The heavy oak doors of Elena's mansion slammed shut behind Rose with a resounding boom, the percussive finality seeming to reverberate through her very bones. She stood there for a moment on the ornate front steps, chest heaving with each ragged inhalation as she struggled to rein in the blazing fire of her fury.
All around her, the night seemed to have taken on a peculiar, hyper-realized quality - the shadows cast by the estate's tasteless neo-baroque facades elongating into ebony claws, the ambient sounds of the city taking on an almost oppressive weight.
Even the air itself felt heavier, more viscous, as if charged with the same roiling energies that crackled through Rose's psyche.
A bitter chuckle, harsh and sardonic, spilled from between her clenched jaw. To think she had actually harbored doubts, allowed the whispers of prudence and discretion to slither into her mind even for an instant. That momentary qualm seemed so laughably naive in the wake of the undiluted savagery she had just unleashed upon her wretched sibling.
No, there could be no more shilly-shallying or hesitation when the path ahead was finally so clear, so righteously inviolable in its purpose. Her sights were now firmly trained upon the ultimate quarry - that cabal of corruptors and manipulators whose vile machinations had set this whole sordid affair into motion.
And if that devious pack of vipers truly believed they could simply slither away unscathed after orchestrating Blake's torment and ruination...well, they would soon realize the folly of rousing the terrible, unstoppable wrath of one such as Rose.
She turned on her heel and stalked down the sweeping front drive, each measured pace thrumming with scarcely leashed menace and scarcely restrained violence. The sleek black lines of her town car seemed to materialize from out of the gloom, the vehicle's glossy exterior reflecting the muted amber glare of the street lamps in burnished tones of smoldering balefire.
Rose swept around to the rear passenger door and wrenched it open, sliding into the plush leather confines of the vehicle's interior with a fluidity that bordered on the preternatural. No sooner had the door thumped shut than the engine rumbled to life, carrying her ever further from the debacle at Elena's estate with implacable, single-minded determination.
The drive back into the heart of the city seemed to pass in a blur, little more than a kaleidoscopic smear of flickering neon and shadowed shapes resolve beyond the polarized panoramic windows. Rose's mind raced with each plodding mile marker, hand unconsciously drifting to the deep scoring left by her sister's treacherous talons.
The memory of their vicious altercation rekindled the smoldering embers of her fury, searing aggression and calculated ruthlessness burning away the lingering vestiges of hesitation and denial until only the diamond hardness of her resolve remained.
Yes, she would see this through to its implacably bitter conclusion, no matter how many bridges she was forced to burn or how far the bloody trail of retribution was destined to stretch.
But no sooner had she pivoted onto the hallway leading to her sanctuary than a fleeting warble of distortion seemed to crease the air around her. For the span of a single, stuttered heartbeat, every line and contour of reality itself appeared to waver and shimmer like desert miasma unspooled through the shimmering noonday heat.
Then, with a flicker and distended ripple of energy, the air before her simply...parted, as if sundered by the passage of some invisible blade.
A fissure split the veil of reality itself, unmasking a sudden vision/trance that set Rose's hackles rising in an instinctual display of threatened aggression.
She stared with wide eyes as she watched right in front of her. There, nestled behind the awning membrane of existence, stretched a desolate hellscape straight from out of the darkest fever nightmares of the most depraved minds. She found herself in a desert. But how come?
Rust-hued skies carried on balefully over a plain of blackened, ossified ruins and desiccated cinders that seemed to stretch on towards some distant, unseen horizon.
At the center of that waking vision of apocalyptic decay stood the instantly recognizable silhouette of a lone, towering figure - midnight black blood dribbling from the gaping emptiness of the figure's eye sockets as it opened its maw in a rictus display of hunger.
The air around Rose seemed to shudder and keen with the echoing weight of its silent howl of torment, a communion of agony transcribed into wavering harmonic distortions too terrible to be borne by mortal minds. Was this magic?
On what appeared to be the chest of the figure, she read aloud "Devil".
Was that the devil?
Was it hell?
Who was the devil?