Chapter 2

Miaka’s P.O.V

I was looking around the central base for evidences when Rain, the commander of my elite guard, came to stand beside me.

 “Your Highness, all immortals are secured and the scientist has been contained .Our team has also gathered all evidences of DNA they could find in and out of the warehouse base.” Rain bowed her head in a curtsy. “The trucks just left for the rehabilitation centre. We await your orders.”

 “Thank you Rain, I’ll just do a last check and then I’ll burn this place down,” I said as I looked at the deserted warehouse. Who could have thought that such heinous deeds were being committed inside this innocent looking building?

“Shall I escort you?” She asked.

“No. Go wait in the car outside, I’ll be right there.” I told her and headed towards a door at the back of the factory. The cold storage has to be somewhere in that direction, and although I knew what I’d find there, I still went alone. As the Demon King and the head of the Dark Council, I’d witnessed far worse scenarios from a very early age. No one ever gets used to watching such horrors, but it was like poison, once you take it on a daily basis in tiny doses, your body becomes resistant to it. Maybe that said something about my sanity, or maybe I was truly becoming a part of my world where only the cruel ruled.

 As expected, the cold storage was empty except for the slaughtered corpses of several immortals. All three of the freezers were in the same condition. Since my men had already gone through this entire space, there was nothing else for me to do here. I ordered the hounds to leave and they disappeared into the shadows, returning to heir home. Since there was nothing else to be found, I was about to turn to leave when a faint heartbeat caught my ears.

And a movement behind me caught my eyes.

I went to turn towards the noise but someone put their hands on my mouth and I was pulled back against a solid wall of muscles, my arms held behind my back. But my captor didn’t know who he was dealing with. Within the next second, he was pinned to the wall, my dagger at his throat with nowhere for him to run. And then my eyes locked with the most unusually beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

They were violet with a hint of bluish grey around the pupil, a colour I’ve never seen before, even among demon kind. It was like a kaleidoscope of colours, shifting from blue to violet to grey. It took me a second to look away from those hypnotic eyes and to a handsome face that was all sharp angles and perfect symmetry. Soft black hair fell on his forehead, which looked like liquid silk from the light of the lamp overhead. For some reason I felt captivated by him, which was strange because beauty wasn’t something that I was unaccustomed to.

There was just something about him that was hypnotic…something tantalizing. It held me captive, made my breath swell. He was the perfect distraction. And yet I couldn’t make myself end his life.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” there was no fear in his melodic voice, in his eyes. “But I need you to put the dagger down so we can talk.”

I did so instinctively, but my guard was still up. Although I did want to laugh at him for trying to reassure me about not wanting to hurt me. He clearly had no idea who he was dealing with. Or maybe he did know who he was dealing with, unless he was living under a rock and hadn’t just witnessed what had happened.

 There was however, no way that I was trusting even my own shadow in this place pervaded by the stench of death. What I wanted to know even more was how he evaded my hounds? How was he still alive? There was no way my hounds had missed him. Where had he been hiding? Hellhounds were known to sniff out any living being in their vicinity. Unless he was a zombie, he couldn’t have evaded defection.

“Who are you?”I asked him. He couldn’t be more than twenty years old and yet he wore the same clothing as the guards had. Those vile humans who had been torturing innocent immortals!

“That’s not important,” he shook his head. “You need to come with me, now.”

He turned and left on the heels of his statement, moving further down the hall and away from the storage unit. I blinked rapidly at his retreating back, unused to someone expecting me to follow orders. Not knowing what else to do, I started following him, knowing full well that he just might be leading me into a trap. Well, he could try to kill me but I doubt this would be his lucky day.

But he led me to the actual lab at the back of the house where the stench of chemicals combined with immortal blood was so strong that it was making my stomach churn. I kept my face expressionless despite the situation. This was probably the place where the experiments were being conducted because I think I saw several jars at the back of the lab with body parts suspended in formaldehyde. I followed him through another set of doors with more chemical bottles and even more body parts held in formaldehyde, including an entire head of a vampire which had been skinned.

Whispering a silent prayer in my mind to all the souls lost, to all the people I had let down, I followed behind the man while placing a hand to my stomach. It was getting nauseating in here and I needed to get out soon. I knew I would be scrubbing this stench off my body for the next several days. If only regret was as easy to clean as the stench of this putrid blood.

We stopped suddenly in front of a wall at the end of the hallway and I thought we had reached a dead end, but then the man pressed his palms on the wall and it moved back to reveal a secret trapdoor and a set of stairs that led to what appeared to be the basement.

So that’s how my hounds had missed him!

I used my senses to search for heartbeats or any kind of movements, but all I could hear was the sound of air vents turning. The basement was narrow and stingy with the scent of rot and decay heavy in the air. This must be some kind of burial site or dumping ground for failed experiments.

“How much further?” I asked him, getting impatient. If her was trying to take me to the depths of Hell then the jokes on him.

At first he didn’t answer me, just kept on moving forward. His stance was rigid and his shoulders stiff, like a soldier in attention. And just when I thought he was purposely ignoring my question, he came to an abrupt halt.

“We’re here.”

We finally came to a stop in front of a set of closed doors. Just like any other door in this facility, this was too was made out of metal and looked old. But there was something about this that didn’t quiet settle right with me.

“What’s behind this?” I asked him, a sense of dread settling in my stomach.

He didn’t say another word, simply opened the doors wide enough for me to see the contents inside.

And all the air left my lungs at the sight.