As Page-Turner slept on the bed, her once still body began to toss and turn. She couldn't tell just what it was that was rooting itself around in her dreams, but something was urging her to wake up. It was like one of those feelings someone might get that tells them that they had forgotten something, but don't know exactly what.
Begrudgingly obeying these basic instincts, her eyes slowly blinked open. With a groan she rubbed a hoof over her face and let her dark surroundings come into focus, soon discovering the pocket watch she had left on the counter. Picking it up with a lazy sweep of her hoof and squinting her eyes as hard as she could muster, the pony could see it was only some time after two.
"Well, that would explain why there's no sun yet..." she muttered under her breath, before the very act of speaking prompted her to unleash a mighty yawn. After closing the watch with a click and putting it back in its spot, she rolled onto her back, fixed the warm covers over herself better with her hooves, and was about to close her eyes and return to dreamland, but snapped them open wide the moment she recognized something out of the ordinary that sent a chill as cold as ice down her spine.
There was a figure standing at the foot of her bed, next to the only window in the room. With what little light was given off by the rain-shrouded lampposts outside, the queer, deathly silent shape seemed even darker than the shadows sitting at edges of the room. It was clearly hooded and covered in something black as pitch, and its basic form was vaguely pony-like, but with the the fact that there was someone else standing in the same room as her, the only thing Page-Turner could see in this stranger was pure terror.
She remained frozen in utter fear, lying in her bed helplessly while her eyes stretched to the size of dinner plates. When she noticed, ever so subtly as it was, that something long, thin, and (what could only be described as) eel-shaped was slowly inching its way out of its hooded head with a sickening squelching noise, her jaw dropped.
Like a sick perversion of a proboscis from a butterfly, it crawled further from its mouth, revealing two strips of loose flesh lining its tip akin to a forked tongue, and a tiny, needle-sized projection just between where they separated. Shooting forward in a sudden move that was faster than she could flinch, the forked appendages on either side of its tip wrapped around the base of her throat, centering on Page's collarbone. The moment the pointed tip stuck into her neck was like a prick from a syringe, but it stung like the bite of a spider.
All Page could do was let out a muted cry of pain. She tried to scream, to let someone, anyone within earshot know of her plight, but all she was able to accomplish was a high-pitched gasp as she felt that stinger's noxious venom enter her bloodstream. She felt numb, weak and excruciatingly tired, as if something of her own was leaving her body in the process, and only faintly realized that the thing had let her go and pulled its 'tongue' away after her ears picked up the sound of the being's footsteps tapping on the floor, and up to the front of the bed. With barely enough strength to open her eyes, the pony witnessed the creature looming its head over her own. Even being this close to it, she still couldn't make out any features in the blackness that were hidden within so well.
Though she still could not see its face through the darkness, without warning, the figure suddenly pressed its dry-feeling mouth over her own, which was already wide open with pure shock. It wasn't in a manner that conveyed forced lust of any sort, but in a way that felt very unemotional and almost... robotic. While she struggled as much as her unresponsive body would allow against this 'kiss', which was accomplishing absolutely nothing, Page felt something extremely warm begin to exit the stranger's mouth and enter down her throat in a long, inexorable motion. Right off she sensed that it had a thick, unbearably metallic taste to it that made every fiber of her being want to gag in revulsion. To her horror, she quickly realized what it was.
Blood. Ichor of a most foul design, and she was uncontrollably swallowing every drop that entered her mouth.
After a scant minute, which felt more like a hellish eternity to Page, the being finally pulled its concealed head away from her own in a brief motion. Page retched and coughed and hacked several times as she tried to recover from what revolting, utterly vomitous deed had just been brought upon her, but her lungs, and chest for that matter, felt as if they had just been set aflame like a torch to a bonfire. She spasmed and twitched on her bed from the unbearable pain that quickly overtook her, still unable to move completely, and when her crazed, bloodshot eyes finally managed to refocus on the creature that had done this to her, it was standing a few feet away from her once more, in baleful silence.
