Chapter 22 : Beneath the Church
The church stood silent against the night sky, its white paint peeling, its windows dark and hollow.
I'd waited two days after my library research before coming here. Time to plan, to gather supplies, to convince myself that exploring a vampire tomb alone at midnight wasn't completely insane.
The flashlight beam swept across overgrown grass as I approached. Fell's Church hadn't held services in decades—the congregation had moved to a modern building in town, and this historical landmark had been left to decay. Perfect for hiding supernatural horrors.
I'd parked my truck a half-mile down the road, approached on foot through the woods. No witnesses. No one to explain my presence to if something went wrong.
The front doors were chained, but a side entrance had rotted through. I squeezed past broken boards, flashlight clenched between my teeth, stake in hand.
The interior was worse than the exterior. Pews had collapsed. The altar was buried under fallen ceiling beams. Water damage and decades of neglect had transformed what was once a place of worship into something closer to a cave.
I picked my way through the debris, following the map I'd memorized from the Gilbert records. The tomb entrance was in the basement, behind the altar, accessible through a door that should be...
There.
A section of floor that didn't quite match the rest. Newer boards, probably replaced when the Council reinforced the seal decades ago. I knelt and tested the edges.
Loose.
The boards came up easier than expected, revealing stone steps descending into darkness. The smell that rose from below was old—dust and stone and something else, something that made my skin crawl.
Don't be stupid. Turn around. This isn't worth dying for.
But I needed to know. I needed to see. Preparation without information was just guessing, and guessing got people killed.
I descended.
The stairs went deeper than I'd expected—thirty feet, maybe forty. The walls transitioned from brick to carved stone, ancient symbols covering every surface. I didn't recognize them, but I could feel their weight. Power. Purpose. Centuries of containment.
At the bottom, a tunnel stretched into blackness. My flashlight barely penetrated the dark.
I moved forward.
The tunnel curved, branched, doubled back on itself. Without the map, I would have been lost in minutes. But the Gilbert records had been thorough, and I'd memorized every turn.
After ten minutes of walking, I found the door.
Massive didn't cover it. The stone barrier stood twelve feet high and nearly as wide, covered in symbols that seemed to move in the flashlight's beam. Iron bands crossed the surface, reinforced at intervals, corroded but intact.
The seal was visible—not a physical lock, but something carved into the stone itself. A pattern that pulled at my eyes, made my head ache when I looked too long.
Bennett magic. 145 years old and still holding.
I stood before the door, barely breathing, and listened.
Silence.
Then—
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Something on the other side. Something that knew I was there.
My blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the underground chill. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to get out, to put as much distance between myself and that sound as possible.
Instead, I reached for my power.
The blood in my veins responded, sluggish but present. I'd barely used my abilities since the overextension collapse, still rebuilding my reserves. But some instinct told me to try—to feel, to sense, to understand what waited behind the stone.
Cold.
The word formed in my mind without my choosing it. Not temperature—something else. An absence. A void where warmth should be. The dead place where blood stopped flowing, where hearts stopped beating.
Twenty-six of them. Maybe more. Pressed against the seal, sensing my living heat, desperate to reach me.
Starving.
I stepped back. Then back again.
The scratching intensified, frantic, hungry. They could feel me. They wanted me. A century and a half of nothing but darkness and hunger, and suddenly fresh blood stood just beyond their reach.
I turned and walked away.
Not running—running would feel too much like prey. But moving quickly, steadily, back through the winding tunnels, up the stone stairs, through the ruined church, out into the night air.
The stars were impossibly bright after that darkness. I stood in the overgrown churchyard, breathing hard, trying to slow my racing heart.
They're real. They're there. And someone is coming to let them out.
Damon Salvatore. In about six weeks, he'd arrive in Mystic Falls looking for Katherine. He'd try to open that tomb, release those starving horrors, tear through anyone who got in his way.
And Katherine wasn't even there.
I photographed the church exterior, marked the side entrance location on my mental map, and headed back through the woods to my truck. The walk helped clear my head, let the adrenaline fade to something manageable.
Fifty-four days until Stefan arrives. Maybe sixty until Damon tries to open the tomb.
The math was brutal. I had less than two months to prepare for an apocalypse I could barely comprehend. The Council had protocols, but their protocols assumed containment would hold. They didn't account for a vampire who'd spent 145 years planning to breach it.
File it under future problem. Focus on what you can control.
The truck was where I'd left it. The engine turned over on the first try—a small mercy. I pulled onto the dark road and headed home.
The trailer was quiet when I arrived at 2 AM. Vicki's car was in the driveway—she'd been coming home more regularly since our talk, though I still found empty pill bottles in her room sometimes.
Small victories. Incomplete progress.
I locked the door behind me and stood in the dark kitchen, processing.
The tomb was real. The vampires were sealed. The seal would hold until someone with the right knowledge and the right bloodline tried to break it.
Six weeks.
I filed it away and went to bed.
Tomorrow: training. Caroline. The endless work of preparation.
The tomb could wait. Everything else couldn't.
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