16 The Ace of Swords

Lucky couldn't exactly recall how long she'd been out for, but the unconscious Corvis next to her let her know it was long enough for him to gorge himself on magical items. What concerned her more was the taste of chalk in her mouth and the magical circle drawn in chalk around her. Something was up. She hopped over to one of her tunnels and began crawling through the house.

It was quiet, there were no sounds of the forest. Exiting her tunnel she crawled to the window in the living room. She crawled up the carved wooden leg of the sofa then crawled around to the highest point on the back frame and jumped from it to the cord to pull the drapes. As the curtains opened she saw snow all around outside. Where were they?

She had already looked for Zion, so she decided to try to find Cerberus. However, when she entered his room, the sight of him shocked her. It was if he was frozen in time. None of this looked good. She had a very bad feeling about all of this. What's worse, when she tried to summon Zion she got the magical equivalent of a busy signal. Not knowing what else to do she decided she'd have to figure out how to wake up Corvis.

Finding her way back to the lab, Lucky nudged the sleeping Corvis. She chirped loudly. Corvis did not budge. Lucky chirped louder and jumped on Corvis. Corvis was still unmoved.

Perhaps it was the residual magic present in Corvis from all those ingested magical items, perhaps it was part of the spell cast earlier in the lab. Perhaps it was something else entirely. Lucky didn't really know, but she did know that she felt something well up inside her like water when it starts to break through a dam. First a trickle and then a rushing until the levee broke, only the levee was her body. Instead of chirping a third time she felt herself grow rapidly, her whole body changed its structure. 'Could this be what it feels like to shift?' she thought to herself. However, as she continued to grow she felt a sense of anxiety as she was quickly outgrowing the house.

Before she knew it she had burst through the roof. Fear quickly became terror as she worried what magic she had stepped into, why she was still growing, and if she had been cursed. Catching part of her reflection in a nearby glacier, she fainted.

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Cerberus found the mirror gate to be interesting. When he would think on a place and imagine it, that place would be reflected in the mirror. His childhood home, the first place he shifted, where he met Zion, where Zion is now. Where is that place?..

No sooner had he thought that when the mirror began to show him Zion in a cloudy dimension. He called out to them through the mirror.

Zion looked at him puzzled. "Cerberus, how on earth, or any of the other dimensions, did you manage to get yourself stuck in a mirror gate?"

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Contessa had finally packed the earth smooth on the top of the grave. Drinking Nyx's blood did make her immune to the negative effects of the sun. While vampires are born, they don't always awaken. A vampire who does not awaken will not be allergic to the sun, nor will one yearn for blood. Sometimes it's the taste of blood that will awaken a vampire and sometimes it's an unspeakable trauma. Contessa's awakening was the latter.

She remembered her last time out in the sun. It was the day she awoke. The day had started normally, she'd gone to the local bizarre to find some spices for cooking. But something felt off when she came home, it was too quiet. No birds, no insects, not even the sound of leaves. She noticed this similar eerie silence now as she finished burying the corpse formerly known as Nyx. And while she had no beating heart to race inside her chest, she began to look around knowing this silence was often the proverbial calm before the storm. Then a gentle breeze combed through her hair. She smelled flowers blooming. Contessa didn't need to remember the field of crocus she had used as her hunting grounds to know who was standing next to her.

With a voice that sounded as melodic as springtime and smooth as water he quietly spoke by her ear. "Hello Contessa, Nyx. You'll have to let Zion know that I took the bait, but I'm not keeping it." Then, as if reading her mind "If you're still wondering, Contessa, where Nyx is, have you ever considered taking a look deep inside yourself?" Without any explanation or hint, just like that the Fae King was gone.