Eternal Night

(III) Chapter 12: The Casualties of War

Vesper's heart thundered in her chest. With her back pressed to the stone wall of the Ervin Szabó Library, she clutched the hilt of one of her throwing knives to her breast as she forced herself to breathe slower, quieter. There was nothing but adrenaline rushing through her veins – adrenaline and pure determination.

Taking another deep breath in, she swallowed once and inched her head toward the corner of the wall to see what was happening on the other side. She was met with a blinding blast of red energy that came barreling toward her at breakneck speed and she only barely ducked out of the way before it took out the entire corner of the wall. Jagged and sharp bits of broken stone scraped against her cheek as she turned her head away from the blast, the unearthly screech of a possessed witch making her blood ice over.

"GET HER DOWN, GET HER DOWN!" Jacob was shouting.

"I'm fucking trying! She's too strong!" Lyra barked back as another explosion of magic barreled across the way before it slammed into one of the massive trees in front of the building. The thick trunk snapped like a twig before the blast found a home in the neighboring apartment building. Mercifully, the thing had been abandoned for nearly a decade now. Vesper only hoped there weren't any unlucky squatters inside.

The witch made another unnatural noise that sent Vesper's heart racing even more in her chest and she swallowed once more, struggling to steady her nerves. She had to get inside the building. With Rémy, Vlad, and Frankie in the tunnels with the Ardelean family, and Lyra and Jacob outside dealing with a demon-possessed Sara Blood Thorn, Carmen, Jacob, Tristan, and a now dwindling number of werewolves had been left to contend with Basilio and his men alone. And the last time she had checked the CCTV footage in the van down the street, the Spider nearly had them cornered.

Vesper had tried to get a hold of Frankie to warn her of the danger, but the connection had gone bad and all she had gotten in turn was static. Somewhere in that white noise, she thought she had heard Frankie shouting at her to stay put, but there was little chance of her doing that. Not when her family was in danger.

The Spider had already taken so much from her – she'd rather die than give him the chance again.

And so she centered herself, closing her eyes while adjusting her grip on the hilt of her blade, counting down from ten just under her breath as the magical war raged on in front of the library. When she got down to one, she rounded the corner and sprinted for the entrance of the building just as another blast came shooting down from Sarah's open palms. Her magic was red like blood and hot like fire. But the witch was too distracted by the counter-assaults of Lyra and Jacob to really notice the teenage girl racing toward the iron gates of the library.

The main gate had been smashed open when Lyra had been sent barreling through on a ball of dark magic, the iron railing still white hot, bent and steaming from the impact. Lyra's blood also littered the pavement around the miniature fence she had landed on, the weed-ridden grass soaked in it. That was when Jacob had left his post, intervening just in time before Sarah could deliver a finishing blow.

The cool air of the shadows chilled the sweat running down the dhampir's back as she slipped inside the main foyer of the library. With the chaos from outside now muted and the immediate danger no longer present, Vesper once more tried to compose herself as she strained to tune her ears to any unseen enemies.

The entrance to the tunnels was oddly enough on the fourth floor of the building in the more historic part of the library – a hidden stairwell in the wall of one of the reading rooms that led all the way down to the subterranean network beneath the city – the only way in or out of that labyrinth. That's where Carmen, Danny, and the others were located.

Sheathing her knife, Vesper removed her bow from her shoulder and nocked an arrow.

Her heart was still pounding wildly behind her rib-cage, almost painfully, but she didn't have the time or luxury to ease her own growing anxiety. Carmen and Danny were in danger; and so she proceeded up the stairs, praying silently along the way that any unfriendly vampires she might encounter would be too distracted to notice the sound of the blood rushing through her veins.