In the Blood (12 page)

Chapter Eight

Even the biting cold couldn’t persuade Cassie to push the buzzer at the address she’d hastily scrawled down. The woman inside expected her, but that didn’t quell Cassie’s desire to run home to her apartment and climb under the blankets and never emerge.

What had happened to her life? One day, she was a call girl. The next, she was unemployed, standing on the street in front of a psychic’s apartment building, ready to go in and see if she was the reincarnation of a vampire’s dead wife.

God, had she lost her mind? From the moment she’d looked up “psychic” on Viktor’s computer—she was surprised it had actually worked, after the way he’d pushed it off the desk the night before—she’d felt like she must be going crazy. First, she’d ventured into the city, alone, not knowing if those Minion things would still be after her. Then, she’d come to a stranger’s apartment after one phone consultation and quit her job at 4-1-2.

There was still time to call the club and act like it had all been a joke. Ha ha, I was just pretending to quit! Fooled you! Please take me back, I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent. But she couldn’t do that. 4-1-2 was a good job for a lot of women, but not for her. Not anymore. She’d spent too much time pretending to be someone else in order to please her clients. She hadn’t had time to figure out who she was.

And now she might be someone else. She blinked back sudden tears. Had Viktor known? Had that been what he’d wanted from the beginning? Was that why he’d come to her rescue?

This is so stupid
. She should swear him off completely. No, she should go back to him. Let him protect her from monsters she’d thought had been all in her head. She could pretend to be Melina. She could pretend to be anyone. She’d certainly had enough practice to pull it off. But no, she couldn’t do that. It was crazy, but she wanted him to know her, possibly to even love her. She had braved a city swarming with Minions to get her answers. To chicken out now would be to abandon her progress entirely and go back to the Cassie who spent her days in the grip of anti-psychotics and sedatives. She couldn’t be that person again. Not if she wanted to be with Viktor, and she did. God help her, she did.

The only way she could do that was to find out who she was, really, and the gnawing feeling in her stomach seemed to suggest that the answer to that was very complicated. Maybe the woman inside would be able to help her. She just had to get the courage to push the buzzer.

The door opened before she had a chance to make that decision. A young woman with a chic haircut leaned out into the freezing cold. “Are you Cassie?”

The woman in the doorway didn’t look anything like what Cassie had expected. When they’d spoken on the phone, she’d imagined an older woman with frizzy hair, wearing some throwback to Flower Power. To be confronted with a perfectly pulled-together and fashionable New Yorker threw her off substantially. “I am. Are you Maya?”

The woman nodded and motioned her inside. “Come on in.”

Cassie followed her into the small, modern lobby. “I’m on eight,” Maya said as she pushed the button to call the elevator. “You were having second thoughts about coming, weren’t you?”

It probably wouldn’t do any good to lie to a psychic, so Cassie said, “Yeah. I’m just not sure about all of this.”

“All of what? What’s going on?” The elevator door slid open and Maya stood aside so that Cassie could enter first.

Her first instinct was to snap, “Shouldn’t you know that already?” but Cassie controlled herself. “I just have some questions, is all.”

“Questions that can only be answered by past life regression therapy?” Maya hit the button for the eighth floor. “You’ve come to the right place.”

They reached Maya’s floor and finally the door to her apartment. The place was small, but impeccably decorated and welcoming. Maya took her coat. “Have a seat on the couch.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Cassie began, her fear taking her over once more. “I think I’ve officially lost my mind.”

“I hear that a lot.” Maya seated herself in a chair beside the couch and settled in as though she spent many hours in that pose.

“Maybe I’m just wasting my time.” Cassie waited for the woman to agree with her, or disagree, or say something that would make her decision for her.

“You owe it to him to find out.” Maya’s words stopped Cassie’s desire to flee in its tracks. Calmly, she continued. “I don’t know the entire situation, but I feel that you are very strongly conflicted. Wouldn’t it be better to have a clear picture of things before you closed the door on him forever?”

Cassie’s hands shook. “I guess I didn’t really buy that you were…psychic.”

