Rebels of Darkness II, Chapter 24

A disaster stood before them! Papers and broken glass flooded out of the classroom and into the hall, and pools of blood were scattered everywhere! Gwynivara and Bernadette held up their hands, ready to fire an incantation at a moment’s notice, and Rebekah and Cody followed closely behind them as they crept closer to Professor Chadron’s room. Gwynivara called out, “If anyone is alive in there, come out now!” To their dismay, no one responded. Out of an abundance of caution, they approached the doorway as if someone waited for them on the other side, and as Gwynivara leapt into the vicinity, she inwardly prayed that she would find no one but one of their enemies dead…

To their horror, they saw Professor Chadron laying motionless on the floor! Gwynivara dove to the ground to check on him, she just couldn’t accept that he died! Bernadette stood guard as Gwynivara checked his pulse, and Gwynivara convinced herself she would discover that he was fighting for his life. She had already prepared herself to direct one of the others to call an ambulance, but after a while, she figured out that she hadn’t felt anything. It took a few seconds for it to sink in, but soon she realized that if she didn’t detect anything by then, she never would! With a lump rising in her throat, Gwynivara announced, “He’s gone!”

“No!” Bernadette gasped. Her hands fell as she gazed at him sadly. “Oh, Professor Chadron! We’re so sorry!”

“There’s no blood!” Rebekah observed. This statement confused her grief-stricken companions, so she elaborated, “There was blood out there, but he doesn’t have any wounds at all. There’s a lot here by his side though…” She glanced around a bit, and when she spotted something significant, she let everyone know, “There’s a gun over there! Obviously, Professor Chadron wounded someone before he was killed. His murderer had enough sense to get the weapon out of his hand in case he managed to retaliate before passing, so I would say someone with law enforcement training killed him!”

Despite their sorrow, they couldn’t but feel impressed by her deductive skills! Cody complimented her, “You sound like a detective!”

Rebekah blushed. “My dad talked about his work a lot, and ever since Emorick mentioned honoring the memory of the fallen, I’ve been thinking I might become a police officer when I’m old enough to, you know, to carry on his work where he left off… But anyways, enough about me! Whoever killed him clearly was looking for something.”

“The cure!” Gwynivara ran over to the desk where they saw him working before, and when she didn’t see anything relevant, she declared, “It’s not here! Neither are any of his notes!”

“Unless his notes are part of this mess on the floor,” Cody theorized.

They heard sirens blaring down the street, so Bernadette remarked, “We don’t have time to look! We gotta go!” Bernadette ushered Rebekah and Cody out of the room, but Gwynivara stumbled across a box of syringes on the floor, so she grabbed that before running out.

Rafeneita held a vial of brown liquid up to the light to make sure it had the right texture, and when she saw that it had, she poured it into a funnel attached to an assembly line machine. She watched as it blended with the corn syrup, sugar, and good coloring, and soon, the cooking tanks began to boil. Just as she took a load of the “Rialowe ’76” labels to the tray at the end of the mechanism, she heard the door open. Abigor croaked out, “It’s me!”

“You’re late!” Rafeneita barked. As she turned to face him, she saw him slumped on her spikey throne, so she screeched, “What do you think you’re doing there?”

“I think I’m bleeding to death!” He revealed a clumsily wrapped bandage around his arm that had gotten almost entirely soaked in blood!
Rafeneita looked at in surprise. “You got hurt!”

Abigor groaned, and then he explained, “That bastard shot me! I need that healing elixir, quick!”

“I don’t see why I should give you any more!” Rafeneita folded her arms and glared at him. “I gave you a second chance on that mountain, and you have done anything that I told you to do to repay me! Venenatus Sanguis isn’t spreading as much as it should, and your carelessness got one of my beasts killed!”

“That wasn’t my fault!” Abigor refuted through gritted teeth. “Those Rebels weren’t supposed to be there that night! Bella’s men should have been able to take them out at the debates!”

Rafeneita didn’t get swayed by his argument. “Her guilt doesn’t take away from your own! I tasked you with taking care of those nasty Rebels, and they’re all still roaming free!”

