A/N: This is my fav chapter so far, it has some really powerful things happen in it and is a pretty monumental moment in the story.
ENJOY - AND PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK!
As I stood outside the HQ offices I fought the feeling of impatience. My fast tapping foot was a dead giveaway that I wasn't succeeding. I checked my watch again and sighed.
Pursing my lips I pulled out my phone and dialled Bastian. He answered on the second ring, "Garnet, I'm running late."
"That fact didn't escape me," I replied curtly.
He paused, "Look, I'm on my way, I'll be 5 minutes."
I weaved through the busy street, the wind pulling a few strands of my hair from my up do, "Meet me at the restaurant instead, I'm already heading that way. The board members should be there already."
"Right, ok. I'll see you in a moment. And Garnet," he hesitated and I couldn't almost hear him frowning, "I'm sorry I was late."
His apology disarmed me. I chewed my lip then blew out lightly, "It's ok. Just don't do it again." I failed to sound remotely threatening.
By the time I made it to the restaurant my hair had completely fallen out and I knew my cheeks were flushed from the cold wind. Bastian's golden hair bobbed down the street, moving swiftly towards me.
"Told you I wouldn't be late." His mouth stretched into that perfect smile, the one that made my chest tighten painfully and warmth settle in my stomach.
My mouth twitched, almost breaking into a grin, "I believe your words were 'I'm on my way', and you already admitted that you were late."
He shrugged, shoving his hands into the pockets of his brown wool coat. He shouldered open the door and stood aside to let me through, his eyes bright with amusement.
I took a step into the warm restaurant then froze in the open doorway.
The vision exploded behind my eyelids, sharp and fragmented. A child, a girl, lying on a surface. Blood, streaming from her mouth. Screaming, the sickening crack of bones breaking. Then my sight cleared, spots of light dancing at the edges of my vision as I tried to remain conscious.
Tilting my head I tried to capture the sound that had whispered across my ears, echoing with my vision. Bastian saw the slight frown that marred my face and reached for me. Before he could grasp my arm I had turned and was marching across the street, to a boarded up building.
Crying.
That's what I could hear, the heartbreaking soft sobs of a child. The sound was unmistakeable.
I broke into a run. Terror ripped at me as I threw the door open, heedless of where I was. I flew up the stairwell to my left, ignoring the stink of urine and sweat that coated every surface. The crying grew louder with my ascent, urging me faster.
Veering to the right I ran through a doorway, the rotted door hanging from it's hinges, a hole where the handle should've been. I slowed, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. Behind me I could hear the steady thump of Bastian's feet on the stairs.
In front of me a table with a broken leg lay on its side, several needles scattered besides it with a ripped sleeping bag. The counters in the kitchenette were covered in a thick layer of grime. A broken sob echoed through the abandoned apartment.
I started towards the noise, coming from the room towards the back. I pushed the battered door open, revealing nothing but a torn mattress in the far corner. At first I couldn't understand why the crying was stronger here, until I saw a small door which blended into the dirty walls, covered in things I didn't dare guess at. As I gripped the bent handle I was thankful I'd kept my gloves on.
When the door swung open it revealed a small closet, and bent into a small huddle in the darkest corner was a child. Almost the ghost of a child.
Her frame was tiny, the small bones sticking out sickeningly. Her skin was ashen, streaked with dirt and a rusty colour I suspected was blood. She looked up at me, her eyes too big for her shrunken face, the whites a sore red, her irises a washed out blue, tears flowing from them. A dirty hospital gown hung from her stark frame, ripped in places.
I knelt slowly, trying not to startle her. She watched me like a deer about to flee, though I blocked the only exit.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I whispered, softening my features, offering my hand, palm up, "Please let me help."
A sob erupted from her, her whole chest lurching forward in a violent motion. She leapt from her crouch with surprising force and threw herself into my arms. I pressed her small body close to my own and held her as she cried, sobs raking her entire frame.
I rocked her gently as I lifted her up and left the bedroom, joining Bas where he waited in the other room. His looked at the girl in my arms, anger building like a flame in his eyes, causing them to burn an incandescent emerald.
When I felt a slickness on my fingers I froze, the scent of fresh blood tainting the air. Placing her quickly in Bastian's arms I slipped off my coat and spread it on the counter, than took the girl from him and laid her down gently. With swift hands I began to exam her, mentally cataloguing her injuries. The list grew quickly, until I found the source of her bleed.
Several ribs down was a wound, deep, haemorrhaging blood heavily. Her breath grew laboured even as I pulled out my cell phone and dialled an ambulance.
I threw the phone to Bas as it rang, "Tell them to bring blood, type A, and to be quick. She doesn't have long."
He nodded and began rattling off information to the person on the other end of the line. I turned to the girl, applying pressure to her ribs. As the blood slipped through my fingers it became clear something crucial had been ruptured by whatever had caused her wound.