“It doesn’t take a psychic to recognize a woman who’s having a hard time deciding what to do about a guy.” Maya snorted. “I see one in the mirror almost every day. You came here because you thought this might actually help you. I think you owe it to both of you to see if it does.”

She made a lot of sense, and Cassie couldn’t argue with her reasoning. “What do I do?”

“Well, you close your eyes, and I put you into a light hypnotic state.” Maya gestured to the sofa. “You might want to lie down, unless you feel you’re going to fall asleep.”

There was no way Cassie would fall asleep. Not when she was as keyed up as she was. Without giving doubt any more time, Cassie arranged herself on the couch and willed her body to relax according to Maya’s softly spoken instructions. The woman was truly talented. She painted a picture with words, of a room in Cassie’s mind. “In this room, there is a door…”

Closing her eyes, she let Maya’s calm, sure voice weave a spell around her mind. Weave a spell? She’d started taking this stuff way too seriously. She’d met one vampire, and now she was believing all sorts of stuff she would have laughed at last week. Part of her really wanted to stand and run out again, but some indefinable urge kept her rooted to her couch.

“Continue taking slow, deep breaths,” Maya instructed. “As you walk through the door, concentrate on your breathing. I’m going to begin to count backwards from ten. Let yourself go, deeper and deeper, as I count. Ten…”

This isn’t going to work
.

“Nine…”

You’re crazy, Cassie. You should be in your therapist’s office, not some psychic’s apartment.

“Eight…going deeper and deeper…”

You should have just put up with your crazy rich vampire delusions. At least you’d have a place to live.

“Seven…six…deeper and deeper, into a state of total relaxation…”

You might have just quit your job over some crazy thing you made up. You might be certifiable.
She opened her mouth to speak, to tell Maya that, nice as she was, all of this was hocus pocus and she wasn’t going to waste any more of either of their time when a cold draft hit her.

“Your veil! It’ll get caught in the door!” The voice that spoke wasn’t hers. It wasn’t Maya’s either. When had the woman stopped counting?

“Don’t just stand there, watch out for your veil!” Furthermore, why could Cassie understand the words in her ears? They weren’t in any language she’d ever heard.

Maya’s voice broke through the fog of confusion. “I want you to go now to the happiest day of this lifetime. See the people around you. Do you recognize them?”

At the word “see”, Cassie’s vision cleared, though she hadn’t realized she’d been staring into total blackness. If she had, maybe she would have been afraid. She didn’t feel afraid. She felt excited, happy, and…perhaps just a bit afraid. She looked around her. The woman who fussed with the lace hanging past Cassie’s shoulder didn’t look like anyone she knew, but something about her was so familiar…

“Look at what you’re wearing,” Maya’s voice urged.

“This is a mistake,” the woman, middle-aged and wearing a shabby but clean black wool dress and a heavy gold cross on a chain around her neck, frowned at her. “You couldn’t wait until after Lent? Give it some more time?”

“No, Mama,” she said, the words coming to her effortlessly, as though she read words from a script. She looked down at her dress. A wedding dress. It didn’t look like a wedding dress she would expect to see in the twenty-first century, but something inside of her knew what it was.

“People will think you’re in a bad way,” the woman warned her.

“I don’t care!” Never in her life had she raised her voice to her mother, and her own action shocked her so thoroughly that she immediately shut her mouth. It took only a moment of courage to open it again. “Viktor loves me, and I love him. We need to arrive in Prague before the spring, if he is to take the job his cousin has offered him.”

“Let him go! He chases a fantasy, Melina! The city is no place for you,” Mama admonished, crossing herself dramatically.

Just the thought of Viktor leaving without her brought tears to her eyes and an aching loneliness to her heart. They could not be separated. They would wilt in their despair like flowers in a drought.

“I must go with him,” she said, steel behind her words. “Everyone waits at the church. Will you make this day a sorrowful one? This is my wedding, not a funeral.”

The scene jumped ahead in a dizzying rush. Perhaps it was not the mental journey, but the oppressive heat that suddenly surrounded her skin and invaded her lungs with every breath. Though it was winter outside, the atmosphere in the church was stifling, with the candles and incense and the crush of bodies pressed around them. She told herself it was a mark of Viktor’s popularity that the entire village had turned out to see them married, and not because they had all come for the gossip.

