JohnHKnight

Hey guys! Now, if this chapter seems a little "the road so far..."-like, it's because when there will be books, this will be the first chapter of the second one. Hope you will enjoy it neverthey

Anna took off her top very carefully. It was soaked in her blood and the fabric stuck in the wound, so she had to remove it by force. The hardest part was not to yell: her roommates were probably at home. Although she wasn't sure, as she arrived through her window. But it was early in the evening, so they must have been around. 

She lost a lot of blood and was surprised that she made it home somehow. She passed out on a rooftop once, but only for seconds. It was a long journey. But there she was now, in her own bedroom, bleeding on the floor tiles. 

It was her bad luck, nothing else. She was at the National Gallery, checking out a new exhibit she had to write about for the news site she worked for. Art wasn't even her field, but the colleague who normally would cover it was on his holiday. Anyway, she didn't have her special coat or her weapons with her, only the mask. She could only hope that not a person, nor the CCTV cameras saw her put it on. 

Trafalgar Square was a living chaos. The cries, the dying people, those bleeding things eating them, cars everywhere… And there was the masked man. Just a plain white wooden mask, but somehow it was terrifying, Must have been the eyes, Anna thought now. Those cold eyes.

She was too late to save the boy, she just stepped out on the door when the masked man cut the boy's throat. A matter of a second or two, that's all she needed to save him, but he was dead now. And the masked man dipped something in his blood, then there was a lot of magic, the wind was howling and lights flashed. Then the dead boy got up and ran and bit an old woman on the throat, and she died just to get up as well, seconds later.

Everything that happened was way beyond Anna's imaginary paygrade. But she was the one on the scene. She had to do something. She had no idea what, but hitting the masked man in the head seemed to be a good start. It was pointless of course: he was a sorcerer, a really strong one as far as Anna could tell, and she didn't have any of her tricks with her. At first, he just put her away with an annoyed wave of his gloved hand, as he was busy putting some kind of ghost or whatever into a woman's body.

But Anna came back with a bunch of flag poles she found on one of the embassy buildings. She finally got his attention, but that wasn't a good thing. There surely was a man under the white mask because he immediately wanted to play the history-old "Who has a bigger one?" game, and as an answer for the poles he brought down the pillar with the statue of Admiral Nelson on Anna. The girl just had enough time to dodge it. She realised then and there that she cannot win this fight. 

She was right, the fight was quick and one-sided: Anna lastly threw a whole empty car at the man (the heaviest thing she ever lifted), who threw it back. Anna dodged the car but spent a moment to make sure it didn't hit the redhead guy in the grey coat next to the fountain, and that was a mistake: White Mask cursed her with something nasty, she saw her own blood splashed on the ground, then she fell on her knees and that was all she remembered.

Nobody tried to eat her, but the list of positive things ended there. The fight must be all over a few minutes later because not much changed when she opened her eyes and she assumed that the good guys lost. Anna saw White Mask magicking himself out of the ground someone put him. He dropped something but didn't notice, or didn't care, and left. Anna reached out and flew it to herself. It was a round thing like a pocket watch, only slightly thicker. She put it away then searched the closest metal big enough to use, and started her long, long way home.

And now she stood in front of her mirror, trying to determine whether she is gonna bleed out or not. The wound already looked at least a day old or so but was still open enough for her to pour some disinfectant on it. She couldn't help but groan because of the pain. It was a long cut right under her left breast. The spell was probably aimed for her heart, so she considered herself lucky after all. It could have been much worse. Anna could have been dead by now. It wasn't like the masked guy didn't try his hardest to make it so. 

Who the hell was he, by the way? And what was that ghost-like thing he let out of that statue? And why Anna didn't know about all that earlier? She could have done something. Or at least she could have tried it. But the small phone remained silent. No text from the Seer, no information from any other vigilantes. Silence. Would it be possible that all this went down without any of them notice anything?

Anna wrapped herself in bandages and took a couple of aspirins for the pain. It was going to be a very long night. Nothing she didn't face before, though.    

She laid down on her back and switched the TV on. All the big news channels were talking about what happened at Trafalgar Square. The concern was whether the attack was terror-related or not. Like that would change anything, though Anna. The officials contained the scene and collected six individuals who were acting like possessed people or some kind of zombies. Anna saw them for real and knew that even though they said they would try to cure them, there was no coming back for those poor souls.

