Willowstream mortuary was a family run business, having been passed down from father to son by the Kelley's. While technically owned by the Santana family, which was bought in a time when the mortuary was about to go under, it is mostly self run and left to it's own business as one of two mortuaries in the town.

It was a small, boxed building that went further underground where it was easier to keep things cool. It was roughly five minutes on foot from the Kelley family home, and was as non-descript a building you could get. It's only significant detail being the small parking lot out front, and the evergreen, metal, sign with bronze lettering that detailed the purpose of this place. Mortician and medical examination. Thanatologist. All fancy words for: "Family with a fascination in the business of death". Which was seen more as a quirk of character around these parts, rather than something to be troubled by. The Kelley's themselves were respectable and reputable people, with a notoriously grim sense of humour and the darkest brown eyes being the defining traits that united them as family.

Alaric, Alice, and Lilly all pulled into the parking lot underneath the solitary and buzzing lamplight, discovering that Rhys and Marshal were already there. Nonchalantly chilling on an embankment of grass, as they stood up to come meet them.

"Hey guys" Marshal beamed cheerfully. He was practically vibrating with excitement. As if he was going on sparkling adventure and couldn't wait for what sights he would see. But then again, he always felt a rush when being particularly rebellious, and what's more rebellious than breaking in to a mortuary and examining the dead body of a dear friend?

Alaric proffered the ring of keys signalling their success, but despite the somewhat enthusiastic energy of Marshal, Rhys, and Lilly; there was a grim task that made the air heavy with begrudging anticipation. Dauntingly thickening the air as time caught up with them, and what they had decided to do meant it was now or probably never.

They went over the game plan one more time, just to be sure. Lilly was to park the car a little ways down the road so as not to raise suspicion to anyone driving passed, which she questioned the likelihood of considering it was approaching eleven o'clock at night, but inevitably agreed. Rhys and Marshal were to hide near by and keep look out, while Lilly, Alice, and Alaric were to enter the building and discover what they could about Yasmines murder.

With one final look of understanding to one other, they went to their positions and entered the building with the simple turning of a small, silver, key.

Quiet buildings always caused an uneasy feeling to spread over Lilly. Death she was fine with, but the unknown? The unknown terrified her, and unlike some of her more gifted companions, she could not see in the dark without the light on her phone. She huddled closer to the what she hoped were the walking frames of her friends, squeaking a little when she bumped into Alaric's muscular back.

"Sorry! I can't see in the dark" She yelped, as Alice gripped her hand warmly. Invisibly smiling through the dark with a kindness that Lilly could just sense.

They passed through what seemed to be some form of reception area. A desk sectioned off a piece of the back wall, held a computer and several pieces of disorganised paper that was strewn about the place. Several chairs were pushed up against the other walls, there was the gentle buzzing of electricity through old wires, and the place smelled like a strange concoction of sanitary products and cheap pot-pourri.

"How can they work like this?" Alice scoffed, tempted to go and tidy the place up, but was quickly reminded of the real reason they were here by the tugging Lilly at her side.

They turned a corner into a long hallway that held wooden walls, a well trafficked carpet that held track marks from thin wheels, and a single door at it's end. The door held a steel cage that opened into a simple elevator, or diverging off to the right to a set of hatched, metal stairs, leading downwards into the bowels of this building.

Luckily, the lights seemed to be on a motion detection of some kind as they blinked into light as the door was opened, allowing Lilly to let go of Alice's hand.

"Do we use the elevator? Or take the stairs?" Lilly questioned quizzically as she folded her arms across her chest and tapped her finger upon her chin. The Elevator would make much more noise. Simple ones like this were designed with the sole purpose of going up and down. Aesthetics like silence were an unneeded luxury in the business of transporting the dead.

Alaric rolled his eyes striding forwards and opening the rattling gate that sealed the elevator and stepped inside, being quickly followed by Alice and Lilly. The lift had two buttons, up and down, and when Alaric pushed the one for down with his thumb, the elevator jolted to life with a whirr.

Lilly immediately began humming. It was a directionless, mildly cheerful, tune that caused her to bob her shoulders from side to side and smile pleasingly to herself.

"Elevator music? Kill me now..." Alaric whined as he threw his head back, immediately getting a swat from Alice.

"Don't be mean, it beats being in silence and Lilly has a great voice!" Alice responded, the almost desperate need to keep distracted all too obvious in the eagerness to her voice.

