CHAPTER 157

[General POV: With Lydia]

Having not the slightest idea what drew her here or why she even lied meaninglessly to her friends, Lydia found herself back in the classroom where she had drawn five overlapping circles and the number two on one of them.

They had managed to get to Mr. Westover before the Darach could kill him and if not for Malia's timely actions, they might have watched how slow and methodical the teacher would have been killed.

She walked with shaky steps towards the empty board and picked up a piece of chalk with trembling hands and brought it to the board, letting everything run on instinct despite how cared she was.

She closed her eyes as she felt her hands moving across the board, giving up to whatever banshee spirit she was possessed with.

Finally her hand's movement stopped, prompting her to open her eyes to what she had written.

Only it was none of the exciting things she was expecting, because right there inside a circle was the number '2' on the chalkboard.

"What the hell? This doesn't make sense!" Lydia stumbled backwards, unable to comprehend why the numbers were still the same.

The number she wrote was a confirmation of the two people that would die, Mr. Westover and Deputy Taya, right? But they were able to save Mr. Westover on time so the number should be '1' instead of '2'.

After all, she as a banshee was supposed to predict and foretell the deaths of people.

-!!

"Predicting the death of people. Is it not over yet?" Lydia asked herself as she was genuinely confused and lost.

"How could it be over yet?" A nice voice came into the room that scared Lydia out of her living wits.

She jumped back and turned to the source of the voice and stood rooted to the ground, shell-shocked and stunned into silence at the appearance of Ms. Jennifer Blake, their literature teacher.

"Ms. B-Blake, what are you doing here?" Lydia asked with a shaking smile, trying and failing to hide the sinking feeling and the wave of dread she was feeling.

Jennifer Blake smiled warmly at Lydia with eyes that said Lydia couldn't be more obvious of what was happening with how poor her acting was.

"My dear, should we really go through with the introductions? I see it as a bit inane after we've come this far, don't you think so?" She tapped a two-pace hum on the desks with her fingers as she walked towards Lydia who was literally frozen in fear.

"P-please, I d-don't know what you're talking about. I have to go back to the recital." Lydia said quickly and wanted to hurry out of the classroom but Jennifer Blake grabbed her hand and drew her back in.

"Don't go now, Lydia. We have a few things to talk about."

"Arrrghhhh!" The young girl screamed as she was pushed into one of the many chairs inside in the classroom.

"Honestly, I did not expect it, nay, I held no hope of it. But nature, oh nature, so unpredictable. You don't know how lucky you've made me Lydia."

"The wailing woman. The forecrier of bereft souls and the dead – A banshee."

She chuckled almost sarcastically as she ran her fingers through the side of Lydia's head and brushed a few strands of hair to the back of her ear.

"Please… please… please." Lydia broke into a mess of sputtering pleas but all Jennifer did was smile and rubbed her hair as if she was comforting her.

"Don't worry, you won't feel a thing." She said as she brought her face towards Lydia until their noses were just a few millimeters from touching but she abruptly stopped and moved back, smiling calmly as she dodged the scythe-like blood tail that then wrapped around Lydia, using with the chance she gave them by backing off to draw Lydia towards Tristan.

"Go now." He urged Lydia to leave but they quickly found out that the doors were locked and no matter how Tristan pulled, the doors refused to budge.

"A vampire. I have never seen one of your kind but from what I've read about your kind makes me agree that nature was right to write you off as a great taboo."

"You teach History now?" Tristan wasn't really trying to fight because he knew he might lose as that already happened once. If he could stall her for Malia or any of the others to come then that would be ideal.

"For a child you have quite the confident gait. Or did becoming a Primearch made you so?"

"You plan on letting us out of here?" He wasn't really keen on fighting her, but he wasn't a good negotiator either. They both knew what the other wanted.

"Oh, Tristan. You really don't get it, do you?"

"That you want to kill Lydia, yes I do. That you're the Darach? I do too. What I don't get is if that door is going to open any time soon." He said and she chuckled, meanwhile Lydia who was standing him was shivering. Not at the ominous banter the two were sharing, no. But instead the flowing puddle of blood that was gathering around their feet.

Jennifer Blake stopped her chuckling and looked at the flowing blood that had now stopped after pooling over 1/5 of the classroom.

"I'm not your enemy, Tristan. You might not believe me but I can prove it to you." She said, taking a step back to keep a good distance from the blood pool.

The small smile on her face faded away as she saw thin blood tendrils raising up from the blood pool.

"I believe that, but you were really trying to kill Lydia weren't you?" He asked rhetorically. "And for your information, the school is already surrounded."

She scoffed at Tristan's threat, not taking it as anything more until a thought occurred to her and she froze.

"You'll be lucky if he hasn't gotten wind of it."

The person Tristan was referring to was Deucalion. Of course there was no way that he could be sure Deucalion was here since the man was very good at hiding his presence, but his bluff wasn't a chance Jennifer Blake was willing to take.

"And another thing is that you want to kill me, even more so than Lydia." The temperature in the room dropped so fast that Lydia could practically feel it.

"And from what I heard, you ran a number on Malia."

For Lydia, this was the most frightening thing she's ever seen Tristan, or anyone for that matter, do. Not the night at the motel, not the beating Malia got from the druid's hand, who also turned out to be their literature teacher.

The classroom took on a red shade as Tristan's blood froze over all the windows and from there almost seemed to cover the entire room in a blood cocoon.

Jennifer's eyes widened in shock at Tristan's attempt in skewering them to bloody paste inside a bloody iron maiden but then the hair in the back of her neck tingled as a shadow loomed over her.

Frozen blood had already encased her feet and Tristan's hands were looming over her as if inviting her for a death hug as his fangs descended on her neck.

From around the walls and even from behind him sprouted blood tails for binding and others in different shapes of weapons and tools aimed for taking a life.

Seeing how effectively cornered she was, Jennifer's eyes trailed to Lydia in that instant and projected something into her mind that broke through the remaining mental barrier she had.

And it wasn't only Lydia who saw it. Tristan did too.

A room of endless flowing blood that induced the worst sensation of dread and despair Tristan ever felt.

A bloody dream.

If Tristan who felt all these ominous emotions for the second time was completely frozen in fear, Lydia who was bombarded with it all at once completely lost it at that moment.

In that moment, for the first time, the banshee screamed in abject horror.

An ear-piercing scream rang out through the entire school and the surrounding area, but the thing was that not everyone heard it. Or rather, only certain creatures did.

For Tristan being the closest to Lydia, the scream literally passed through his body and touched something that he never knew he could be touched.

Inside his bloody nightmare, with Lydia standing in front of him, Lydia's scream sent ripples through the stream of blood, ripples that soon transformed into turbulent waves that forced the blood apart from each other with enough force and magnitude that almost completely pushed them apart and revealed the seafloor.

In the classroom, Tristan fell to his knees and grabbed his chest, perspiring with troubled breaths as if he was having a heart attack. All his frozen blood lost their integrity and collapsed.

"Oh, I really really want to kill you now, but I need your help against Deucalion. Ironic how I'm using the lesser of two bad choices…"

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