CHAPTER 4 #2
Tears sting in my eyes, voice cracking. I rarely sound this desperate. “I need to see him. Please.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the chief nods.
The general gathers his folder. “I’ll escort you to the medical wing.”
The walk there feels endless.
Each step echoes in the sterile hallway, punctuating the silence between us. I look at our reflection in the floor-to-ceiling windows, noticing his rigid posture as his steps measure to match mine.
“Your father would be proud of you,” he says, breaking the silence.
I resist the urge to flinch at the mention of my father. “For what? Getting my boyfriend turned? For failing to capture the vampire who murdered him?”
“For surviving.” He slows his pace. “For saving lives. You’re good at what you do, Seraph. Redmoore would love to have you back.”
So that’s what this is about.
“Not after what happened that day.” My stomach twists into knots. “It’d just reopen old wounds.” Ones that I’m trying hard to mend.
“Those deaths were not your fault.”
That doesn’t take away the fact that I was the only one spared, while the rest were torn through without mercy. Our conversation takes me back to the night when I learned what real loss tastes like.
“Seraph, your form is sloppy,” my father said, his voice stern but his eyes kind as he adjusted my stance. “Elbows tucked, core tight, knees bent. Remember, vampires are faster than you think.”
I rolled my eyes, fifteen and invincible. “Dad, I have been training for three years now.”
“And yet,” he said, sweeping my legs out from under me, making me hit the training mat with a thud, the breath knocked from my lungs, “you still leave yourself open.”
He extended his hand, pulling me to my feet. Benefits of having a parent at Redmoore, I thought. Private lessons.
“I was distracted,” I muttered, dusting myself off.
He squeezed my shoulder. “Learn not to be.”
It wasn’t a reprimand, more like a gentle nudge toward better focus.
“Where’s your brother?” he asked, his gaze drifting toward the door.
Saul’s absence from our private training sessions was nothing new. In fact, he avoided them every chance he could. He preferred brooding in silence and arguing with our father to picking up a weapon.
I took a big chug from my water bottle, pondering whether I should cover for him or not. “Probably hiding in the library again, pretending to study.”
Absolutely not.
Saul had been getting away with being ‘sick’ a little too much. If he wanted me to keep carrying his weight, he’d have to start paying me, either in snacks or in favors, like letting me borrow his gaming console for a week.
Before my father could press for details, the alarm started blaring, urgent and high-pitched. He cocked his head to one side, listening to the code through his earpiece.
“Breach in the west wing,” he told me. “Level five.”
My body stiffened in dread. Level five meant vampires—multiple, powerful ones—inside Redmoore itself. A near impossibility.
“Stay here and keep yourself hidden,” he ordered, already moving toward the door, drawing his sidearm. “Lock the training hall and don’t open it for anyone but me or the general.”
“But I can help—”
“No!” The force of his command stopped me in my tracks. His eyes softened for bit. “Please, sweetheart. Just this once, do as I ask.”
Something in his voice made me nod. He pressed his palm to the scanner beside the door, initiating lockdown protocols.
“I love you,” he said, words that rarely left his lips.
I would’ve said it back, if I knew it was the last chance I was going to get.
The wait in that training hall felt like hours, forced to listen to the distant cacophony of gunfire, shouting, and the occasional inhuman screech that made my pulse spike. Each passing minute stretched my patience thinner. The noises grew fainter, the gunshots more sporadic.
When the silence and my panic finally settled, I could no longer bear it. Had the threat been neutralized? Was anyone coming for me?
I had to know what happened. Had to help where I still could. Against my father’s explicit orders, I overrode the lockdown with my emergency access code.
The hallway outside was eerily quiet, the overhead lights flickering, the air charged, like the moment before lightning strikes.
I moved cautiously toward the west wing, pressing myself against the wall at each intersection, just as I’d been taught. The scent of blood grew stronger with each step—human blood. I swallowed hard, forcing back the instinctual hunger that rose within me. Now wasn’t the time.
As I rounded the final corner, I froze. Bodies lay scattered across the floor of the grand atrium, their weapons still clutched in lifeless hands.
