When Connor arrived at the cellar he had been supernaturally drawn to, his eyes widened as a gasp escaped his throat. Not only a ghoul, but a mage as well as two vampires lay unconscious, including the one who was well over three hundred years old, and the one that he had been tasked to save.

Due to the very bond Connor had to her, Kirielle was of course the first one he moved to check on the well-being of. Ironically, she was the one who was in the least dire need of his medical assistance. As he hurried to check and make sure Kirielle was only slumbering, and in no way injured, the large suitcase he had brought with him began shaking violently.

Tearing his attention away from his beautiful blond regnant, he moved to open the case and reached in to remove the lid from the mist-filled jar packed in amidst the stored blood he had taken from his old place of employment.

Returning to her natural form, with a few still smarting burns covering her skin from her brief brush with daylight, Lissa also quickly surveyed the scene around them. “You said she told you to save Claire?” she asked worriedly, her eyes moving to where Claire had been overtaken by that daily slumber. However, Lyka had now grown deathly pale as she too had collapsed unconscious and lay across Claire’s chest, with a bloody gash in her wrist.

Lissa tossed a glance at Eliot long enough to see that he did still seem to be breathing at least, though she was more concerned with how near to death Lyka now appeared, as well as the message Kirielle had given Connor upon summoning him.

“She told you Claire needed blood to keep healing?” she asked as she pulled Lyka off of Claire’s body as gently as she could. The wording of the message itself struck her as more than strange. Once their kind healed, they healed. Needing to ‘keep’ healing was a rather odd turn of phrase, which must have had some deeper meaning behind it in order to have been included in such an urgent plea for help.

“I thought it was strange too,” he agreed as he moved toward Claire then as well.

“Well it looks like Lyka has given her all she could,” Lissa told him sadly as she checked to find that the girl’s pulse was nearly non-existent. “Give Claire the blood, quickly,” she told him in the same regretful tone.

“What about her? She looks like she may need it too,” he swallowed hard as his pretty blue eyes took in Lyka’s pallid complexion.

Lissa took a moment to ponder the choice before her. “I can save the girl with only a drop of my own. But it seems Claire is in even more dire need if we go by what Kirielle told you.”

“Your own?” Connor swallowed hard, his hands shaking slightly as he began preparing for the transfusions that Claire apparently needed. “You mean...?”

“Just help Claire. That’s what Sean needs us to do. I’ll deal with the rest... somehow,” she whispered as she lifted Lyka into her arms, heading out of the cellar to make sure that what she needed to do to save Lyka would not endanger anyone else there in that room.

Lissa carried Lyka back through the tunnels for as far as she could before the girl succumbed to blood loss at last, her heart coming to a stop there in her arms. Lissa let out a deep, sad sigh as she set the girl as gently as possible upon the floor of the tunnels.

“You kept her alive long enough for us to get to her. You don’t deserve this,” she whispered to the dead girl laying before her.

Lissa then took another look down at her, deep in thought then. She knew all too well of the laws it was her very job to enforce. But she also knew that law and justice were not always the same thing. On that thought, Lissa then decided that she would quietly accept her own fate if it meant that justice would prevail, and an innocent girl would not perish for giving her very life to save another, just as her bond had demanded she do.

Lissa then steeled herself to tear a hole in her own wrist, just like the one upon Lyka’s. Another moment to tell herself that this was indeed the right thing to do, and then she dripped her own blood into the girl’s mouth with another shaky sigh.

Standing again she looked down at Lyka once more. Lissa then closed her dark eyes, sending her own thoughts and desires to the denizens of the tunnels surrounding them. Within minutes, dozens upon dozens of the city’s rats began appearing from the darkness of the tunnels. Upon reaching Lissa’s feet, they all simply came to a stop, almost as though awaiting their next command.

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Lissa finally opened her eyes and looked around at all the supposedly lowliest of beasts that now surrounded her. Sadly smiling down at them, she spoke in a gentle whisper, “Your sacrifice will be noble, just as hers was.”

It was then that Lyka began to stir once more, her body being reborn as she struggled back to consciousness. Lissa then stepped back, pressing herself against the tunnel, and literally melding her body into becoming one with that earthen wall. Lissa needed to take that step in order to keep herself safe while Lyka sated her inevitable paralyzing hunger on all the small creatures now surrounding her, prepared to give their lives in order for her to continue living, just as Lyka had done for Claire already that day.

