Her nights were scarlet, violent, brutal. She could barely see, but she was moving through dark alleyways, her nose sniffing out the seductive scent of meat. Her quarry was running, but she walked at a slow, assured pace. She knew the streets well. Her prey won't be able to escape.
The alley's silence was broken with the sounds of sobbing pants, of shoes slapping against pavement in a desperate rush to survive. She, calm, patient, only walked steadily towards the sound, unstoppable, focused. Eventually her prey was backed up against a chain-link fence, too high to surmount in time. Whimpering he curled up and stared at her with wet, fearful eyes.
"Please," he wheezed, holding out a hand in supplication. "I don't know what you want, if it's money you can have it, just leave me alone or else I'll...I'll call the Seraphim. You're a vampire, aren't you?"
She smiled, felt it stretch her own features. "A vampire?" she purred. "Do I really look so commonplace? I don't feed on blood."
She paused, and the man's expression slowly dawned into horror. He stuck his hand into his dirty jean pockets, searching, most likely, for a cell phone.
Too slow.
Yukari's grin grew wider, feral, and then she was on him.
-o-o-o-
"Ah!" Yukari awoke with a start, breathing wildly. The coppery taste of blood was still in her mouth, and she felt sick. Disoriented, she almost fell out of bed as she made her way to her bathroom, gasping, heart pumping quick and fast. She pushed the door open and stumbled inside, flicked the switch on. The light stabbed her eyes like a sword and she placed her hand on the cool countertop, steadied herself, stared into the mirror.
Yukari stared back. Her face was paler than usual, her eyes wild, hair mussed. Slowly, her breathing calmed. Slowly, her mind returned to rationality.
"Just a dream," she whispered, running a sweaty hand through her unruly hair. "It was just a dream..." she closed her eyes.
She had been having dreams like that often. Far too often. She didn't know why - after all, Yukari was an ordinary human, wasn't she? She wasn't a vampire, or a werewolf, or a genie, or any one of the many supernaturals that populated the world. These dreams made no sense...perhaps it was just stress. Only stress. Yukari swallowed, hard, and splashed some water on her face. The cold jolt of it woke her up a little more, and sighing she stared at her reflection again. Enigmatic, it gave no answers.
She glanced over at the backlit clock in the room. 6 in the morning. Around time to wake up...Yukari put a cool hand to her forehead, calmed herself, and started preparing for her day.
-o-o-o-
Miku bit into her sandwich as she stared outside the window. The world was blanketed in whiite, snow falling from the cloud-darkened sky. There was condensation on the window now, inhibiting her view of the world outside. The sight of it reminded her of the fog that had covered the area when the genie went after Lily, and it was with a shiver that Miku turned away and focused on her food.
The classroom was mostly quiet, conversation kept to low murmurs. A lot of people had called in sick, probably due to the weather change, so the only people around who were in Miku's friend group was Lily and Yukari. Out of those two, only Lily looked energetic - Yukari looked as though she had barely slept, nibbling at her food distractedly, eyes elsewhere.
"Uh," Lily ventured, "are you okay, Yukari?"
Yukari gave a small jolt, as though snapped out of a daze, and she grinned up at Lily. "Okay? Yeah, I'm fine! Just a little tired, that's all." She glanced around the room. "Pretty empty today, huh?"
"There's some kind of bug going around," Lily said with a shrug. "Can't be helped."
Miku wondered if Lily could even get sick if she was a dhampir. Although the girl had called in sick before, perhaps it was because she had been grappling with whatever Leon sent to assassinate her at the time.
"Yeah," Yukari said. Her voice sounded sleep-fogged and it was with a slow dip of the head when she focused on the food once more.
"Didn't sleep much?" Miku asked.
Yukari laughed hollowly. "Yeah. Yeah, I didn't sleep very well."
Lily frowned. "Why not? Did something happen?"
At that question, a caged expression sped across Yukari's face, her eyes becoming, for a moment, haunted, but it passed too quickly for Miku to focus on it. "Nothing happened. Just, you know, stress. Midterms coming up."
Lily looked completely unconvinced. "Well-" she started, but stopped. She glanced over at Miku, meaningfully.
"Oh. Midterms are...hard," said Miku, not entirely sure of what Lily wanted her to say.
Lily groaned, took out a piece of paper, scribbled something down on it, and passed it over to Miku. It was with some trepidation that Miku took it, her eyes flicking over to Yukari. Yukari was too focused on her food (or on nothing) to notice her friends passing notes in front of her, so Miku flipped over the note and read it.
Think something weird is happening?
Miku stared at the note and then stared at Lily, who had turned her attention back to Yukari. What? 'Something weird'? Miku shook her head, writing her reply underneath the neat black letters of Lily's handwriting.
no Yukari's probably just down because of some family or guy troubles or something and people always get sick this time of year.
She passed it back to Lily. Lily took the note, read it over, scribbled out another reply, passed it to Miku.
Yukari doesn't even have a boyfriend. Go ask your vampire friend if stuff is happening.
"What are you two passing?" Yukari asked, glancing up from her food. Miku froze.
"Uh," said Miku. "Just. You know. Nothing important."
