Shadow Guardians: The Key

Uriah jolted awake, hearing the clanging of metal against metal. The next moment, his mattress, which was hardly more than a piece of sponge, was overthrown, and he landed on the hard floor on his side. He heard sniggers, but before he could rub his sleepy eyes open, they were gone, dematerialized.

It could only be Rip and his lackeys.

Uriah groaned, turned onto his back on the floor, and stared up at the white ceiling. He didn’t stay there long before his protruding spinal vertebrae dug into the hard floor, and he got up with a grunt, like he needed the reminder that he was eighteen and trapped in the body of a twelve-year-old. And the perpetrators had all gone through their transitions, so they were now four times his size and even bigger assholes. Yay.

He pulled the spongy mattress back onto the steel bedframe, sat down on it. Talk about military-grade. The lodgings were divided into sections for males and females. Each cell er- room, had four bunks. Slate gray floors, white walls, bright LED white ceiling lights, and a single square mirror against the wall. The bathrooms were communal, for the males at least, as far as he knew. One wide open shower, and at least the toilets were in stalls.

Not that that stopped Rip from barging in on you when you wanted to take a piss. And when you had to sit down while doing it because your joints were too sore to stand, that really made you weak.

Uriah had been feeling utter crap for a while now. Exhausted all the time even though he tried to sleep more, starving but too nauseous to keep food down. His bones and joints felt like they were seizing up and aching most of the time. And he randomly got hot flushes, like he was going through menopause. Seeing his weenie-sized manhood made him wonder if he was even a guy. Apart from the hot flushes, for lack of a better word, he was cold. All. The. Time. And sometimes he woke up with dried blood on his pillow covers and his face, like his nose had been bleeding in the night.

He thought about going to the nurse, but the last time Z took him there, when Rip beat the crap out of him, he was mocked for weeks after for being weak. He choked his symptoms down to having some kind of flu, assuming vampires could get the flu.

Rip and his friends were at him all the time, and his palms were raw from his nails biting into them as he fisted his hands to keep from punching the asshole in the face. But he didn’t say anything about it to the vampire brothers.

Rip’s father was an important aristocrat. He could potentially make things difficult for the warriors, Uriah thought. He didn’t want the vampire brothers to get into trouble in any way. And besides, he would just feel like more of a wuss if he went crying like a babe to them all the time because he was being hounded for hanging with them too. But he couldn’t help it. He just felt drawn to them. It was more than friendship. They were like brothers to him, a replacement for the family he’d lost to the war.

Man, his joints and bones felt like they were clamped down on with a torture device. He rubbed his eyes and went over to his chest at the foot of the bunk with his personal stuff. Every recruit had one. Just his clothes and his notebooks for class were in there. He keyed his pin code into the electronic locking device on the black box, and it clicked open.

A hot shower was the only way he could nurse the aches out of his body at the moment, at least temporarily. He took out fresh clothes. Long-sleeved dark green cotton shirt, black pants, underwear, and his parka. All bought in the children’s section... He sighed and avoided the mirror in the room as he left. The males’ bathrooms were down the hall.

He’d been here for seven months, and so far he hadn’t managed to make a single friend apart from the vampire brothers. He was the outcast among the recruits because he was a vampire too.

He opened the bathroom door and thanked the gods. It was empty. He closed the door and stripped down to his skin. He chose one of the showerheads closest to the blanched almond wall tiles. The floor was done in the same tile. Turning the water on, he waited for it to heat up. When the steam wafted through the bathroom, he moved under the hot spray and nearly wept with the joy of relief. He braced his small hands against the wall, let his head hang forward, chin to chest. It wasn’t long before the ache in his bones started fading.

And then the doors flew open. “Well shit, boys. I thought this was the males’ restroom.”

Uriah shut his eyes. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he muttered to himself.

A hand clamped onto his shoulder and swung him around, and he stared up into Rip’s mug. Buzz cut of blonde hair with a green streak through it, big muscles now that he’d transitioned, and narrow, hateful gray eyes.

“Hey Nancy,” Rip smirked, “Girl’s restroom is way over there.” He gestured with his head while his eyes scrutinized every inch of Uriah, right down to the tiny balls between his legs. “Jesus, are those marbles real?”

Uriah gritted his teeth and clenched his fists as the guy went down on his knees, and yes, actually felt at his balls. He was not supposed to fist kiss the guy in the face. That was dishonorable, but this would be in self-defense, right? Except if he did, he would get beat up so much worse. Since Zachiel told Rip to get his shit together, he’d been beating Uriah where it didn’t show. The stomach, the ribs, on his back, anywhere but the face.

“How do you even aim with this dinky thing? Or was it you who pissed all over the floor the other day?” Rip’s friends sniggered at the door, which was wide open, so anyone walking by could see Uriah naked as the day he was born. He prayed to the gods that a female wouldn’t pass by.

