Page 100 of Cloak of the Vampire
“Three beastly men share a golden cloak,” I crooned as I rubbed my knuckle against the painted men’s faces and leaned back, feeling the breeze in my throat.
“The Morrow Gods have come.”
The painting showed three men standing side by side, their bodies silhouetted while their faces showed an identical expression of wrath—or so was my purpose. They were standing in the middle of a fiery forest, the sky beyond marred with smoke. The painting wasn’t clear, with blood being the only pigment present and me not being as good as a true artist, but it was clear enough for my purpose.
Because this painting was one way for me to ask the Morrow Gods to take mercy upon me. To save me from this hell that was the Auction. From the hysteria and fear, sadness and agony that suffocated me from deep within.
Shaking, I climbed to my feet and, frightened at what the reaction would be, turned to face the audience. It only then occurred to me that it had been almost one minute since I finished my act, and yet the hall was entirely silent.
That didn’t help calm my terror.
When I watched the audience, there was a stillness in the hall that hadn’t been there before. I might’ve seen the crowd as one big black blanket, but the blanket seemed to be immobile. As if everyone was frozen.
Then I blinked.
And the Auction hall was gone.
I was in a field, an endless expanse filled with wilted gray grass and faintly luminous white flowers, with an empty sky of orange-tinted violet. Something about this field felt familiar, as though I’d been here before, but I knew that couldn’t be. I would’ve remembered if I had.
A soft breeze, similar to the one from before, brought with it the scent of the ocean as it gently blew my hair.
A bright flash of gold made me freeze, and I grabbed my hair, feeling my heartbeat accelerating at what I found. Gone was the muddy-brown dye; my hair had returned to its original blonde, as if the entirety of the colorant had suddenly been neutralized.
Whipping my head up and letting my hair go, I looked around me, my eyes darting frantically throughout the field to see where the hell I was.
Because I was no longer in the Rayne League.
I was no longer in New England, that was for sure.
But was there a place like this on Earth? So tranquil yet oddly chilling, not a star blinking in the cloudless, sunless, unchanging sky?
As my heart boomed in my ears, I took a step forward; then a rustling to my right made me whirl around with a scream lodged in my throat. For a moment, I thought I must’ve imagined it, but then a few feet away, I saw something moving in the wilted grass.
Cautiously, I walked toward the moving thing until I was right before it, able to see it among the dry thistles.
It was a bird. A strange, naked bird with the head of an eagle, the body of a pheasant, a long tail that resembled a rat’s, and large, featherless wings. Its skin was the same gray color of the grass it lay in, and its movements were jerky, its eyes shut tightly, as if it was fighting a terrible pain.
I crouched before the bird, watching helplessly as it writhed on the ground. As though it sensed me, the bird stilled, and its white beak opened. It let out a pained groan that did not sound like a bird at all.
Still, whatever it was, I couldn’t just sit and watch as it was tortured by obvious pain. Gently, I gathered the bird in my arms, sat down on the dry, crackling grass, and petted its body as I would a cat’s. “It’s going to be okay,” I lied, a knowing deep inside telling me that this bird was reaching its imminent end. “You’re going to be okay.”
The bird’s lids trembled before they lifted, revealing a pair of dark rubies for eyes. Those rubies looked straight into my eyes, and the emotion within them seemed to contain far more than heartbreaking agony, but ... sadness.
It gutted me, struck right against my chest. It felt as though I was staring at an old friend about to take their last breath, and before I could stop it, a sob escaped me, tears welling in my eyes. “Don’t die,” I begged, unable to think of anything but saving the bird. “Please don’t die—”
I sucked in a breath when the bird’s eyes mimicked mine, welling with tears.
Shaking, I stared at it as its lids fell over its eyes, its tears trickling out, falling to the ground.
The bird stopped moving.
It was dead.
And it felt like I was dying along with it too.
“No!” I yelled, hugging it close as the tears streamed down my face like water from a dam that’d been broken by pure force.
“No, no, no ...,” I whimpered, grieving for the bird as though it was my own flesh and blood. Grieving for it as if I’d known it my entire life, despite having just seen it for the first time.
