doing that?”
“I ran until daylight, and they were forced to retreat,” he explained. “But I can see the purpose of a safe zone for us.” His jaw was set, taut until he stood up. “Let’s go. We’ll pick a back area, and you can watch me make it for us.”
I raised an eyebrow at his back as he began walking off again. This time, I scrambled to keep up, Heath not nearly in so much of a rush. Jabari stopped at a dead end, nodding. It was a little thing, something one of us could lay out in and hide if needed. We would be seen, but if Jabari did that thing again, we could be safe.
“Jacky, come here,” he ordered, pointing beside him.
I bared my teeth but went. He pulled out a knife and scratched a line around the mouth of the little area. I watched intently, seeing he was making a divide of sorts.
“This will keep the rune working in this area. Scratched from the same silver blade, it stops the power from affecting the entire cavern. You can do this to rooms as well by marking a door frame, for example.” He knelt and scratched in the same rune as he had in the cabin. “Now, no creature of demonic origin or essence will be able to enter this space. It will burn them with pain beyond imagining if they cross it, and they will die within a few steps if they push through.”
“Demonic?” Heath spoke up from behind me.
“Yes. Vampires are humans corrupted with demonic energies, thanks to an old curse on their kind. Some say it was supposed to ravage the entirety of mankind, but it never grew. So, quickly and whenever there was an overpopulation of vampires, many other supernaturals culled their numbers. We’ve never been able to eradicate them and finally, we let them build their own culture and societies as long as they didn’t grow too big.”
“You talk like you were there when they came into existence,” I commented.
“I was. So were Father and Zuri.”
The blood left my head. “What?”
“They originated in Mesopotamia,” he informed us softly. “About three hundred years after I was born in Africa with Zuri. Father wanted to take us to see other cultures since we had spent so long living with a variety of different tribes in Africa. It had to have been…” He looked away, and I wondered what sort of mental math he was doing. “Two thousand BC? Yes, that must be it. Human civilization was still trying its hardest, and it was growing all around the world. Different tribes were appearing. Hasan once disappeared for a hundred years and explored what would later be known as North and South America. How he got here, I don’t know, but he brought back many things for us to wonder at.” He stopped, closing his mouth abruptly.
“Please continue,” I asked softly.
“Well, we arrived in Babylon, and there were humans, of course. They looked more like Father than Zuri and I, as we take after Mother. In the hundred years we stayed there, we noticed things, bodies beginning to show up, drained of their blood. We tracked down what did it, and it was a fight, but we succeeded.”
“You were there during the appearance of vampires,” Heath whispered in awe. I looked over my shoulders to see how wide his eyes were. Mine probably matched.
“I don’t know the exact circumstances, but we’d already known demons existed. From a different plane, a different world, they’re monstrous, cruel, and could never be trusted. We knew the signs of them and saw those signs on the human-looking thing we had killed. It took a little testing, but we discovered our runes against demons worked for vampires as well, finalizing the connection between them.”
“How do you know it’s a curse?” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“It was just our theory,” he explained. “But it was the best one we ever came up with. Within a century, other werecats were finding them in their own territories. Within five hundred years, they had infected the entire world. The original vampires were much more vicious and dangerous than the ones you will meet today. Ones in these modern times keep their humanity better than those who showed up in the first five to six hundred years. They quickly became feral, death addicted beasts, while today, they fight much harder and last much longer against it.” He waved the conversation away. “Enough of that. I would