I glanced outside the window again, and the hospital where Elsa had been born stared back at me, a sad, decrepit building with broken windows, unhinged doors, and long, spindly cracks that spread across its façade like black veins.
Just a harmless old building, but this time I wasn’t fooled.
Rhapsody was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs leading to the hospital entrance. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I grimaced. “Not yet.”
She blinked. “Pardon?”
I shook my head, mumbling, “Nothing.” We’d be doomed if I ended up scaring Rhapsody, too, with her paranoia. We’d never get anything done if so.
“You’re a little red in the face, too,” she noted. “Are you sure you’re fine? You’re not suffering from heat stroke?”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead with my handkerchief. Thank God we weren’t required to wear our school jackets for the trip or I really might pass out from heat exhaustion. “I’m okay,” I told Rhapsody. “Let’s go?”
Rhapsody nodded. We ascended the stairs side by side, and I frowned when I caught a glimpse of the vandalized walls in the hospital’s lobby.
ELSA. The letters on the wall were spray-painted in orange.
Rhapsody paused at the doorway when she saw me frozen on the third step. The other students filed past her, most of them chatting noisily while the others were busy taking photos and peering at their haunted surroundings through the zoomed lenses of their cameras.
“Lady Zari?”
I started to feel faint. Oh no, not here, not now—
Someone bumped me from behind, causing me to lose my balance.
I started to sway.
It was the last sign.
I started to see.
~~~~
Heat. Such scorching heat, burning my skin like the sun was next to me.
Orange. Everywhere was orange.
Swaying. It was hungry and uncontrollable, dancing like…a flame.
FIRE.
I screamed in my mind as my vision burst into life.
La Scala Legaturia was burning in the distance.
I sank to my knees. Sobs of guilt tore out of me.
Katarina was in front of me. Crying. Burning. Dying.
Noooooooo—
I reached out to her, but the flames kept me away.
This was all my fault, all my fault, all my fault.
Chapter Two
ALEXANDRU
“This is not like any demon we have dealt with.”
Alexandru couldn’t count the number of times he had heard that line before, and yet every time it was uttered, it proved to be true. It was as if Hell had nothing to do but birth demon spawn one after another, and they always came out more evil than the last one.
“We don’t know what it looks like, but we’ve seen enough of its victims.” In front of him, Sir Richard clicked on the pointer for the next slide to show up on the wall, revealing human corpses whose eyes were gouged out, ears torn from their heads, and their tongues ground into pieces. But the worst thing about it was that these wounds were not mortal, and autopsy reports had showed that they had been made to suffer the pain until they had finally bled to death.
The human enforcers in their midst looked fit to throw up. Beside him, he heard Lord Erou suck in a deep breath in reaction, which didn’t surprise him. The baby vampire’s experience with human warfare might be considerable, but humans could never be as evil as demons.
On his other side, Katarina was still and silent, a figure from the most buried part of his past. Even though a month had already passed since she had come to work in LSL, Alexandru was still unable to unbend in her presence.
Once, he had thought he would be the happiest person alive if he were ever to be with her again. But now that she was here?
Even just thinking about it didn’t feel right, and Alexandru forcibly shoved all such thoughts to the back of his mind. There would be time enough for it later.
His gaze returned to the images on the wall. Every death was a game to these demons, a way to taunt those who wanted to banish them back to the underworld. And always, even without meaning to, they would leave behind a clue because that was how demons were. Arrogant and believing they were as perfect as God.
“Based on the data we’ve gathered, we’ve come to the conclusion that this demon is relatively young and needs to feed every week.”
Young, which meant it had only seen its first century on Earth. Young, which meant it might even be under the command of one knowledgeable in the black arts. Young, which meant it had something to prove and thus was willing to go where the older demons wouldn’t dare.
Alexandru looked at the images again, rearranging them in his mind like puzzle pieces until it all came together. Finally, the demon’s message became clear, and he murmured, “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” The passage was supposed to be a moral lesson, but trust the demon to have twisted it into something evil.