Abigor, through his pain, differed, “Two of them died at the FBI headquarters in Richmond!”

“And the rest got away!” Rafeneita shot back. “They got Emorick back, and now they found someone who could help them with the cure! You probably failed that mission too! They’re probably already getting the cure out into the world! This is going to be extremely difficult to-!”

“I killed Professor Chadron!” Abigor gave her the facts before she went on too long of a rampage.

Rafeneita’s eyes flickered over to his bleeding wound. “Your injury says differently.”

Abigor corrected her error in judgment, “I fired an incantation at him as he fired his gun! Luckily, he missed my chest, but now I can’t stop the bleeding!”

“He hit an artery,” Rafeneita told him, and then probed, “Are you sure he’s dead?”

“Yes, and I took all he had about the cure!” He wailed in agony, and then he requested, “Please, Rafeneita!”

She relented, “Fine! Since you finally did something right, I’ll give you one more chance!” She walked over to a shelf full of various chemicals and took down a yellow substance. She handed it to him, and after he drank a few sips, she took it back and snapped, “Now, get off my throne!” She then shoved him to the ground.

She could see the weight of his aching fading, and he witnessed the blood on his clothes disappearing with glee. “Thank you!”

“Don’t thank me, get me results!” she reacted with irritation as she pointed her palm at her throne. As she made the blood disappear, she ordered him, “Give me the cure, and then, as soon as this batch of lollipops finishes, go bring it to Bella. She unloaded a lot of them at this rally, so…” She picked up on Abigor’s face twisting in guilt, so she inquired, “What now?”

“I can give you his notes…” He distanced himself more and more as he spoke, “The cure wasn’t there!” Rafeneita let out a blood-curling scream!

Gwynivara bolted up from her sleep. Kierram reassured her, “It’s okay, you’re safe now!”

She hadn’t remembered falling asleep at all, and as she checked out her surroundings, Gwynivara recalled last seeing a half dozen agents firing incantations at them. Now that she thougtht about it, she was about to perform a spell that would shoot out a beam of light to know out most, if not all, of their adversaries to make up for the Rebels being outnumbered, so it mystified her as to how she ended up in the forest! For a split second, she worried about the welfare of the others, but she relaxed a bit when she espied Cody, Rebekah, and Bernadette close by. She then wanted to know, “What happened?”

“You knocked them all out!” Bernadette answered with a proud grin. “We got into the nearest sewer before their backup or anyone else came, but we were all so exhausted from the fight that we had to take a lot of breaks along the way back to headquarters.”

“See, if I just got infected with Venenatus Sanguis, I could’ve helped you guys fight back!” Cody brought up.

Rebekah upbraided him, “If you had the virus, you’d have been too exhausted to carry Gwyn to the sewers! You did more by having focus still sharp, we would’ve taken a million wrong turns if you had our level tiredness!”

Riley showed up through some bushes that partially concealed them, and he put in, “Is he starting up with that again? Look kiddo, I know people your age like to follow the crowd, but trust me, sometimes it’s better to stand out! We’ll go into more details about that another day, like when you’re back in school and try to get a weird haircut! What happened to you guys?”

“They got into another incantation battle,” José gleaned as he came up to the area and studied their behavior. “Did that professor double cross you?”

“No!” Gwynivara instinctively defended him. He sacrificed everything to assist them, so she wouldn’t allow anyone to believe for a minute that Professor Chadron had betrayed them! His good name needed to get honored for all he did! “Abigor murdered him and called a group of FBI agents over to try and kill us!”

Bernadette added, “If they hadn’t succeeded in that, they had some cops outside waiting to take us to jail! Abigor used Professor Chadron to lure us into a trap. One way or another, he wanted us out of the picture that day!”

Gwynivara felt vindicated since Bernadette shared her sentiments on the subject! She iterated her point, “Professor Chadron did everything he could to prevent that from happening to us! He never would have become a tool for the other side if he was alive!”

José shook his head sadly. “Poor guy! He didn’t deserve to go down like that! But at least they didn’t get you guys!”

