Daughter of the Night

Aaron’s P.O.V. (continued)

You know how I ended the last chapter inferring that it would be a long night? I was wrong. It was downright forever. The endless hallways blended togethe;, all of them looked the exact same, and all of them were equally abandoned. Once or twice I had to take a desperate measure when I saw a shard of light from around some distant corner, such as jumping into a giant urn (I clipped my elbow and nearly broke the vase, now that was embarassing).

The minutes dragged by so slowly that it seemed time itself had slowed. The only thing I could hear was the sound of my own heart, which after a time couldn’t bother racing with adrenaline.

The night I spent in that building will remain in my memory forever. After wandering down the hallway only to judge from the inches of dust etched into every facet of the corrider that it was unused, I decided to map out a landscape of the building so that I’d have at least a vague idea where the hell everything was.

I’ll admit, after the initial rush of climbing four stories into a forbidden werewolf HQ that was housing a captive vampire, I got kind of bored just hanging out. I mean, I wasn’t hanging, I was walking around the hallways, but still. Walking around with no idea where I was going and no idea if I was taking a wrong turn or not wasn’t just disheartening, it was sleep-inducing.

I was practically snoring when at four o’clock in the morning I had taken a hidden, rickety staircase up two or three flights only to nearly walk into the middle of a werewolf poker game.

It took all of my self-control to not crack open the door that I had all my weight behind. Luckily for me there was a window about eye-level so that I could see into the rooms, otherwise I would have interrupted a round of superhuman cards. Judging from the remaining shreds of wooden chairs scattered around the room as well as the shards of broken mirrors and champagne glasses, they were betting money, and someone was losing badly.

Snarls and growls and then a loud “ah-hah!” penentrated the silence. I quickly realized that my face was still pressed against the window and I immediately yanked myself away, spinning around and placing my back to the wall beside the door.

My heart, dormant for so many hours, had begun pounding fiercely again. I figured that if the werewolves were concentrating enough to pay any attention to it, I would already be dead, so I figured I was safe. I only had to wait for it to calm down.

One, two, three minutes passed. Once I myself couldn’t feel the pounding in my veins, I decided that it might be of some value to listen to what the wolf-people were discussing, even if it was through a drunk stupor.

I slid slowly down the wall and placed my ear against the crack in the door, praying that the dog-men or dog-women wouldn’t notice.

After a few seconds, I heard a muted voice.

“Ah, damn! It’s a four! If it was a five, I’d have a move or two!” one wolf disparaged, albeit through the slur of alcohol.

“Ah, shut up, man,” a female voice drawled. She shut up as she put something in her mouth, and then the klink of a shot hitting a table echoed through the chamber.

A few cards were doled out, some chips slid across the table, and a few more minutes passed before any more words were exchanged.

“This is so boring!” a new voice exclaimed, decidedly younger than either of the previous two. “This sucks!”

Some more chips slid across the table, and a wry voice replied, “maybe if you weren’t losing you wouldn’t be complaining.”

“I can’t help that!” The other voice retorted irately. “Did you see my last hand?”

“I can’t help that you’re terrible at poker,” the other voice snapped. “Now shut up and play. We’ve only got another ten minutes to finish this match up before we go back on guard duty.”

What? I thought. Guard duty? Then the ‘ten-minutes’ part sunk in and I realized that if I didn’t want them catching me I might need a head start. Even if I did get one, I was entirely screwed over if they came through the stairwell since my scent was so blatantly here. But, what were they guarding? Hopefully Cross. That would make my life easier, if they took a different exit and I just followed them to learn her location.

I weighed the two options, stay or go. Finally I decided to leave, only because I was so exhausted anyway that I wouldn’t have been able to successfully follow them without revealing my presence, which was suicidal. Even if they came up this way, they might not smell my scent. Hopefully, even if they did, they would be too lazy to pursue it.

I crept up the staircase this time; if the wolves did catch my sense, at least hopefully the fact that my scent split into two different dirctions might throw them off.

Slowly, carefully. I had to watch out for bum stairs since the entire thing was at least four decades old. Eventually I reached a landing and decided that it was the one for me.

As I passed through the door connecting to yet another hallway, I heard the creak of a door opening stories below. Shit! Well, at least I had had the common sense to give myself a head start, however useful that would be. I supposed it came to a matter of how much the wolves actually cared.

I sped my gait up to a jog and began taking wild turns around the corridors, to at least give them a bit of a challenge if they were in fact coming after me. Left, right, right, right, left, right, left, left, and so on. This maze of hallways seemed to go on forever, and everything looked the same, which didn’t help.

Eventually I came to an empty office room. Files that were at least thirty years old (I mean, they had the cobwebs and everything) were discarded loosely across an oak desk at least that age. The lack of cleaning was so obvious that I wondered if I would acquire allergies just from stepping into a room with that much dust.

I stepped in slowly, careful not to disturb any of the spiderwebs or clots of dust. My lighter, at this point nearly out of fuel, was put-puttering pathetically and I decided to give it a rest as soon as I got situated.

The desk covered everything behind it, and the floor, albeit dusty, was carpeted. Large bookcases that stretched to the ceiling were filled with rows and rows of books, and there were even booklets and pamphlets stuck inside those.

Once I reached the desk, I slowly creeped behind it and knelt in front of the spacious room underneath it. Carefully, I swept away the cobwebs. Luckily for me, there wasn’t any dust under the desk itself; the top of the piece of furniture covered the one spot of carpet.

I crawled into the opening and curled myself up so that none of my limbs protruded from the gap underneath the desk. The legs of a red office chair stared back at me, and then there was only blackness as I shut off my lighter.

As soon as the blackness claimed my sight, I was immediately weighted down with fatigue. The events of the night, as well as the wolfbane from before, had definitely taken their toll.

My eyes slid closed, and I rested peacefully, even though the morning sun was just creeping above the horizon.