Unmarked Property – North Woods
The Unmarked
Night
Ortega stopped attempting to figure out the time.
Time was irrelevant down here. Not like on the planet above. Not like in a kitchen where his mother sang and his sister grouched about mornings like they were a habit.
Time mattered only now because time was something that his body had begun keeping for him.
Thirst was no longer a sensation.
"It was a countdown," he said
It lived in his throat, like sandpaper. It lived behind his teeth, like pressure. It lived in his chest, like a cold mouth opening every minute he didn't feed it.
He remained perfectly still and listened to the room breathe around him.
For example, he had also learned that the worst thing about a cage isn't the bars.
The people were.
The witches crossed the boundary of the circle, their steps quiet, their tone low, their confidence boosted by the understanding that he had not yet escaped yet.
Yet.
A door opened somewhere inside the property. Then new footsteps, more substantial, human, utilitarian. Footwear on Stone. A cooler latch click.
A scent greeted him first.
Iron.
Cold plastic.
Blood.
Ortega's muscles contracted by reflex, and the runes punished him accordingly, a swift beat reminding him his body shouldn't crave.
"Go away," he said, louder than he intended.
"No," he said again, this time
If he acted like he was starving, they'd handle him like an animal.
If he appeared calm, they would be careless.
Whispers drew nearer.
"Bag only," the older man said. "No live donor. Not in here."
"His readings are spiking," replied a clinical voice. "If he doesn't complete the transition, he crashes. If he crashes, he destabilizes and takes half the matrix with him."
"Then hold him steady," said the older man harshly. "Minimal sound. We're not adding power to a problem."
Ortega did not budge, but the wolf in him raised its head.
They were frightened lest he finish something.
"But that meant they knew what he was getting closer to becoming, even if he didn't."
A shadow fell across the light of the candles. A person drew near the circle.
The exhausted woman's voice rose above the others, calm and inflexible.
"Or
Hearing his name in her mouth was not right.
He opened his eyes.
She was right up against the bars, hands empty, demeanor controlled, the kind that came from long training and even longer regret.
"You're going to drink," she said, not asking a question.
Ortega's throat constricted. "And if I don't?"
"Then you die. And we move on," the old man replied from behind her.
The truth of it landed clean.
They had killed him before.
They would do it again.
He stared at the woman until she finally returned his look. This was Ortega, a detective who
"Don't pretend this is mercy," he said.
"I'm not," she said.
A valve opened near the bottom of the cage. A small tube was inserted through a narrow port that Ortega hadn't seen before. The works were deliberate. Engineered. A system that had been designed with the express purpose of feeding Ortega without ever opening the door.
Smart.
And also, not smart enough, tonight.
Cold blood started to flow.
He didn't lunge. He didn't growl. He didn't draw attention to it.
He leaned in and drank.
"The first swallow burned."
Not in a "hot" way. In a wrong way. Like his body knew the substance and was rejecting the notion of his body requiring the stuff. Like his blood splattered his insides and sparked the darkness waiting within him to be sparked.
His eyes clarified.
Then blurred.
Then honed again, too sharp, the world suddenly filled with details he couldn't filter out.
Heartbeats. More than one. Much too close. The heartbeat at the perimeter of the room, rapid and agitated. The slower heartbeat of the older man. The woman's heartbeat, weary but not calm, as if she were standing before an assembled gun and refusing to blink.
Ortega drank again.
His back was a screen that lit up
Magic flashed under his skin, a bright, sparkling energy, no longer like magic, no longer like a skill, more like a tempest trying to burst out of his very marrow.
The runes responded instantly.
The bars buzzed louder. The cuffs grew hotter. The circle pulsed brighter.
A pressure came crashing down on Ortega's mind. This is so severe that it makes his thoughts blur.
"Hold it," growled the older man. "Clamp the surge."
Someone was chanting.
Nevertheless, Ortega's body responded.
The blood didn't just feed him.
It was an end to something
He could feel it click into position in a sickening way, as a door closing behind him.
His teeth extended. Not merely the conventional fangs. More. Sharper. Too many.
His jaw ached.
Then his eyes inflamed.
Not the usual heat of a vampire. It was an inner heat, one that radiated behind the iris itself, causing the world to burn red at the edges.
Ortega gasped, and what emerged from his throat was a cross between a swallowed breath and a growl.
He felt the tubing throbbing against his lips as the process continued.
The runes screamed.
The cage wasn't meant for a finished version of himself. It was meant to hold a partially developed creature long enough for them to come up with a plan for it.
They had simply chosen to work with the congregation.
This had led to a situation that would
They thought that the system was more important than the variable.
Ortega's magic burst out again, uncontrolled, unaimed, imprecise
It filled the cage as a lightning strike can overload a power line.
"The cuffs flashed."
Then cracked.
The hairline fracture traversed the rune-engraved metal like glass when pressed.
The elderly man screamed some violent phrase.
A tired woman raised her hand.
Too late.
The chains snapped.
"The bars sagged inwards as if struck from the inside."
Ortega didn't emerge either.
He erupted outward.
