Gaze of Fire Read online

  In the early hour of the morning, she and Hadrian passed through the waking streets in the Water district like speeding phantoms. A few streets over from where they both lived, she and Hadrian pulled up in front of a regal, older home. It was in the midst of being restored. Scaffolding wrapped around the double barreled chimney. Half of the paint had been chipped off of the front of the house. Some of the siding had been replaced with new wood shingles and boards. Piles of rock waited by the foundation of the house, so as to be used to patch up the gaps in the stone walling.

  Karena spotted the homeowner next to an unruly hydrangea bush, which she seemed to be trying to prune back. Next to her, Hadrian pulled off his helmet.

  “That’s one old house,” he commented.

  Karena assessed it with a certain wariness. Houses that looked that old usually held secrets.

  She said, “They really should tear houses like this one down. They cause too much trouble.”

  “People are all about the historic value. To them, it outweighs the scare factor,” he said with a laugh.

  She nodded, and got off of her motorcycle. After placing her helmet and gloves on the seat, she walked through the short, wrought iron gate at the front of the property. The spiders that were in the middle of their webs scurried for cover as she tore through their web’s mooring lines. They disappeared into the short hedges on either side of her.

  “Ms. Lark?” Karena said in a loud voice.

  The woman at the hydrangea bush looked up and waved with her gloved hand. They went over to her, and introduced themselves. In her mid-thirties, she was as tall as Hadrian, and long-limbed. Her hair was tucked under a bandana.

  “The others are on their way,” Karena said. She didn’t like standing so close to the house. Something about it felt foreign and slightly menacing.

  Hadrian said, “It’s because they drive like grandpas. You could say that they’re more mature for their age.”

  Ms. Lark wiped some sweat off of her brow. She said, “Ah, I see. By the way, you can call me Julia.”

  “You have a beautiful house,” Karena said and gestured to it.

  “Thank you. It’s been in my family for generations,” Julia said, and it was then that Karena noticed her grey eyes. Karena hadn’t paid attention to her last name. Julia was an Air, and yet living in the Water district.

  “How old is it? It has to be older than the others on this street.”

  “It was built towards the end of the Vampire Regime.”

  Karena’s breath caught in her throat. Now she knew why she didn’t like it.

  With an incredulous and yet horrified look, Hadrian said, “The Vampire Regime?”

  “Yes,” Julia said without flinching. “My ancestors were servants in this house for one of the vampire lords, and then when the vampire was killed during the uprising, the house was left vacant, and they took it for themselves. The treasures and the furniture that had been left were all taken out and either burned or sold. When Archelm began growing, my grandparents sold off some of the land. So the plot is smaller than it used to be, but that’s okay, I don’t need much land.”

  Karena remembered the history lessons from school years ago. When the Vampire Regime began, people were forced out of their houses and into tiny apartments. The vampires destroyed all of the existing houses, except for the ones they wanted to live in. After a couple of centuries, the need for houses grew, so the vampires had new ones built to keep up with the influx of vampires coming into the Sundarin Nation. And Julia’s house was one of those that had been specifically built for a vampire. Due to the painful memories associated with them, most of those houses from that time frame had been burned to the ground. But Julia’s house was one of the few that remained five hundred years later.

  Karena resisted the urge to step back away from the house, and asked, “Do the neighbors know about this? This house dates back to a time that no one wants to be reminded of.”

  “No. They don’t mind it. Back in the day though, they wanted to tear it down, but after doing some re-landscaping, selling off most of the land around the house, and modifying the exterior, everyone made peace with its presence in the neighborhood.”

  “Have any paranormal disturbances been seen or felt in the house?”

  “No, but I do have a medium come in every year just to be sure that there aren’t any spirits hanging around, especially during times of restoration, like now. The last time this house was restored was about fifty years ago.”

  “That’s wise to do. Restorations can trigger residual emotions to surface and cause hauntings in the house.”

  “I’ve never had a problem until yesterday. Something broke out of the basement.”

  “Broke out of the basement?” Hadrian asked. He broke into in a fearful shiver that he tried to hide with a shrug and a sudden interest in the hydrangea bush before them. Karena was just as creeped out as he was.

  “Hadrian and I didn’t get a good look at the report. Amarine did though. She’s normally the leader of the team,” Karena said.

  Just then, the sound of a motorcycle’s and a truck’s engine reached them. Amarine and Tristan had finally caught up. From the looks on their faces as they walked over from where they had parked by the sidewalk, both of them weren’t happy that they had been left in the dust. Upon spotting what could only be the homeowner, their peeved expressions vanished. As cryptid hunters, they had all been trained to act professionally. Amarine and Tristan politely greeted Julia.

  Taking charge and getting right to business, Amarine said, “The report says that something crawled out from inside one of the dirt walls of your basement.”

  “That’s correct,” Julia said. “Whatever it was, it left a trail of dirt when it ran out of the basement and through the kitchen. It went right through the screen door and jumped over the ten-foot fence in the backyard.”

  “Did you manage to get a glimpse of it?”

