“This-“ Mia wheezed. “- is it.”

“Your endurance could use some work,” Brent mused as he carefully stalked up to the door of the house. “If we had rats chasing us down, you three would be monster snacks by now.”

“Fuck,” Mark let out a strangled gasp. “You.”

Lina rolled over and flopped into the overgrown grass, not even gracing anyone with an answer as she focused on breathing.

Mia herself was better off than those two, but she still felt like her lungs were on fire and as if someone bolted a stake into her side.

Carmilla looked irritatingly nonplussed, having taken to the dead sprint the group did like it was a leisurely jog.

“Should I knock?” Brent asked.

“Wait a moment,” Mia said, getting her breath under control. “Okay, let me go first. I don’t want any of you eating a buckshot by accident.”

“As for you, no attacking. You are on pure defence, alright?” Mia looked at the pink cat sitting alertly on her shoulder. It nodded. Taking a quick breath, Mia knocked loudly on the front door. “MOOOM? Are you home?”

Hearing no reply from the inside or even footsteps, Mia frowned. She could be asleep, she told herself. Instead of panicking, she reached over to the old potted plant to the right of the door.

It was like one of those bonsai trees, with its roots being aboveground and burrowing into it like a dozen questing tendrils. Which left a little place at the centre between them, mostly hidden. There she found the spare key.

Smiling, she snatched it up and quickly opened up the door. A moment later, she cast the spell she had prepared and a semi-translucent pink shield a metre in diameter appeared in front of her palm.

Just in case. I wouldn’t fault her for shooting anything that comes into the house before even thinking about asking it questions.

Her ears twitched. No heartbeats, no shotgun’s getting loaded, no clicks either. The house was dead silent. The closest sounds aside from Mia’s group came from the two neighbouring houses, some people having muffled conversations in each.

Mia walked ahead, knowing the place better than the back of her hand. Even as the evening sun’s light dimmed and cast long shadows, she easily navigated down the hallway and into the living room.

There was no sign of a fight, nothing was torn, looted or scraped. They continued on. Kitchen, toilets, storage room, basement, and even Mia’s old bedroom were empty.

That only left her mother’s bedroom and Gabe’s old room. Mia took a slow, calming breath. She didn’t smell blood, nor had she seen anything that would point to a monster having broken in.

She counted those facts as good news for now.

Mia pushed open the door that had once been her shared bedroom with her brother, back before Sophie moved out the moment she could get into her college dorms.

Taking the room in always made her stomach lurch uncomfortably. They never touched it, never cleaned it up either and the blankets were still on the bed just how Gabe left them after waking up one morning.

“Empty,” Mia murmured, closing the door again. She moved to the last door. No sounds still. Quick breath in, slow breath out, she turned the handle and stepped through with the Shield in front of her.

She expected, hoped even, that she’d hear a shotgun’s discharge the moment she did so. Alas, nothing. Empty. Mia felt her knees going weak, the whiplash from being so tense for so long just for nothing to happen strained her nerves to the limit.

“Can you smell anything?” Lina whispered a few steps behind, making Mia’s ears twitch.

“Yes,” Carmilla answered after a moment. “The trail is there, still hot. Someone slept in that bed just yesterday.”

“Can you follow it?” Mia whirled around, her voice quivering.

“Sorry,” Carmilla said weakly, averting her gaze. “The trail leads to the back garden and there it disappears.”

“How does that happen?” asked Brent.

“Either a Skill I suppose?” said the vampiress. “Or … her mother flew away.”

“What?” Mia asked, confused.

“The trail didn’t get erased like with the cat, it … dissipated naturally in the wind.”

“Can you tell whether there are older trails?” Brent asked thoughtfully. “Ones coming back here regularly over the last week to go together with earlier tracks leading away into the air?”

“I … can check,” Carmilla said with uncertainty. “It’s harder for me to find anything older than a few hours.”

“Please do,” Mia said, her eyes tearing up as she stared into those glowing sets of crimson eyes like a sad puppy.

“I’ll do my best,” Carmilla gulped, then quickly made her way to the back garden. She started walking in circles, sniffing at the air regularly like a bloodhound as Mia watched from the window.

“I’m glad you talked us into taking her along with us,” Lina whispered, leaning onto the windowsill next to Mia. “She’s a nice girl, even if the first impression we had of her was horrible.”

“Yeah,” Mia said awkwardly.

“Why don’t we let her work?” Lina asked. “I’m certain you watching her like a hawk isn’t helping her jump through the hoops calmly.”

“But-“

“Why don’t you read a book?” Lina asked. “Distract yourself a bit with something. I’ve seen you have a bunch in that pack of yours. Which ones did you choose?”

