The Supreme Knight

Torpidity seeped into the recesses of Elysa’s foggy mind and threatened to drag her back into the blackness she desperately wanted to escape. She felt drained, and she had never felt this tired before. It was too much fight for her weak body, and she allowed herself to be sucked back into unconscious oblivion.

It felt like an eternity later when she opened her eyes. She blinked, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dim light. The air was cold and musty, and each breath she took made her lungs ache.

She pushed herself into a sitting position and hissed as a deep pain shot through her back.

Where was she? She clamped her mouth with her hand as she retched and focused on breathing slowly. An old light bulb hung above her head, dimly illuminating the brick walls that soared up till they met with a beamed metal roof.

She was in some empty room. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her racing heart. Think, Lysa, think.

She remembered getting up at dawn, drawing, and going to the children’s home. Nothing peculiar happened until she was on her way home. She had run into a figure dressed entirely in black, and then nothing. She remembered nothing.

Icy fear trickled down her spine. Why couldn’t she remember what happened next?

A thud echoed across the cold, hard floor. It ricocheted in her ears. Someone was coming.

A door creaked open somewhere in the shadows. She jerked her head up and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her stomach churned at the sudden motion.

The figure that entered the room was so dark that he seemed like a shadow. He was a thickset man, wearing a black hoodie that ensured he remained anonymous to her.

Elysa wondered how long it had been since that day. Three days? Two days? A month?

Her head ached as she struggled to assess her surroundings. He bent in front of her and lifted her chin to look at him. His pose screamed power, his broad shoulders were held high, and he loomed ominously in her face.

Elysa flinched. He didn’t have a face, and he wasn’t faceless because of the dark. He didn’t really have a face.

“What are you...Oh my god.” Her stomach retched again as the man began to laugh.

“Glad to see you’re awake, my darling.” The man’s voice was deep; it slithered across the room, making the hair on her arms stand up.

“Who are you? Where am I?” Her voice cracked. “How did I get here?”

“I brought you here. You’re my special guest.” His accent was so thick that she had no idea where he was from.

“I think it’s high time I left.”

“What you want doesn’t matter here, my darling.”

“My family knows I’m gone. They’ll be looking for me. My dad is the Alpha.” Anger and terror paraded up her spine.

His evil laughter echoed against walls and hung over her like a promise of what was coming. His boots tapped against the floor as he circled her.

“Your family has no idea you’re missing yet. And when they do, yes, they’ll definitely come to rescue you, but it’ll be too late. You’ll be gone by then. Long gone. You’re the key to sustaining our bloodline, Lysa.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Sustaining what? I’m a werewolf. I’m not like you,” she squinted, trying to make out the dimensions of the room and find a way out.

“Oh, my beautiful Lysa, so sheltered away from the evil lurking in the dark. Your mother has not told you about us, has she?”

“My mother?”

“The coward. She preferred to be called Luna rather than serve the Queen Mother. She renounced us, and we allowed her to leave. How does she pay us back? She connives with her wicked husband to make our clan extinct!”

His voice turned icy at the last sentence.

“I don’t understand what you are saying. Please let me go... please let me.”

“Have the drawings started?” he asked.

“No one, Lysa. I repeat, no one should know about your drawings. Promise me. Promise me Lysa!” Her mother’s voice resounded in her head.

“No...” she gasped out the answer as she felt her lungs close up. Her hands caught her neck as she gasped for breath. The torture was unbearable.

“Choose your next words wisely, my darling. Have the drawings started?”

Her lungs felt free, and she drew deep breaths to get them functioning.

“Y...es.”

“What has your mother told you about it?”

“Nothing...I was not supposed to tell anyone about it.”

“Typical of that coward,” he laughed.

“You’re a prophet. A seer if you prefer. Your drawings, as I’m sure you already know, are from the future. They can never be wrong.”

“A seer?”

“Oh, so naïve, my darling. There are werewolves, so, of course, there are witches and other supernatural creatures. You should have been taught that as a wolf... Did your dearest mother hide you away from that too?”

Elysa bowed her head. She had believed that it was only because of her inability to shift that she was hidden away from others like an illegitimate child.

“Your father killed our people. He wiped them all up like he was clearing trash. And I can’t let us go extinct. Now that’s why you’re here. To help us.”

“There’s nothing I can do. The visions don’t come when I want them.”

“Oh, no, my darling, not visions. You won’t need to draw for a long time. What I need is your blood. And not just a mega pint. I need all of it. Every single drop, my darling. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

Elysa blocked the harrowing thoughts and thought of a plan. She quickly scanned the eerie room, and it was empty except for a dull-dusted green wooden chair.

There was barely any light in the room. The bulb above her head grew dimmer, but rays from a fire gleamed through the window.

Suddenly, her mind raced. A window was good; she could make a run through it. She pulled herself off the ground and began to stand. If only she could get to the window, she would make her escape.

Her legs were crippled with excruciating pain.