There were fifty-three dead and more than a hundred injured. The newscaster mentioned Robert Montgomery by name, who arrived with his team to stop the sorcerer called The Priest, which they failed to do. Anna assumed that this Priest was the man in the white mask. Looked like that girl from the vampire pub, Jennifer was right after all: Montgomery was, in fact, someone who was willing to take a risk for others. Hopefully, he won't die. 

Even though she figured out who the girl was and why she was familiar to her basically the next day, Anna still thought about her as Jennifer. She must have been on Trafalgar Square, too. Anna hoped that she was all right. If only she had her number… Not because she was still thinking about how Jenna Carano tried to lure her to bed (which she was, occasionally, on lonely evenings, truth to be told), but because they might have been able to help out each other. Even if Anna preferred to work alone, she had to admit, this Priest guy was much more than she can deal with by herself.

Now the Commissioner spoke on TV. He was serious and professional like always.

"The individual known as The Priest is extremely dangerous, and our main priority at the Met is to find him. We have plenty of help from the MAGE and from our civilian advisors, who were, unfortunately, the closest to Trafalgar Square today. They acted immediately, regardless of their own safety, which was not my intention when I hired them. They proved that they are heroes nevertheless, and the whole Met wishing them to get better as soon as possible.'

Anna had a feeling that this was not how things actually were. She dug deep when she was making a file about the Commissioner a year ago or so when he first started to speak about how his SRU should have had much more rights and fewer limitations when dealing with criminals. It was all a little too police-statey to Anna's taste, so she decided to have a look about who that guy was when he was at home. She did not like what she found, not even a little bit. The fact that he was one of the oldest living vampires in Europe was even more remarkable given that the Commissioner did so many things he should have been executed for decades if not centuries ago. Anna couldn't understand how a man like him could be in charge of the police. It was concerning at best

There was no mention of the ghost-like something Anna saw. Whatever that was, must have been a bigger threat than The Priest himself, if the Commissioner held the information back. Not to cause fear and panic was a good idea, but a little more transparency would have been nice. 

That reminded Anna about the pocket watch she found. She got up with a groan and went to the bathroom. Her blood-soaked clothes were on the floor, and now she took out the watch from the pocket of her jeans.

It wasn't a watch, she realised as she sat back on her bed. If anything, it looked like a silver compass, only it didn't have any little lines or letters for the quarters. It only had a little black arrow which didn't move no matter how she turned the thing and two words written on the face of it with overly complicated handwriting: "YES" and "NO". Looked like a little too simple mobile ouija board. 

On the inside of the lid, there was a sentence engraved with the same handwriting: Vox nihili. Anna used to learn Latin in high school (she had to choose a third language besides her own and English, and Latin sounded much more fun than German) and she remembered this: the voice of nothing. Of course just because she knew what it meant, wasn't closer to understanding what the instrument was. 

'Are you magical?' she asked as a test, and the arrow made a sudden move, pointing to YES. No surprise there. 

'Are you answering questions?' Another YES.

'Who am I?' This time the little arrow hesitated for a second, then turned somewhere between the YES and the NO. It seemed useless until Anna realised that it was pointing to her mask she left on her table. Maybe not so useless after all. 

'Who is the man called The Priest?' The arrow turned around and pointed at her. Okay, semi-useless. She closed the lid of the compass and put it down next to her mask. There will be a lot of time to play with it, but for now, there were more important things to do.

She took the not so smart-phone and made a text group. She added everyone in her phonebook, the Seer, the couple of active vigilantes, those who somehow lived long enough to retire and even the sketchy little guy who used to "find" magical weapons and wanted to sell them. Then she wrote: "I encountered a masked man called The Priest. More than 50 died. I need every information you have, NOW."

The first answer came just thirty seconds later: "stay away from him". Then the next asked if she was all right, and the third one claimed he killed the masked man ten years ago. Anna asked for a description and it matched the man she saw, but of course, there could have been any average-sized human being under that mask. Then the Seer said: 10:34, mugging goes wrong. man in a red coat. loc in the link" 

Anna sighed and straightened her back. The cut under her breast hurt, but it didn't bleed anymore. When she got up and made some moves to see if she could fight, it didn't hold her back too much. She popped in two more aspirins and went to her wardrobe to put on her work clothes. It was a job someone had to do. Besides, it will do good for her to kick someone's ass after the beat up she just got. Mental health was an important thing, after all.