"We're passing notes about the quiz answers last period," Lily covered. "I had some trouble on the um, proof about primes and square roots."
Yukari blinked. "It's a simple proof by contradiction. Why are you passing it around as a note? That looks so sketch."
"It's easier to write it out on paper," Miku said, and she drew her attention to the note once more. Ask her vampire friend...Miku frowned.
In truth, after the incident at Leon's castle, Miku hadn't really kept in that much contact with Luka. The last time they met up was a two weeks ago, after which Miku was immediately thrown into a whirl of studying for midterms. Not that they don't still text, but still. Miku didn't feel good about merely using Luka as a source of information. Besides, after Leon, Lily was much jumpier than she was before, constantly seeing supernatural threats in things such as squirrels jumping out of trash cans. Most likely this was just her nervousness getting a hold of her again.
Still, it couldn't hurt to ask, Miku guessed. Luka seemed amicable to helping them enough. She sent out a text and waited.
-o-o-o-
"Uh, hello?" Gumi waved her arms around as she paced around the wooden floor of the coven. "There's some shit going down. .Are you really not going to do anything to stop it?"
Sonika sighed, leaning back in her velvet red seat. "Wendigo spirits are difficult to catch. We can't just suck them up into a jar like we do with genies. They're actually pretty intelligent."
"But because of these spirits, we have all this...all this...shit going down!"
"It's not that big of a deal," Luka said as she scrolled through her phone.
"Not that big of a deal?" Gumi laughed. "Thanks to all those, we have all these dead humans. And you know what wendigo spirits do. They possess humans in their sleep and have them...you know...do the wendigo thing."
"The wendigo thing," Sonika said, flatly.
"I'm not going to spell it out, you know what they do. Over time, given enough exposure, the humans become wendigoes themselves. They can send their spirits out and infect more humans."
"How is this our problem?" Luka said. "Let the Seraphims deal with it."
"The Seraphims are an underfunded government group staffed by wannabe heroes," said Gumi. "And the less humans there are, the less blood we get. Since this part of the city is ours, we should be...alert."
"Right, alert..." Luka trailed off once she saw the text from Miku.
anything going on supernaturally? lily is nervous
Luka paused. She wasn't entirely sure how to respond to this. In her own estimation, the wendigo problem would fix itself. In her years of unlife, she had seen many of these. Worst case, a few humans become wendigos and had to be put down. If one caught them in the earlier stages of possession, one could even simply extract the spirit and leave the human. It wasn't a problem, certainly not one on the scale that Gumi is proposing. The Seraphim might not be the most organized force, but they were competent enough to know how to deal with a problem on this relatively small scale - murders made by a person possessed are very easy to identify.
The only problem Luka could foresee was that wendigos had been very uncommon over the years, so there wasn't much public awareness about them. Still, there had to be regulations and rules in place for dealing with a problem of this nature in an institution as old as the Seraphim.
No problems, Luka texted back. No need to unnecessarily worry the girl.
The reply was fast. kk. lily was just worried cuz yukari hadnt been sleeping well and ppl r sick lol.
Luka's eyes caught on the middle part of the sentence - Yukari hadn't been sleeping well. Luka knew who Yukari was - she had observed Miku enough early on in their relationship to know who she was friends with. Yukari was a cheerful girl with a predilection for the color purple and a love of rabbits. She was also completely ordinary, a human like Miku. If she hadn't been sleeping well, it was possible that she had been targeted by some wendigo spirit.
Except...it was also time for midterms and time for study. Plus, there was some sickness going around with the change of seasons. It was perfectly possible that Yukari could merely be suffering from some bout of cold. There was no need to jump to the worst possible conclusion. After all, out of all the people in the city, what were the odds that Yukari would be targeted? Very slim. Luka sighed and pushed the worry away from her mind. It was nothing.
Probably.
-o-o-o-
"So yeah, she said it's nothing," said Miku to Lily.
Lily's scowl only deepened. "I don't believe that."
Miku sighed. "Come on, Lily. What are the odds that there's some other random supernatural event going on at our school?"
"Pretty high," said Lily. "For one, there are only three other high schools in the city, and we're the biggest."
"What does that have to do with anything if you take in the overall population of the city?"
"Look," Lily snapped, "I'm just worried."
Miku shook her head. "You worry too much."
Lily ran a hand through her hair and exhaled. "I don't buy that there's nothing going on. All these people sick, Yukari acting weird...and you've heard about the murders, right? I didn't bring it up in the classroom since, you know, I don't want to worry Yukari."
Naturally Miku had heard of them. Every night, between the early morning hours of twelve and three, there had been murders, all of them disturbingly similar. The victims would all be disemboweled, their chests burst open. But that was only the beginning - there was more involved that Miku didn't want to think about.
Miku stared down at the ground. "So...so what do you think is happening?"
Lily sighed. "I don't know. These patterns don't match anything I know of, but it's just too weird to not be something supernatural. Closest thing I can think of is a genie or a bunch of vengeful ghosts, but they don't really fit these..."
"Luka said it's nothing," Miku offered.
"Luka can go suck a steak," said Lily. "There's something happening. We just need to find out what."
Thanks to Fliers for agreeing to look over this chapter! This begins part 2.