The Cursed Blood, стр. 49

The Countess rolled her pretty eyes behind her feathered and fur lined hat’s blue beaded veil. “That when the Warlock walks the Earth once more and the last Darkling falls, the Dark Lord rises to rule a blind world. Roughly translated, of course.” At this Gramps went silent and swept the horribly savaged clearing with a tired, troubled, sad look.

“Is it possible?” he finally asked.

“Of course not. It’s a silly, wicked story that wicked Witches tell their wicked spawn to make the sting of their last abject failures defeat sting a little less.” Milly snorted as she blew out smoke and continued to stare down at me in a very unsettling way. The Countess, however, said nothing, rubbing her still grey and white dusty and ash powdered gloved fingertips together in pensively thoughtful silence.

“Wait, you disagree?” Milly asked disbelievingly.

The Countess merely glowered at her coldly from behind her veil and pursed her very red, full lips in an almost pouting way and shook her head uncertainly. “There are urgent questions that need answered. We need to convene the full Council, now.”

“But that hasn’t been done since that disastrous cruise in April 1912, and we all know how that turned out,” She complained agitatedly. “It was a mess, and the food was ghastly, and I lost my luggage!”

The Countess just continued glaring.

“Oh, very well.” Milly resigned herself as she conjured a clear glass vial webbed in silver and iron and uncorked it as she stalked forward, scooped it full of Fiendfire tainted ash, and recorked it, carefully sealing it with green wax from her designer leather purse that she melted in her fingers.

Just then I shivered, and everyone stopped and stared at me with no small amount of concern, but not for me catching a chill.

I could sense something that felt for a lack of better descriptions, dark and wrong. And with it an icy freezing touch I could feel in my bones began to build as the ethereal cold slipped down my spine, eliciting another pronounced shiver.

Everyone glanced about uneasily while Milly secured the vial in her bag as she wearily studied the shadowy tree line at the property’s edge. A moment later she sniffed at the air and froze, her eyes widening in disbelief.

“Oh no, oh great Gods, no,” she gasped as she whipped about, fixing Gramps with a startled, horrified look even as he and the Countess glanced among themselves grimly, they too having just caught the scent.

As yet another bit of useful insight to the reader, much like Ascended Darklings, Witches and such have uncommonly potent senses when it comes to detecting magic or danger. They can actually feel it, as if it were vibrations in the air accompanied by telling scents that hint at what lurks unseen. Some of the rare exceptions being Darklings and Wizards, the latter being more than powerful enough to almost completely cloak themselves from being sniffed out by a Witch.

“It’s them, Artur. How could they be here?” Aunt Milly hissed, something in her voice chilling my blood more than the Darkling’s gift had as her hand clamped onto my shoulder.

She then began swirling the other franticly in the air as The Doctor had when summoning up his portal, through which Gramps and I had walked through to get to this horrible clearing in the first place. The air bubbled, warped, and violently twisted and with a powerful shove I was sent tumbling through it.

I toppled head over heels out of the portal, landing in a heap dry heaving my guts out at White Owl’s booted feet on Gramps’ porch, my head spinning and splitting, like someone with heavy spiked boots was marching all over my brain. He arched a brow at me from his seat and took a huge bite of breakfast sandwich as Manx trotted over whining and licking at my face.

“Went well, did it?” he asked as he chewed.

“I’ve not a clue,” I gasped out between heaves. “I think something’s, something’s wrong though.”

“Mmm… Sounds about right.” he chewed calmly. “The Clampetts all dead then?”

I nodded but didn’t trust myself to talk as I fought off my splotchy, fuzzy vision and tried to catch my bearings. All while for the second time in under an hour a bubbly, gurgling feeling twisted at my stomach and an acidic bad taste unpleasantly seeped up from my guts into my dry, fouled mouth.

“Sad news.” He nodded back and salted his hash brown as heavily as ever and took a generous bite. “I weep for them.” He chewed and tossed Manx a bit of hash brown that the Witchound snatched out of the air almost mechanically.

“Anything interesting?” he asked as he licked at his fingers then plucked his sandwich back up from its cheese clumped wrappings and took another bite.

“Something about a prophecy concerning a ‘Dark Lord’ rising, before things went cold and I got pushed through a portal,” I managed as I pulled myself into a chair in time to watch White Owl drop his sandwich and choke, gagging and pounding at his chest with his big, silver ringed fist.

Manx eyed him then ate the dropped treasure trove of buttered biscuit, sausage, egg, and cheese in one gulp, delightedly licking the porch boards clean of crumbs.

After a moment the coughing and chest pounding subsided and he was again OK as can be for a man who’d just tragically lost his sandwich. White Owl eyed the demonic dog (that was at that moment happily licking at his chops) with the deeply accusing and pained look of someone who had just been betrayed deeply. Forlornly, he plucked off leavings of cheese from the lost sandwich’s wrapper, ate them, then crumpled it up and tossed it into his lunch pail, fixing me with a deadly serious look as he latched it closed.

“Tell me everything.”

By the time everyone stumbled back in through the door an hour later (the now hatless and disheveled Countess between them), they found