Slinking its snakelike 'tongue' out from under the hood, the dark appendage previously used shot from its mouth once again like the crack of a whip, and reattached itself snugly to the front of her neck. It once more pricked her with its barb-like stinger, reopening the small hole in her flesh it had made originally. Then Page began to feel weakness envelope her as its venom was pumped into her veins again.
Her focus dwindling with every passing second, but her abject terror bright and filling her brain with numbed alarm, Page-Turner's eyes rolled into the back of her head before finally closing. Her senses dulled to the point of nonexistence, she eventually succumbed to the spell she had been placed under, and slipped back into the darkness that awaited her.
And she knew no more.
Awakening sometime very the next morning in a thick enough sweat to rival a waterfall, Page-Turner found herself wholly bedridden.
"Sleep paralysis... it was just sleep paralysis... J-just a crazy dream..." those were the words she continued to remind herself with like a mindless chant as the day stretched long and her thoughts shifted to the night before. Hours would at times feel like minutes, but at other intervals, those meager minutes seemed like hours. And all of it was spent in searing agony, for her pain-wracked body felt as though it was submerged in molten lava.
Of course, in this state, Page was forced to extend her time here at the hotel when a maid who was due to clean the room found the ill unicorn lying in it. Since she was unable to do it herself, Page instructed the maid to pay for her prolonged stay with the bits she was keeping in her bag, and when asked if she should call the nearest hospital or a doctor, Page blatantly refused, stating in a strained voice that all she was suffering through was a fever she must have caught earlier the day before.
It had to be a fever, and Page practically brainwashed herself into believing that theory with those six words. Before originally setting off, the mare told her parents that she was going to return from her trip within a week of it finishing, and she couldn't allow a doctor to hold her here in Manehattan over something she knew had to be trivial. But the longer she tried to wait through her malady, to let a period of vigor come by, when she would actually be able to move on her own, the worse it got for her, and the more such a moment of improvement appeared to be in vain.
What hurt worst of all was what went on in her chest. It was as if something inside her was contorting and rearranging itself into something else. Something unnatural. She felt like she wanted to vomit because of it, and that vision of what unspeakable liquid she ingested, still fresh in her memory, encouraged her to do so. But even with the memory of that sickening dream, Page was unable to. She unleashed a great many screams and earsplitting cries of uncontainable torment, and in an effort to silence herself, as to not let someone here call for the hospital, muffled the tortured shrieks under her pillow and sheets, which she hadn't even noticed were beginning to tear and rip under the gripping pressure of her hooves and grinding teeth.
Then it stopped. An incalculable amount of time after it began, all the pain, agony, torment and burning suddenly stopped.
Page had no idea if a day or two, or three, or ten had passed her by while she just sat there, but she didn't care. She just wanted to embrace this sweet, merciful release from her suffering. And then, as if all life had just left her, Page's once-twisting and writhing body went still on what little remained of the bed.
"Well, I'm off, Zeff," Ebonwind said as he made his way to the apartment's door. "I'll be sure to get you the right donuts this time. You said you wanted a cappuccino too, right?"
"I hate coffee," Zeffith, the aged zebra whom he spoke to, mumbled back in a thin, but clearly grumpy voice that begat fragility in his already gaunt shape, which was sitting in a chair by one of the windows. "You know that, Ebonwind."
"Just asking..." the pegasus shrugged with a small, playful grin. The old zebra he was now leaving was colored in black-and-white stripes like any other zebra, but wore a thick trench coat over his hunched frame to keep him warm against the early autumn morning air, and had a medium-sized beard of a plain white color hanging from his chin. His mane, bearing the same texture, hung loosely from his head in a tangled mess of long locks. Ebonwind himself was a young pegasus with a dark grey coat of fur lining his body, while his mane was fully black.
As he trotted along the sidewalk, happy that the rain that had been plaguing the city for the past few days had finally made room for the sun and a lovely, near-cloudless blue sky, he passed a great many ponies that he greeted heartily, one-by-one, until he reached his destination - a cozy little café he visited more frequently with every passing day, called the Manehattan Mocha.