“Stupid, stupid move.”

As her senses kicked in, she felt pain shoot up and down her body. Peering down at her legs, she saw it. They were disjointed. She screamed. The man was wheezing, and he clutched his stomach and laughed heartily.

“If your mother had taught you the basics, my darling, escaping would have been as easy as snapping your finger. You would have been able to bury me beneath the ruins of this building in a second. So, I have your mother to thank for you being so idiotic.” He straightened himself. 

“As much as I would love to watch the blood seep out of your body as you screamed, I do not have the heart to stomach it. So, I’ll see you in hell, bitch.”

He walked toward a wall and walked through it.

“Make it quick. She may fight back, and she has a weapon.” He seemed to be talking to someone.

Two people, actually. She leaned back against the wall and signed out, eying the two men slowly walking toward her.

“It’s all over. Nowhere to go,” one of them murmured in a soothing voice.

Elysa pulled the small blade she always carried around from her booth and held it by her side. She lacked basic fighting skills, but she wasn’t going down without a fight.

“Little wolf, it’s too late to struggle. I promise it will be quick. The master doesn’t want us to prolong it,” the second one said.

“It’s a sacrifice. Everyone sacrifices one way or the other for their loved ones. My wife and daughter sacrificed themselves for me. Think of the good that will come out of this later for our clan.”

“Fuck you,” she said, gripping the knife much harder.

They came at her then, fast, but not so fast that she got a good slice of one of them across his palm. He wrenched the knife from her grip and pinned her against the wall, pressing his arm into her neck.

“You little bitch. She fucking cut me,” the man holding her down complained.

“I thought we were all supposed to sacrifice. The knife was made with a drop of my blood,” she threw out sarcastically.

He flung her down on the cold floor and frantically started to wipe the blood from his hand.

She tried to rise and make a run for it, but the other man caught her and kicked her feet from under her, and she fell back to the ground.

“You fucking witch!” The man she had cut kicked her in the stomach a few times.

“Where’s the master?”

“He left. He won’t be back until we have her blood.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do with this cut then? She fucking cut me.”

“You’ve said that over and over. I hear you. Let’s do what we have to do and get out of here.”

“What if I die? Her blood is toxic. We all know that we can’t let it mix with ours without the spell cast first.”

The man started to pace back and forth, muttering to himself, while the other man tried to calm him down.

Elysa didn’t want him to calm down. The man had said she had the power to kill him, so she thought of a lie as fast as possible, and she was glad it helped.

“I don’t think you’ll die. The last person didn’t, I promise. He was paralyzed, fully paralyzed. It was just a drop of blood,” she tormented.

“I’m going to kill her,” the cut man said, still frantically wiping the cut on his hand.

“While your friend here is draining me of my blood,” she said, “I’ll be glad to watch you suffer in agony. Your wife and daughter need you.”

“You fucking bitch!” he lunged at her and locked his hand around her throat, and she prepared herself. This was the end.

If she couldn’t escape and if help wasn’t coming, a quick death was the best.

But his friend dragged him off of her before he could snap her neck or rip out her throat or whatever he was going to do.

“Something is going on outside.”

“What do you mean?”

He gripped the man she had cut behind the neck to try and focus on him.

“Something’s wrong. We’re being attacked.”

“Attacked? Is that even possible?”

The other man dragged Elysa to her feet and pushed her forward toward a wall.

“Let’s get her out of here. If we lose her, we’ll be dead first.”

A door appeared, and they pushed her through to a hallway. His friend was a dozen feet ahead of them when two big, hulking shapes emerged out of the darkness.

“What the hell?” the man holding her said to himself.

“Oh shit! Oh shit!” the other man said, running back toward them.

Ahead, the two shapes slowly came out of the darkness. The first thing she could make out were the eyes of the first one. They were blue like the sea, and they glowed in the dark.

He was almost the same height as her eyes, and he was not a werewolf that she was sure of.

“What the...” the man holding her said under his breath, letting go of her arm.

The two started backing up, but Elysa remained where she was. She watched, not really believing that she would come out of this alive. Every instinct in her body told her to run, but she stayed completely still. One wolf had a sandy color, the other was jet-black.

The sandy wolf stopped in front of her and stood next to her as if standing guard. The jet-black one passed her without a glance; his towering body of muscles and fur slid past, eerily silent.

She turned and saw the two men trapped with nowhere to go. Elysa shut her ears as a deep guttural sound growled out. It sank into her bones and terrified her. Then she saw it lunge, and she heard the screams faintly and smelt the stench of blood as their flesh was torn away.

She slumped, but she never touched the ground. Her only thought was if she would ever be able to go home again as she heard the two wolves shift back to their human form.

“Is she okay?”

Her body seemed to recognize the voice. Unlike the guttural sound of his wolf form, his voice was rough and flat, but it sounded ethereal.

He took her into his arms, and she snuggled into him as she slowly drifted out of consciousness. He seemed safe.