Priest Vaken to make us practice in an abandoned hive where every step could be the one to lead you to your doom or several broken bones. This place was supposed to be the birth place of many Priest. At the age of twenty an apprentice would be left alone in here while a captured vampire would be released in the maze of tunnels. It was up to the lone Priest to hunt the creature down without being killed, but until then this was a training ground for agility and speed.
"Moving too slow Heather", a familiar voice came from my right where I saw Michael using only one hand to cling to the wall grinning at me.
I set my jaw, wiped the sweat and dirt gobs from my forehead and heaved myself up farther. Once I was up on a walkway dotted with caves and winding up to the opening above like a spiral staircase I sighed. Michael jumped up beside me. His black attire and tan skin almost making him one with his surroundings. We both took off at the same time up the spiral. The caves and crevices that dotted the wall became a blur we were moving so fast, and when we could come to a blockade it was quickly traversed by using the adjacent wall to summersault over.
Juno, an Asian girl only a year younger than me with shimmering black hair, was below us but making quick time against Jason the other apprentice next to her. I stole my attention away from my brothers and sisters and focused on Michael and me. The ledge walkway ended and we both dug our feet into the vertical stone wall, using the momentum our speed gave us, to jog up it. A few more jumps, turns and falls later we both leaped into the sunlight. I had never been so relieved to feel the wastelands burning rays on my skin.
The masters waited for other eight of us to surface. I fought to keep myself straight up and against the urge to just fall over and breathe hoarsely until I passed out. Michael had made it in just barely ahead of me and was already grinning in his victory. Michael and I had always played secret competitions with each other, and this one was going to be the one to decide who's paying who thirty credits for our day off. I guess I could kiss my holofield goodbye. I looked over at my friend who was still breathing harshly through his nose as sweat poured down his dark, shaved hair and skin.
"Glad you…can finally keep up with me this time", he nudged me with an elbow.
I grinned back, squinting my face against the harsh sunlight, "I was actually ahead of you there for a little bit".
He made a weak and dismissive gesture, "Just letting you get your hopes up".
We both laughed dripping with sweat and muscles fatigued. We stopped when we saw the three Masters glaring at us and joined the line of other apprentices.
"The last five will run the course again", Vaken said with slight distaste toward them, "You will finish on time or you will be here until you do so".
I thanked God I didn't decide to slack off today.
We were all tired and weary as we came back into the city with our dark hoods over our heads. A secret entrance, just for Priest, allowed us to come in without being noticed and pointed at by the citizens. Right now we wouldn't be so scrutinized since we didn't bear the mark of the Priest just yet, but rumors always floated of the men and women in dark robes.
Michael followed beside me always looking up into the gray sky whenever there was a chance. I found out not too long ago that my dark haired friend was taken when he was twelve. There were rumors about his parents resisting and the Church taking action against it, but those were just rumors. Every parent knew that when the Church chose your child resisting was a sin, and a sin results in banishment or something else. The polluted sky above the city rumbled with the threat of an oncoming storm as we made our way into the secret underground training grounds. The tunnels were old, dark and looked abandoned with the lack of light save small flickering lamps. It gave me room to think.
The day always ended with intense weapons training and hours of text reading. I swore we spent more time in the bible than physically training. After passage studies it was nearly midnight. I didn't sleep much. I hadn't had a full nights rest since the day they took me. I came to accept the fact that seeing my parents again were out of the question. Already their faces were nothing but blurs in my memory and their voices mixing in with those of everyone else around me. They were faded in my history nothing more and nothing less.
I focused on holographic targets bounding around the room. They were shaped like the very vampires we kill but were see through and silent. With my hands tucked into my sleeves my eyes surveyed their movements. Vampires were sporadic in their fighting style; never really having any pattern to the way they moved. It was based on each individual how one moved and on the situation. We were taught to learn their behavior, to predict when and where they would move.
The underground level was silent since most of the apprentices were asleep in their rooms. Only the occasional chants coming from the church above as well as the hissing of some underground pipes penetrated the air. We would all be forced to wake up in six hours for another day of hell. It was all the same and became somewhat as a routine for me.
My brown eyes darted fast to follow the moving objects. In a flash two daggers about the length of my forearm appeared seemingly out of nowhere glistened in the low light as I propelled them toward the targets. Each of them hit somewhere on the body. The first landed in the holo creatures chest making it fade instantly, but the second dagger merely stuck into the other vampires shoulder. The holo targets were programmed to react like a normal vampire would. Which meant the creature howled and came dashing quickly and maddeningly as if it had been possessed by Satin himself.
