Page 123 of The Succubi's Choice

It resists her, for just a few seconds, before the plug pops out of the wall. The lights flicker, before plunging her into darkness.

She breathes out, hard, before emergency lights flicker on, dim, small tracks of light along the floor.

“Okay,” she whispers again. “It shouldn’t be that easy to do that.”

Trailing her hand along the side of the long cubicle walls, she turns, back towards the elevators.

“Okay. Twenty minutes,” she whispers to herself, setting a timer on her phone before shoving it back into her pocket. The screen is blindingly bright in the dark, causing dots in front of her eyes that she has to blink away.

“Twenty minutes. I can do this.”

Twenty minutes to find Jacqueline and stay alive and out of custody. Starting now.

No power means she has to take the stairs, and floor eighteen is a long way above her, and the stairs are all hooked up to alarms, so she takes a deep breath and pushes open the emergency doors to the stairs.

Immediately, a loud ringing, piercing through anything resembling her composure, and she ducks, clapping her hand over her ears. The lights flood back on, red and strobing.

It’s like the entire building floods to life, and she can hear everyone up and down the staircase open their own emergency doors and filter through the staircase. It’s late enough that there aren’t too many people up and awake, but…

The door to the floor above her swings open, and people filter down.

“I can’t believe they killed the elevators.” One says, not even glancing at her as he strides right on by, instead focusing on his coworker. “That’s a huge health and safety hazard.”

The moment they pass her, she sprints up the stairs behind them, going against the flow of traffic, against the flow of semi-confused humans, all who have the ability to stop her and arrest her and stop her from getting to Jacqueline and —

A woman, in a rush, barrels into Miri, knocking the wind out of her. The woman doesn’t even apologize, just turns her shoulder away and clomps down the stairs.

So much for the protection rune, or whatever it was meant to do. Clearly didn’t protect her from physical harm.

Winded, Miri starts back up. Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth floors, the door swings open and Beatriz starts down the staircase. She catches her eye with a raise of her brow, but other than that, doesn’t say a thing, instead merely continues down, her lips tight.

She pauses for a breath past the seventeenth floor, dodging people streaming down, before she’s able to catch the eighteenth floor door open as a few doctors in scrubs stream out.

One glances at her, idle, but doesn’t look past the polo shirt before he starts down the stairs. He has a limp, and he grips the handrail carefully, as he makes his way down the many flights of stairs.

The moment they have their backs to her, she slips through the door behind them.

Her heart catches, because it’s the same medical floor that Lundy took her after the copper room, and the same medical floor she woke up in after the hotel. After the torture.

All this time she’s been pulled in there, and she’s never been given the privilege of knowing where it was in the building. Always has just had to follow Lundy, get taken there. As if she wasn’t allowed to know how she would be able to medically help herself.

Thankfully, it’s entirely evacuated, with the nurse stations empty in the emergency only light, lit briefly by the red flashes.

Any light sensitive person here would be having the worst time ever. But, then again, Miri doubts they created this floor with the best interests of vampires and ghouls in mind.

Every recovery room has a window, and every recovery room is empty: just the cot, mini fridge, and medical equipment. And every room is just like the last, a never-ending row of rooms.

Now that she’s looking from the outside, the deadbolts on the doors stand out.

Her pulse jumping in her throat with each successive empty room, there’s a whisper of noise, a whisper of a fragment of a sound, between the strident alarm.

She stills, in the hallway with the antiseptic tile and the smell of too much bleach, and hears it again. A touch to her right and a touch still further down the hall, muffled from doors and walls and just enough to barely trigger her hunting instinct.

Stepping as quietly as she can, she moves, unconsciously, drifting towards that sound.

It sounds like the small noises Jacqueline makes when she falls asleep on the couch. The small, not quite snores but not quite heavy breathing that comes from sleeping upright in a warm environment.

She swallows, and she’s unsure if it’s out of fear or out of relief. That sound means alive, and that sound means relatively unharmed.

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