  “I heard it leave, but I didn’t see it. I was upstairs at the time. I called the authorities, and they investigated, but couldn’t pin it on being an intruder. It was then that they called to request a cryptid hunting team to come out and look,” Julia said.

  “Could you show us the trail before we go inside?” Amarine said.

  Julia said, “Of course, let’s go around the side.” She took off her gloves and set them down on her pruning shears that were laying on the ground.

  They followed her around the side of the house on a stone walkway to the backyard. The backyard was just as impressive as the front yard. The green lawn rolled out in a wide stretch to a tall, wood fence that was being devoured from sight by a honeysuckle bush.

  Together, they inspected the part of the fence where this creature from Julia’s basement had supposedly jumped over. They pushed aside some of the flowering vines and saw the claw marks on the fence. The creature hadn’t been able to clear the fence in a single leap, and had been forced to scramble up the last two feet of it. The claw marks were wider than a canine’s. There was at least an inch between each individual claw mark.

  “They’re like a tiger’s claws,” Tristan said. He squinted at them.

  They retraced the path that the creature would’ve taken from the back door to the fence in reverse. Karena combed the lawn. Hadrian plucked something from the grass and held it up. It was a blood ruby. They were rare, and held the power to either purify blood or poison it. It was small, about the size of a fingernail. Karena shuddered and rubbed her arms, not because she was cold, she never got cold, but because of the emotions that had been evoked upon seeing it. Tristan collected the ruby for evidence.

  With Julia leading the way, they went up the back steps of the house and walked onto the porch. Again, there were the same kind of claw marks on the wood. The claws had left deep scars. The creature had used all of its strength to bound forward. The screen door had been busted open by force. The wood frame had splintered, and the netting hung in ragged shreds.

  They went inside. The natural
lighting in there was dim according to an Air elemental’s standards. In typical Air fashion, the interior had been repainted with light colors. All of the wood had been bleached to a light grey hue. The house screamed opulence with its engraved moldings, custom flooring patterns, marble fireplaces, and crystal chandeliers, but Julia’s simple taste in furniture and minimalistic approach to decorating clashed with what the house stood for.

  They followed the scratch marks through the hallway, down the stairs, and into the basement. Electric lights turned on, flooding the basement with illumination. Looking at one of the light bulbs for even a second was like looking at the sun. Apparently, no one had wanted any shadows to linger, but it was still spooky down there, which nothing modern or magical could fix.

  The hard-packed dirt floor of the basement was flat and litter free. The pitted pillars that held the house up had been reinforced. The old beams that supported the floors above were coated in a special oil to keep pests from eating at them any further. Across the walls, stashes of vegetables and jarred goods were lined up on shelves. The basement kept them cool.

  Julia turned and pointed at what was behind the stairs. She refused to move, so they stepped around her, but stopped just as she had. An insidious looking cavity yawned in the basement wall. Karena almost expected something to come flying out of it, but luckily nothing did. The artificial light in there couldn’t reach all the way inside of it. The shelving unit that had been in front of it had been knocked over. The broken glass of light bulbs and miscellaneous junk had spilled across the floor. Nothing had been disturbed or picked up from the ground, so the scene was pristine.

  “What were they looking for?” Amarine asked, squinting at the gaping hole in the wall.

  The cavity was at least six feet wide and seven feet deep. It had been dug with purpose. It didn’t strike Karena as the result of someone poking around, but rather, someone looking for something. The removed dirt had settled over the shelving unit on the ground and had piled up directly below the cavity, like snow dumped from a tree.

  Julia twisted her fingers together. Julia said, “No one entered the house, or else I would’ve heard them. Something came from out of there.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Tristan said. “Do you leave your doors unlocked?”

  “Usually. There’s nothing to fear day or night. Everyone else does the same,” Julia said.

  Hadrian drew to her and put an arm around her. She melted into him and put her forehead against the side of his head. Though Hadrian was a complete stranger, he came across as a loveable character. When he put his charm to good use, he could become a source of comfort to women, rather than a prize to fight over.

  Karena picked up a lantern and flipped the switch on it. It glowed, but she could barely tell because it was so bright in the basement. She stepped over the toppled shelving unit and all of the items on the floor and held the lantern up to the cavity in the wall. The claw marks went one way, then another, and kept doing this until all of the sides had become ripped up. Because there were horizontal line marks that ran parallel to the opening of the squarish hole, the possibility that someone had been digging into the basement wall was ruled out. It was as though something had dug its way out, rather than in.

  “Look at these claw marks. No one broke in, something broke out,” Karena said.

  Without bothering to look for himself, Tristan said, “It was a werewolf. The tracks outside are a close enough match.”

  “No. This thing, whatever it was, woke up, and dug its way out, and then escaped. It was reacting to something, an internal timer or whatever,” Karena said.

  “It’s unthinkable what you are suggesting,” Amarine hissed. The air humidified due to her emotional state.

  “Come over here, and see for yourself!” Karena said, and motioned for them to actually examine the cavity, instead of speculating.

  With a sigh, Amarine did, and then Tristan. But it didn’t seem like the notion took hold because they shrugged their shoulders at her. They wanted to remain stuck in their own convictions. It felt safer that way for them.

