Min's Vampire (23 page)

“
It’s really you? You’re
really awake?” Andy laughed and cried out, but then stiffened
against the feel of her mother’s familiar arms. She pulled away and
looked up to her sister. “This isn’t some trick? Not just some
glamour or spell?”

Min shook her head and tried to bring a
smile to her lips. “No, no. This is real…I swear to
you.”

Andy’s hands shook as she reached out
to her mother, hesitating for a moment, and then taking the older
woman’s hands into her own. “But how?” her voice betrayed how
enormous her joy was.

And why the hell isn’t Min
overjoyed to have our mother back with us?

Katarina spoke, and her lightly
accented voice was music to her daughter’s ears.

“
It was all your sister’s
vampire’s doing.” She looked up and rolled her eyes and sighed,
then continued, “He figured out what was keeping me from reentering
my body. That a thing’s magick was only as strong as its greatest
weakness. He broke the Winter Queen’s spell using cold iron.” She
looked to Min with troubled eyes. “Rather clever, that young man of
yours…for a centuries-old, soulless vampire.” Her tone turned cool
and harsh as her words played out.

Andy shot her mother a hard look.
“Yeah, I just met the guy—and wow, what a looker—and since he just
helped save my life, and apparently just gave my mother back her
life, I’m going to cut the man some slack when it comes to the
whole soulless thing.” She lifted her eyebrows, “I think we all
should, don’t you, mother?”

Katarina looked nonplussed, but she
nodded. Andy threw herself at her mother again, grasping the woman
to her for dear life. Her voice choked with tears, “I never thought
we’d get you back. Everything Min tried failed. And now…” she cried
out with such joy. Words just failed to form anymore in her
head.

“
It’s alright now,” her
mother cooed, stroking her fingers through Andy’s wild tangle of
hair. “We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re not stumbling
around blindly anymore.”

What did that mean?

“
Mother,
” Min’s voice was harsh and disapproving.

“
Now Min…”

“
No,” Min demanded. “We have
to tell her.
You
have to tell her. We won’t have time enough soon, and she
deserves to know.”

Andy pulled away from her mother’s
embrace, looking at her face. It slowly changed expression, from
one of cool detachment to worry. When she met Andy’s gaze, her eyes
were beseeching.

“
Know about
what?”

Katarina took a deep breath, her lips
parting as if she were about to speak, but she hesitated. “I’m so
sorry for lying to you all this time.” She took her daughter’s face
in her hands and then let go. “I’m not really your
mother.”

There was such silence in the room.
Andy shook her head. “Wow. Your bedside manner needs some work.
Ever hear of tact?”

Katarina looked completely confused.
Andy sighed and it was her turn to roll her eyes. It was a family
trait…or so she’d thought until about thirty seconds
ago.

“
So you’re telling me I’m
adopted?”

Katarina looked to Min, and
Andy saw tears welling up in her sister’s eyes.
Oh, this is going well.

“
No,” Katarina finally said.
“What I mean is…you were not born to me. You were not born to any
woman.”

A question tried to form in Andy’s
head, but her mother began to speak again before she could pin it
down.

“
Arianna, the Summer Queen
of the Sidhe came to me. Her blood has run through the veins of our
family from time in memoriam, so she used that link to…to call me
to help her.

“
She had a thing of power
waiting on the other side of the Ethereal Mists. I didn’t
understand what it was, precisely, but she needed my help in hiding
it.” She took Andy’s hands in hers and peered deep into her eyes.
“And the best way to hide something is to place it in plain
sight.”

Andy wasn’t following her mother one
bit. Why was she talking about the fae? Katarina had always told
her daughters that the faerie people were just folk tales.
Creatures of lore. And now she was talking about them like…well,
like she knew them.

“
Using my blood and my
magicks, I helped the Queen mold that…the power…into a human
being.”

Andy looked up to her
sister, her mind jumbled and confused. She had thought they were
talking about her. That Katarina was explaining how she—and then it
hit her. Her mother
was
talking about her.

She saw it in her sister’s eyes. She
knew too.

So it was true.

Andy pulled her gaze back to her mother
and said, “So I’m not real?”

“
Of course you’re real,”
Katarina said, holding all the tighter to her daughter’s hands. “No
matter where you came from, or how you came to be, you are as real
as I am.”

Andy felt her entire body turn cold as
her stomach bottomed out. She pulled her hands from her mother’s
grasp and stood on wobbly legs.

“
Real?” She staggered past
her sister to the fireplace, wishing the flames of its fire would
warm away the ice that was flowing in her veins. “Real…like one of
your spells?”

“
Well, yes, but much more.
Since—”

“
Since a faerie Queen
pitched in, is that it? You made me into a real little girl, like
some stupid Disney cartoon?”

“
It wasn’t like that!”
Katarina shot off the couch and tried to get nearer to her
daughter, but Andy would have none of it, skirting around her and
putting the couch they’d been seated on between them.

“
I don’t know you,” she
looked at her mother, her eyes burning, her breath coming in rapid,
hoarse pulls. “How could you do this…how could you keep this from
me? You’ve been lying to me my entire life!”

At that Min turned away and
Andy watched her sob into her hands. Min was crying like…oh god,
she hadn’t seen Min cry like that since the day they’d found
Katarina, cold and lifeless on the floor of the magic shop. What
could be worse than—
dear
goddess
.

“
When did you and this
faerie Queen make me?” She could hear the sharpness in her voice,
and didn’t care. Her mother was still hiding something from her,
and she was going to hear the whole damned thing, and now. “How
long ago did this happen?”

