The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) (14 page)

“Teddy?”

I started to reach out to touch her shoulder, but Leon, who had said nothing the entire time I’d been there, finally decided to speak.

“Miss Wood, do not make any physical contact.”

Turning my head, I stared at him.  “Why not?”

Declining to answer, he again stood at attention and closed his mouth.  His gaze settled on Teddy and stayed locked on her.  She sat very still for several long minutes and then blinked rapidly five or six times.  There was a definite change to her expression when she looked at me again.  And her tone of voice was hard and angry.

“Leon, brin
g the car around.  Sarah, your clothes have been cleaned and are in the upstairs linen closet next to your bedroom door.  Change into them and freshen yourself up in the b
athroom.  We need to leave here as soon as possible.”  She got up quickly and moved to leave the room.

“What’s going on now?”
I asked, jumping to my feet.

She didn’t look like she was going to tell me at first, but then she turned and said sharply, “The hearing has been cancelled.
Isaiah is dead.
”

CHAPTER 20 – Michael

The point had been to dilute the blood of Isaiah that I had running through my veins with Alex’s blood.  It was done in an effort to even out my temperament as well as to see if the lower levels of supernatural blood in his system might help Alex with his deteriorating condition.  I wasn’t trying to gain additional power by drinking his blood.  I’d had his blood in the past, but that had been before his recent biological changes.

We had found an abandoned house not far from the shore.  There had been vagrants there
at one time
.  Their trash
was scattered across the floor.  Food containers, water bottles, old newspapers, soiled cast-off clothing.  The smell was atrocious. 
I
gathered all the trash from one room and threw it out into the alley behind the house.
  The floor was still awful, but there were a few spots that were less dirty than others.
  And while a hotel room would have been far more comfortable, the possibility of being detected by security cameras was a serious concern.

Alex laid his coat down on the floor and then lowered himself onto it with his dark sunglasses still on.
  There was only a few hours left until the hearing.  I had to be there, but Alex didn’t.  If our little experiment worked, he would have several hours to recover before I came back for him. 

There was, of course, a part of me that wanted to abandon him completely. 
I could recognize those kinds of impulses as byproducts of Isaiah’s powerful blood.  It hadn’t seemed separate when I’d killed the two humans who had witnessed the car accident.  But as I sank my fangs into Alex’s wrist and began ingesting what was, ultimately, the polar opposite of Isaiah’s
essence
I saw it all more clearly.
  I felt the particles contained within me begin to fight for control of their host.

Alex was absolutely silent.  Outside the house, cars rumbled by on the street.  Shouts of occasional laughter drifted over us from a few houses away.  A feral house cat prowled through the alley, investigating the trash we’d thrown out there.  I could hear hearts beating, pulses ringing, radios blaring.  But nothing at all from Alex.

“Talk to me, mate,” I encouraged him.

He blinked behind the glasses and swallowed.  “I told you that Selena wasn’t Sarah’s mother.”

I had already taken more blood from him than was necessary.  Finally, I sat back and wiped my mouth.  “That was a surprise.” 

“She doesn’t know.”

“Did Selena say who Sarah’s mother really was?”  I knew what was coming.  It was true that I had been shocked by the initial information, but once I had begun to process it, it seemed clear that there was only one person who could rationally have given birth to Sarah.

“It’s Nelly.”

I nodded.  “It had to be her if it wasn’t Selena.  I wouldn’t have guessed it by the conversations I had with Robert, though.”

“I never met him.”  Alex’s voice was becoming weaker.

I stood up and looked around.  “Are you quite sure you’ll be safe here?”

“Yes.”

“How’s the head?”

“Much less pain.
  I’m just tired.”  He rolled to his side and pulled off the sunglasses.  “Are you going to tell her?”

“About Nelly?  No.  But if
she
doesn’t come out with the truth when we get back to the farm
, I’ll have to say something.”

He looked up at me with dull eyes.  “You really think they’ll let you go after all this?”

“I have to hope.”  I shrugged a little and tried to smile.  “I’ve got to make something out of myself, right?  Something other than a freak of nature?”

“
Well, good luck with that,” he replied.  “If you see Isaiah, give him a kick in the ass for me.”

The doubt about leaving him grew as I stood there.  If anyone were to make their way into that house, I didn’t see how Alex w
ould defend himself if
necessary.  There wasn’t anywhere he could really hide.  There was no doubt in my mind that when I saw Sarah, she would ask where he was.  I couldn’t tell her that I left him alone and powerless in an old abandoned house.

“You can’t stay here.  It’s not safe.  I’
ll just take you with me,” I told him.

He protested when I hauled him up over my shoulder.  “This is stupid.  Put me down.”

“I really don’t want to
carry you, either.  But if I leave you here, I’m going to have to explain it to Sarah.  I would rather not give her the opportunity to tear me a new ash-hole.”

“It’s
as
shole
.  Not ash hole.  Dumb ass,” he countered.

I turned around and started towards the front door of the house, kicking my way through the garbage on the floor.  But something was not right.  I stopped in the middle of the room and listened. 

“What’s wrong?” Alex asked.

“There’s someone here.”
I leaned down to put Alex on his feet.  He remained upright, but leaned on me heavily.  I smelled something odd in the room.  It reminded me of lamp oil, but there were some subtle differences in the scent.