Not with strategy.
With hunger.
With the wolf and the vampire and the magic all singing the same note at the same time: feed, survive, protect.
The first witch he hit didn't get a spell out. Ortega crossed the space too quickly for the human eye to follow, smacking the robed figure into stone hard enough that something that shouldn't crack was going to crack. The scream ended abruptly.
Blood smell permeated the atmosphere.
Ortega turned to it as if to a guiding light.
A binding had been attempted on him. Runes climbed up his legs like icy fingers.
Ortega growled, no thinking about it, and a flash of raw magic tore through the floor in a jagged ripple, leaving sigils smeared and candles askew. The circle faltered.
For a heartbeat, all the wards in the room blinked.
Ortega employed this blink as predators do, for concealment.
This time, he lunged
This time, the bite was not careful.
It was not measured.
This was the vicious, addicted violence of a hungry animal experiencing its first taste of warm blood and forgetting how to be anything else.
Ortega's tongue was covered in the second victim's blood, and everything in him shouted "yes."
He fed until the body went limp.
He might have killed them. He might have left them to die. His brain didn't label it in the moment. Hunger didn't label.
His head came up, his face wet, his eyes blazing with bright, red light in the candlelight.
It was as if the room had come to a
But not because they were calm.
It was because they were scared.
Ortega looked at the weary woman.
She stood immobile, not running, not shouting, just watching him with a look which was not pitiful.
It was calculation—fueled by fear.
Ortega moved one step towards her.
Then another.
She raised her hand.
A word, and it was out of her mouth.
And the room slams sideways.
A push. A shove. A containment. Not a harmful spell, not a spell designed to affect him. A spell designed to move him. To use him. Like any other object.
Ortega slammed into the wall hard enough to see stars.
It shook something loose in him. Not hunger.
Awareness.
*A flicker of thought*
His hands were shaking.
His mouth tasted like death.
His eyes smoldered with embers.
He was not escaping. He was rampage-ing.
He heard his mother's voice in his mind, absurdly distinct for a split second.
Ortega Sinf
As if it's a warning
As on an invisible string.
Ortega sucked in a breath that was like knives in his throat, but willed his body to move.
Not toward more blood.
Towards the door.
He didn't stop to finish anyone.
He did not choose to be a hero, a monster.
He ran.
He burst up the stairs, smashed through the wood, ripped into cold air and the smell of the trees as if it were the first clean air he'd breathed in hours.
Behind him, the sound of the cellar was erupting into shouting. Chants. Spells. The cacophony of Triad attempting once again to reassert its dominance over a quickly spiraling situation.
Ortega didn't look back.
He ran until there was a change in scents, until the smell of burning candles was gone, until the only heartbeat he could hear was his and the deep, primal drumming of animals that didn't know his name.
Only then did he stumble, support himself with one hand on a tree, and vomit bile that tasted faintly of blood.
His eyes smoldered while he blinked.
Red.
He didn't know why.
He could not yet understand what had transpired to transform him into what
"He only understood one thing," his biographer
Nobody had protected him.
He was alive.
And surviving had cost him something which he couldn't count yet.
"Salvatore School – Hope's Room"
Late Night
Hope sank into sleep like diving headfirst into water.
No warning.
No softness.
One minute she was looking at her ceiling, and then she found herself in some cold, wrong place.
Stone under her back.
Iron biting her wrists.
Candlelight flickering too close.
He tries to make her sit up, and she can't. Tries to get her hands loose, and metal bites back as if to leave scars.
There was a shape behind a set of bars.
Blurry to start with. More shadow than substance.
Hope's breath caught.
The figure raised its head.
Eyes blazed in the darkness, not the red that ringed the white, as in vampires, nor the glow she'd observed in so many fights at school.
This was different.
"The irises themselves burned a blood red, a radiating false light."
For a moment, they were like the eyes she remembered in New Orleans—of Marcel when he had business to conduct and the room knew it too late.
Hope made an attempt to talk.
Nothing was audible.
His gaze fastened on her, and Hope felt a tug in her breast as if a chain was hooked to her ribcage.
Then the bars creaked.
"The cage buckled."
The dream-shape pushed forward, and the candlelight became crazy.
Hope saw blood on the stone.
Heard screams not sounding like hers.
The eyes blazed brighter with each step, too quick to follow, too ravenous to be called human, too alive to be a spirit.
Next, suddenly, the figure made contact with the boundary of the dream, and the air split apart like fabric.
Escape.
"It's like the room dropping pressure," Hope felt.
The chains binding her wrists relaxed.
The cold stone beneath her melted away.
Hope woke with a jerk in her bed, breathing air as if she'd been submerged.
Her hands shot up to her wrists.
No cuffs.
No marks.
Only skin, trembling fingers, and the pounding of her heart.
Hope sat in the dark, staring at nothing.
She didn't recognize the figure bound by the chains.
She didn't know where the cage had been.
But she knew what those eyes meant.
Not because she'd met him. Because she had felt him. Kyaa Unstable Free. And sailing through the world now, like a storm which hadn't known where to alight.