"Thank you! I'm nothing compared to Marshal, but I suppose that's not really a fair comparison is it?" Lilly beamed happily, before dropping her tone somewhat with a worried expression "He hasn't sung for a while... Do you think something has happened?"

"He's lonely." Alaric stated matter of factly, causing both the girls to look at him quizzically, which made him scoff with a roll of his eyes in response. "He's the only, at least openly, gay guy at the school. Yeah, modern times have made that shit easier to deal with, but it's still tough. He doesn't have anyone to call his own. Other than us, and while no, you don't need a relationship to be happy or even complete, he hasn't come to that conclusion yet. He hasn't had the experience. So he's alone. Probably cripplingly so. Like a thousand suns are not warm enough to help him forget that the world is so cold. He just hides it with a smile."

They got the very poignant sense that Alaric was speaking from a deep seated experience with hiding feelings. Alaric was expressive, but not in the usual way, and only in the way that someone that knew him would understand. When he did express himself in the more recognisable way, it was often an intentional decision to show it. The smile, the smirk, the snarl, all of it were to communicate what he wanted to people that couldn't read the near expressionless facade he held most times. It was the small movements of his features that spoke volumes to the ones that loved him. The slight furrow of one of his eyebrows when he was confused, the subtle tightening of his jaw and stiffness of his body when he got upset, his eyelids fluttering uncontrollably or closing slightly when he was happy. All things nearly invisible to those who didn't know what to look for and he was secretly, unfathomably, grateful to have found those with an understanding of his language.

"Well that's not true, there's plenty of gay guys at school! You for one, Shawn for two, and I'm pretty sure Mark Lawrence is at least curious."

"I'm not Gay, I just don't care. Shawn doesn't like men, he likes me. And Mark is a goof ball who I'm almost certain doesn't know what sex is, let alone who he wants to do it with. Just because he has abs now doesn't mean he's a catch-all casanova."

"Oh! You saw his abs? Did you see his ass?" Lilly asked in excitement, deciding that it was perhaps best not to mention to Alaric that she had most definitely seen Shawn and Mark flirting with one an other earlier in the day. Or least what she thought was flirting.

"Of course I did. I said I'm not gay: I didn't say I was blind. Not to mention the boys shower room after gym class"

"What!? Tell me everything immediately." Lilly squawked, throwing her hands up before scrambling to catch her bag which almost slipped from her slender shoulders.

"I've seen better." Alaric quipped, crossing his arms over his chest with a pleasing smirk drawn on his face.

"I hate you."

Within half a minute, the elevator came to a rickety stop with a slight screech of it's gears as it landed on the lower floor. The air was much cooler down here, causing Lilly to pull her cardigan closer to her arms with a shiver. Much of it was made of dull, grey, concrete with little to make the place welcoming. The doors were a pale green in colour, with silver handles that were cold to the touch, with the one at the end of the hallway stretch being a set of double doors with circular windows.

The place looked medically intimidating, bathed in the pale white of the overhead lights. A brief inspection of the first door they came across opened into a small office. Looking through documents however, was secondary to their objectives as they pressed onwards to the double doors.

The three of them were hesitant to go any further. A silent understanding of finality passing between each of them, as with a bolstering breath; Alaric pushed through the doors.

The far wall was layered in steel doors, no bigger than two to three feet wide each, all them had a small handle and lock in their corner. Three tables were set up in the centre with a myriad of trays on wheels, carrying medical tools. The tables housed white sheets covering what they could rightly assume to be bodies.

"This is the one..." Alice said quietly, stepping to the middle of the three. "She always smelled of cut flowers..." She said before anyone could question as to how she knew, as she stood at the tables' side, her hand frozenly stuck and terrified to the white sheet.

Lilly placed her hand on Alice's, landing her second hand reassuringly on her shoulder. She gave a wry smile in a sore attempt at making things better, and with one sweeping motion they tore the sheet from it's place. Revealing the beaten, pale, beautiful, corpse of Yasmine Nanwa.

A mixture of rage and grief flowed through them all. It hurt to have the choice of denial being ripped from them as easily as pulling back a swathe of cloth. It hurt to see a vessel of such love bereft of life. Like it was a cruel, mocking, imposter of what they wanted. Alice immediately buried her sobs into Lilly's embrace as the pair shared whatever meagre comfort they could find in this place, and Alaric's silence filled the room once again.

