As if in slow motion, I watched as the magic revealed the well-worn oak with its abundance of knots, indentations, and rippling character. The steel hinges that held it in place were rusted and in bad need of replacement, but so was the door itself.
When the door finally appeared after a few seconds, George opened it up for us and Lucas and I scurried down the steel ladder. George closed the door behind us, casting the lower room into relative darkness. At the bottom of the ladder he pointed his palm upward towards the trapdoor and said the same spell word again, meaning the trapdoor would once again be shrouded in invisibility.
This first entry room to the IMI was located roughly five metres below ground level. It was encased in thick concrete to support the walls and prevent cave-ins. The room was simple, plain, and had no adornments other than the secondary entry point located only a few metres away from me.
My eyes began to slowly adjust to the darkness—I knew my way well enough by now to know where the other door was. It was constructed from the same thick, solid timber as the trapdoor above with a small, centralised handle and latch in brass.
I walked forward, carefully running my hands along the concrete wall, treading carefully. The ground was uneven beneath my feet and the lack of light made it difficult to see anything too clearly, but I pressed on.
I could hear Lucas and George following closely behind me, their fingers also brushing against the wall. I often wondered who the bright spark was that built this room under the ground and neglected to install even just one light bulb—total dipshits.
Once I reached the door, I secured the handle in my grip, turned it clockwise and then pushed it inwards. I blinked a couple of times, my eyes now having to adjust to the new found brightness of the subsequent passage.
This area was also constructed from concrete, but the walls were finished in a smooth render of limestone or stucco and then painted gloss white to help reflect light and cut down on dust collection. You’d think they would have run the left over paint into the first chamber just to brighten the place up a bit—obviously not.
Set into the ceiling were some very ostentatious looking crystal chandeliers. They were strung roughly two metres apart from each other and cast pools of light upon the walls and floor, in complete contrast to the dark hole we had just emerged from and the dilapidated building back upstairs.
I walked down a set of oak timber stairs that led me further into the passage and took us a further two metres down under the ground’s surface. I took the last step off the stairs and headed further in, my feet sinking into the thick, fire-engine red carpet that lined the concrete floors.
Persian runners were laid haphazardly over the top of the carpet that covered the entire area of the IMI, except for the training rooms which were lined in stone, probably for durability. Old and crumbling oil paintings depicting various battle scenes that I was unfamiliar with adorned the narrow walls, but there were no other adornments. Past this particular ornately decorated passage was a junction in which three other intersecting passages of similar decoration branched off.
I took the left passage, feeling the familiar slope of it heading downwards, until I came to another set of carved timber stairs that lead to the library passage.
This passage was no differently decorated than the other passages except that it led to the largest room in the entire complex—this was where we mostly all congregated and where our daily lessons were held. The library room was roughly the size of our entire house, possibly even bigger given how many books were crammed in.
The sumptuous red carpet and vibrant Persian rugs were strewn about the room. The walls themselves could not be seen as they were lined from floor to ceiling with journals and books, encased in a frame of stunning oak timber bookshelves. There were also organised seating arrangements and more books piled up on side tables.
The plush leather sofas had brass-studded detail and were arranged into comfortable groupings around coffee tables. In between each arrangement there were multiple brass reading lamps placed centrally on battered oak side tables, matching the shelves, stairs and coffee tables. It was these lamps that cast the warm glow around the cavernous room that created the feeling of a more intimate setting. There were at least six of these groupings set up all together and from previous experience I knew they could easily cram about one hundred people in this particular room quite comfortably.
I stepped into the library, giving Karina and Lisa a quick wave before throwing my back pack on the floor and sitting down on one of the sofas away from Sarah and her equally bigoted friend, Kim.
Lucas was greeted by everyone and then gravitated towards Peter, his favourite instructor.
Peter was a short, tubby man in his mid-fifties that somehow appeared charismatic in Lucas’s eyes, but not so much to me. If anything, he kind of freaked me out a little bit. He always wore dark grey sweaters over similar coloured pants which were always rolled up a few times around the hems. His hair was dark where he wasn’t balding and his eyes were chocolate brown. I thought that they were too closely set together to be able to see straight, but apparently not. He had no trouble seeing at all when it came time to whooping my ass in a training session.
He wore a deep, pink scar that started over his left eyebrow and intersected with the corner of his eye, distorting the edge of it slightly, and flowing down to the hollow in his cheek. He never talked about how he’d got the scar, but I liked to think by the way he taught me martial arts that it was from fighting bad guys and not a visual display on why children shouldn’t play with knives.
He looked at me now with discontent, his lips thin and pressed together in a hard line that emphasised his wrinkles. His skin was deeply tanned and worn from both sun exposure and age, but it was not his appearance that freaked me out as much as his personality. He was cunning, devious, secretive, and always sneaking up behind me or watching me—his beady brown eyes held no compassion.
So I found his whole presence unnerving. Although I did have to admit he was an excellent self defence teacher, though I still found myself preferring Vincent or even Malcolm over him.