I swallowed hard as my fangs dropped, unable to ignore the heady scent of blood. All the intensive training I'd suffered through allowed me to control myself, far better than I had several months ago. The girl quivered beneath me, pulling me out of my haze.
"Shh, darling," I crooned, reaching with one hand to stroke her sweat soaked hair, "It's going to be ok. I promise it's going to be ok."
She whimpered under me, her eyes bearing into mine, pleading. I soothed her, relieved when the flow of blood ebbed under my hand.
My swept over the rest of her body with my eyes, studying her. When I saw the dried flaking blood between her thighs my stomach lurched and bile stung my throat. This girl could barely be 12 years old.
"Bastian," I called softly, my throat closing in horror, "I need your help."
He joined me on the other side of the counter, and helped to calm the child while I worked on her wound. He said nothing when he saw the clear signs of her defilement, but his aura pulsed in an angry ebb of power. Below us I could hear the medical team entering the building, pounding up the stairs.
Suddenly she began to fit under our hands. Bas placed a hand under her head while I looked around desperately for something to put in her mouth so she wouldn't bite her tongue clean off. Finding nothing to use I placed my hand between her teeth and winced as she bit down.
We tried to hold her down as the medics arrived, bustling around us. The man beside me injected her with something and in seconds she stilled. I breathed deep with relief, and met Bastian's green eyes over the counter. He smiled tentatively and stood back to let the paramedics work. The man took over from the pressure I'd been placing on her wound, and I moved to her head, trying to reassure her with a gentle smile.
She stilled and gratitude shone in her large eyes.
Then she began throwing up blood. It gurgled in her throat and bubbled from her mouth, soaking her throat and gown. It splattered across my face and dress as it poured from her mouth. I watched in horror as she convulsed, the image mimicking my vision perfectly. The blood began to stream from her ears, nose and eyes too, until her heart gave a shudder and stopped.
I struggled to breathe, looking into her flat dead eyes. They stared unseeingly up at me. Then as I watched the tears dry in them I caught the shape of a pale symbol in her iris. As I leant closer it formed, until I was looking at that all too familiar symbol. An angelic signature, burned into her iris.
"Bastian, give me my phone."
He pressed it into my palm silently. I lifted it and quickly took a photo, trying to ignore how my stomach dropped at the disrespect I was showing her. But I couldn't risk the symbol fading as it had with the others.
Inside I felt the familiar chill creep along my body. The horror and grief slowly subsided until I felt nothing but cold indifference was I looked at the corpse before me.
With brisk practicality I swept the paramedics out the way, who had called time of death and were attempting to prepare the body for transport. My fingers brushed her lids, closing them in a small sign of respect. Then I began to examine her. I had no doubt that the coroner would do the same later, but there were things that could only been seen immediately after death, that would fade by the time she made it to the morgue.
Around her throat were the clear markings of strangulation, the vivid purple shape of hands, red crescent cuts in her skin, from fingernails biting into her. She had struggled. She had fought.
Her collarbone was broken, I hadn't noticed in the flurry of it all. Her left arm had been pulled from it's socket, she had been cradling it when huddled in the closet. Several burns marked her right forearm, likely from a cigarette.
Her hips and thighs bore more large hand shaped bruises, and her hip bone showed signs of being damaged. There were three savage fang marks on her inner thighs, each distinctly different in size and spacing. One was definitely female, the distance between each fang too slight to be a male vampire.
One ankle was broken, viciously swollen, likely from walking excessively on the injury. The soles of her feet were cut, bloodied, and caked in filth. Each little toe nail encrusted with blackened dirt, as were her fingernails. As I looked at them I noted several fingers had been broken, snapped back against the top of her hand, a torture technique. I took an evidence bag from the medic, which they were instructed to carry for circumstances such as this, and scrapped the dried blood and dirt from her nails. There could be her attackers DNA buried under them, if she had fought hard enough to scratch her assailant.
I lifted her onto her front to find more bites across her back, an incredibly painful place to be fed from. At the base of her neck was a small lump, and as I pressed on it something shifted beneath my fingers. I pulled a small knife from my boot and cut lightly above it. With a light push an electronic chip slip out from under her skin, and I held it between my thumb and forefinger.
It was no bigger than my little fingernail and glimmered slightly when the light caught it. I took another bag and slipped it inside, then placed the bag into one of the pockets of my dress. The chip would need disabling if it was still transmitting a signal, but we would need to track it first, in case it gave us a location. Until then it wouldn't leave my sight. If someone was using it a GPS tracker, I wanted to be sure I would be the one they found.
Confident I had not missed anything on the body I turned and promptly left the room, allowing the paramedics to precede with their preparations. I ignored Bastian's attempts to capture my attention as we left the building.