Yasmines skin was ashen, but that only made the wounds and bruises more apparent. Burning garish purples and congealed reds onto her once flawless, sand coloured, skin. Her forearms held cuts and bruises, but most of the deeper wounds, of which their were seven, were localised to her ribs and abdomen. Distinct abrasions snaked from the edges of her mouth, violently deep in their blossoming colours and patched, light, burn marks scored the upper right of her face.

"What do you see?" Alaric said, clearing his throat as he uncharacteristically fought back tears. Alaric didn't cry.

Alice hated that he asked the question. She hated everything at this moment. Her heart weighed heavy in her chest, as each thump bludgeoned painfully at her core, like her ribcage could not bare the weight of such an object.

With a sniffle, Lilly withdrew from Alice and turned to study the body.

"Defensive wounds on her arms." She began "She fought back--"

"Of course she did." Alice said, not out of spite, but out of pride. Yasmine wouldn't go down without fighting. Her Yasmine would never have given up.

"She was gagged at some point, by something thin. Like a rope or maybe a handkerchief? Could've been impromptu, and most of the stab wounds and bruises looked aimed at her lungs maybe to keep her out of breath?"

"To stop her spell casting..."

"Which means they were, at least a little, unprepared for her, I think you were right Alaric in thinking this was somebodies first time."

"Right."

"But what worries me, taking from what we know and what we've deducted from this study, is that they did know what they were doing. I highly doubt the gag was to stop her screaming, the marks are too thin to have been from anything to drown out any sound really. There doesn't seem to be any ripping from the puncture wounds either, meaning they were precise and controlled. Practised." The deduction hung in the air, like an impossibly heavy penny waiting to drop and crush those below. Suddenly the prospect of there being a hunter that was hunting them was a lot less like a possibility and a lot more like an actuality.

Lilly placed a gentle hand on Yasmines forehead, running it down the length of hair that was splayed out across the metal surface of the table, before stooping low and planting a kiss on her forehead with a sniffle.

"Oh Yassy.. I'm so sorry" She whimpered quietly, moving her hand to her mouth as she stepped away and doing her best to restrain herself from sobbing.

Tears tracked heavily down Alice's cheeks as she stood with her fists balled and bolted to her sides. She seethed with anger, the hurt becoming so consuming that it morphed and poisoned into nothing but rage. She would rip whomever done this limb from limb, and enjoy every second of it.

She was about to step forward, having finally cooled down enough to say her own goodbye to her beloved friend, when they all heard one. Singular. Crack.

It froze them to the spot. When a second sounded, wet and sticky: they took a step back. Giving a cursory glance to each other as the other two sheets gave a sickly, laboured breath. They watched in horror as joints began to snap and click into reanimation, slovenly groans from unbreathing lungs, rose as swathed in white sheets the two other bodies began to rise from their tables, the cloth slipping down and pooling onto the floor.

Their teeth were blackened, their eyes glassy and fogged. Lightless. Their skin was pale and clammy as the blush of life was entirely absent from lazy forms, their necks snapped loudly as they turned to face the three visitors. Their faces were gaunt, and heavy, like they lacked the musculature to keep their skin from gravity tugging at the flesh. Their mouths, oozing with thick saliva opened in a yawning length as guttural roars rattled from their hungry throats.

"What. The. Fuck." Lilly announced in shock as she took a step back. The figures slumped to their feet off the tables and on to the cold floor, lolling their heads as if struggling to keep them up right.

"Whatever you do: Don't get bit" Alaric said calmly, as he tensed up and his eyes began searching for a weapon.

The zombies charged at them in a display of clumsy speed. Throwing themselves forward, torsos first and hands twisted into claws. Lilly squeaked as she clutched her bag and darted to the side. Alaric gripped the one that had lunged for Lilly, wrapping his arms around it's waist and lifting it with ease before slamming it heavily onto the ground with a growl. It shrieked, champing it's teeth in his direction as it rag-dolled to the ground, and scrambled to swat at it's legs.

Alice's eyes shifted to a burning yellow, like candles in the dark, as her deadly claws outstretched the flesh of her finger tips and pushed through the thin membrane there. Her mouth stretched into a quarter snout as her teeth pointed into the deadly canine fangs, and a thin layer of bristling hair coated her arms that appeared more muscular than before.

