Vampires and Sexy Romance (36 page)

He turned, stunned that Elaina knew so very much.  She couldn’t have been in the room, but she still knew. 

“And still you grovel for her affections…even after the spell was broken.  I had hoped that with it gone you would have regained some sense about you.  But instead you played nursemaid to her.  It was disgusting.”

The playfulness, the insane fire, all died away from her gaze, replaced with cool, clear nothingness.  He knew the look.  She was about to pull the trap, to do whatever horrific, terrible thing she had planned all along.  And he knew from how she’d spoke just now about her, that she was going to do it to Min.

But the words that she spoke in a flat, detached voice shocked him.  “I could order you to kill her.”

No.
  His mind reeled and he tried with all his strength, all his anger, to rip himself free of Elaina’s hold on him.  He needed to break free.  He needed to kill her and kill her now.  But there was no way, no possible way.

“One word from me and you’ll bloody up that pretty little house—that soft, warm bed—with her.  They’ll be finding pieces of her for weeks.  And you’ll have every stinking moment of it to remember.  I’ll be so very specific…hell, I might even take a seat and watch, giving you little adjustments like a movie director.

Luca looked to Elaina, beseeching her with his eyes, for he could not even open his lips to speak.

Elaina perched on the chimney of the house they were atop and daintily crossed her legs, her skirt slit high enough she showed a lot of slender, curving leg. 

“But I won’t do any of that.”

He blinked at her.

She waved her hand in a permissive gesture.  “Go ahead, you can speak now.”

“What…” he choked as her control over his tongue vanished.  “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is I have no intention of killing your lady love.”  She nonchalantly adjusted the sleeves of her dress.  “I’m not going to
make
you do anything at all.  In truth, I think I’m going to steal off into the night and lick my wounds.  Your choosing her over me has cut me to the quick.”  She said these things with a languid sarcasm, rolling her slender wrist with her words.

“I’ve hurt you?”  He said with disbelief.  Anger, hatred, cold and hot running sadism—he’d seen all these in her aspect—but never had he dreamed she could be hurt.

“Well, that is what I’m telling you.  You’ve broken my heart.”

Luca felt a glacial surge run down his spine.  Sarcasm or no, whether she was acting or no, there was truth to her words.  He’d hurt her.  He didn’t breath, he didn’t move, he dared not even think too loudly.  He had hurt her, and he couldn’t imagine that he could have really touched her in any such way.  She thought of him as a possession, a consort when she wished it, and then as disposable when she didn’t.  Anger, vengeance, rage, those were things she felt, and lashed out with wild abandon.  But he had actually hurt her? 

What would she do to avenge a wound as deep as that?  The prospects were unthinkable.

But even more than he feared her, he felt sorrow.  Not sorry for her, but guilty that he’d hurt her.  It was insane, but he couldn’t shake it. 

“I’m sorry.”  He finally said.

“For what?”

“For hurting you.” 

She laughed, playing it off with a wave of her hand.  “
I’ll
live.

It was the inflection of that one word that made him gulp. 

“What have you done?”
“I’ve done nothing.” she said, looking with still, radiant eyes into his.  “I’ve been hunted, without stop, by a pack of werewolves.  They are a part of the great Hunt—a very old-fashioned concept in my opinion.  And just before I came to your little city I slaughtered the leader of the pack’s sister.  He is gunning for me in a hell bent push for vengeance.” 

She smiled devilishly.

“I led them straight to your lover’s house.  Their leader watched as you fucked her.  He will kill her with you, you know.”

“They know each other.  He would not kill her.” 

Elaina thoughtfully stuck out her lower lip, tapping her chin with one crimson painted fingernail.  “Maybe not,” she said winsomely. “But he’s so going to try and kill you.  They all will, some two dozen werewolves, all lethally trained, and all with a pawn to leverage against you.”

“And what is that?”

“He may not wish to kill her just for being with you, but he has his sister’s death on his mind.  He will see you as part of me, and he will readily use her to get to you.” 

“As I said, Min can handle herself.”

“But she will be looking to protect you from him.  She won’t think to protect herself.”

“He won’t hurt her.  He can’t know I have anything to do with you.”