Vincent, on the other hand, was a polar opposite to Peter and probably, if I had to choose, my favourite adult at the IMI. At present he was sitting on a chair in the far corner of the room talking to Martha, our instructor for the day. He was only in his mid-forties, was over six feet tall, and slim but with a slight belly that he put down to drinking too many beers on a Friday night. He had a decent sense of humour, which he constantly flaunted by wearing hideous Hawaiian shirts, exclaiming they were the height of fashion, along with baiting me constantly in training with packets of blood maintaining that ‘all good little vamps need their AB-negative’.
The guy was harmless enough, but like Peter, he was as ugly as sin. His slender build did little to hide his acne scars and a poor attempt at creating a decent hairdo by using what little of his blonde hair he had left resulted in a nineteen seventies style comb over.
Ugh!
Malcolm, who was at least an ally to me here because I was
partially
friends with his daughter Karina, looked exactly like Peter except taller and thinner. They could have been twins except for the fact that Malcolm came from Spain and was moderately less creepy.
Sarah, of course, was the one person here that I really didn’t like at all. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to warm to her. Her attitude towards people was repugnant.
I flicked a quick look in her direction and noted that she was whispering something in Kim’s ear, watching me. There was nothing particularly unusual about that. The woman always had her eye on me, though what she thought I was going to do was beyond me.
Sarah was short and quite plump. She was just on forty-six years of age, maintaining short strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. Not an ounce of grey in those blonde curls. She wore a lot of pink and yellow ensembles, a bit glary for my liking, and was in complete contrast to the woman sitting next to her.
Like Malcolm, Kim wore a lot of black. She was scarily thin, almost twig-like in appearance and had similar short blonde hair and blue eyes like Sarah. Both of them were like two evil trolls, and I was glad that they spent most of their time keeping out of my way and out of my life. I didn’t really have a lot of patience for people who were intolerant of other people’s differences, particularly when narrow-mindedness was considered a noble asset by both of them.
I slumped down into the chair and waited for my morning classes to begin. I had a feeling Martha was going to run me through algebra today. She seemed to enjoy torturing me with mathematics.
‘Morning, George,’ Malcolm said as George lowered himself onto the sofa next to me.
‘Morning, Malcolm,’ he answered politely.
Martha and Vincent ended their conversation in the corner and came over to sit on the sofa in front of us. ‘Malcolm tells me that young Elena here took down two vânâtors on her own last week.’
George frowned and then looked at me. I sank down lower into the chair and suppressed a smile. ‘Oh yes, I forgot you’ve been away from the IMI for the
last few days, Vincent,’ George said quietly. ‘And, yes, it is true. Elena did kill two vân
â
tors without any direct help from us.’
Vincent grinned at me and winked. ‘I told you I’m a good teacher.’
‘It was silly and irresponsible, Vincent,’ George growled. ‘Please do not encourage her antics.’
‘But two vânâtors on her own?’ he continued, whistling. ‘That’s exceptional for a human.’
‘She’s not human,’ Sarah piped in.
George leaned forward in the chair and touched my
shoulder lightly. ‘She
is
human, Sarah.’
She scoffed and then continued her whispering with Kim. ‘So are we sending her out on more scouting missions?’ Malcolm asked.
I looked up at George hopefully.
‘No. She needs to learn the value of teamwork before she’s allowed on the field again.’
‘George,’ I moaned, sitting up in my seat, ‘that’s not fair. What have you been training me for if you aren’t going to let me use my skills?’
‘Oh, boy,’ Vincent said, standing up from the sofa, ‘I feel an argument coming on. It must be time to leave.’
George shook his head. ‘There will be no arguing. Until Elena learns that she doesn’t in fact know the answer to everything, then she will continue to train and only hear about the missions rather than participate in them.’
I slumped back into my seat again and kicked the edge of the coffee table in disgust. ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said, turning to look at me with one raised eyebrow and a heavy set scowl on his mouth.
‘I said … that’s bull—’
‘Alrighty then!’ Martha interrupted, her brown eyes silencing me. ‘Time for lessons.’
She tossed her mane of curly red hair over her shoulders and then beckoned for me and the other kids to head over to the desks and chairs at the side of the room.
Vincent, Kim and a few of the others said a quick goodbye and took off for work. I watched them go.
Most of the Protectors had day jobs. Vincent and Kim were lawyers who jointly ran their own firm. Most of their associates ran the practice for them in their absence, bringing in the money and allowing them more free time at the IMI. Occasionally they had to stop into the office for a few hours at a time to sit in on consultations or even attend court hearings, but as they ran the practice together, it did give them both a little more freedom.
It was the same with the other Protectors. Malcolm taught Spanish at a night school, and Peter ran a martial arts academy in the city. All of the classes ran at night so that they both had free time during the day at the IMI training the rest of us how to fight.
As for Sarah, I didn’t really give a rat’s ass what she did with her time. She was probably the head of some sort of white supremacist party who spent all of their time plotting revenge against anyone who was even slightly different from them or dared to believe in Santa Claus. The woman was intolerable and annoyingly present.