Chapter 11: “The Second Seal”

 

 

 

            Sam stood in the hallway after recovering from her dodge, relishing the feeling of new power as it brimmed inside of her.  She didn’t know what it was, but it seemed to augment her senses as well.  It was like she had a sixth sense for danger – as she’d started her dodge even before Darius raised his hand fully.  Sam sniffed the air.  Even with her nose, the heavy smell of fresh blood made it difficult to gauge his distance.

 

“Damnit.” Darius’ voice echoed out from where he’d gotten back up.  “Why couldn’t you just accept your new life like the others do?”

Sam slowly sank down into a crouching position, feeling her tail swirl around behind her as she did.  She kept her ears trained forward, waiting for the sound of Darius’s feet as he moved towards the hallway across the wooden floorboards.  She waited, listening as he cautiously stepped forward, until she noticed one footstep different from the others.  It sounded like when his foot landed, he’d turned it, making to change direction.  Meaning he was off balance – Sam’s ears pressed flat.

As Sam dashed from her cover, she secretly praised Darius for his positioning.  He’d managed to pick the spot hardest to get to if you’d been sprinting down the hallway.  As she entered the room, he was off to her left, between the bed and the closest wall, but not quite in the corner either.  Sam smirked, somehow when she’d looked at Darius, she could feel the mana moving within him and knew he was about to attack.

 

Sam let herself fall to the ground, using her tail and agility at the last moment to turn her fall into a roll, and evaded his second lighting tendril with ease.  Bits of rock fragments and some wooden splinters were knocked loose as the tendril collided with the wall and bookshelf.  The smell of ozone permeated the room from his two missed strikes as Sam came out of her roll.  Still keeping her momentum, Sam pivoted on one foot, using the claws on her feet to aid her tail as she sent herself at Darius again.  Sam aimed herself at his left side, hoping to take his arm or head.  Darius shuffled his feet and managed to turn his body so that she was charging at his right side and smiled.

But Darius wasn’t an experienced fighter, just a good ambusher, and failed to react as Sam changed her angle of attack yet again, pivoting off her feet twice as she moved to attack from his left side again.  This time, she was too close, and he was too slow.  Sam swung out, feeling her claws bite deeply into the flesh of his left arm.  Darius grunted and rolled away, sending a bolt of crimson lightning into Sam’s chest from point blank range as he did.

 

Sam’s face twisted in mild pain as she felt her chest burn and muscles spasm, crashing into the wall behind her in a daze.  She got up again to see a wounded Darius who looked afraid, backing towards the center of the room, keeping his left side towards her as he did.  Sam grinned and jumped at him again, stretching out her claws as she envisioned ripping him limb from limb.

 

But as she sailed at him through the air, her tail streaming behind her, Sam noticed his smile again, confident this time.  She twisted her body, trying her hardest to evade but it wasn’t enough.  Darius pivoted his stance and with a shout he swung his right hand, which now held a long knife, and stabbed at Sam, swinging wide to catch her as she twisted.

 

Sam landed against the wall behind Darius with a crash, a piercing agony coursed through her from where she’d been struck.  She was shocked, and mad at herself, through the fight Sam had kept the upper hand, but she grew complacent and fell into a rhythm – believing Darius to be weak.  Sam kept her eyes on him as she tried to stand up, using the wall to aid her, but as she pressed her back to the wall she heard the sound of metal meeting stone as fresh agony tore through her chest.  Sam screamed out and fell to her knees, realizing she’d been pierced all the way through.  Her chest felt heavy with the foreign object embedded in her.

Darius stepped over to her triumphantly while clutching his arm and breathing heavily.  Sam looked down, seeing his knife sticking out of her from just above her right breast.  She tried to take a breath, but she felt a rumbling gurgle in her chest that only made her cough.  Sam felt something running down her chin and knew it was her own blood but wasn’t afraid. 