The jagged outline it ran in gave me the perfect opportunity to predict it's trajectory. Using one of my cross stars hidden in my sleeves I ran up the adjacent wall, using the height advantage it gave me, and spiraled the star into its skull as it fell into the path it had set for itself. The fake predator sparked and dematerialized into the air.
"You're aim was a little off on that last one".
I turned around still breathing a little heavily from the adrenaline rush.
I smirked at Michael as he leaned up against the door frame. His eyes looked droopy as if he had woken up from a deep slumber. Already my friend was starting to show signs of a 5 o'clock shadow coming on which he liked to keep clean and shaven.
"Nightmares pretty boy?" I asked as I walked over to grab my daggers from the floor.
He yawned and stretched his arms out, "Doesn't everyone these days?"
I shrugged indifferently, "You get used to them after a while, can't have 'em if you don't sleep".
"But you need sleep or you'll get careless", he corrected.
I saw him frown as I rolled my eyes, "Does it matter? It's not like we see any real action these days anyway". I walked around looking for the cross star I threw at my last mob.
The missing weapon sparked in between Michael's fingers as he held it up with a sly grin, "But you can't beat me if you get careless".
I scoffed stomping over to him, "You and your amusing little competitions against me. We all know Gabriel's going to beat us out once he gets back in the game". Gabriel was the oldest and strongest one of us. Taken when he was practically a teenager he was tested harder than any apprentice has ever been. Some said it was because the elders saw something in him that they didn't see in us. Great for him, I'd always think, it means that the elders have their noses turned while I made all the mistakes I cared to make.
Michael seemed to mull the thought over in his head before cracking a smile, "I can settle for second".
"You can settle for third", I retorted.
A blanket of silence settled over us as we both stared off into the practice field. I fiddled my knives in my hands and chewed on the corner of my lip in thought.
He sighed running his hands through his short black hair, "Heather do you ever question the Church?"
I looked around us to make sure we were in the clear to speak. These clergymen were everywhere. "Why would you say that?"
"I don't know", he shook his head, "Sometimes I feel like I'm doing their bidding instead of Gods".
"Their bidding is Gods", I replied as if I was reciting a mantra, "We do this to protect those we love. Without us who would do it?"
His head throbbed in frustration as he closed his eyes and pressed his nose with two fingers, "Never mind I should have known better than to ask". I saw him fail to crack a smile at me as I gave him a perplexed stare. Michael was always one to try and defuse a personal problem with a smile here and an inside joke there, "You just work on your aim so I don't have to save you in the future".
I saw his muscles tense under the black shirt he was wearing as he turned around to leave.
"Mike"
He turned as I walked up to him. My gaze was penetrating and if I were to look from his point of view frightening.
"Don't ever say things like that again. If the Clergy were to do away with you…..you know what they do to people to question them, to people who question God", I placed a hand on his shoulder feeling the muscles from years of training under the thin sleep fabric he wore. "I can't lose my best friend".
With that last sentence his lips quirked up into a smile as he patted my cheek playfully after a few moments of silence, "Don't worry kitten I'm not going anywhere". I smirked at the nickname he gave me the first day we met. He said I looked like 'a scared kitten' and he was all but wrong. The first day they brought me back I hid under my bed, not crying, just hiding from the men in black. I would try to remember the quote my mom read to me every night.
Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
Michael came to me. He was just a fifteen year old boy then, his cheeks plump and eyes gleaming with youth. He told me about how they came for him on his father's animal farm in Philistine when he was twelve. The church had established a monastery there and they have watched him closely since he was young. It was almost hard to take in how much Mike had changed since then, how much we both had changed. Rough years of training had taken its toll on my friend.
His dark eyes that were once filled with a childlike playfulness were replaced with the attentiveness of an alert predator. His short plump face and lips filled out along with his body. On Priest there was absolutely no fat to be found, even on women. Our diets were strict and our trainings were endless. Physically we were healthy, but emotionally we were scarred more than anyone cared to admit even with the constant confessions and prayer.
I was still sixteen. My face remained on the childlike side with freckles spread across my ivory skin. My hair was shoulder length and most of the time up in a military style bun unless it was a night like this where it hung in straight strands around my face.
His smile seemed endless as he turned over his shoulder, "Get some sleep. Tomorrows endurance day remember?"
I quirked a brow at him and smiled back and waited until he was down the hallway before I made my way to my room.