Chapter 3: Echoes of the Past

Chapter 3: Echoes of the Past

The deadbolts on Kaelen’s apartment door slid home with a series of heavy, final-sounding thuds. He tossed the two chilled blood bags onto the crate that served as a table. They landed with a soft, wet slap. Elara, who was still curled on the floor, a trembling knot of misery, flinched at the sound. Her head snapped up, those crimson-flecked eyes locking onto the dark red liquid within the plastic pouches.

A low, guttural sound escaped her throat, half-whimper, half-growl. The Beast inside her was roaring.

"Get a hold of yourself," Kaelen said, his voice sharp. He ripped the top off one of the bags. "This isn't a steak dinner. It's medicine. Drink it slow. If you throw it up, there isn't any more."

He tossed the bag to her. She caught it with a fumbling, desperate clumsiness, her hands shaking so violently she almost dropped it. She tore at it with her teeth, the plastic giving way with a rip. She tilted her head back and drank, the thick, coppery fluid spilling down her chin. The sounds she made were not human; they were the frantic, gulping noises of an animal that had been dying of thirst.

Kaelen turned away, a muscle twitching in his jaw. The sight was too raw, too reminiscent of his own horrifying first days. He looked out the grimy window, his thoughts drifting back to the Undermarket, to the cool, assessing gaze of the Enforcer in the tailored suit. Getting noticed was bad. Getting noticed while harboring an illegal fledgling was a death sentence. He’d have to find a new place to lay low, maybe even a new neighborhood. But first, he had to get the girl stabilized.

When he turned back, she had finished the bag and was staring at her hands, which were now steady. The violent tremors had ceased. The feral light in her eyes had dimmed, replaced by a dawning, soul-crushing horror as the reality of what she had just done began to sink in.

"What... what was that?" she whispered, her voice hoarse.

"O-negative," Kaelen said flatly. "Hospital grade. Don't get used to it."

Before she could ask another question, a deafening crash echoed from the first floor of the building. It wasn't a door being opened; it was a door being annihilated, splintered from its frame. Heavy, booted footsteps pounded on the stairs, accompanied by shouting.

"Clear the ground floor! Sanctify the exits! Second team, move up!"

The voices were sharp, disciplined, and laced with a righteous fury Kaelen knew all too well. His blood went cold. The Argent Sun. They hadn't just been patrolling the area outside the gas station. They had tracked the scent of the Turning here. To his building. To his door.

"Up," he hissed, grabbing Elara's arm and hauling her to her feet. "Fire escape. Now."

He practically threw her towards the window, which overlooked a narrow, trash-filled alley. He slammed the heel of his hand against the rusted lock, forcing it open with a shriek of protesting metal. The cold night air rushed in, carrying the scent of rain and, fainter now, the cloying smell of holy oil.

They were already on the floor below, kicking in doors. "Anomaly presence confirmed! Upper floors!"

There was no time. Kaelen pushed Elara onto the rickety iron platform of the fire escape. "Down. Don't look back."

The old metal groaned under their weight as they clambered down the ladder. Elara was clumsy, her body still an alien thing to her. She slipped on a wet rung, crying out as her shin scraped against the corroded iron.

"Quiet!" Kaelen ordered, dropping down beside her.

A beam of intensely bright, silver-tinged light sliced through the darkness from a window above, sweeping across the alley. They pressed themselves flat against the brick wall, hiding in the deepest shadows. A head clad in a tactical helmet leaned out.

"West alley is clear," the hunter reported into his radio. The light swept past them, missing them by inches, and then the head withdrew.

They scrambled the rest of the way down, landing in a pile of sodden cardboard boxes. The hunters were at his apartment now; he could hear them smashing what little he owned. They'd find the empty blood bag. They'd know they were close.

"This way," Kaelen whispered, pulling Elara into a labyrinth of back alleys. They ran, their footsteps splashing in the filthy puddles. But the Order was efficient. Another beam of silver light cut across the alley ahead, blocking their path. They were being boxed in.

"In here," Kaelen grunted, forcing open a cellar door that led beneath a derelict bakery. They plunged into the musty darkness, the door swinging shut behind them. It was pitch black, the air thick with the smell of mold and long-dead rats. He could hear Elara’s ragged, terrified breathing beside him. Above, the footsteps of the hunters were closing in.

