“So...” Karina started as she stopped at the entrance of her mother’s office. This was a large office, as expected for someone in Amara’s position, and most people would have waited until they were seated in front of the hybrid to speak, but she knew that her mother could hear her. “Are we going to talk about the person who’s claiming to be a part of your family?” Once she got her question out, she continued to walk into the room. 

Karina didn’t have her mother’s number, her address, or even a detailed agenda. She didn’t know when or where to find her, but she did know where Apollyon’s headquarters were and she also knew that it wasn’t difficult to just walk in. The Apollyon tower was a busy establishment with plenty of employees walking in and out of the premises. Everyone had some place to be and something to do. Nothing seemed out of place for the headquarters of a conglomerate. 

Had she died? 

Panic gripped her being as she started to gasp and wheeze. Her body felt so tight and so foreign to her. It didn’t help that she couldn’t see straight or that her head felt so hazy. What had happened to her? Where was she? It was hard to tell without her spirits and the white room that she was stuck in didn’t give her much information either. Karina let out a choked cry when she turned her head enough to see a concoction of some sort being pumped into her body. She reached over to get it out, only to find that she was restrained. 

She was better, not quite ready to practice magic but better. She should have taken time off to get her head put on straight, but Karina wasn’t the type to sit still for too long and she needed to feel productive again. She avoided going to River Styx, unwilling to see her mother in law, and instead found a strike team ready to leave for another mission. It was going to be a small time operation, two cities away from Ceres, a drug and alien weapons bust. No one at the Inner Sanctum wanted these things to hit the black market. 

Karina joked with them and she remembered laughing. Her team was in a good mood which meant that she was in a good mood. They were thirty minutes away from where their point of contact should have been when a mine exploded underneath their vehicle. One of her squad mates shielded the van, but it didn’t stop them from being thrown off the road and rolling down into a ditch. She hit her head and blacked out.