 

“Heh, looks like I got to sheath something in you in the end.”  Darius laughed dryly as he stepped closer.  Sam grimaced, but she hadn’t given up.  Instead, a different, more masochistic plan formed as she laid there.  It wasn’t anything special, but Darius had just given her a big knife – it would just hurt a fuck-ton to use it.  Sam wasn’t worried about her injury, it wasn’t immediately lethal, and she could feel her own magic inside herself working to fix the injury already.  There was just very little it could do with ten inches of slowly warming steel in her lung.

 

Sam closed her eyes, feigning weakness as she instead thought back to her spar with Liam.  He’d said she had moved like a blur, but to Sam at the time it was like Liam was just moving slowly.  She thought back to the feeling that coursed through her at the time, and tried to mimic that feeling now.

Sam heard as Darius knelt next to her, felt as his rough hand slid up her thigh slowly.  “I didn’t want to kill you.  But here we are.  I suppose you can be my first then.”  In her minds eye she could picture him perfectly as he crouched over her keeling form.  She practiced grabbing the knife and stabbing him in her mind over and over, she imagined the pain as best she could to prepare herself – she knew this was probably her last chance. 

 

Sam’s eyes snapped open, she could see Darius reaching for the blade in her chest but his hand seemed slow, like he was taking his time savoring her final moments.  As fast as she could, Sam wrapped her hand around the handle of the knife and heaved.

A blinding, searing agony tore through Sam as she withdrew the blade, revealing serrations along its length as it came free with a wet sucking sound.  It came out flat, having passed between her ribs, and was slick with her own blood.  Sam watched Darius’s eyes widening through the eye holes, surprised at either her speed or determination, or both.

But that was the last thing Sam let him perceive on this mortal coil.  With a grunt, Sam joined her hands together and stabbed through the hole in Darius’ mask, putting all of her weight behind it as they landed onto the floor with him beneath her.  A sickening wet crunching sound met her ears as the blade ground through his eye socket and out the back of his head, pinning him to the floor with his knife.

 

Sam withdrew her hands from the handle and sat on his chest as death throes began to pass through his body in the form of a tremor.  His body shook beneath her, but his head remained stock still, pinned as it was.

Sam panted, blood running from her chest and back, and falling in thin droplets from her mouth.  She could feel that familiar yet new feeling of her magic, an icy heat as it circulated around her wound, stemming the flow of blood, and trying to seal the damage.  But she could tell she was running out of power quickly as her tail returned to normal and her claws turned back into nails.  Fatigue was quickly replacing the adrenaline that was coursing through her.  That, coupled with the dismissal of her feral state allowed a wave of pain and disgust to wash over her.

 

Sam had never killed anyone before, and even doing it to stay alive left a bad taste in her mouth.  Sam shakily got to her feet as she fought back sobs, the stress of the last five days threatening to overwhelm her.  Sam had never allowed herself to fully consider failure, but now that she held victory in her hands she couldn’t help but realize just how close she had come to never seeing her family or friends again.

 

Sam took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself and realized with a start that she could breathe normally.  There was a light rattle in her lungs, but the organ seemed to be working again.  She glanced down at her chest and saw that the wound was still there, bleeding still but not as heavily as earlier.  Sam could still feel that icy heat inside her, operating on instinct, but it was already far weaker than it had been. 

 

Sam looked around her cell again, her eyes drifting from the bed to the shattered shelf before settling back on the now limp form of Darius.  I wonder how many people he’s harmed.  It was a quiet solace to her, knowing that the person she killed was a genuinely despicable person.

Using the walls for support, Sam slowly made her way out of the cell and down the short hallway to the door that she’d walked through on her first day, leaving a thin trail of blood in her wake.  Sam pressed her hand against it, pushing firmly, but it wouldn’t budge.  She reached out and pulled on the bars of the door but got the same result.  Looking at the door revealed there were no key holes.  Did I just… trap myself?