Then
I felt
a low vibration, starting from the floor.  It grew and moved.  The
walls seemed to absorb it and send it back towards us in strange waves.  There was a distinct change in the darkness as the pulsing vibration grew stronger.  Pinpoints of light with no discernible source appeared in front of us.

Alex went down.  When I got down on one knee to try to help him up, the light became more solid, surrounding both of us.  Alex kept trying to say something, but I couldn’t really make out the words.  A stunning flash of light burst directly in front of us.

Then I heard the voice
of a woman and it echoed through me
.

“Michael Graviano.” 

The room grew quiet once again, but the light remained.  Alex coughed and tried to repeat what he had been trying to tell me.

“The Breath-Giver.”

I looked up quickly.  There was no face, no body to the thing that was speaking to us.  There was only a brightness that looked unreal and did not seem to match anything I’d ever seen before.  It did not remain stationary, but bounced slightly from side to side.
  The movement gave away the game.

Unsure of how to proceed, I stood back up.

“You chose well, vampire,” crooned the
voice
.  “You did not leave him.”

I gestured weakly at the light and told Alex.  “This is the Breath-Giver?”

He nodded but kept his eyes down, almost in reverence.  I wanted to laugh.  I would have if the situation hadn’t been so horribly timed.
  There was no time for games.  Although I knew exactly who was behind all this, I was hesitant to reveal the truth to Alex while he was in such a miserable condition.

“Oh, Great and Wondrous Breath-Giver!  How may we serve you?”  I bowed deeply and hid the smile that threatened to break across my face.  Alex looked over at me suspiciously, but I ignored him.

“Michael Graviano, you must do as I sa
y,” replied the voice.  “You will go to a very tall building.  Inside that building, you will find a friend you have known for many years.  You must tell her that the children in her care are to be set free from all convention.”

I rolled my eyes at the “being of light” and said sarcastically, “No rules for the children?  Is that what you’re saying?”
 

Alex, sensing he was being played, struggled to his feet.  “What’s going on?”

“Turn off the glamour, Sam.  I know it’s you.”

The light flickered once or twice,
then
the female voice, sounding much younger than before, swore.  “Damn it.  Anne said it would work.”

“What the hell did I miss?”  Alex asked.

A loud popping noise, followed by a groan of defeat filled the room.  The space in front of us, previously displaying an impressive amount of magical light, was then suddenly occupied by one little blond girl with twinkling blue eyes.  She rushed at me with a shriek and I picked her up for a hug.

Alex’s mouth dropped open in shock. 

CHAPTER 21 – Alex

The little girl, Samantha, walked along next to me as we made our way to
the
Dwight
Tower.  I was still leaning on Michael for assistance, but the headache had not returned.  Samantha explained in a polite tone of voice that she was a shape-shifting vampire and had a slightly younger sister named Anne who possessed the same gift as she did.

“Where is Anne?” Michael asked her.

“Back in New York.  Teddy didn’t know it, but I shifted into a rat and hid in her suitcase for the ride to Chicago.  It was a little scary, actually.”
  She
kicked at a rock in her path and then
hurried forward to kick it again.

“Are you sure that what you saw in California wasn’t some kind of stunt put together by Selena?”  Michael asked.  He loosened his grip on me a little to see if I could stay up.  I did.

“I don’t know.  I thought Samantha was the real thing.  Maybe I was wrong about how the transformation happened.  But Selena seems to really believe it.”

“Selena is a practiced liar.  She’ll say anything to get what she wants.  Sam!  Get back here.  I don’t want you wandering off.”
  He k
ept looking behind us and pausing
before every alley we passed as if he were expecting an attack.  It made me nervous as hell.

“All I know is that one day I was the vampire you turned me into and the next, I was practically helpless.  I thought I saw a light sometime in between and heard a female voice that wasn’t Selena’s.”  I came to a halt in order to rest for a minute.

Samantha came skipping back to us.  “Michael, can I be a huge guy with muscles?  That way if anybody thinks about mugging you, they’ll see me and back off!”

“No.  You’ve probably run out o
f glamour juice already
.  That was quite a show you put on in there.  I don’t want you morphing in the middle of the street anyway.  You know better.”

“
Damn
,” she said, disappointed.

He tried to hide a grin and failed.  “Is that your new favorite word?”

She giggled.  “Damn.  Damn.  Damn it all to hell.”

“Don’t let Teddy hear you say that.  She’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”

“They don’t do that anymore.  Punishment is ‘time out’
.  I think I prefer
the soap.”

Michael was still nervous.  “I don’t like us being out in the open like this.  Amanda is out there somewhere and she’s bound to be tracking me.”

I dug into the right pocket of my jeans and pulled out my money.  “Let’s just get a cab.  We’ve still got twelve blocks to go and I’m not sure I can make it that far.”

It was another ten minutes before a taxi went by.  He only stopped when Sam put her fingers to her lips and whistled shrilly.  The driver looked at us curiously.  I’m sure it didn’t look right, two grown men out in the middle of the night with an innocent-looking little girl.  But when Sam smiled at him and asked him to take us to
the
Dwight
Tower, he smiled back.

Michael hesitated before he climbed into the back seat.  “I hate cars.”  He made Sam put on her seat belt and then clutched at the door handle as if were a safety strap.

“Relax, man,” I said. “It’s only twelve blocks.  What could happen?”
 

The driver pulled away from the curb.  I looked down at Sam.

“Can I ask you a question, beautiful?”

She glowed with the praise and nodded her head like a little lady.  “Yes, sir.”