We Shall Rise (24 page)

She didn’t know where to look. She tried calling Maddie, but there was no answer. She called Reysa and everyone they knew at The Lore hoping someone had seen her, but no one could find her. After precious hours of time wasted, Yasmine thought her prayers were answered when she received an email from Maddie. At least she thought it was from Maddie. She should have been suspicious considering Maddie rarely used email, but Yasmine was too desperate and anxious to find her sister that she embraced any small hope that Maddie was reaching out.

“The message stated that Maddie was in Chicago at a club called Serenity. She was visiting a friend in trouble. She claimed she needed my help. That was a red flag I ignored. Maddie never asked for help. She was too stubborn to admit that she needed someone else. I should have known the email was not from her, but I couldn’t get the vision out of my head. I kept thinking that if she were visiting a friend in trouble, then that could be the trouble that leads to her death in the vision. I had to go to her. I sent her an email promising I would be there soon.”

Yasmine rushed to the airport and boarded the first available flight to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. She hailed a cab and gave him the address for Serenity that was included in the email. The cab driver was visibly taken aback by the address and asked Yasmine to confirm this is where she wanted to go. He warned her it was a dangerous part of town in the Southside of Chicago. Not the kind of place for a girl like her. Yasmine didn’t care about the danger to herself. All that mattered was finding Maddie.

The cab driver pulled up to an abandoned house. Windows were boarded up as if the house had once caught fire, but no one bothered to rebuild. Next door were several men sitting on the stoop of a house that looked just as withered minus the wooden boards. The human men were boldly shooting heroin in plain sight as if daring the cops or anyone else to stop then. One had a small firearm bulging from his right pocket. All of them were focused on the taxi probably wondering who would be crazy enough to come to this part of town.

There didn’t appear to be a club in sight. This was suburbia, albeit a very dangerous part. The driver pointed to an alley next to the abandoned house. “At the end of the alley is the address you seek, but I wish you would change your mind.” His midnight almond shaped eyes pleading with her to not get out of the cab. “This is no place for a lady. Only death looms here.”

That’s exactly why Yasmine need to get out of the cab. To prevent death from finding her sister. Yasmine nodded in understanding as she gave the driver a fifty and jumped out of the cab. He paused briefly before pulling off the sound of his tires scraping the pavement as he anxiously fled the danger surrounding this neighborhood.

As she approached the alley, she heard the human drug addicts calling out to her. She ignored them, but they persisted. She heard their footsteps. They were coming. Yasmine summoned her power. She reached for the sky and began to chant. By the time the men reached the alley, Yasmine had disappeared.

At least they thought she had disappeared. Yasmine had cast a spell of illusion, allowing her to become invisible. She heard the men curse in frustration trying to figure out where she went. Eventually they gave up and left the alley.

Yasmine remained invisible until she reached the end of the alley just in case other unsavory characters were lurking in the shadows. There was nothing there but a brick wall spray painted with gang signs and threats.

She was literally at a dead end. She pounded the wall and suddenly the ground beneath her gave way as she dropped below. She landed on her rump in what seemed to be a dimly lit sewer.

Unlike other immortals, she could not see in the dark nor cast a spell to create light, but she always carried a lighter in her pocket thanks to her mother’s survival rules. The first thing she noticed was the intricate markings on the wall. They appeared to be an old unfamiliar foreign language. As she marveled at the etchings, they reshaped until the words were in a very familiar language, English. This was a spell. The words flashed “Immortals Only – Straight Ahead.” An arrow appeared and Yasmine walked in the direction that arrow pointed.

Rats. She could hear the sounds of their tiny feet as they tapped the surface. They were close. She tried to stifle the fear. She truly hated rats. She never recovered from the trauma of being bitten by several at her mother’s apartment in Rabat. She felt the onset of a panic attack as the sounds grew closer, too close. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. She would survive this. She had to. Maddie needed her and she would be damned if a rat phobia stopped her from saving her sister. With that sobering reminder, she found the courage to continue even as she felt the rats’ presence.

She walked nearly a mile before she reached a door with another inscription. As before, the words unscrambled before her eyes. “Welcome to Serenity”. As she read the words, the door opened and she was thrust inside a small intimate lounge. It was empty. “I knew I was in trouble. There was something so disturbingly evil about this place. I felt the hair on my arms stand up as soon as I entered. I had this horrible feeling that I needed to flee. I almost did until this warlock stopped me. He said his name was Franco and he was here to help me. His words were kind, but his eyes said otherwise.”

Yasmine tried to pull away from him, but his grip was too strong. She pleaded with him to let her go. That she had made a mistake. She was in the wrong place. “You are where you belong. At least you will be soon,” he told her with a confidence that caused her stomach to clench.

She kicked him in the groin forcing him to let go of her arm. She ran around him to leave, but she heard him chant something. “After that, everything went black and when I woke up, I was in a cell locked in with several other witches and a couple of sages.”

Most of the others had been confined for days. No one had any idea who their captors were or where they were being held. They were all brought in by Franco. He was the collector. “It was like an episode of the
Twilight Zone
. We were just strangers who were trapped. We didn’t know why, how, where or anything else. We just knew we couldn’t get out. They bound our hands with an enchanted chain that blocked our ability to perform spells. I couldn’t even cast a spell to free myself.

“One day, a man and a woman appeared in front of our cell. They called themselves Adam and Eve. They looked more like Lucifer and Lilith to me. The odd thing about them was that I couldn’t detect their immortality. That had never happened to me before. They must have been masking it with a witch’s help or a warlock like Franco.”

“Did they say anything about who they were or what they wanted?” Reysa inquired.

“They claimed we were not prisoners despite the bars and handcuffs. We were their saviors. They needed us and our gifts. One day we would be heroes. It made no sense to me at the time, but I later understood.”