But what caught my eye was the lone figure still standing in the center of the room, my father, facing off against someone I couldn’t quite see.
Someone who was little more than a blur, moving with a speed that no ordinary vampire should possess.
It must’ve been what triggered the level five alert.
I should’ve run for help, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the battle.
My father was magnificent, decades of training evident in every movement. He seemed to know weak spots I’d never seen anyone hit, targeting delicate areas that no one else would think to exploit—the kind my mother must’ve shown him in their years together.
For a moment, I believed he might actually win.
Then, one of the corpses twitched. Another rolled onto its side with a wet crack of bone. My breath hitched as I watched the guards I’d assumed dead rise slowly, jerkily, like puppets yanked upright by invisible strings.
I clamped a hand over my mouth as their heads turned toward the fight. With my father busy deflecting a strike from the blur, I staggered back a step. Why? Why would they turn on him? Had the blur forced them? Bent their wills somehow?
I searched their faces for recognition, for some trace of resistance, but found only blank obedience. Mindless. Controlled.
An icy shiver ran down my spine. Whoever—whatever—he was, he wasn’t just fast. He had them dancing to his strings. And for the first time in my life, I saw my father falter.
As they began to circle him, closing in from all sides, I forced my trembling legs forward, stepping into the atrium despite the terror clawing at my chest.
“Dad!” I called out, running, unable to contain myself. I wanted him to know I was here, that help had arrived.
His head turned slightly at the sound of my voice, his concentration broken for just a fraction of a second.
It was all the opening his opponents needed.
Time seemed to slow as a tall figure with shocking white hair like my mother materialized behind me. My father lunged at him as I rolled away. A veined hand plunged forward, punching straight through my father’s chest. Blood sprayed in an arc, spattering across the floor.
“NO!” I screamed, grabbing a gun from one of the dead bodies and leaping to my feet, but it was too late.
My father’s eyes found mine as he fell to his knees, his mouth working silently. The vampire pulled his hand free with a sickening sound, my father’s heart clutched in his crimson-stained fingers.
Horrified, I watched him collapse, his body hitting the floor with a finality that completely shattered me from the inside. I rushed to his side, skidding on my knees across the blood-slick vinyl.
“Dad? Dad, please—” My hands hovered uselessly over his body, shaking with shock and disbelief.
His eyes were still open, fixed on something beyond me, beyond this room.
Beyond this life.
The blur slowly moved to stand in front of me, his shadow falling across my father’s body. I looked up at his masked face, blurred by my tears. He looked at me as if I were some specimen to examine.
I knew I should run. Hide. Fight.
But all I could do was clutch my father’s cooling hand and weep with ugly, heaving wails that tore through my throat, the grief and rage making me struggle to breathe as sobs wracked my chest. Snot and tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore.
The vampire crouched down, bringing his face level with mine. I could make out some of his features now—ones that would haunt me forever.
Something primal snapped within me. I wouldn’t die like this. Not without a fight.
I lunged forward with a scream, hands outstretched for his throat, ready to tear him apart with my bare hands if necessary.
My muscles coiled, my teeth bared in a snarl that felt more animal than human.
I expected to feel his flesh beneath my fingers, the satisfaction of causing him even a fraction of the pain I was feeling.
But my hands met nothing but air.
He was gone. Simply vanished, as if he was never there at all.
I collapsed forward, my momentum carrying me to the floor where he had stood moments before. The room was silent except for my ragged breathing and broken cries. I was alive.
Why was I alive? Why did he spare me when everyone else lay dead around me? The questions tortured me as I crawled back to my father’s side, cradling his head in my lap, rocking back and forth as I whispered apologies that he’d never hear.
The bodies of the guards that were revived and somehow enslaved were later found at the security checkpoint, where all logs indicated no unauthorized entry.
Not only did he treat humans as tools to be bent to his will, but he’d discard them the moment they’d outlived their usefulness.
In the debrief that followed, I was questioned over and over, forced to recount every moment of the chaos in the atrium.