A cold draft chased the rain from the sky as I followed after the mage and left the heated diner. I felt the chill brush of the wind as I never had before, and the cold sank through the permeable layer of my skin, bypassing my jacket and t-shirt. I'd never known the cold to be so sudden, to be so all-consuming before. As a Sin, the cold had been naught but an inconvenience, a lack of atmospheric energy to convert and consume, something I would ignore and brush aside. As a mortal, the cold was more immediate. More pressing and insistent. 

I turned my face toward the black sky, eyes shut to the brush of raindrops breaking upon my cheekbones and forehead. 

A sudden recollection stole my breath as I remembered Cuxiel dying in the rain. I remembered the cold drops of water falling from the heavens and striking my face, the inexorable pull of grief upon my shoulders and the trickle of water upon my skin. Amoroth had screamed her terror and sorrow into the night. 

Real screams in the present yanked my awareness free of the torturous nightmare. I nearly stumbled from the curb as my head turned to the distant sound. Cage, too, standing below the awning outside the diner's glass door had heard the noise. Our eyes met, and without a word he started across the parking lot, moving with a swift gait toward the source of the sudden outcry.

Sucking air through my teeth to show my displeasure, I followed.

The slap of our feet against the wet pavement was loud despite the distant roar of motors on the highway and the sound of the rain splattering on the asphalt. Cage and I both hopped the chain barrier at the parking lot's end, landing in the knee-high brush of the abandoned lot situated adjacent to the dusty diner.

The scream that had summoned our attention had been strangled and singular. Cage and I moved carefully in the dark and checked behind each overgrown bush and prickly plant in search of the person who had cried out. I kept catching myself drawing in deep breaths and rolling the air past my tongue, desperate to taste the essence that would've directed my senses—but I tasted nothing aside from the bitter, acrid scent common in the desert after fresh rainfall.

I stopped searching after a minute, thoroughly irritated and now wet.

"This is pointless," I spat as I crossed my arms to stop my body's shivering and stomped back to the mage. "There is nothing here but fucking tumbleweeds and litter."

Cage sighed as he knelt in the brambles and dragged the hem of his coat through the mud. "Your lack of extrasensory abilities has dulled what little patience you have, boy." Before I could respond, the mage drew aside a twisted bush, revealing what lay beneath.

It was the teenager from the diner who'd left his friends in a rush. As I drew closer and crouched with Cage, I could see the boy was dead. His face held a terrified pallor, his eyes wide and unblinking despite the steady onslaught of rain.

I knew his death hadn't been natural. Something had sliced him open across the abdomen just above his groin, and though I didn't care to lift his ruined sweater to see the cut itself, I could smell that the slice was deep enough to splay open his bowels. My experienced eye roved from the obvious wound to the smaller one at his throat.

"Vampire," I hissed as my legs shifted beneath me. Before I knew what I was doing, I had adopted a defensive posture, my head swiveling as my eyes fixated on the shadows swathed around the kill site. Something innate in me sensed the eyes upon us and the boy. It was a predatory instinct so ingrained in my being it even acted upon my human psyche and drew my gaze in the right direction, fixing my eyes upon the denser shadows moving through the underbrush.

The vampires slithered through the dark with quick, jagged motions, like blades being drawn through flesh by arms too weak to complete the action. Dressed in ragged, torn clothing, their pale flesh was visible only in the briefest of instances when they stopped their circling to breathe or stumble.

I tried counting their number, but they kept their faces hidden from me and their movements were too blurred to decipher one body from the next.

"There's more than one. We need to leave."

The mage didn't raise from his kneeling posture. Instead, he leaned forward to lay two fingers upon the boy's chin and tip the head to better see the bite mark. "Curious. Why would they do that?"

The bite hadn't been clean. In fact, I was certain it'd been the killing blow on this poor boy, and the scream that had summoned us to his side had been little more than his death rattle. The vampires had all but hewn the side of his neck fully open—which was what Cage, and I, found so odd.

Vampires killed to survive, to feed, or to retain anonymity. They didn't murder for the sport of it. They were capable of doing so, obviously, but vampires lived in a world where their prey was often more cunning and less restricted than they were. Ruining potential food was taboo. Ripping the boy's neck out had wasted valuable sustenance for Wrath's wayward children.

"Vile creatures," I muttered as I took hold of the mage's collar to jerk him to his feet. He allowed me to do so, the smirk on his face clear even in the darkness. "If you do not move or cast some sort of spell we will be joining this kid in the hereafter shortly."

As I spoke, the mage dipped a hand into one of his pockets and withdrew a knife. The switchblade glittered with an unnatural light, and Cage swiped the extremity of the blade across his right cheek. Blood welled as the mage drew his thumb over the new injury and grinned.

I reared back on instinct, having been the recipient of such nefarious looks one too many times.

He began to twist and twine his hands together and move his fingers in intricate patterns, liquid and almost boneless. Just as it had at the house, the mage's power rose as a river does over its bank, swelling upward until it breaks its barriers and roars out in a great flood.

