Blessed by Night

He truly felt guilty even though his disappearance wasn't his fault.

He could only imagine how he would have reacted if any one of them had gone missing for a single day, let alone a year.

He was just grateful that the girls had each other to rely on and support each other so that they never had to deal with it alone.

It took an entire thirty minutes before the girls could stop crying and then their questions started flying one after the other.

Nadine: 'Are you okay, darling?'

Bianca: 'Where have you been?'

Luna: 'Do you have any idea how worried we were?'

Malachi tried to sate the girls' curiosities as best he could but he didn't know anything either.

All that he could say for sure was that he woke up without the bulk of his powers and in a new body while floating in the middle of a lake.

He sat on a nearby rock and stared at the lake with the dead bat nightmare inside as he gave the girls his very brief run down.

'I've only been up for a few minutes and I've already gotten jumped by a nightmare... I guess things started while I was gone, huh?'

'Yes... It has been difficult, but since we had the base from the beginning things aren't nearly as bad as they could have been.' Sei explained.

Malachi looked up into the dark sky and felt like his mind was swimming with questions, but for right now only two really mattered to him.

'My mom and Anna... Where are they? How are they?'

For some reason that he didn't understand, the girls fell silent afterwards and he could feel their anxiety spiking.

'Your mother... we aren't exactly certain.' Luna said with difficulty.

'Aubrey is the only one who she comes to speak to on a rare occasion, and judging by what she tells us she has never stopped grieving.'

'At one point she was fighting with the gods constantly... they went from pleading with her to bring the sun back to trying to force her and... you can imagine how that went.'

Malachi pictured his mother enraged and beautiful, holding off an army of gods with one hand and holding the skulls of their fallen in another.

While that wasn't much different from the truth, it was still something of an over dramatization.

'As for Anna...' Nadine began.

Even from here, Malachi could feel the heartbeats of all of the girls quicken when his fiancé was mentioned.

And as he listened to his vampire fiancé explain, he understood exactly why.

Understandably, much of the world had been destroyed with the arrival of the nightmares.

However, it was able to recuperate faster than one would have thought due to the rise of two great factions.

The remnants of the previous world government, dubbed The Revival Regime.

And the faction of Arias and his Blessed supremacists, The Light.

Both sides have claimed different halves of the U.S as their own and do their best to contend with the nightmare threat and rebuild society to the best of their ability.

Albeit they have two very different ideas for how they should do this.

Where the Revival Regime seeks to restore, The Light want to make anew.

However, in the middle of these two powerhouses are the small and unknown Nightfall faction, who obey the desires of neither side and focus solely on locating people displaced in the disaster and helping them get to whichever side they choose discretely and without confrontation.

But on one of their missions, Anna and Joanne were leading a family of six to the border that separates The Revival territory and The Lights; an area that's been dubbed as the wastelands.

In the midst of their journey, the girls became surrounded by a large squad of over fifty regime soldiers.

But from what Malachi had been told, these were not regular human men and women.

These people were augmented, either technologically or genetically to become their own version of superhuman.

Due to Arias having a literal army of blessed supremacists and even human underlings who believe in him, the attitude the humans have taken towards blessed has undergone a complete one eighty.

Now, if a blessed is caught by a member of the Revival Peace Corps they are expected to surrender themselves to a shot that implants a nanite device within.

Not only does it have GPS tracking, but it can also be used to deliver paralyzing stuns in the event of noncompliance.

When caught, the first thing that the peace corp soldiers did was try to inject the girls with chips.

Needless to say, Anna wasn't going for that shit, and neither was Joanne.

They attempted to flee with the rest of their squad mates and get out of there, but there was one particularly strong cybernetic human who got the drop on them both one after the other, and they were captured.

The only reason why the girls even knew everything in such explicit detail was because they had seen everything within Anna's shared memories before she was knocked out.

They had been trying to contact her and rescue her for months, but security around the facility were they held POW's was tighter than a nun's pantyhose on the day of Sabbath.

Every mission that they had led to retrieve Anna and her mother either ended up with one of their own almost being captured or killed by a member of the regime, and with every time they failed the difficulty only got that much more difficult the next time around.

After all of these months, the girls were even more distraught.

Just as Malachi views them as irreplaceable pieces of his life, they feel the exact same about him and each other.

They are all incredibly close friends that border on a tightly knit sisterhood, so the loss of the man who they all loved and one of their own right after had surely done a severe amount of damage on their hearts and minds.

'Honey... We are so so sorry..!' Sei sobbed.

'We knew that you wanted us to protect each other but we couldn't...' added Luna.

'It's all our fault that they got captured..! We should have stayed together..!' Cried Nadine.

Malachi had no doubt that the girls were incredibly emotional at this moment and were likely weeping all over each other.

His own emotions were in utter chaos but for right now he had to prioritize them over everything else.

'It's alright, you girls tried everything that you could to get her back. That is all that matters to me, and I can't thank you enough for never giving up on her. All three of us will be home soon so get al of your crying out before then, okay?'

Just like that, the tears of all four girls dried up as their despair changed into disbelief.

Bianca: 'Babe... You can't mean..'

Luna: 'You can't do that by yourself! We just got you back, we can't have you risking your life again!'

Sei: 'A-Atleast come back to base first, we can assemble a team and-'

'Girls... I need you to listen to me. I don't care what the circumstances are, I will never come home and relax quietly if all five of you aren't by my side.

I would do anything for any of you, but don't ask me to change that. I'm not leaving Anna or Joanne in some prison facility for even a second longer than I have to.' He said seriously.

Against the knowledge of the girls, Malachi stood up from the rock he'd been sitting on and started to float up into the sky.

His eyes became locked on the direction he could feel Anna waiting in, and he unconsciously clenched his fists hard enough to crack his own bone.

'Like I said, all three of us are coming home soon, okay? Just wait for us.' He tried to put on the calmest tone he could muster but was unsure if it actually worked.

'Alright…'

'We'll trust you.'

'We love you… so much.'

One by one, the girls all voiced their acceptance meekly before they wished him luck and sent him their love.

The connection was cut a moment later, and a densely concentrated aura started to leave Mal's body.

He did not consider himself to be a particularly bloodthirsty man or even one who enjoyed fighting and violence.

But for the first time in his entire life he felt himself turning into something largely unrecognizable as he made a vow to kill every single person who got in his path to rescue the girls.

With a sound like a sonic bomb, Mal shot through the air faster than most planes as he raced to get to Anna and Joanne as fast as he could.