Chapter one hundred fifteen

After the awe of what we were seeing subsided somewhat, Boris led us across the crystal lake on a glass walkway. When we reached the door of the mansion, it opened on its own to let us in. There was nobody guarding the mansion but I could see many camera's inside and outside the house.

We went deeper into the massive house but it remained deserted. There wasn't anybody inside the lavishly decorated mansion, not even a maid.

I was starting to wonder if my grandfather had gone out on a stroll or something when we came face to face with a large imposing door. It was also the only closed door that we had encountered so far. I strained my ears and I could faintly hear muffled voices coming from the other side of the door.

I was going to rest my ear on the door to hear what was being said when it suddenly opened without any warning, leaving me in an incredibly awkward position which I tried to play off as if I had bent down to tie my shoes while hoping all the while that nobody noticed that my shoes didn't have any laces.

I decided to ignore the giggling coming from Delilah's direction and instead focused on the people inside of the room.

The first person was an extremely old looking man whose face was covered by wrinkles sitting behind a large desk that dominated most of the room. His complexion was extremely pale, so much so that blue veins could be seen beneath his almost transparent skin. He had a rather prominent beak like nose that was bent as if it had been broken many times and hadn't healed properly. He was staring at me with eyes that were a blue color so pale that he looked blind, combined with the fact that he had snow white hair, eyebrows and even wore a snow white suit, he looked like a ghost.

Besides that, he was also the only male in the room so I assumed that this was my grandfather.

Apart from him, there were two other people in the room, two women to be exact. One stood behind my grandfather, gazing out through a large window from which the crystal lake was visible and she appeared to take no notice of my presence. All I could see was her back so all I could really tell about her was that she had a good figure which she showed off with a tight skirt and a matching suit jacket, both were a deep black color just like her hair which she had in a tight bun.

The other woman was sitting on the edge of the table while looking at me with naked hostility that made it clear that she was unhappy that I was here. She looked about eighteen, wore black jeans, a black t-shirt, and way too much eyeliner. She looked like a goth who was trying too hard.

After I checked out the inhabitants of the room, I did what I usually did and used my soul vision to check for Atelli and what I found shocked me.

The woman by the window had a dark ball in her soul which was surrounded by sinister looking red symbols that throbbed and shifted as I watched. I had seen a lot of crap so that wasn't really enough to trip my alarms but apart from that, her hands were covered in blood.

Under my soul vision, her hands were shriveled up until they almost looked like claws and they were covered in fresh dripping blood all the way to her elbow like macabre long gloves.

The goth wannabe chick wasn't as bad. She only had a small dark spark in her soul with red symbols appearing and disappearing every now and then. Her hands still looked normal and lily white without a speck of blood on them.

I didn't know what these two women were but I was sure they weren't very nice people so I immediately became more alert and guarded.

I turned towards the man who I assumed was my grandfather and said quite formally , "Greetings. I assume you are Mr. Usmanov. I am Sophia Belikova , I believe you wanted to see me."