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"I've got some," says Lexi, handing a pile of them to Beckham. She looks queasy, I'm guessing from the blood. Just what we need right now.
"Do you have any spells that can clean this stuff up?" I ask, pointing to the puddle in front of Damon. It's also gotten all over Beckham I notice worriedly.
"I'm not a janitor," she shoots at me indignantly.
"Let's try not to let pride get in the way right now," I snap at her. "Were you not listening when Liu gave us a story that involved vampires? Probably not a good idea to have blood all over us, especially when the man in question ran off because he felt like this particular part of the land was cursed."
Lexi's eyes grow wide and she starts murmuring words that will hopefully clean everything up.
Beckham is still dabbing at Damon who's grumbling and trying to swat his hand away. Beckham stops and looks at me.
"Can you sense anything Mase? Is anything close by?"
It's tough to admit that I can't sense anything. My ability to sense and read energy has fallen by the wayside as well with my current state.
"My senses aren't working too great at the moment," I tell him reluctantly. Beckham's face grows really worried with that statement, but we're all distracted from my issues when all of a sudden a scream that sounds an awful lot like Liu sounds in the distance. We all look at each other.
"Let's move," orders Damon, releasing his powerful wings from his back so he can fly at any moment. He begins to jog through the mud, a little slower than his previous pace thanks to his knife wound.
Lexi's managed to clean up some of the blood, but there's still quite a bit on the ground. I can see the red pooling beneath Damon's bandage as well from the strain he's now putting his wound through. I can only pray that whatever happened to Liu resulted from a wild animal and not some kind of zombie-vampire creature.
Damon eventually has to stop jogging since the movement is preventing his wound from healing. He's been trying to keep a hand on the wound to hold in the blood, but there's so much of it that he's still left a trail of blood as we've walked.
I'm grateful for the break as Beckham tries to crudely stitch Damon's wound together so that he can stop bleeding until we can break for the night and his supernatural healing can take over. I feel a little bit like I'm the one who's been stabbed though. I'm wheezing from the strain of jogging for several hours with zero energy. I lean over, putting my hands on my knees to try and get my breathing back, when I see a dark blur out of the corner of my eye launch itself at Lexi. Lexi falls to the ground with the weight of the impact. She's screaming hysterically as some kind of creature dressed in rags jerks on top of her. Lexi's arms are straining as she struggles to hold the thing away from her. Looking closer at it, I can see that the creature's fanged mouth is literally snapping at her. I watch as a long, forked tongue extends from the snapping mouth and licks Lexi's face. I'm too far away to get to her right this second, but there's no reason she shouldn't be shocking the monster into oblivion with the same powers I saw her use to throw Damon into our apartment wall several times.
"You're a witch you idiot. Use your fucking powers," I scream at her as a few more creatures jump into the fray and start attacking Damon and Beckham. One of the creatures is literally licking the ground where Damon's blood has fallen. Ick.
Lexi finally comes to her senses and blasts the thing off of her. It's still for a moment before its limbs start moving again and it slowly stands up. I can now see just how grotesque the creature really is. It looks like it was once human, but it's now just a decaying corpse. It might even be a few corpses put together by the looks of the stitching on some of the limbs and its mismatched oozing eyes. I grimace when one of the said eyes falls out of the socket, landing with a splat on the ground.
Damon and Beckham are standing back to back fighting off the creatures that are attacking them. Beckham's using Liu's hunting knife that he pulled out of Beckham, and Damon seems to be using his bare hands, like the show off he is, to wrangle what I'm thinking are theJiangshiLiu warned us about. At least if I were to picture what a vampire zombie hybrid would look like, these would certainly fit the bill.
I'm about to go assist when one of the said creatures leaps onto my back. I grab it by its neck, straining to keep it's snapping jaws from clamping down on my own neck. The effort to pull the creature off of me is far harder than it should be and it embarrassingly takes a blast from Lexi to get it all the way off. There's a knot in the pit of my stomach. I'm in trouble if there are many more.
No sooner do I have that thought when we're swarmed with what seems like a pack of them. The smell of their rotting flesh is absolutely nauseating, and I see Lexi spray vomit out of her mouth as she blasts three of them that are attacking her.