Elaina hopped down from atop the chimney and sidled over to him, leaning in and kissing him.  Her cold lips so soft, the fresh taste of blood intoxicating on her lips.  He tried to turn away, but she deepened the kiss, and the taste of the blood was too much to resist.  He feasted at her mouth, pushing his tongue into her, trying to get at every last trace of the innocent’s blood.  When she finally ended the kiss, breaking it off, she smiled and glanced to the right, pointedly leading him to look where her eyes were leading him.  Günter and a squad of his men stood on a neighboring rooftop.  And like Elaina had planned, he took the bait, his pack falling in around him, and then surging out to jump from rooftop to rooftop.

“New plan, my beautiful sweet boy,” Elaina purred, and then in the tone of a master order she said, “Go to sleep for one hour, lover.” 

Luca tried to say something, but she spoke over him, too loudly for even him to hear his words, “Run, my love!  I’ll hold them off!”  And with that she pushed him off the roof.  He pitched over the side and the world turned to black as he fell to the ground below.   

Min woke in her own bed, gasping for breath.  She’d been dreaming, and it hadn’t been good.  It had been horrifying.  And somehow she already knew that it wasn’t just a dream.  It had a completely different feeling to it, a taste that made her know without a doubt that it had been really happening.  Luca had left her bed, followed his maker out to a rooftop where they spoke.  He'd been so scared.  And then she’d kissed him.  And he’d responded to her kiss.  She had seen it, she had freaking felt it.  His hunger for both her and for the blood that tainted her lips.  But then came Günter and his pack, and then Elaina had pushed him from the rooftop.  Min woke as he’d blacked out.  She knew the building they’d been arguing on.  She knew where the alley was where he had fallen. 

As she sat there, gasping for breath, she looked beside her and his side of the bed was empty.  It hadn’t been a dream.  He’d really been with Elaina, and now he was…she couldn’t think of it anymore.  She pushed the thoughts that he could already be dead out of her mind. 
He's a freaking vampire.
  Unless he fell on a wooden stake, or a silver blade, or into a vat of holy water, or into the freaking sun, then he’d live from a fall.

But Elaina’s last words came to her.  “Sleep for one hour.”  That meant that he would fall to the alley below, but not stir, not run away, he’d be completely defenseless. 

Min pulled on some clothes, shoes and her coat, and set out to the alley.  Halfway there it occurred to her. 
Out in the middle of the night with a homicidal, insane vampire thirsting for my blood, and a pack of werewolves to boot, and I don’t have any weapons…just my girlish charm and some magic.
  Could she hold it together enough to cast powerful enough hexes and charms to outwit all those foes?

She raised her hands in front of her and her hands gave a tremor before she could hold them steady. 
Shit, definitely not together enough
.  She walked on, but slower, her mind racing, frantically trying to grab some brilliant idea out of thin air.  And just when she thought none would come she walked right up to the magic shop. 
Sometimes,
she thought as she pulled the key to shop’s front door from her pocket,
I am incredibly dense. 

~*~

Min missed the lock with the key a couple times, scratching the old key hole.  She gritted her teeth and finally forced it into the lock, turned it and let herself into the shop.  Already halfway through the store, she finally realized she hadn’t switched on the overhead lights.  With a stamp of her foot and a sibilant phrase the candles usually just for decoration flashed and blazed to life and illuminated the store with a haunted quality. She stayed her course to the back of the store proper and whisked the beaded curtain impatiently out of her way. 

Enchanted, the beaded curtain was fashioned from blue green globs of glass she and Andy had collected at the shores of the Dead Sea when they were children.  As with the curtain, humans that were not magically inclined never saw the thousands of shimmering crystals scattered along the Dead Sea’s shores.

The candles in this room were already lit and she grabbed things she would need up in her arms as she moved through the displays and shelves.  Holy water, a cross—just in case Elaina showed herself—wolves’ bane, a thick piece of yellow chalk, some silver dust and some thistle.  The thistle and silver powder would help with any glamour she would need to do; the thistle to trick the wild thing inside the werewolves, and the silver powder to specifically work on the wolves.

She looked around the shop but couldn’t see anything else that would be of use to her.  These were all defensive charms and ingredients for protection spells.  She needed something offensive, something she could use as a weapon.