The following day, they came for Yasmine and escorted her to small room with a table, TV monitor, and DVD player. “They showed me picture after picture of butchered lesser immortals like us. They were gruesome. I’ve never seen such barbarianism. There were pictures of slain babies, their tiny bodies covered in fang marks. Women and men who had been raped and tortured sadistically. Then they showed me a video of what they called “The Chase.” It was vampires and lycans hunting innocents both human and immortal for sport. When they caught their prize, the things they did to them were pure evil. It’s hard to believe such evil still exists.” Yasmine trembled as the memories of those images flashed her mind as if she were still in that room seeing them.

Julian rose and pulled out a bottle of water from his backpack. Yasmine watched him warily as he crouched in front of her. “My name is Julian. I’m a friend of Reysa’s.” Yasmine looked over to Reysa for confirmation who smiled in acknowledgement. “Please drink this,” he spoke so gently that her anxiety subsided from the warmth of his words. “If it’s too cold, I will have it warmed for you.”

Yasmine struggled to respond with those piercing blue eyes watching her so closely. Such concern this stranger showed for her. She could not trust this. He was a pureblood vampire, and after the atrocities she had seen, she could never feel safe in their world. Of course, after what she experienced at the hands of her own kind, she would never feel safe with them either. There was no peace for her anywhere anymore.

“I prefer the cold,” she responded as her voice trembled.

“Me too,” he smiled as he abruptly stood up and returned to his seat across of her. Something about him rattled her unsteady nerves. She couldn’t worry about this now. She had to tell Reysa everything. She needed their help.

Yasmine quickly drank the water as the coldness numbed away her fear. “After hours of looking at pictures and video clips of the attacks, Adam and Eve explained that they were part of a movement to stop this—to stop the purebloods from destroying us. They wanted to save people like me from becoming another victim. They called themselves ‘ELM’, the Equality and Liberation Movement. Their mission was to end the tyranny of the purists and to help the rest of us rise up against out oppressors and free ourselves from their enslavement.” Yasmine smiled bitterly as she recited those words. So often they preached those words to her. They had been permanently etched into her memory. She would never be able to cleanse them from her mind.

“The funny thing is, I felt like they were my oppressors and they were enslaving me. I knew they would not let me go unless I helped them. They weren’t asking for my support they were demanding it as if there was no way I could possibly refuse after what they showed me. They kept saying this was war and that I needed to join my people and save us from our oppressors. I didn’t know what they wanted me to do, but I could sense they wanted evil and I would take no part in that. I refused them, at least for a while.”

Yasmine’s stubborn refusal to join was not without consequence. “For several days, they tied me to a chair in that little room and they kept replaying the images over and over again until they were all I could see but I wouldn’t break. Then they started drugging me. I don’t know what it was but I had never felt such unbearable agony. Despite that, I still didn’t break, but they wouldn’t give up either. Eventually they found my weakness and I had no choice but to give them what they wanted.”

After two weeks of Yasmine’s failure to submit, her captors showed her a different video—a video of a lycan who had ripped his own flesh from his bones in a fit of rage. There were others. Vampires and lycans suffering from some type of madness destroying themselves. They were all subjects in a lab. This lab Yasmine realized. Each day of their insanity chronicled for the amusement of ELM. Yasmine would never forget that sickened feeling as she saw the smiles on Adam’s and Eve’s faces as they watched this video with her. They were so disgustingly pleased with themselves. So proud of what they had done. So proud of their kills. They had helped create a drug that could kill vampires and lycans. Something that seemed virtually impossible had become a reality.”

“Mescah.” Reysa explained what they knew about the drug to Yasmine and Yanis. There was no point in trying to keep this a secret any longer. The secret was out whether the Council wanted it to be or not. Mescah was destroying purebloods at an increasingly alarming rate.

“They boasted about their creation,” Yasmine explained. “This was just the beginning. They had sages and alchemists helping them develop even stronger, better drugs, using various herbs and unstable compounds, but that wasn’t enough. They needed help making these herbs and compounds interact. They needed magic, black magic.”

That’s when Yasmine learned what they wanted from her. They knew about her powerful spellbinding abilities. All witches had some degree of skill, but not all witches were the same. Only a small percentage could fully embrace dark magic, the black arts of death. Yasmine was one of the strongest.

She could not understand how they knew about her. Yasmine rarely used her gifts, but they somehow knew the depth of her power and that’s why she had been taken. “I was set up from the beginning. They had been looking for me for some time. My boring, invisible life in Las Vegas shielded me for years, but somehow they found me and they set this plan in motion. I stupidly fell for it.”

After watching the video about mescah, they removed her from the small room and took her to their laboratory. In the room were two cages both filled with traumatized children who had been kidnapped from their parents and clans. “They grabbed this little jaguar cub.” Yasmine stroked the cub resting comfortably on her lap. “They threatened to inject him with the drug I had seen on the video. They said that even though the drug was meant for lycans and vampires, it worked quite well on shifters, especially baby shifters. I couldn’t bare it for them to hurt this little guy.” Yasmine wrapped her arms around the sleeping cub like a mother protecting her child. “There was something about this little guy that tugged at my soul. I couldn’t let him be hurt. I gave in, Reysa. I agreed to help them as long as this child stayed with me. At least I could keep him safe even though there was little I could do to protect the others.

"The other children were part of another plan," Yasmine explained. "Some of those children were being trained as soldiers who would be expected to defend ELM against vampire and lycan reprisal attacks. They would be expected to kill their own brethren on behalf of those that stole them from their families. And they were the lucky ones. The others, those not strong enough to fight, were being used as ELM test subjects for their drug experiments.”