Dark Surrender (12 page)

But he didn’t have a triumphant smile on his face. He looked…relieved. And why hadn’t he taken her, killed her while she was out? Why hadn’t he bound and gagged her? She could still work magicks on him, and if she was lucky she might just be able to destroy him. Or maybe he wanted to play with her before he tried to kill her…or turn her into a soulless thing like him…but then, of course he did had a soul. If he sired her, would she have a soul too?

But when he finally spoke it wasn’t about any of the things racing through her head. “We really should get you to the hospital. You’ve hit your head pretty hard,”—Min could see herself being flung across the room and into the wall, a vision seen through his eyes. And then of her lying defenseless on the floor of her mother’s room. The hunger had been so strong in him—“and you’re still just human.” She blinked at him, and gulped—her mouth and throat were so dry. He reached out and handed her a glass of water, as if he’d read her mind. “And then we need to talk about what you tried to do to me.”
Okay, there’s that other shoe I’ve been waiting on to drop. He’s still going to rip my throat out…well, after he gave me a tongue lashing for trying to sacrifice him to wake my mother.
“I don’t pretend to understand the magicks you were doing, but I’m quite certain it wouldn’t have worked.”

Min scowled at him. “It would’ve worked. I mean, why else would fate send me that spell and the one vampire in-all-the-world to use for it?”

He got a cold, detached look on his face, his young, handsome features hardening. “All vampires have a soul, Min.”

No they don’t!

“
Yes, we do.” Min felt a stab of panic as the vampire answered her mental objection. “It tortures us when we’re first brought over, but the hunger helps us ignore it until it fades to only a memory. Once you get past that part you will never suffer from it again. You know the phrase, ‘Better, for lack of use.’” He looked so thoughtful sitting there. “Something about what has happened between us has reawakened mine.”

Min shook her head, but it made her nausea all the harder to ignore. “But it was working. I could feel it. A presence was in the room. My mother’s soul.”

“
So that’s what she is to you. Your mother?” He looked to the door and Min got a brief chill. “Well, believe me, what animated your mother’s body wasn’t her ghost, or her spirit, or anything like that.”

“
Alright, smart-guy! What was it?”

“
The sidhe.”

“
The what?”

“
The sidhe…faeries…but not Tinkerbell, the kind that rule over the ethereal mists…”

Min just stared at him like he was crazy.

“
You’ve had to have heard of them: The Summer and Winter Courts—Seelie and Unseelie.”

“
You’re trying to tell me little fairies did that to my mother, and that they smacked me around up stairs like I was a piñata?” She laughed at him.

“
You’re a gypsy, a witch. You can’t tell me you’ve never heard of them?”

“
Fairies are just…the stuff of
fairytales
. That’s all.”

“
No, they are most certainly real…and they aren’t little. At least the ones you’re dealing with aren’t. They’re also so strong they can smack a mightily powerful witch like you around,
like a piñata
, and not even be in the same room as you. They probably weren’t even in this world when they did it.”

Min waved him off, feeling like his words were simply madness. “How in the world would you know anything about such creatures, even if they did exist?”

Luca’s face turned from hard cold to almost winsome, a smile touching his lips, and then there was torment. She could suddenly feel his grief. And then Min was slammed with another vision: one of his memories.

An injured fae, a woman, and even injured he would never have been able to take her by himself. There had been half a dozen vampires, all so hungry for the creature’s blood, the scent of the faerie so powerful and alluring, intoxicating and absolutely irresistible. They had fallen upon her in concert, like ravening dogs. One had lost his head to her sword, but the other five sunk their teeth into her and drained her, though it took all their strength to subdue her, her strength finally faded as her blood was sucked away.

They drank her until she was stone cold and dry to the bone. Then they tore her body apart to get at what little was left inside her. It was terrible.

And all the while one of the vampires had Luca’s hand in hers. He loved her, hated and feared her, her glittering black eyes and pale skin—so beautiful and crazed.

Elaina.
The name wafted into Min’s mind, cold and sharp. And she knew that this horrifying creature had made Luca into a vampire.

She ripped herself from the vision and she spoke the words that fell from Luca’s lips. “Hard to kill.” And she knew he enjoyed the thought of having killed the fae as much as he loathed himself for ending the life of something so powerful and beautiful.

She was suddenly frightened, for as he spoke again of the Summer and Winter Courts of the fae, and that he could tell just from the smell, and the feel of power, that whatever fae had been in her mother’s room, that it was one of the Winter Courts, the Unseelee Court.

But somehow, someway, it all seemed vaguely familiar. Like, as he spoke of it all, she realized she’d already heard it, knew it once. Yet as she listened, as she tried to pin down and touch those thoughts, they slipped away. As if something were obscuring those things from her mind’s eye. Magic, it had to be. But who had done it? Was it the same thing that had stolen her mother’s soul and life, or was it something else entirely?

Min felt the coldest of sensations trickle like the blood of a corpse down her spine.
What else do I not remember? And for how long has this been going on?

After a fuzzy, dizzying moment, min tried to stand on her own. She couldn’t even pull herself to sit up on the side of the bed.
How hurt am I?

Min finally agreed to let Luca carry her to the hospital. Moving with his preternatural speed, they arrived only moments after he departed her home. He took her in, setting her oh so gently in a waiting room chair that seemed to magically become vacant, and he talked to the woman at the desk. For a moment the woman flatly told him to fill out the paperwork and they would get to her eventually. But then Min felt a twinge, something cold and dead, and then she realized that the vampire was pushing, glamouring the clerk. Abruptly she was smiling at him, and saying that she would have her in a bed in no time.

Min glared at him, ready to hit him—but as her stomach turned over, just sitting there was making her so very, very dizzy—she let it go. Maybe having him around wasn’t all bad. She cringed at the thought.

