Chapter 10: Lightning Strikes

Silvana ran promptly outside, her boot heels clicking as she rushed down the manor's marble steps.

Couples sat on the fountain, smoking cigars and sharing kisses. Bruce's truck was still parked.

"Bruce, where are you?" Silvana shouted into her phone. But she got only a dial tone, and the last noise she heard him make inside was a holler of pain.

She hadn't even thought Bruce capable of pain.

But where was he?

Silvana observed her surroundings. Even outside, the party raged on, and as she fluttered about searching for Bruce's mask from the crowd, she saw a bolt of crimson lightning flicker above a hedge garden and illuminate the side of a well-maintained brown barn.

She knew he was inside.

Fast as she could and clutching her wound, she moved towards the barn, past the garden of trimmed bushes to resemble men and women on all fours and howling like wolves to the starry sky above her. Silvana unhitched the wooden beam securing the barn doors shut, and she burst through the door