"She's gone."

The girl felt lost. Her chest tightened into a vice, her head spun into madness and dizziness. Blood seeped in silent sobs, the city suddenly cold and empty, her vision blinded by the crimson blur of blood tears. Her hands reached out, desperate, for the softness of the thick, rich, rug under her feet. She either reduced her body to her hands and knees, or she collapsed where she stood when she heard the words. 

"How did it happen?"

There were no words worth speaking. There was no rational reaction, no logical course. Every time her blurred eyes closed, she saw the woman's face, every time her hands pressed hard over her ears enough to numb the voices behind her. It did no good to hear those words, any words, or anything. Not now. It wasn't until she felt the hands on her that she realized she was screaming.

"What's happening to her?"

She felt she was dying. Suffocation for the girl who didn't need to breath; a violent cutting off not from air, or life, but of the very presence that meant all of that and more to her. Suffocation not of the body, or the mind, but the soul. She saw only blood tears staining white plush rug under her as the sheer strength of one of the men held onto her. 

"I don't know. It's her sire, not mine, not yours, not yours...what about him? Mihail?"

The very blood in her body boiled at the thought of it. The scream turned inward, her body freezing in silence as her back arched and every muscle and joint that composed her physical frame locked tightly in place, her essence trying to find any and every avenue of escape. Sprint through the ghost yields. Spin through the darkness and beyond. Dive into the well of voices and minds even monsters dared not to touch. 

"Where's Grace? Everything stops until we find her. Every agent we have should be looking for her."

[i]Show me[/i], she begged in languages only spirits spoke, in tongues too dark to ever have survived this world. Audibly she babbled the nonsense, feeling but not seeing the others present moving away and giving her space as her eyes faded from the present and blanked white as she drowned in the night of Los Angeles. Inaudibly she prayed the prayers of lost souls, into the abyssal nothingness where the eternal dreamt. She was a child along such a path, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered, now. 

"...she's doing something...how the hell am I supposed to know 'what'?"

She would dive and die until she felt that touch. The touch spoke any language they needed, but her's was in the off-colored tongue of the amateur and the desperate. Her body rolled as those around gave her space, her body digging into the floor of the mansion of glass and concrete, the house of the damned in the city of angels. Opened, blinded, eyes saw nothing but the black sun light up the sky over the edge of the sinuous road running the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains.

"She's losing it. Where the fuck is Henry? He was supposed to come with you."

Without doing too much, she was in a trance. Words were faint and distant sounds, her mind racing quick jerks around hidden twists and jarring turns, titans of evil and the devouring more than she'd been prepared to expect watching her blaze by in search of the light she'd spent her unlife hiding and sheltered from; towards the light. Her frozen frame heated, the unsweltered warmth of love dawning over that last crest, guiding her through nothingness and dimensional barriers she hadn't experienced before.

"What do you mean you don't know where he is? She looks like she's about to snap!"

She felt it, small and round like a tear, press and pass over her cheek; the same star, the Sun of the Morning. Brilliant and once blinding, now easily seen, murmuring a murmur so inaudible that even though she could feel her lips tremble against her mind, understanding was fleeting and like clutching onto grains of sand. It didn't matter. The touch was enough, her eyes opening, her body relaxing as she laughed--as she giggled aloud, staring at the ceiling, then the faces of Rachel, Andre, Maty, and Mihail peering over and down at her.

"...she's not lost." The relief rippled through her, a shockwave of soothing sensations and calming aftermaths. Blood tears dried, and her lips smiling large. "I heard her." Her tone was sunshine as she propped her upper body up with either arm behind her, palms on the blood tear stained rug supporting her weight. "Get Grace. Get Henry. Get our people ready for battle. We're going after Lubbock."