“You know Rip, you’re so smart. You know everything, right? So how the fuck don’t you know when to shut your trap?” Uriah spat.

Rip went red in the face. Next moment, his knee made contact with Uriah’s groin. He yelled in agony and bent over, feeling deeply sick just then. But through the pain, he still couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Cheap shot, asshole.” He groaned.

That was the last thing he remembered before receiving another knee to an already hypersensitive stomach. He vomited. The lackeys came to help, tae kwon do’ing him in the ribs, the back, and the kidneys while he curled up into a fetal position through the fog of pain. “You’re all fucking weak,” Uriah slurred.

Rip dragged him through his own vomit. Somehow, something like a mop handle came into the mix and was held in front of his face.

“You say one more fucking word, Nancy, and I’ll spear this up your ass like you’re a kebab, you feel me? One more fucking word—and don’t you go runnin’ to the brothers neither, got it?”

Uriah’s vision blacked out for a while. He heard Rip spouting more shit, but he couldn’t hear what exactly. He was asking him something, he thought. But his limbs weren’t working right, so he tried to crawl away, not sure in which direction he was going.

Then he felt the stick at his ass. He whirled around blindly, grabbed the stick, and somehow, with energy coming out of nowhere, managed to shove it right into what he thought was Rip’s stomach.

He heard a heave and stumbling, then blacked out.

Uriah came to much later, feeling like hell. Stiff, he curled into himself in a ball, disoriented. And cold as a corpse’s tit. Wet. He peeled open his eyes. Why was he out in the rain, naked? He blinked a couple of times. Then his teeth started clattering. He pried open his blue fingers and forced his body to work through the ouch. Shit. He was still in the fucking shower. With ice cold water running over him, his back bones digging into the hard tile of the wall. He reached for the tap and turned on the hot water.

He screamed at the sharp pain of the hot water on his frozen body, pins and needles spreading all over. He slammed a hand over his mouth to shut himself up, not needing any extra attention.

He stayed under the hot spray until he was mobile again. Now he had no idea what time it was or how long he had been out. He looked at his body. Jesus, he had a couple of blue mushrooming tattoos all over him. He used the wall for support and stood, washing himself with care.

Physical training was going to be utter shit today.

He left the bathroom eventually, checking the time on the wall clock in the hallway. Oh hell... Draven’s going to skin his ass. He’d already missed the first theory class.

He ran down the hallway to the lockers to get his textbooks, having to stop and lean against the wall every now and then to breathe through the pain.

When he burst into the classroom, his jaw slacked at Draven. He’d shaved his head down to a military cut. He looked damn sadistic now, which explained why all the nosferi in the classroom were all glassy eyed. Except for Rip, of course, who gave Uriah a nasty smirk.

“Nice of you to join us,” Draven said with clear annoyance.

Uriah ran a hand through his disheveled brown hair. “Sorry I’m late.” He went over to his seat at the front and sank into the chair with as much grace as his battered body could muster. He looked Draven square in his bi-colored eyes. “I, ah, overslept.”

Draven studied him for a moment and took a deep inhale. Uriah wasn’t sure if he was smelling something in the air or if he was trying to calm himself down. His expression seemed to soften, then.

Uriah’s eyes moved to the blackboard behind him, where he’d drawn a perfect illustration of an explosive device. The khad had their toys, just like the vampiric warriors had theirs. They were only soulless humans after all and didn’t have the powers of the demons that controlled them.

“Get out your textbook,” Draven told Uriah with a much more patient tone of voice. “Page 86.”

“As I was saying,” Draven continued, “These types of improvised explosives are just an artillery shell connected to a trip wire, which is supposed to be triggered by vehicles that pass by. It doesn’t make sense to add timers to them because they don’t know when you’ll eventually be within the blast radius.”

Uriah leaned his chin into his palm and took notes in neat cursive handwriting.

He followed the class with ease because, on some level, he was able to predict what Draven would say next.

He couldn’t explain how. He didn’t have prior knowledge of explosives, he couldn’t look into Draven’s head, and no one class followed a preset chronological order.

He just knew what was coming.

He wished he could predict Rip’s movements like that.

As if on cue, a paper ball hit the back of his head. He clamped down on his molars and didn’t turn around. His skull was doing a gray matter squeeze.

“Uriah, I want to see you after class,” Draven said.

Snickers erupted in the classroom while Uriah’s eyes widened.

Great. Rip must’ve talked shit about him.

“Busted, Nancy,” he heard the asshole whisper behind him.

“I’ll tolerate a certain degree of stupidity from you all,” Draven glared at them all, “But don’t abuse the privilege...”

Silence fell on the class.