Eventually, Lyka’s frenzy subsided and she was able to get some small control over her wits again. Her wide blue eyes took in the sight of the numerous dead rats around her, and the taste of blood in her own mouth; the feeling of all her senses multiplied, her skin so cold to the touch now... her heart no longer beating.

Just as she let out a shuddering sigh, she felt her eyelids becoming unbearably heavy. The sun was still high in the sky outside of those dark tunnels, and the time was just barely seven am, despite it having been ten pm just a couple of hours earlier. Having been newly made, Lyka of course had not yet mastered Lissa’s ability to stay awake during the day, and she fell unconscious once again, just as Lissa emerged from the tunnel wall once more.

Lissa sighed sadly down at her new childe once more, regretting the fact that she would not yet be able to try and help her adjust in any small way she could. At least not until the sun set once again. And once that happened, Lissa would have to go and face whatever punishment was to be levied against her for breaking the same laws she had been tasked to enforce for over two centuries.

She looked back the way she had brought Lyka and sighed again. Perhaps, just perhaps, if she found some way to make any sense at all of what had happened to hurt Claire so badly, and how the very night had turned to day in only a matter of seconds; then maybe that would grant her some lenience from her Prince, if their two centuries of friendship alone weren’t enough, that is.

Upon arriving back at the mysterious and ever so well-hidden cellar, Lissa found that Kirielle was still asleep, as was expected. Though Claire’s magically inclined lover was also still unconscious, despite having already spent years in some strange coma, before then disappearing from her life again for another several years. Yet now, here he was, apparently having somehow returned to her side once more, just when she was now in such a dire state.

Turning her attention to the one conscious soul in the room, she found Connor had since moved Eliot and Claire to a mattress at the side of the room, and Kirielle had been placed on a cot nearby, despite Kindred having no such need for comfort while they slumbered. He had also begun giving her those apparently needed transfusions, and was now sitting at a small table near the mattress she and Eliot now occupied.

He looked up from the table in front of him as Lissa arrived. With a questioning look, she spoke, “Has he woken up at all yet? We could really use some answers about... all of this,” Lissa stated, gesturing to the ceiling above them in a silent reference to the sun still hanging in the skies outside.

“No, I was concentrating on Claire. But maybe we should try to wake him. Though I’m not sure if that would be wise or even helpful really, as none of this makes any sense at all,” Connor stated with defeat.

“You look a bit... terrified,” Lissa observed. “I know the time flying forward like it did is pretty disastrous. But I assumed my kind would be even more afraid of this than yours. I still don’t even know how many may have fallen when the sun suddenly rose, at ten o’clock at night,” Lissa stated, still trying to keep a calmness to her tone, despite how she was truly feeling right then.

“Yes the sun thing is pretty decidedly strange too. But not like...” he just shook his head down at the table again.

Narrowing her eyes as she followed his, Lissa continued, “So, have you discovered why Claire would have this need to ‘keep healing,’ yet?”

With a shaky breath, he looked back down at an x-ray that he had been studying before Lissa’s return. Thankfully, he thought to bring every medical supply he could get into his vehicle, as he had no earthly idea what, if any he would need to somehow try to help with any sort of ailment a centuries’ old vampire may need his assistance with.

“I doubt you’d believe me if I told you,” Connor said in a near whisper, looking down at the x-ray once more.

Lissa scoffed as she moved closer, “I’m walking around during the day, even though I’ve been Kindred for over three hundred years, and before that, a nurse. I may believe more than you think,” she told him, trying to maintain a light tone despite the worry on her face.

Shaking his head again, he looked back up at her, “The red haired woman, you said you were going to turn her?”

“We were talking about Claire,” she redirected his attempt to postpone telling her about this mysterious malady Claire was apparently suffering.

He sighed again before standing and handing her the x-ray with another shaky breath, “You tell me what you think I may be able to do to fix this.”

Lissa narrowed her brown eyes as she took the x-ray from him. She couldn’t stop her loud gasp as she looked down at what appeared to be an image of Claire’s body filled with dozens, if not hundreds of snakes, very likely now devouring her from inside.