Mae didn't spare Lazarus a glance as she headed toward the stairwell. It was as if she had been possessed and was simply a spectator in her own body. She glided down the rotten stairwell and through the old entryway. Barely batting an eye at the blinding light as she crossed the splintered concrete toward the far end of a tree line.
Something or someone was guiding her on where to go. Thick darkness immediately shut out the daylight as she crossed into the trees and began to head in deeper. A feeling of eerie familiarity incased everything she came across but all Mae managed to do was shrug her shoulders and keep going. As she traveled farther and farther into the ink colored shadows her body began to emit a soft silver glow.
Mae started to pass a string of birch wood trees and halted. The smallest flash of gold caught her eye as she stepped toward the nearest branch and found dangling from a broken chain, the golden locket, the vampire woman had shown her. Mae reached up and tugged gently on the chain and it easily untied itself from the wood allowing the locket to fall into her outstretched hand.
A piercing scream echoed through the woods as she began to turn the locket over in her hands; she shoved it into the left pocket of her torn pants and headed in the direction of the sound. Fear was irrelevant now as she navigated the darkness as if she lived in it. As she grew closer, the silver light grew brighter, until she turned the length of a burnt out hollow log and came face to torso with the same creature as before. It's cold crimson eyes would've once bore holes into her causing panic and fear but now she found herself glaring into him. The creature screamed once more before moving out of the way of the soulless who had caused the slashes through her torso.
Mae leveled her gaze at the empty black pupils of a woman who had once been her superior and dearest friend. An unfamiliar smile etched itself across her face as she unleashed a blood curdling scream causing both creatures to be thrown across the manmade clearing. She jumped from burnt stump onto burnt stump in the circle surrounding the two now horrified creatures.
She raised her hands and the earth beneath their feet began to split and creak. Mae jumped upward into the air directly above the soulless female's head, lowered her left hand, and watched as the hollow fell screaming into the darkened earth. Then she turned her attention toward the hollow. It's crimson eyes held the fear she had once felt before it took off running across the clearing.
Mae shook her head as a petite hooded figure stepped in front of her and looked up revealing two ember colored orbs. She recognized this creature as Celest and gently Mae glided toward the ground. As her now bare porcelain feet touched the cool earth a bright silver flash took the remaining wind out of her lungs. She saw the beautiful vampire woman once again; this time her throat wasn't slit and she held in her hands the same long knife the teenage boy had used. The blade was blackened along the edge with dry blood and as the woman stepped closer it became clear to Mae that she was no longer an apparition.
Fear began to swell as the darkened clearing grew darker in her failing vision. The woman had used Mae as a way to transport her soul through the realms. She smiled softly at her, exposing two sharped fangs, before turning her attention toward a startled Celest.
Celest glanced from her mother down at the unconscious albino woman and back again. She had seen this woman die. Celest let out a frightened scream as her mother stepped within arms length; the long knife held precariously as she fought growing fear to utter two strangled words, "Mother, please," was all she managed before the tip of the blade slashed downward against the left side of her throat.
She fell in the same way her mother had and began to spit up streams of thick black blood. Celest looked up in bewildered betrayal only to find herself peering into the crystal blue eyes of an eighty year old man. Lazarus smiled down at the woman who had once been his mentor before turning the blackened blade over in his hands.
He glanced over at the still body of a beautiful albino woman whom he didn't recognize before sitting down at the base of a blackened stump. Lazarus looked upward between the trees at a light blue sky and felt at peace for the first time in centuries.