Unfortunately, the fact that there are so many means that there's no one available to assist me with the four that are advancing on me. I'm as weak as a human right now, and these walking sacks of rotting flesh happen to be much, much stronger than humans. My lucky day. I also don't have a weapon at the moment since my own knife and gun are tucked in my backpack which I set down a little ways away while I was trying to catch my breath after our jog. I scan the ground for things I can use as weapons and see a large rock that should work. I pick it up off the ground and crack it against one of the creature's skulls as it tries to jump on me. It's skull breaks open like a cracked egg, the exiting brain even resembling yolk. It's safe to say that eggs aren't going to be on my diet plan any time soon.
Before I can feel good at all about offing one of them in my weakened state, I'm again jumped from behind while the other two creatures come at me, passing their fallen comrade without a second glance. I pull and rip at their limbs. I even use my teeth to rip into their gummy skin, but nothing deters them. I'm soon overwhelmed, their fangs sinking into my skin several times. My last thought before the world goes black is that I wish I could see Eva's face one more time.
Chapter 13
Eva
My progress in my flying lessons is going much better than my progress in my magic lessons. Lexington didn't even have to make good on his threat to throw me out of the window because I voluntarily jumped. Now that I can call my wings at will, the rest feels like instinct, like I've done this a million times. And I guess I have since my old self obviously had wings as well.
It feels freeing to glide through the air, the breeze caressing my cheeks. My wings feel like old friends and I can't believe I managed to live without them for so long in this life. Lexington flies next to me, his enormous bat-like wings stretched behind him. Sometimes he gives me pointers, but most often we just talk about random things. It's become an escape from the pressures I feel from Aiden about the progress of my magic, and our relationship. Aiden's becoming increasingly frustrated with both and I'm at a loss at what to do about either.
Lexington never wants to talk about anything serious with me. I still don't know anything about him after a few weeks of training, but I've come to accept that he's a private creature.
Today we are working on speed drills. Lexington has an old pocket watch in his hand and he's been barking at me for the past few hours while I try to fly three hundred yards faster than the time before. I'm dripping in sweat and getting a little tired if I'm being honest. I'm about a hundred yards from the finish line when I'm pelted with what feels like an arrow. I waver in the air, losing my balance from the pain and dropping a few feet before I recover. Not a second goes by that I feel something else hit me that sends pain shooting through my left wing. I again fall and this time I see that I'm being surrounded by what looks like a murder of crows. Since this is Fairie, of course the crows are five times the size of the ones that I'm used to seeing. Another one of the crows dives at me, and I narrowly miss getting stabbed by its sharp beak as I swerve to the side. My wings are throbbing where they've been hit twice now by what I assume were either the crows' sharp talons or their beaks. My wounds, combined with the fact that I'm exhausted from hours of training, is not a good combination and I'm just barely escaping the attacks that keep coming.
Lexington is yelling at me to get to the ground from the other side of the field, but that's easier said than done. They start to attack from all sides, tearing my skin and wings with their talons and beaks. I'm about twenty feet from the ground when my shredded wings finally give out and I start to freefall to the ground, droplets of blood streaming from my face and almost blinding me. The crows are still tearing at me and I can see Lexington racing towards me as fast as he can. He's not going to make it in time though.
Right before I crash to my death, or what I think would be my death seeing as how I'm unsure of the limits of my immortality, I'm held frozen in the air, just a foot off the ground. I can hear the crows splattering behind me against where some kind of barrier must have been erected.
My heart is practically beating out of my chest from the adrenaline rush of my fall, and my blood is still pouring down my face, but I'm alive. I stare at the ground for another long moment before I finally look up to find out the identity of my savior. Of course, it's Aiden. But it's an Aiden I haven't seen before.
Untold fury is written all over his face. His eyes are burning with rage as he walks towards me. He finally unfreezes me and I softly land on the ground, where I have the insane urge to kiss it from my happiness in being alive. My mind briefly flashes back to my dream last night, where I was again free falling, but this time because I was pushed, but the murderous rage that's still present on Aiden's face distracts me from deeper thinking on my sense of deja vu.