  “There aren’t any vampires or their skeletal hounds left,” Tristan said. “And if this is what you are suggesting, you should know that dormant, vampiric beasts don’t just wake up. Something has to wake them up. Vampires are long gone, and one would have to be physically here to wake up one of their vampiric beasts.”

  Karena shook her head. She stared at the gaping hole in the dirt wall.

  Karena said, “We don’t know that for sure, and there’s a lot we don’t know about how vampires and their beasts function. They could have some kind of telepathic connection. What if this thing had an internal timer of some kind and woke up because it was subconsciously programmed to do so centuries ago? This house is old, and a vampire lord once lived in it, which means we have to factor that in as possibly related to what happened here last night.”

  Amarine crossed her arms. “A werewolf did this,” Amarine insisted.

  Hadrian said, “Even if there was something of interest for a werewolf here, what would it be? Werewolves aren’t known to be planners or hoarders. They’re more like rabid dogs than rational, logical beings. I side with Karena’s theory, even though it’s outlandish.”

  Tristan chewed on his bottom lip, as though he was holding back from saying something.

  “Think of the strength that this beast must possess if it dug itself out of a solid, dirt wall. The claw marks alone look savage,” Karena said. She hoped that Amarine and Tristan would come to their senses because she didn’t want to think about this anymore than she had to.

  “And if this cryptid has such a brutal and bloodthirsty nature, then why didn’t it attack Julia?” Amarine said.

  “It was called, that’s why. It ran out of here like a bat out of hell. It had a destination to go to.”

  They were quiet as they mulled this over.

  Amarine put her hands on her hips. With one eyebrow raised, she gave Karena a one-sided smile. “Captain Valmar is going to laugh at you,” Amarine said.

  “That’s fine,” Karena said. “The evidence is right here. There are claw marks everywhere inside of this cavity. If someone was digging something out, there wouldn’t be claw marks on the farthest side of this hole, or on the top of it, or horizontally. It would’ve come across whatever it had found, and pulled it out. The rake marks would’ve come towards us, and not be running from one side to the other.”

  “I think you’re overreacting,” Tristan said, “but that’s okay, it’s our job to think about all of the possibilities.”

  Karena turned to Julia. “Has this ever happened before?” she asked.

  Julia said, “No. I’ve never had a problem with this basement before, and neither did my ancestors. Do you think that this could happen again?”

  “I don’t know, and until we come up with an answer, it would be best if you locked your basement door and didn’t come down here for a while,” Karena said.

  Hadrian withdrew from Julia. He went over to the large hole in the wall, and motioned for Karena to hold the lantern inside of it. She obliged. He reached a hand in and patted his hand across the dirt, leaving the score marks intact, but still allowing himself to feel for anything that might’ve been left behind. It was something that she hadn’t thought about doing, but it was because she had been too preoccupied with arguing with Amarine and Tristan. His hand stopped at one of the far corners, and he pulled something out.

  “It lost a part of itself,” Hadrian said and he held up a four-inch, hooked claw.

  They all went pale. Karena’s stomach lurched, and she put a hand to her forehead in an effort to subdue her nausea. Tristan moved in and searched for blood with a spell.

  “I don’t see any blood. If it ripped out its entire claw, it would’ve been bleeding like crazy,” Tristan said. He retreated from the cavity, now fearful. However, he refused to admit that she could be right about it being related to a vampiric beast.

  Hadrian
wasn’t about to let this slide. He said, “And why isn’t there any blood, unless Karena’s theory is correct? The living undead don’t bleed unless they fully regenerate or their blood organs are punctured.”

  Tristan ignored him. “We’ll send in the report as urgent. Captain Valmar needs to take a look at this,” Tristan said, and pulled out his crystal skull to start communicating with the cryptid hunting headquarters.

  Karena stared at the basement wall and the gaping hole. She had a bad feeling about it. She hoped that the creature wasn’t of vampiric origins, but all evidence pointed to the fact that it could be. It was known that vampires calculated everything out, even down to the last penny they owned. So it made her wonder if this awakening, of whatever it was, had been an accident or on purpose. It was obvious that it had been buried in the wall to keep it safe, to keep it waiting for another time or era, but why? Vampires were said to not exist, but a trickle of doubt crossed her mind.

  She listened to Tristan detailing their investigation to the crystal skull, which was being heard by one of the communication teams at headquarters. Finding the creature would be difficult unless it made a kill, which it would have to do in the first twenty-four hours of it being awake in order to nourish itself after such a long sleep.

  “It won’t be able to survive in this day and age,” Julia said, flashing her scared eyes.

  Karena nodded. “I agree, not with all of the Nightguard patrols. This is a different era. It will be destroyed like all the other evil remnants from the past have been in Archelm City. It shouldn’t be hard to do.”

  Hadrian said, “They’ve searched all of the old grave sites before, and the houses and properties of previous vampire lords and ladies. It’s possible that they missed a couple, especially if they lie in unknown and unmarked grave sites. I wonder if the vampires ever forgot where they buried everyone, like a squirrel trying to find all of the nuts it stashed underground for winter.”