Rune Mage [Fantasy/Adventure | Book 1 +2 | Complete]

Chapter 16: The Mighty Blob Horse

Seiren pushed open the cover of the body container. The test rune was completed. The only way to know if it did anything to the wounds on a dead body was by trial and error. The hinge was rusty and opened with a squeak.

Madeleine lay there, her eyes shut, her cheeks sunk in, and her skin pale and bloodless. Her hands were clasped across her abdomen and she was in the white night dress she wore the night she was killed. Seiren lifted the sheet with her newly-created rune and placed it across Madeleine's chest. It glowed with a green-violet hue. Seiren snapped her fingers, activating it. The rune sank into Madeleine and, on cue, she started to mutate. Her eyes snapped open, the eyeballs rolling independently in the sockets. Her mouth opened and shut like a fish. Her arms and legs snapped around at odd angles, each crunch resonating deep into Seiren's head. A guttural sound emanated from Madeleine's throat.

Seiren stepped back, horror closing its hand around her throat. She waded through syrup-thick air. The monster that was Madeleine twitched its head, reaching for her. Seiren tried to scream. No sound came out. The air suffocated her, smothering her.

Seiren sat up in bed with a scream.

Cold sweat covered her from head to toe. The bed sheets stuck to her legs and abdomen. She peeled them off with a shudder, the remnants of the nightmare still heavy on her shoulders. A headache throbbed at her temple. Nausea swirled in her throat. The tight sensation of being strangled lingered; she could taste bile in her throat.

Her breath came in erratic gasps. She swung her legs out of bed, slapping her cheeks in hopes to wake herself up further. The persisting images were becoming less real and more fuzzy.

Reality came back. Her cheeks burned, partly from the slapping and partly from embarrassment knowing Loren would now have had one live performance of Seiren's daily nightmares. Something else she could gossip to Rowan about.

The flat was silent; the only sounds came from the hustle and bustle out on the streets. She'd half-expected Loren to come sprinting and kicking down her door seeing as she'd just screamed the place down, but even as the minutes ticked by, no glamorous blonde came rushing in. What kind of a doctor was she?

Seiren got dressed and took yesterday's clothes to the bathroom to wash. On the table was a scribbled note, in cursive as curly as the writer's hair.

Hi Seiren. Have to rush to work today, sorry! Meet me for dinner tonight, yeah? L.

She scrunched up the note and sighed. There was no getting away from her.

A photo sitting in a frame on a bookshelf caught her eye as she readied to leave Loren's flat. She paused. Three boys and a girl huddled together. A spindly boy, about sixteen years old, stared at the camera with serious eyes. A girl not much younger than him looked equally grave, blue eyes piercing in the picture. They both sported jet black hair, the same as the youngest boy, who looked about eight or ten. His grin stretched across his fat cheeks, a chunky arm wrapped around the last boy with spiky blond hair and chubby cheeks. The blond boy's sparkling grey eyes rolled up to his friend, the epitome of happiness and a stark contrast to the glum faces of the two older siblings.

She put the picture back, frowning. Maybe the young blond boy was Loren's brother. The three black-haired siblings looked somewhat familiar, but she couldn't place what. Perhaps they were family friends.

I miss the Feblands, thought Madeleine at the mention of family friends.

Seiren hadn't thought about that name in a long time. Mr. and Mrs. Febland and their children Kasia and Tala were childhood friends. Kasia would be eighteen now, and Tala in his mid-twenties. Since Seiren moved into King's not long after her family died, she had never gone back to Finberry. There were too many bad memories.