Now tears were filling her mother’s
eyes. Katarina Boccherini never cried. She was a kind and loving
mother, but she was also cast from freaking steel. But now she was
crying…for the love of god!

“
A little over a year
ago.”

What? Just a year
ago…

That wasn’t possible. She was
twenty-four years old. She’d gone to college for business before
going to work at the family magic shop. And before that there had
been high school and junior high school, and…and…

But almost anything was possible when
it came to magick, now wasn’t it? She may not have any real talent
or knowledge of the craft, but her mother did. Who knew for certain
what all her mother could do? Or her sister—

Andy wheeled around and shot Min a
razor sharp glare. “Did you know?”

Katarina walked between the two,
shaking her head. “I had to place the spell on her as
well.”

So it was spells all
around.

“
But Min was too strong to
permanently change her memories. Once I released the spell, her
memory returned.”

Min came up beside her mother, her eyes
swollen and red, “So now I have both: all my original memories and
those with you.”

“
But that’s just magick!”
Andy turned her back on them both. “It’s just tricks. Not real.
Just like I’m not real!”

“
It doesn’t work like that,”
Katarina said, the sound of her voice coming closer. “Whatever you
were before the Summer Queen and I…before we molded you, you were
real. Not a thing of magick, but a naturally occurring power that
came from this world, this universe. That makes you real. That,
and…we used my blood to cast you with.”

Andy spun around to face the two women,
hot tears running down her cheeks, making the room blur and pitch.
“So I’m some experiment? You cooked me up like a batch of mystical
cookies, and now what?” her breathing heaved and then stopped.
“Why?”

“
Because…” Katarina blinked,
and then very slowly she shook her head. “The fae are not much for
sharing their reasoning. I know she said she needed to hide you
away from her nemesis: Sliva, the Winter Queen, the Queen of Air
and Darkness.”

“
Sliva…” Andy repeated the
name. It even tasted cold on her tongue. She was about to say it
again, but her mother raised a hand and hushed her.

“
Never say a thing’s name
more than twice, or you’ll call that thing to you.”

Andy’s mind whirled and turned in her
skull, a rather dizzying experience. But suddenly it all came to a
halt, and she felt her shoulders loosen. “So that’s who I saw in
the frozen puddles in the park. Who sent those horrifying spider
things after me, and…and who put you in a coma.”

Katarina nodded.

“
So why hide me from her? I
mean, she knows who I am now, what’s the point of trying to hide
me? We might as well invite her in for some coffee; just let her
have me.”

“
We can’t!” Min and Katarina
said in unison. Min continued, “We could never do that.”

Katarina patted Min’s hand as she
walked closer to Andy. “If she gets her hands on you, she will
devour you…” And that’s when Andy stopped hearing what her sister
and mother were saying.

Andy had her back to them both, facing
the mantel of the fireplace. She wanted to be anywhere on the face
of the earth, anywhere but there. Her breath started to catch, and
she couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs.

Oh god, oh god, oh
god…

It was all just crazy. It couldn’t be
real. She had to have snapped, and this was some sort of psychotic
nightmare. What did the shrinks on television call it: a
dissociative break from reality? Maybe her entire life was just a
hallucination? But then, that’s what they had been telling her,
hadn’t they? A spell.

And then she finally really looked at
what was right in front of her on the mantel. There between a blue
and pink carnival glass vase from the 1940’s and a six-inch tall
green marble geisha statue that predated the Ming Dynasty, sat a
small, white and silver stone, worn smooth, longer than it was wide
or high, and nearly cylindrical.

Andy hadn’t gone around to all those
conventions and out of the way estate sales for nothing. She may
not have the practical magical knowledge her sister and mother had,
but she did now her magical artifacts. Shamlus stones were
naturally occurring marbleized limestone quarried in the highlands
of Scotland, and they had a singularly innate enchantment to
them.

And that white and silver stone was a
Shamlus stone.

Andy reached out and took it
in her hand. Cold, smooth and hard in her hand, she held it tight
and closed her eyes, pushing all her will into the stone. She felt
it warm in her hand, and then she thought a word three
times:
Shamlus. Shamlus.
Shamlus
.

A tingling sensation spread over her
flesh, covering her completely in the space of only a few
heartbeats.

Her mother and sister gasped at the
same moment, and her mother called out her name. But Andy didn’t
even look back at them. She needed to get away from them—from all
of it. So she ran for the door, clawing at the door locks and
racing outside and through the darkened street. She just couldn’t
stay there and hear another word. She needed to get away, to get
out…to get anywhere they weren’t.

She had a vague feeling that things
waited in the shadows, watching the house—watching for her. But the
Shamlus stone must have done its job thoroughly, for nothing so
much as stirred in the surrounding night.

A cold numbness settled in around her
heart as she ran down the street. They had betrayed her. Her own
kin…but then again, if the insane things they had told her were
true, they weren’t even that to her. They were
just…just…

No, they weren’t
just
anything—
she
was what wasn’t real.
She
was the no one.

Andy made very good time, for before
she knew it the streets turned unfamiliar, and she knew without a
doubt she was well away from her family—the word brought a jolt of
intense anguish with it, as if a shard of ice were clogging one of
the chambers of her heart. She had to wake up. She had to get out
of this nightmare. It had to be a dream, it couldn’t be
real…because nothing in her entire life had hurt an ounce as much
as this did.

Her legs started to give out on her,
and she slowed to a terrified, though weak, jog. Her body wanted to
slow down desperately, but her mind was still racing, and she could
no more stop and catch her breath than she could keep
running.