With a huff, Sam crossed her arms over her tits and grimaced at the pain for a moment before uncrossing them.  She thought back to the first day when she’d watched as Darius placed his hand over the door and it clicked on it own.  It must be magic, Sam thought, lightly facepalming.

 

She reached out again and placed her hand on the door, but nothing happened.  She thought about pushing her magic at the door but again, nothing happened.  Sam tried a different approach, she imagined a stream, a thin trickle of water running along her arm and out of her hand, but the door remained sealed.  Sam sighed, fighting down desperation, she needed to get out of this room.  She had to, or she would starve or bleed out.  She wanted to see her dad, her brother, and Liam.  Sam even wanted to see Sarah again.

With a click, the door unlocked.

“Huh?”  But Sam wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and threw open the door, stepping out into the room she’d woken up in.  Sam followed her nose to the door across the room from her own, and found it locked.  Sam repeated the process of trying to open the door, failing miserably before she had an epiphany.  Her magic seemed to be guided by some instinct inside her, at least for now, and it only let her open the door after she’d thought about how badly she wanted to go home.

Pressing her hands against the door again, Sam thought about home, about how badly she wanted to be there with her family, how she needed to get out of here.  She also thought about how much she wanted a bath but felt it wasn’t as important to her.  With another click, her way was clear.

 

 

At the top of the stairs, Sam found herself in a narrow, two-story house.  It was sparsely furnished, but it had all the amenities one could need.  She made her way round the house quietly, unsure if she was alone.  But after searching top to bottom, she realized she was indeed alone.

Sam found herself in what she assumed was Darius’ study, on his desk there was a phone and computer, Sam grabbed the phone and found that it was charged.  With a grateful sigh, Sam flipped it open and dialed her father.  As it rang, she limped her way across the small hallway to his bathroom and immediately began to summon hot water for a bath.  With a start, however, she realized she wasn’t sure if she was even in Storm Rock and made her way back to the window in his study.  As she went the phone call ended, he hadn’t picked up. 

 

Throwing open the window revealed to her passerby below, and on the horizon she could see their familiar walls.  As Sam backed away from the window the phone in her hand started vibrating.  Looking down at the contact revealed her father’s number, and Sam opened the phone with haste.

“Dad?”  Sam asked timidly, making her way back to the bathroom in time to stop the bath from overflowing.

 

“Sam? Sam is that you?!  Oh thank god you're alive.”  She sighed, thankful that he was okay too, she hadn't known if the supposed 'client' had plans for the rest of her family.  “Yeah, dad it’s me, I’m okay now.  Listen, I’m in the city, but I don’t really know where I am, I got knocked out –”  But he cut her off.  “I know sweetheart, Liam told me everything.  We’ve been looking everywhere for you.  Michael is here and we’re going to track the connection now okay, does the phone have enough battery?”  Sam pulled the phone away from her head and checked the status symbol.  “Yeah, I’d say we’re good.”

Michael had helped to develop their family name by creating a tracking spell that hijacked the signals that the call used.  It was an incredibly useful spell for whenever someone called while being stranded out in the wild from a breakdown.  But it still relied on there being cell service and an open connection.

 

The call grew fuzzy for a moment before the sound of Michael’s voice could be heard over the feed as he said something to John, who then relayed that to Sam.  “Okay sweetheart, it looks like you’re across the city from us.  Sit tight, we’ll be there in an hour.  And leave the phone open.”  Sam knew, and might have normally said something to retort, but she also knew that he must have been worried out of his mind.

 

After giving her assent, Sam set the phone next to her by the tub and lowered herself into the warm water for the first time in days.  She sighed as the warmth soaked into her bones.  Sam gently scrubbed the dried blood off her tits and abdomen, taking care to clean the week’s buildup of filth.  She took special care to wash out her cut, which still bled into the water, slowly dying the water pink.  Sam let her hair hang over the back of the tub, deciding to wash it at home with more care.

 

Now clean, Sam took a moment to close her eyes and enjoy the warmth.  Before she knew it, she passed out.