Heedless of the blood coating my face and dress, I headed for the bright cheery glow of the restaurant where my fellow board members waited for us. We were beyond late and I had no doubt they'd be in a foul mood.
I didn't pause when the matradee attempted to stop me, marching through to the private function room. At the large table sat 9 men and women, who muttered among themselves. As I approached they looked up, their expressions changing from anger to shock in seconds as they took in my horrific appearance.
"Please excuse us, we were waylaid by the discovery of another victim. If you will permit me another moment I shall clean myself up and then we can commence this meeting." My tone was chilling, and my mouth pinched tightly.
They all nodded wordlessly, mouths hanging open, though I had not paused to wait for their permission. I bowed my head in a polite gesture then withdrew to the bathroom.
In the mirror my bloody reflection stared back. I had managed to hide my fully extended fangs while stood before the board, but now they surpassed my lips, which were stained a ruby colour by the girl's blood. I closed my eyes briefly while I tried to resist the urge to lick my lips.
A sound behind me startled me out of my thoughts. I reacted without thought, whirling to capture the hand extending towards me. It wasn't until I had my hand wrapped around his throat, holding him a foot above the ground, arm twisted at an awkward angle, that I realised I was gazing into eyes of vivid green, that whispered sensual promises along my senses.
Forcing my muscles to unlock I lowered him back down to the ground. I fought the urge to apologize for my almost animal behaviour. To act before I thought was embarrassing, but to give admission to the act was a greater embarrassment, and would put me in his debt. That I could not allow to happen.
So instead I turned to the mirror and began to wash the blood from my hands and arms, "Bastian, this is the women's toilets."
"Do you know," he voice was raspy, tickling at my conscience, "I hadn't noticed."
I fought the flutter of amusement that threatened to creep through the icy walls I had erected.
"You don't have any blood on you. You could have joined the board at the table."
"That did occur to me. I came here to help you clean up."
I frowned, "I am capable of doing that myself."
Clearly that didn't merit a response, because he proceeded to ignore me. He grabbed a wash cloth from a basket on the counter and wetted it, then gently wiped at the blood on my face. As he did so I forgot about the thin layer coating my lips and unconsciously licked them.
The effect was instantaneous. My fangs began to ache right up into the bone, dropping an inch lower than they ever had before, and my eyes glowed a deep blood red. Around my eyes the distinct markings of my fey heritage revealed themselves, pearlescent against my warm skin tone. I knew the image was grotesque.
But what captured my attention was the taste of the liquid as it danced across my tongue. That dark, seductive quality all blood had, with a telltale lightness only prepubescent victims possessed. And a bitter edge, which often marked a kind of madness, a disease of the mind, infecting the bloodstream.
Then, there, under all those tastes, was a chemical aftertaste, which made me spit into the sink in disgust. The only way blood could contain that foulness was when the person had been drugged, heavily. Based on the taste it was a drug I had never encountered before.
Bastian stopped his cleaning as I spat into the basin, holding my hair away from my mouth. I washed my mouth out, finally rid of the rancid taste that had clung to my tongue, and held Bastian's gaze in the mirror.
"They need to take a sample of her blood, she was drugged with something obscure."
He only nodded and then continued to clean my face. This time I let him, watching his face as he meticulously wiped the blood from my skin. He didn't so much as flinch at my monstrous appearance.
In contrast his face was flawlessly beautiful, all sharp angles and sloping planes and smooth silky skin. Hell had not changed that, but yet he held a tension in his jaw he had not before, and a haunted shadow in his eyes. He had been by no means innocent before he left, but now he seemed almost cautious to allow himself to express any means of warm emotions, particularly affection.
Not that I care, I thought sullenly.
And just like that my walls of ice cracked and shattered. Emotion flooded me again, and grief rocking me so violently that I struggled to breathe. Tears burned my cheeks as violent sobs erupted from my chest.
The sight of the child's violated body filled my vision and I wept harder. Warm arms wrapped around me, a gentle hand stroked my hair from my forehead, soothing me. I cried openly into Bastian's chest, clinging to him.
"Shh, it's ok, let it out. She deserves your grief, your tears. Don't hide them. It is a disgrace to her memory to hide them."
I stared up at him, surprised he understood, and saw the tears upon his own cheeks, silently sliding down his face.
So we cried in each others arms, there in the restroom, in memory of that abandoned child that hadn't be shown kindness or love, except in her final moments. As we did I vowed I would find her captors and show them the same mercy they had shown her. They had abused and violated her, and stolen the sweet kiss of innocence from her, until her mind had splintered and broken. And so I would break them.
A/N: Like I said, this is my fav chapter so far, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I'M REALLY CLOSE TO THE END OF MY PROJECT SO I REALLY NEED ANY AND ALL FEEDBACK!
Thanks! x