The nurses and the doctor seemed a little surprised that Min was in the bed she was. Obviously the desk woman had pulled a bit of clerical sleight of hand, but they shook it off and were quick on the pickup. Min was wheeled off to radiology, where they took some x-rays and a CT scan. Once back in the ER, the nurses cleaned and dressed her wounds, and the doctor breezed in, looked at the results for a couple moments, and declared that min didn’t have a concussion. And that she was very lucky.

“
How did you sustain these injuries?” He was looking over her chart, the one the clerk had dashed off so quickly. He was looking for the cause, and was noticeably irritated that it wasn’t there.

“
She had a fender-bender with a fire hydrant.” Luca said, rolling his eyes in an intentionally irritated display. It made Min want to reach out and smack him.

The doctor looked down at her, a condescending smirk on his face. “Well, drive safely little lady.” And just like that he turned and disappeared through the curtain.

Min glared at Luca. “You’re not funny!”

Luca gave an elegant shrug that meant nothing and everything all at once. He grinned. “Get dressed and I’ll take you home.”

There were fresh clothes on the foot of the bed. And they were hers. He’d dashed back to her place and raided her wardrobe. Not that she wanted to put those clothes back on. She took them and tossed them in the trash. They reeked of dark magic, and of whatever it was that made the fae’s scent so distinctive. But it bugged her that he could so easily come and go from her come. She’d have to rescind his invitation when they got back to her place. She was almost certain that she should.

Yet Luca surprised her, having called a taxi cab, and paying the driver—and not using even one of his preternatural powers—to drive us both back to her house. He let her decided she needed to hold onto his arm as she climbed the front steps up to the porch, but once they were in the house he scooped her dizzy form up into his arms and without so much as jarring her, took her upstairs to her room. She noticed that he’d closed the door to her mother’s room once again, as if it all hadn’t happened.

But it had, and no matter how long she lived Min would forever have the sight of her mother’s body possessed by that evil, dark force, burned into her memory.

She let him undress her, ever so gently, as he redressed her in a Betty Boop night shirt that was her favorite. How he knew, she could only wonder. But it was her favorite because it was worn and comfortable—and as far from sexy as bed clothes could get. Another point, if not a creepy one, for the vampire’s scorecard.

Luca made to lay with her in the bed, but she put her hand against his chest. His expression turned hurt, but that look vanished almost instantly. Min smiled. “You’re clothes reek of that fairy magic.”

His mouth made a perfect O.

“
So take them off.”

He shed his shirt and pants in no time at all, looking so very graceful and beautiful as he did so.
Far more beautiful and graceful than I will ever look doing such a thing.

He slid into bed with her, and to his credit, wasn’t even aroused. He just seemed to know that she needed the feel, the touch of his flesh against hers…just not sex. She needed to be held and comforted, and without another word Luca did exactly that.

Maybe being psychically connected to my vampire lover isn’t the worst thing on earth
, Min thought right before she passed into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

*****

Chapter 14

Min was only asleep less than an hour when her sister, Andy, burst into her bedroom, flinging open the drapes and brandishing a Danish and black coffee. “Get out.” Min said.

She was lying on the side of her head where the contusion was and probably some nasty bruises by then. She could feel more bruises and scrapes on her back and hip. And her arm was sore as hell, too.

“
Not a chance!” Andy growled, straightening her glasses and trying to pull a loose wave of auburn curls back into the twist she’d tried to impose on her feral tresses. “You’re not sticking me with this.”

“
With what?” Min looked up, thoroughly confused and still in the heavy fog of both sleep deprivation and being pulled out of said insufficient sleep.

“
The Winter Solstice…
remember
?” Andy had her hands on her hips, drumming her fingers with agitation. “It’s in two days and the sale we advertized in
The Witch’s Cauldron
starts today.”

“
Damn…by the pestilent gods…” Min buried her face further into the pillow. “I know, I know.”

“
Plus, there’s a freaking Renaissance Fair slash Sci-Fi convention just two blocks over at the Avery Center.”

Min looked up at her sister with fear. “You’re kidding.”

Andy glared at her with haughty exasperation, her dark blue suit jacket matching her eyes exactly. “Wish to blazes I was.”

“
How did we miss that?”

“
It was supposed to be all the way across town at the Capital Pavilion. But a last minute structural instability forced them to relocate.”

“
Structural instability?” Min asked.

“
Yeah, a freaking Humvee fell through the third floor to the second when they were setting up the Auto Show two weeks ago.”

Min pressed her face into the pillow again and groaned. She did remember seeing that in the paper. She just hadn’t put two and two together…not with everything that was happening with her mother…and Luca. “That’s what you get for having goblins perform the wards and blessings.”

“
Might as well just offer up a fresh corpse to a pack of ghouls and then hand
them
hammers and hard hats.” Andy agreed.

Min smiled. Yes, they so could’ve done a better job. But she, as her mother and
her
mother before, had tried very hard to not attract too much attention to the family, or to magic as a whole. And though city governments didn’t advertized that they knew anything about the occult, the use of mystical forces for their benefit was common practice.

Min cringed when she let her mind drift back to the Summer Solstice Sale. Not only did they have real practitioners of the craft coming—a long standing event since the store had been established nearly fifty years ago—but they’d be besieged by Trekkies, wanna-blessed-bees, and the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.

It would be worse than Valentine’s week. All those desperate unrequited human train wrecks wanting love potions before the big day, and then all those jilted ticking time bombs looking for some magical vengeance afterward. The love potions were harmless. They actually had an herb in them that caused calmness. And unless the person had some actual preternatural ability, the voodoo dolls were just rag dolls too.