One set of boots stopped directly over their heads. They were trapped. Kaelen’s mind raced, searching for an option, any option, and finding none. They would be found. They would be judged. They would be purged.

And in that moment of absolute desperation, the old ghost rose up within him. The forbidden power he had sworn never to touch again. The very reason for his exile.

---

The memory hit him with the force of a physical blow. He wasn't in a stinking cellar; he was in the alabaster-white Grand Hall of House Valerius, the air cool and scented with night-blooming jasmine. He was younger, barely seventy years old, still full of a fool's pride. Lady Evangeline Valerius watched from her obsidian throne, her ice-blue eyes missing nothing.

He was in a training duel, a supposedly non-lethal contest of skill. His opponent, a brutish vampire named Lucian, had him on the defensive. Lucian was faster, stronger, a favored son of the House. He lunged, his hand shaped into a clawed blade, aiming for Kaelen’s heart. It was a killing blow, a flagrant violation of the rules, meant to humiliate and permanently end Kaelen’s ambitions.

Time seemed to slow. There was no way to dodge, no way to block. All he could feel was a desperate, burning desire to make him stop.

And something inside him answered. He didn't move a muscle. He just... reached. Not with his hands, but with his will. He focused on the life force thrumming within Lucian, the very blood that gave him his unholy strength. And he squeezed.

Lucian froze mid-lunge, his face a mask of shock and agony. His eyes bulged. A trickle of black, viscous blood seeped from his nose. To the outside observers, it looked as though he'd had a sudden aneurysm. But Kaelen could feel it. He could feel the blood in Lucian's veins thickening, congealing, turning to sludge. He had taken control of the very essence of another vampire.

He released his hold, and Lucian collapsed, twitching and gasping on the marble floor. The hall was silent, save for Lucian's pained whimpers. Kaelen looked up at Lady Evangeline. There was no anger on her face. There was something far worse: a cold, clinical fear. The look one gives to an unstable nuclear reactor.

"Hemokinesis," she had said later, in the cold privacy of her study. Her voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of a final judgment. "The power of blood. It is a chaotic, primal force. A cancer. Our society is built on order, Kaelen. On control. A power that allows one vampire to puppet another from the inside out is the ultimate seed of chaos. It cannot be studied. It cannot be tolerated. It must be cut out."

That was the day he became Exile.

---

Back in the suffocating darkness of the cellar, the hunter's footsteps shifted overhead. A floorboard creaked. He was directly above the loose section of the floor that served as their only concealment. In seconds, he would shine his light down, and it would be over.

Elara was holding her breath, her body rigid with terror. He could smell her fear, a sharp, metallic tang in the air.

Don't do it, the voice of reason screamed in his head. This is how it begins again. They will feel it.

But the alternative was a silver sword and a pyre of holy fire.

He closed his eyes, reached out with that same forbidden sense, and cast a net of perception into the world above. He couldn't risk touching the hunter directly. The Order's Knights were warded against such things. But he didn't need to. He just needed a distraction. His senses found what he was looking for: a dead rat, half-decomposed in the corner of the room above them, its body still holding a few precious drops of dried, congealed blood.

It was enough.

He focused his will, not with the panicked force of his youth, but with the precise control of a surgeon. He pulled.

Drip.

A single, dark droplet of reconstituted blood fell from the rafters, landing on the floorboards a few feet away from the hunter.

The footsteps stopped. The hunter was listening.

Drip... drip.

Kaelen made two more drops fall, creating a small, rhythmic sound. A leaking pipe? A wounded Anomaly hiding in the walls? The hunter shifted his weight, his attention drawn away from the floor beneath his feet and towards the corner where the sound originated. Kaelen heard the faint click of a weapon's safety being disengaged as the hunter moved cautiously to investigate the sound.

It was the opening they needed.

"Go," Kaelen breathed, pushing a petrified Elara towards the far end of the cellar. They moved like ghosts in the dark, finding another grate that led into the storm drain system. They slipped through it and disappeared into the foul-smelling tunnels beneath the city.

As they put distance between themselves and the hunt, Kaelen felt it. A faint, sickening tremor in the very fabric of the city's supernatural atmosphere. It was the echo of his power, a ripple spreading out from its point of origin. A signature as unique—and as damning—as a fingerprint.

He had saved them, but in doing so, he had just screamed his existence into the darkness. And he knew, with a certainty that settled like a shroud over his soul, that his oldest enemies had just heard him.