“Uhh, I have a few on magic, one on Halvyr history and one on Rift breaks.”

“Rift breaks?”

“It was a randomly generated book,” Mia shrugged.

“I see,” Lina murmured. “Could I borrow it for a bit?”

“Sure.” Mia shrugged, tearing her eyes away from Carmilla’s focused form. Fishing out the book Lina requested, Mia let out a resigned sigh and grabbed the Arcanism book for herself. Lina was right, glaring a hole into the side of Carmilla’s head as she worked wasn’t helping the girl any. “Here.”

“Thanks,” Lina said with a quick smile before snatching up the book and looking for a place to settle down to read.

“Let’s go to the living room, the boys are probably there already,” Mia said, grabbing her bag.

*****

Okay, how the hell does this work … Mia glared down at the book like it owed her money. She attempted the exercise again, trying to make her mana … flip, for a lack of a better word. The book described it like taking a shirt and turning it inside out but with her mana. Which doesn’t make a lick of sense.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Why was she even bothering? Well, apparently, she was doing arcane magic on hard mode till now since with the element’s main concept being ‘duality’, it obviously had two states.

Three, if you wanted to be a smartass about it. Like whoever wrote the book. These were quite understandably: chaotic, stable and flux.

Mia’s mana was, and had been since the beginning, in the chaotic state. Which apparently overcharged destructive spells like Arcane Blast but was a bitch to manipulate otherwise.

Stable, or ‘crystalline’ if you wanted to be fancy was the exact opposite. It would be calm, near static and hard to mould like clay, but it wouldn’t be trying to blow her arm off at every opportunity. It would also overcharge spells that were more static in nature like Shield and Bolt.

Since apparently weaving arcane mana into a crystalline structure boosts its integrity.

Lastly, flux was when mana would stay in a constant state of change. Flip-flopping between chaotic and stable. The book recommended not even attempting that until she was at the very least Rank 2. Apparently, it was even harder to control than the chaotic mana and would overcharge disruption spells.

Despite her continued grumblings, Mia was wholeheartedly invested in getting this thing to work. It was useful, interesting and … fun.

‘For most arcane mages the mental state they are in heavily influences which state their mana gravitates towards.’

The book read, but Mia could read between the lines. ‘Calm the fuck down if you want to change to stable mana’ was what she read between the lines, and while she understood that, it was harder to do it in practice than expected.

Even meditation seemed like a distant, unreachable goal to Mia as she sat on the old sofa in the living room. The sun was setting. It made her antsy. This would be her first night outside of Jeff’s fortress and she wasn’t in a place she felt all that safe.

This part of the city had been a little village once long ago, built a bit upstream from Graz. As the years flowed by though and as both the city and the village expanded their edges touched. Now that thin strip of suburban houses between the Mur and the werewolf's forest connected the two.

Mia overheard Brent saying he didn’t want to stay here overlong. The man was not liking the possibility of getting boxed in and cut off from the city.

That set her nerves alight once more, she was not leaving until she found her mother. It was just not happening. But she didn’t have anywhere near thick enough skin to ask the others to stay here along with her if they wanted to leave for their own safety.

Raiding, powerdrunk beastkin operating on group mentality was a danger of an entirely different kind than what the monsters in the city presented. If she had to choose, Mia would much rather fight the goblins or even the rats in the sewers.

Killing monsters was easy, making her only relieved, but fighting humans … that would make things ugly. Just thinking of really killing someone, of commiting murder sent her stomach lurching.

Ears twitching, Mia jolted as she heard the sound of something cutting through the air. It reminded her of a murderbird diving. Shit. Carmilla is outside by herself.

She jumped to her feet, but it seemed to have been too late. A loud crash sounded out from the garden, signalling that something smashed into the ground and kicked up a cloud of dirt and dust.

Carmilla’s shriek sent a shiver down her spine as she readied a Blast at her fingertips, the book she’d been reading falling to the ground as she rushed to the door.

The moment she reached for the handle though, her blood went cold as a shout cut through the kicked up dust cloud.

“What the hell do you think you are doing in my garden?”

The wind picked up, blowing the dust cloud right into the group’s faces. Mia, protected by the glass door, saw the form behind the cloud first.

Not that she needed to, just the sound of the familiar voice sent tears to her eyes. Her mother stood there, not quite the same as Mia remembered her, but that was to be expected. Mia wasn’t the same either.

“MOM!” Mia shouted, throwing the door open and rushed up to the woman. She had a pair of snow white wings extending from her back and her hair turned ashen white, but Mia couldn’t have mistaken her for anyone else.

“Mia?” Helene startled, but then was wrapped up in a crushing hug. Mia buried her face in the nook of her mother’s neck.