“Yeah, but what are we gonna do now?” Rebekah fretted. “We still gotta get the cure out there, and he was our one shot!”

“Not true! We have dozens of shots for this!” Kierram held up the box of syringes that Gwynviara saved from the laboratory up in the air triumphantly.

As Gwynivara dipped a syringe into the ornate vial that the cure came in, Emorick remarked, “It’s a good thing that Kierram grabbed these things!”

Gwynivara rectified that impression, “Hey! Grabbing these was my idea! He just snatched them after I passed out!”

Emorick acknowledged, “You had sharp instincts, and I’m glad he saved them when you were incapacitated! You two make a great team!” Gwynivara smiled to hear him voice that opinion.

Her mood shifted to a slightly nervous one as she filled up the syringe, and it felt incredibly strange to do so! It took her back to her childhood when she played with her plastic doctor kit. She had given her parents a fake shot, and the sensations sort of seemed the same, but it tripped her out to think that she was about to administer a real one! She never thought that she would do a thing like this in her lifetime, but then again, so much of what occurred to her recently could not ever have been foreseen as she pictured what she might go through in the future! Still, it had to get done, so she tried to focus! Emorick, Niqun, Bernadette, and Rebekah all eagerly watched as she brought it to Cody’s arm. She pricked the targeted area of skin, and when he winced a little, Gwynivara inquired, “Did that hurt?”

“Sort of,” Cody replied, “But not more than getting a flu shot.”

“Oh good!” Gwynivara took a deep breath as she pushed the plunger, and they all eyed closely as the vaccine slowly disappeared into his arm…

Once it had been fully administered, they all monitored Cody with great anticipation. After a long time of nothing happening, Gwynivara exhaled in alleviation, and everyone bore expressions of relief. Cody kidded, “Well, that was anti-climatic!”

Niqun reminded him, “Nothing exciting is supposed to happen to you from this! The whole point of doing this is to prove that the vaccine is safe!”

“And to prevent you from getting yourself sick!” Bernadette tacked onto that. “Now you can’t go behind our backs and purposely infect yourself!”

“I wouldn’t have done that!” Cody insisted. He mulled it over for a second, and then he mused, “Well, not on purpose! But now I can get myself bit and nothing will happen!”

Emorick warned him, “Don’t even think about it! We don’t know how long it’ll take for it to kick in! Besides, we’re not totally sure if it can be used as a preventative measure. That professor compared it to the smallpox vaccine, so I assume it works the same way, but we don’t know for sure! So, until then, be careful!” Cody had a slight gleam of mischievousness on his face, so Emorick decreed, “From now on, when the minors go out, they can’t be paired together! You always have to be escorted by an adult!” Cody’s visage dimmed somewhat to learn of this ruling.

Rebekah brought up, “We’re gonna have to do that anyways ’cause soon I won’t have my incantation abilities! Do me next!”

Gwynivara filled up the syringe again, but she felt less nervous since she had a better understanding of what to expect. She injected Rebekah, and after they waited for a while, Rebekah conjured up a small ball of light. With a heavy heart, Rebekah lamented, “I still have it!”

“These things aren’t instant,” Bernadette consoled her. “Just give it some time and try again!”

Riley, José, Naama, John, and Kierram entered into the cave with bags full of food. “Who’s hungry?” John projected to the rest of them.

Emorick stared at the bags suspiciously. “Where did you get all this? You didn’t steal them, did you?”

“And if we did? Would you make us bring it back?” Riley quipped. Emorick gave him a reproachful look, so he ameliorated his sentence, “It’s from a food pantry. Don’t worry, we haven’t stolen anything since we nicked those disguises. We know we can’t risk another police encounter right now! Though I might be tempted if a certain handsome state trooper were around…”

“So, what’d we miss?” Kierram queried as he began distributing some of the food. “Did you deal the vaccine yet?”

Gwynivara reported, “Yeah, we just did it. Now we’re just waiting to see if it’s effective. Then we gotta start all over again on finding someone with credibility to tell the world the cure works.”

Naama proclaimed, “Actually, John and I ran into someone who might be willing to do that.!”