A mage's power was not like a witch's or a Vytian's. The energies and synapses it evoked held no natural appeal and they didn't slink like a predator or wend with the grace of ivy upon a trellis. Cage's magic was a river of electric shock that brought with it the taste of iron and metal, of steel and burning rock. The static clung to my skin and could be felt in my bones.

The energy burst from the mage in a silent boom. It illuminated the hunched creatures circling us in the dark and collectively the vampires burst into flames colored green as summer grass. The heat overcame the chill and singed my face, but I didn't turn away and I didn't flinch.

The blood smeared upon Cage's cheek glowed in the firelight. 

This was an augur's spell—an incantation brought to being by the swift, kinetic motion of his hands rather than any words out of his mouth—conjoined with the potency of black magic. Blood was a powerful medium for Cage and his fellows, and it was also one that carried an extreme risk, as it stripped away limiters and precautions worked into their magic.

This was the power of a black spell, the reason Cage and mages of his ilk were labeled pariahs in the other communities, the reason they were hunted and tagged like wild dogs. He'd summoned fire from nothing, offering no visible sacrifice to the physics of equivalency, thus bending and perverting the intended state of nature to something of his own will. It was vile magic. Terrible magic.

The flames wound themselves into vaporous pillars of green as I sneered at the shrieking howls of the vampires. Their cries were loud to our ears, but I doubted they would carry to the diner over the thunder of the motorway and the dulcet whine of the aged jukebox. Anyone looking out the window would think the fire nothing more than a reflection of headlights on the wet earth, or perhaps some fireworks being set off by foolish children during the storm.

I listened to the screams as the night-walkers fell to their knees and I felt no pity stir in my heart. I took no pleasure in torture, having been its victim more than once, but I didn't care for vampires nor their pain. Like black magic, they were a perversion of an intended state, a monumental accident born of one man's poisoned desire to protect, rule, and destroy. Sethanshould have done away with them before their blight was given the chance to spread—but he always had been such a sentimental and weak-willed fool.

Cage straightened to his full height as the last of the vampires crumpled to the earth. They bubbled and smoked to ash in a ring around their victim, and though the human authorities would discover the boy in time, they would never discover his killers, never realize they were traipsing through their remains and staining their boots with the essence of the monstrous creatures who lurked in the night.

"Come, let us get out of this rain," the mage said as he tucked the switchblade once more into his pocket and began to walk toward the parking lot. His cheek was stained red from the open wound and the downpour.

I followed him without thought and studied his profile, the strong lines of his visage and the low set of his brow. His brown eyes were flat, listless. The serious look was uncharacteristic to the man, and I felt compelled to comment upon it.

"Do you feel pity for those things?" I asked, the sarcasm thick and palatable on my tongue. "Those cretins who preyed upon a young boy—who killed him for sport?"

"They should be pitied, even as they are destroyed," the mage replied as we stepped over the chain and reentered the diner's lot. "Their will is not their own. They're not acting rationally, not adhering to normal vampiric behavior."

"They have normal behavior?" I scoffed. 

Cage stopped and grabbed my arm, his fingers tight upon my wrist as he glared with an unexpected gravity. "If you'd stop pouting and think for a moment, you'd realize they've been acting out of sorts. All across the country—the world, even—the vampires have begun to spiral out of control, led on by a siren of madness none of us can hear."

I again wondered at the myriad of ways I could kill the man, but I admitted to myself that the mage had a point. "Wrath was their father, their creator. He keyed their existence into his own blood as to hold dominion over their wills. They labeled it the Call." I shrugged as we approached Sara's—my—car. It'd been abandoned at the airport in months past and why Amoroth went through the trouble to retrieve the bucket of bolts was beyond me. "It's conceivable he might have engineered a failsafe in the event of his demise. With Wrath dead, vampires may be on the brink as well."

Cage shook his head and pawed at the cut on his cheek, cleaning it with the cuff of his coat that appeared oddly immune to staining. "No. Though you Sins are powerful in your own right, Sethan didn't have that kind of capability. He couldn't code an entire species to follow him into the grave. Presumably, the Call should've reverted to you, the nearest equivalent."

"Perhaps," I conceded. "But that was before...." I lifted my arm—my mortal arm—and watched the rainwater sluice down the jacket sleeve.

"Still...it should have gone to you as Sethan's brother and kin."

We came to a stop outside the car and Cage cast a final glance to the smoking field beyond the diner. There were no more flames and no final glimmers of light. Just the broken plumes of smoke yet rising from the ruined creatures.

"Something is stirring the vampires to madness," the black mage stated as I took the keys from my pocket and went to start the vehicle. Only when we were inside, dripping all over the upholstery that had never fully lost the smell of brine and decay, did he speak again. "They wreak havoc in the larger cities, and every day they grow bolder and restless. Something grips them, Darius. I had thought you might be the perpetrator, but I think we must begin to question...where has Sethan's Call fallen in his death? Who wields it now?"

I pushed the key into the ignition and listened to the engine turn over. The rain grew bolder, louder, and it beat like the steady line of a war drum calling its warriors to battle. I thought of that poor boy we'd left to be found in the daylight, of how weak and temporary he'd been in his end, of how inconsequential his story had been, and it filled me with hate.

"I don't know," I replied, tasting the rain water on my lips. "I haven't a clue."