A beeping noise caught Daryn's attention. He darted his eyes to the source and found that the radio was still working, but the headphone was blown to pieces. Relief sailed through him as he looked at it with hope. He managed to climb inside the cockpit and check the buttons near the radio. At first it was just the beep. He pressed the buttons around it for it to come alive. Rough, crack-ish sound emanated and the radio came alive. Excited as hell, Daryn tapped the sleek microphone that was hanging upside down.

"Hello!" he said. But there was no voice from the other side. He was so restless and thought that before even the radio went off, he should at least send some message. So he informed whoever was on the other side, "This is Daryn Silver, CEO of the Silver House." Once again a jarring sound from the radio emanated and it threatened to go off anytime. "My aircraft has cr—"

​​

A frying surge of electricity struck the plane in the front, blasting him through the air further back. He shrieked and landed on his back almost hundred feet away. His clothes were completely ripped apart and the phone in his pants pocket shattered as the tiny glass shards penetrated his skin. Daryn was completely dazed. There were stars in his vision and he was nearly sightless from the blast and the smoke. His ears were almost deaf with the sound. He was now lying in the wet mud with his body covered in bruises, blood and wet mud. What the hell just happened? He wondered as he tried to get up. If a mortal would have experienced the blast, he or she would have died, but Daryn was a Lykae. He survived. He thought that the blast was perhaps the last in a series of complete devastation of the aircraft due to the crash. 'Can't see… can't see…'

There was so much fire and smoke all around it that he couldn't see anything clearly. Was someone nearing? He picked up the scent of something… someone… They looked like shadows. He tried to get up but realized that his right shoulder was dislocated and immense pain ran down his right femur. He tried to rise in order to blindly run away from that place, but he only managed to lift his hips, his legs refusing to lift even an inch. He was left with no choice but to use his claws as he waited for the shadows to take shape. But his vision was so blurry that he didn't even know where to use the claws. So he threw them in all directions, hoping that there was no one around. "Oho ith ther—'' His front teeth or his molars or his jaw—something was badly dislocated or fractured and blood pooled in his mouth. His stomach was soaked in warm liquid, which he knew was his blood. It flowed freely from some wound. "Dawn…"

"Tie his hands!" a female voice interrupted him.

"Oho are yu—" he asked again as through his blurry vision he saw a woman emerging out of the smoke. He couldn't make out who she was. Someone from behind seized his hands. Fighting them was turning futile because he could feel his body becoming cold. He resisted with all his might, with whatever strength was left in his body, but eventually two or three people caught hold of him. He clawed them all blindly, and knew that he had given them serious injuries as they shrieked with pain and he could smell blood on his claws.

He looked up at the female in front of him whose face he still couldn't see. She brought her hand forward and white flickering lights emerged from them. They struck him and his body convoluted as electric shock passed through it. By the time he looked up again, he was panting. "Stoph it…" The pain was excruciating. Who was she? What did she want?

His sight was almost returning when the same female ordered others. "Put a cover over his head. Bag him."

He shook his head violently, but realized that he was now unable to move. The people around him stalked closer and they rolled a black colored sack over his head.

Wolfbane… he smelled. It was a poison to make him unconscious. Within a few seconds, Daryn's world became black. 'Dawn…' he reached her mentally.

All he remembered was that he was being dragged through the wet mud. Then he passed out completely.

Daryn slipped into a darkness that engulfed his mind. The nightmares returned to him with full force leaving him paralyzed and cold. The woman would come to him and make him see illusions that only left him nervous as hell. "Mother!" the five-year-old Daryn shouted. But Sedora never came to him. He curled beneath his blanket. Who was the woman? Always in shadows…

Blackness overcame again.

When he opened his eyes, the twelve-year-old Daryn was hurled in a corner of his room as illusions continued to grow. Snakes were slithering around him. "Mother!" he shouted again as he used to whenever these nightmares haunted him, whenever that woman came in his dreams. But she never came to him. Was he going mad? He couldn't even talk about these to anyone in order to never show his weaknesses. He had come to realize that his mother would never come to him whenever he reached for her help. In fact she had only ridiculed him. His nightmares were stronger whenever she visited. That's why he was always so tired when she was around.

He wanted to break the obsidian he was in. He wanted to blast it the way the plane blasted.

When he opened his eyes after what seemed like eternity, he turned his gaze around. He couldn't figure out where he was, but he was warm. He couldn't figure out a lot of things. Who was that woman? He drifted between sleep and wakefulness. The room smelled like copper and moisture and herbs.

He tried to lift himself, but his head reeled as hell. His right arm felt like it was crushed, which he later realized that his arms and legs were strapped to the bed. It was the second question that made him crack open his eyes fully. He shook his arms in an effort to get up but the pain surged right from his shoulder to his palms.

The first thing he saw as soon as he opened his eyes was a woman with black hair whose face was on the other side. She was wearing a black long gown that had a lot of gold threads woven in it in intricate patterns.

"Dawn!" He pushed himself up, starting to look wildly around the room. "Where is Dawn?" He looked down at his body and with numerous bandages crisscrossing he thought he resembled a mummy.

The woman turned her face to him immediately and smiled. "Dawn should be fine," she said with easy grace as she walked to him. "How are you feeling Daryn?" she asked. She touched his dislocated shoulder and his fractured arm. "We thought we would lose you."

Daryn cringed and focused his eyes on her. Her red eyes glazed. "Vampire!" he said in revulsion.

She chuckled. "Name's Emma."