Excerpt: The Musician

Running through the forest, everything was getting darker by the minute. I could see my breath before me, everything tinted a dark blue as the night settled in. I had to get out of there. I had to. I had to. I had to reach the clearing. Just a few hundred more feet, right? Right.

I could feel them behind me. Two, three, four of them. They were gaining on me, their more recent bloodline speeding up all of their reactions, strengthening their muscles far past mine. I was getting frantic. I knew I should have done something about my predicament. I knew it. I just did not have any idea of how dire a situation I could have been in. I mean, you would expect being in a high school would not involve any crises, right?

Enough of that.

I really needed to focus. I could hear them behind me, a bad sign since that meant that they had gained at least a few hundred feet on me in the time it took for me to run fifty. The others would be at the clearing, but I had to hold them off until I got there. Pushing my legs to run harder, faster, I sped up, feeling something coming close to snapping within me.

There were more of them coming. I could tell. There were four right on top of me, roughly two hundred feet back, and at least four more a few more hundred feet behind the first four. They were unarmed, luckily, though. I knew the others meeting me in the clearing would have brought weapons - I hoped.

I could feel my eyes turning golden, my sense opening up to take in even more of my surroundings. I could close my eyes and rely on the waves of sound my steps made off of objects in front of me to judge my surroundings, allowing me to sense better what sort of situation I was in.

I could tell that they were of the Coven to the southeast, probably the wood dwellers. They were always stirring up trouble, even in the more normal of senses. The ones following me were their young, avid scouts - I could tell by the pattern of their running and the speed at which they were gaining on me - so at least I would not be in much trouble in the sense of how hard it would be to fight them off. There was at least one slightly larger, older hunter with them, a few hundred feet behind the scouts. The others with him were nonspecified and relatively weak. I was about at the clearing when I all of a sudden sensed one of them appearing in front of me - teleportation, most likely from their base, was unexpected. My eyes snapping open, blazing golden penetrating the dark landscape that was quickly turning grayscale due to the darkness, I was face to face with a cloaked elder, his eyes luminescent and red, quickly approaching me, a small bit of light reflecting off the tip of a blade before -