Mia broke down as she was hugged back and a gentle hand started ruffling her hair. She sobbed, clutching onto her mother like her life depended on it.

“Shhhhh,” Helene soothed. “It’s alright. Everything is alright honeybun, I’m here.”

*****

Carmilla extracted her face out of the dirt, staring back at the face shaped hole with a soft sigh.

Jumping to her feet, she took a quick few steps away from the mother, daughter duo as she rolled a nick out of her shoulder. The joint popped, snapping back into place as some of her lifeforce drained away to heal a few hair-thin cracks.

Only vampires had such a backwards, self-destructive way of healing themselves. Consuming your own lifeforce to heal a small wound, that would make anyone else burst out laughing at the stupidity.

Still, they couldn’t replenish it by taking it from others and nor were they one of the very few exceptions to the rule she’d told Mia not so long ago.

Carmilla could survive without a lick of lifeforce, but then she’d be a walking corpse for all intents and purposes. Not quite dead yet, but most certainly not alive either.

As far as first impressions went, Mia’s mother crashing heel first into Carmilla’s back was up there with the worst ones she had. Still, the jaded vampiress couldn’t help but smile softly as she took in Mia crying her heart out on her mother’s shoulder as the woman wrapped both of them up in a cocoon of white feathers.

An angel maybe? Carmilla wondered, her gaze jumping up to the top of the woman’s head. No halo. Plus, angels are spirits of Light. They shouldn’t have been able to survive on Earth, not once the Null Field reached its apex around the early 1900s. Even vampires went nearly extinct around that time and we lost most of our powers. What could she be then?

Her next guess would have been some avian beastkin, but she ruled that one out too as she caught no sign of feathers or clawed feet on the woman. Maybe a Shifter?

There were three kinds of magical beings with animal characteristics. Beastkin, Shifters and Magical Beasts.

The first were humans with animal bits, the last were magical animals that sometimes took on human form and Shifters were somewhere between the two. The most common example of their kind were werewolves.

Beastkin could rarely take on full bestial forms, even hybrid forms being an extreme rarity among their kind.

Those wings could be a partial transformation into her hybrid form. Carmilla thought, then shrugged. She’d find out in due time anyway. The vampiress had no intention of leaving the young halvyr’s side for the foreseeable future, or ever for that matter.

It’s nice to see her finally smile. Carmilla thought. She has a beautiful smile, I wish she wore it more often.

*****

“What are you doing here, you silly girl?”

Mia averted her gaze, having calmed down after a few minutes and was now wiping her tears. Which was probably why Helene felt it was time to question her.

Not that Mia had an answer to that question, not any that wouldn’t have sounded stupid now that she was looking at her mother standing before her looking more spry than ever.

The Awakening she went through had been kind to her, wiping away most lines that marked the older woman’s age. If Mia didn’t know her mother was pushing fifty, she wouldn’t have been able to guess.

She looks more like my sister than my mother now. Mia thought, scratching her cheek awkwardly as she tried to come up with a way to say ‘to save you’ without getting hit with a slipper for it. I promised I’d be careful. Going out to the monster infested city is the opposite of that.

Mia took a glance up at her mother’s face, and saw her release a sigh as the trademark stern motherly look she had on melted away.

“Still, I’m glad you are here,” Helene said, cupping Mia’s cheeks and softly caressing her cheeks with her thumbs. “I’ve seen some of what was happening further in the city. I can’t imagine it could have been easy getting out here, but maybe I have your new friends to thank for getting you here in one piece?”

“Probably,” Mia whispered, jumping at the opportunity to avert the topic. “Uh, guys this is my mother, Helene Vexley and mom these are my … friends?”

“Friends works just fine,” said Brent, stepping forth as the oldest member of the group and their de facto leader. “I am Brent Steiner, pleasure meeting you ma’am, your daughter saved our lives in the last couple of days a fair few times.”

I really didn’t. Mia frowned a bit at Brent. I’d be monster chow without them. I barely did anything.

“Did she now?” Helene asked, a motherly smile spreading on her face. Mia blushed and looked away, never having been one good with compliments. Especially ones she didn’t feel were deserved.

“She certainly saved mine,” Carmilla said with an awkward smile.

“Oh dear,” Helene exclaimed, looking at the ragged girl like she was just noticing her. At the same time her pair of white wings shrunk from their respectable four metres wingspan and seemingly melted into the woman’s back. “Let’s get inside and let me get you some snacks. I’d offer up a bath, but all the water I have here is in those barrels and you’d probably get more dirty from taking a dip in those than you already are.”

“I don’t think that’d be possible for me,” Carmilla murmured. “I’m Carmilla by the way.”

“Well, hello there dear,” Helene said. “I’ll get you a towel alright? The rest of you, come in.”