He walked into the coffee shop, bought what he was looking for, said hi to a recently-made friend who worked there, and returned back to the apartment with the bag of donuts balanced over his back, and cup of hot, steaming coffee held in one of his front hooves. He placed his cup down briefly to turn the knob on the door and open it, and once he picked it back up and was inside, closed the door with one of his back feet.
Taking no more than five steps forward, he came across Zeffith once more, who still sitting in the spot where he last remembered seeing him, but now the zebra was wearing his wide-brimmed hat over his head, despite being indoors, and held what looked like a dirty scrap of paper in his hooves. This boded rather poorly for the pegasus, who took notice right off.
"Is something wrong, Zeffith?" Ebonwind's tone sounded concerned and without his usual sarcasm or snideness. When he set the bag on the table with his wing, the zebra nodded, his silver eyes narrowing into slits. Crunching the paper into a ball in his hooves, he tossed it into the wastebasket he was sitting near in a single toss.
"I received a peculiar message when I went to collect the mail after you left. And you'll never guess what oversized mosquito sent it..."
Ebonwind's expression went blank in immediate realization. "Was-"
"Alder. It was Alder," Zebediah interrupted purposefully, and seriously. "Surprising, considering the bastard probably hasn't written anything on paper in at least a hundred years, judging from the outdated text he littered his message with..."
The zebra let his pony friend walk up by his side; the coffee and donuts completely forgotten at that point. "What did he write?" he asked. "Is it about another victim of his? Is he taunting us?"
"No. He wants us to meet him tonight, just under the Bell Gate Bridge. Something about settling the score once and for all," Zeffith continued on without pause, before letting a crooked smile come over his face. "Everything about this screams 'trap'! But I know him almost as well as he know himself, and that alone has given me other ideas. Call me crazy, but I think he wants to honor these words. Even he, in all of his ageless cunning, should know that such a brawl would be suicide for him."
Ebonwind didn't look very convinced. "He's the last strigoi. Why would he want to just give up and die? After all these years we've spent tracking him?"
"I can think of several reasons, but one is that he's also old, mind you," Zeffith huffed, standing from his seat with a wretched crackling of his ancient bones. "Older than you, older than I, and, if my suspicions are correct, he's old enough to start losing care for anything."
"And you know that... how?"
"His movements have gotten more sluggish over the last two years alone. Do you recall what happened in that little encounter we had the last time we saw him? Back at that old abandoned canning factory in Baltimare where he had made his hideout at that time?"
Ebonwind nodded. "Yes. He just stood there as I was coming up to him and... let me thrust my sword through his chest. It didn't kill him and he still managed to escape, but..."
Zeffith flicked his hoof up and pushed up the tip of the brim of his hat. "Yes, precisely. Let's also not forget that his list of servants has dropped down to one, and he hasn't seemed to have been in the mood for recruitment."
"That sounds ludicrous," the pony sighed skeptically. "But still... what do you propose?"
"It's best if we prepare. What happens tonight may be a trap, may be a fateful duel, may even be nothing for all we know, but either way it could give us the chance we've been waiting for."
He reached for the long, black, silver-tipped cane he left leaning against a cupboard in the kitchen. "Call an old stallion like me cocky, but I've been waiting for a chance like this since I was practically your age, Ebonwind. Every turn I've made against Alder has lead to nothing but him slipping through my hooves. You understand why I can't simply pass up this opportunity."
"Of course I do, sir," Ebonwind agreed. "I'm just worried that you might get a little bit... well, reckless if you let what's in your head get the better of you."
"I am anything but reckless, you foal," he chuckled, pacing up to the pegasus. "And you should know that trusting what's in your head is what will keep you alive. After all, look at me. I've trusted my senses for most of my life, and I still feel as young as a colt and as strong as ox."
Ebonwind let out a puff of air and sighed as he fluffed his wings out, grinning at his mentor's sureness. "Yes sir, I can see that."
"No you can't," Zeffith replied, detecting his deadpanned humor. "Now, cut the jokes and get your gear ready. Tonight I plan on taking another evil off of the face of this good earth."