She looked at the man standing beside her. Though his hair was dark and he wore a suit much less refined than the ones he wore now, she would recognize Viktor anywhere. His posture was a bit stiffer than usual, his expression serious above the starched collar of his best shirt. Church-serious, she had called it, ever since she had noticed the somber cast to his features one Sunday during services. He’d cut his hair for the wedding; it no longer brushed his shoulders in a stick-straight curtain of chestnut brown. She had always thought him handsome, but today, on their wedding day, she felt he must be the most handsome man in the entire world.

As if he could feel her gaze upon him, he lifted one eyebrow, almost imperceptibly, and looked at her from the corner of his eye. He winked and turned his attention back to the priest before them, and she could not contain her giggles.
Let them think what they will think. I love him, and he loves me. Soon, we will be away from here forever, and free.

The oppressive heat in the air encouraged her to give in to the sleepy sway of her knees, and it took her a moment to realize she had closed her eyes. Why did everyone gasp? Had something terrible happened? Something closed around her, hard and reassuringly stable. Viktor’s arms, supporting her as she swooned.

“Open the doors, she needs air,” he barked, and her heart swelled at the concern he showed for her. She did not recover as quickly as she could have, too delighted in the feeling of Viktor holding her close and the tender words he whispered in her ear.

The dizzying rush overcame her again, for a wholly different reason. The church was long gone now, the traditional and lengthy ceremony completed. Now, she stood alone with Viktor—her husband!—her body thrumming with the excitement of discovery, her cheeks flushed. They stood in a small attic room with a sloped ceiling and a chimney that provided little warmth. A lamp banished the dark to the corners, but still she shivered. All the long hours they’d spent together, walking by the lake or talking by the fire, keeping their voices low so that her family wouldn’t overhear, those held little indication of what he would be like now that they were together, alone, on their wedding night.

It was not that she feared him. Rather, she feared she would disappoint him. Nothing Mama had told her had adequately prepared her for what her part would be. Oh, she knew the mechanics, but not how to act, other than to “endure” as her mother had instructed. Endure, and Viktor would be happy. Endure, and she would have many children. But this did not feel like something that was to be endured, standing so close to Viktor that the crisp hair on his chest brushed her bare breasts.

Viktor’s fingers, long and elegant, rough from the hard work he did for his family’s farm, came to rest beneath her chin. The light in his eyes had not changed when he looked at her now. She was his wife, yes, but still his
ptáček
, his “little bird”, and he looked at her with the same tenderness as he had the day he had asked her to marry him. Looking into his eyes, she saw he did not share her worries that something had changed between them. He kissed her, as gently and slowly as he had the very first time.

He looped one arm under her knees and lifted her effortlessly to carry her to the bed.

“Do not be afraid,” he pleaded in that strange language Cassie could somehow understand. His voice was beautiful and dark with desire for her, and she reached for him as he leaned back to look at her. “You are perfect.”

“I am skinny,” she said, covering her small breasts and sunken stomach with her hands.

“You are perfect,” he repeated, brushing her hand aside, and leaned down to take her nipple into his mouth. The room was cold, but his mouth was hot and wet, and she squeezed her thighs together, the place between them becoming hot and wet, as well. He moved to the other breast, and for the moment she did not feel they were so insignificant as she had before. She placed her hands on his shoulders, marveling at why they never seemed so broad before. She tentatively ran her fingers down his back, feeling her way along the ridges of hard muscle, free to explore him in a way she had not been just hours before. How strange, that they loved each other so completely without truly knowing each other this way.

“You’re holding your breath,” he whispered, raising his head to look up at her, and he smiled that same, teasing smile she had seen so many times before.

She gulped in breath, self-conscious at the sound, and he laughed before returning to place kisses on her ribs, her stomach, lower, until she stopped him. He met her pleading look with a kiss to reassure her and parted her thighs with his hand. One finger stroked her soft petals, and she cried out in shock, then bit back her voice at the fear someone would hear her.