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Mel hands him one of the weapons but he holds up his hand, shaking his head. “This is the building Celeste circled on the map,” she explains.
“Are we sure we can do this with just the three of us?” I ask. “What if there’s a whole vampire army in there?”
Mel shakes her head. “There are guards outside but she said it’s just the two of them in the building.”
I narrow my eyes as we walk up the street toward the building, trying to work out why Dante would be hiding out here. “After everything he’s done to get to her, wouldn’t he keep her somewhere more… protected?”
Ibrahim slows to a stop. “Something’s wrong.”
Mel raises an eyebrow. “Something other than the fact he’s a coward and a piece of–”
“Yes,” Ibrahim interrupts. “Can’t you feel it? It’s like the air is buzzing with power.”
Mel waves her hand and urges us onward. “I’m a hard facts person, not so much into the witchy vibes.”
Sighing, Ibrahim says, “Just be careful.”
The building itself is abandoned, its bottom floor fenced in with tall wire fencing, the bottom windows and doors boarded shut. Graffiti has been sprayed across most of the concrete. It looks like the windows on the above floors have been smashed. There is no sign of any guards when we push through a hole in the fence.
Nervous, I throw a glance at the sky, which is beginning to veer from black into purple. We split up and investigate the parking lot, then check all the entrances. Nobody meets us.
The entrance is simply open.It’s a trap, it has to be.My heart stumbles. Were we wrong? Maybe he forced her to trick us. But how could he?
Before we can talk about what we should do in the face of this, I hear an angry shout dulled by concrete and… something else? It does not echo the way you would expect in an abandoned building. Signalling to the others that I hear something, I move towards the voice, slowly making my way through the rubble until I find the stairs. From the bottles and trash lying around it looks like someone might have set up camp in here but they’re long gone by now.
We make it up one floor, then another. The voice still occasionally sounds out, clearer now. I recognize it. My stomach lurches.Why is Dante shouting?
Two more floors and the others can hear him, too. We exchange glances.
“Same plan?” I mouth in my most quiet whisper.
Mel nods.
Slowly, we climb up and up further. Up here, one side of the building seems to remain unfinished, the eastern wall having been replaced with scaffolding and thick plastic tarps. A cool breeze shifts them, revealing parts of the ever lightening sky. We need to hurry. I nearly trip, I’m so focussed on listening for the voice. Looking down, I notice my foot has caught a snakelike piece of rubble across my path. Surprised, I bend to inspect it.A root.
Ibrahim signals towards it and touches his chest.
The source of the power he felt?
“Goddammit Celeste!” I hear Dante. His voice sounds hoarse and viciously angry.
Ibrahim holds Mel back, who has unintentionally shot forward. They must be right above us.
Someone speaks quietly and I don’t catch what he’s saying.
“I don’t care if you have to set the building on fire!” Dante shouts back. “Just get heroutof there!”
I look up the last set of stairs and notice more roots cracking through the drywall in places, their thick wood snaking along the ground and winding around the scaffolding outside.
We creep up the steps noiselessly, holding our breaths. One set of stairs, then we turn a corner to the second. More roots are creeping over the floor and cascade down the stairs as we ascend.
The scene we walk in on is so bizarre, for a moment I wonder if I’m dreaming all of this up. The floor we enter is almost entirely empty save for some rubble and a group of six vampires, one of which is Dante. All of them stand facing… what? It’s difficult to comprehend what I’m seeing.
The center of the room seems to be taken up by the trunk of a giganting tree. On closer inspection, it turns out not be made of solid wood but rather hundreds or even thousands of thick, brown vines winding over and around each other. Green, arrow-shaped leaves have burst forth from them in places, partitularly towards the side of the building that’s missing its walls. White, trumpet shaped flowers dot the strange growth all around. Everyone but Dante is working away at trying to destroy it, hacking with axes or cutting with lopping shears.
“You’re going to regret this when we get you out of there,” Dante hisses in the direction of the plant.
I grab Ibrahim’s arm.“Bindweed!”