With a predatory snarl she plunged her fingers deep, right where the neck meets the clavicle. Thrusting her other hand in the small divide, she gripped and pulled. Unleashing a spray of brackish, black, blood that ejected like reddened rainfall as she wrenched the head free from it's shoulders, and tossed it along the ground where it rolled and clattered into the leg of a table with a dull thud.

It's body sluggishly stumbled around, swiping blindly with wide arcs at the space Alice was as she hopped away on the back foot. Looking to the head that she had just thrown, it still glared at her with its glazed eyes. Hungrily champing it's jaws in an attempt to devour the life in the room.

"Shit." Alaric cursed as he wrestled with the other creature, grabbing a scalpel from a nearby medical tray, and plunging it with all his Vampiric might into the eye socket. It pushed through, releasing a gout of discoloured ooze, and momentarily pinned it by it's head to the wall just behind it. "Salt! We need Salt!" He called out, as the zombie slipped from the wall with a sickening slurp and stumbled forward in it's rampage.

"What? Why would that work!?" Alice growled, as she yanked hard at the arm socket of the one she was facing, pulling it's arm clean from it's holding and tossing it away.

"I read that the taste of salt reminds them of life and sends them back to the grave or some shit, and for fuck sake: stop ripping them apart you're making it worse!" He replied just as Lilly began swatting with her hand bag at the newly freed hand that had began to scurry, like a fleshy spider, in her direction.

She paused mid swing, as a moment of eureka hit her like a wave of inspiration, and she gave the hand a swift kick, sending it careening to the other side of the room where it collided with a metallic pang against the wall and fell to the floor.

"Oh! I think I have some salt packets I swiped from the lunch hall in my bag, hold on!" She called out, falling to her knees as she began rummaging through her bag.

Alice ducked under the blind swiping of the zombie she was faced with, narrowly stopping herself from slipping on the pool of blood that had flooded from it's oozing neck hole. She reached for one of the white sheets, and pounced, enclosing the zombie within and pining it's arms to it's side as she held tight while it struggled against her grip.

"There's my chapstick!" Lilly proclaimed "I've been looking for that everywhere..."

"Lilly!" Alaric growled, as he kicked his opponents legs from out underneath it and fell upon it using his knee between its shoulder blades to keep it pinned.

"Right! Sorry!" She called, muttering a curse as she upturned her bag sending it's contents clattering to the floor. She began sifting through the junk, despite the situation she was actually having a lot of fun, and kept quiet the surprise at finding she had a fair bit more spare money in her bag than she realised. Her eyes soon fell upon the salt packets, of which there were two, and picked them up.

Lilly let out a yell as the same hand from before founds itself tugging viciously at the untameable, fiery, mess that was her red hair. Yanking her to the ground with a scowl as, with surprising strength considering it wasn't anchored to a body, it pulled her along the floor with ease. She managed to pry the fingers loose from her scalp, tearing it free from it's grip and launched it as hard as she could against the wall where it slammed with a loud bang and a screech of its rotted nails as it slid to the floor.

With salt packet in hand, she hurried to the lone head that snarled viciously at her presence, before tearing the paper top open and awkwardly tossed the salt towards its mouth. With a bit of luck, the majority of the salt landed squarely on the zombies tongue, causing it to splutter with almost human-like actions. It gave one last, gurgled, choke, before falling still. The body that Alice had been wrestling with fell into a lifeless heap on the ground, and much to Lilly's relief, the hand stopped trying to crawl towards her.

Between the three of them, they managed to manoeuvre the final zombie into a position where Lilly could pour the salt directly into it's mouth. It convulsed violently, kicking it's legs outwards with a shriek before it too fell inanimate.

"That was close." Lilly panted out of breath, with one hand bracing on the wall.

"What the hell was that all about?" Alice proclaimed, looking more like herself each second, as her more lupine traits began to recede.

"Witches make Zombies. There's only one other Witch in town that also knew about Yasmine." Alaric said with a terrifying seriousness on his face as wiped at the congealed blood that had gotten onto his leather jacket. It was a seriousness that promised slaughter, and a painful death. It was a seriousness that turned rumour into superstitious fear.

"Micah Wallace." Lilly whispered, as if just saying his name might earn a swift death from Alaric.

"Micah-fucking-Wallace."

A/N: You know how I said the previous chapter may have been the longest I had written on here? Well This one is longer haha
Let me know what you thought about the action in this one, as I don't have much experience writing action scenes and would kill for some constructive criticism. 
As always: Thanks for reading! ^-^