Then Min thought of some of the more dangerous objects they’d kept away from the general public—and their more supernatural clientele.  She scrambled to the back of the store, moving quickly back the long, skinny hall, taking the sudden right into the office she shared with her sister and mother. 

She went right for the desk she and her sister shared, pulling a long though subtle sword from the wall behind the desk.  It had been made with enough silver content to be deadly to a werewolf, yet was still hard enough to be deadly to almost anything else.  Min swung its scabbard over her head and shoulders until it rested competently around her waist.  She scrounged through her desk, not finding much that wasn’t a stapler, pens, a ridiculous amount of paper clips, and a plethora of tidy sales slips—the last week of sales slips, to be exact.  They had turned over half the store inventory during the equinox sale and the sci-fi convention. 

Then, reluctantly, she looked across the room at her mother’s desk.  Unlike Min’s simple oak business desk, Katarina’s desk shined with high polished cherry wood and elegant carvings.  She could be in the room for hours without really ever looking over to the desk.  Not that she wished it gone.  No, her sister and she had left it exactly as it was.  Min had tried to dust it once, to put the small stack of letters that were on the desktop in a drawer, to straighten the three pens Katarina always had at hand.  But she couldn’t.  So after that she just left the desk alone.  But now she walked over to it, and very cautiously sat down in her mother’s sleek yet comfortable swivel chair. 

There was a thin layer of dust on everything on top of the desk.  Apparently Andy had found the thought of dusting the desk unthinkable too.  In fact, Min couldn’t remember Andy setting foot in the office at all since their mother’s disaster, opting instead to do her paper work, or the ordering, from the stool behind the counter up front.  She even employed a laptop computer—so very civilized, if not verging on technologically savvy. 

Min placed her fingers on the intricate bronze handles of the center drawer.  She felt no magic there, so her mother must not have felt anything contained within the drawer wasn’t dangerous or of importance enough to rate anyone stealing it.  Inside the drawer Min found nothing but the usual clutter a desk might acquire over a few decades of use.  There was a hairbrush and a lipstick—her mother’s favorite color—and a neatly folded monogrammed handkerchief.  It was pearl white with a delicate fringe of lace.  Min took it in her hand and brought it up to her face, inhaling deeply.  It smelled of her mother’s perfume, and of sage (her mother’s favorite incense to burn.  It cleansed the very air of dark energies.)

She put the handkerchief back and closed the drawer up tight.  She went for a side drawer, and feeling yet again no wards, she opened it.  Nothing of use, just some takeout menus, an old rolodex and a half full box of tissues.

The bottom drawer on that side, though, did have a ward on it, one Min recognized.  It was one they used often—easily put up, and easily dropped.  With a mumbled phrase and a push of her will the ward melted away in her fingers.  In this drawer she found some interesting things: a talismans—one that made the bearer unnoticed (not invisible, just unnoticed)—a potion that caused light confusion when exposed to air, and a stink-slash-smoke bomb.  If nothing else, if she got Luca away from the pack it might cover their tracks for a time. 

But all of this, she had to admit, was pretty flimsy.  Maybe if she were in her own house she could keep a pack of werewolves at bay.  But she was going to have to face them out in the open city.  There she had greatly reduced power, not to mention the long in place wards and counter measures of her home.

They would take her down in a few minutes.  She’d be lucky to get herself away, not to mention their captive.  She needed something with a lot more kick. 

She remembered her mother showing her a few of the dangerous thing she’d collected over the years.  Some of it was inter-dimensional stuff.  But Min remembered her mother showing her what she thought was just a Chinese finger-trap, but was in actuality a small vial of Dragon’s Breath.  It would have only two or three good doses in it, but when aimed and ignited by a force of will, it could burn through anything.

Min went through the top side drawer on the other side of the desk, finding no ward and nothing inside of use.  But in the bottom drawer on that side she did find some things that made her pause.  This drawer was nearly bare compared with the middle drawer of the desk.  This one held only three objects.  A framed photograph of Min, Katarina and Andy looking happily into the lens of the camera, lay in the bottom of the drawer.  It had been taken on Andy’s last birthday, her twenty second, and they had celebrated at a small bistro in Oakland. 

Atop the photo sat two pieces of origami.  Min recognized them immediately, though she hadn’t seen them since she was a child, when she and Andy had folded them and presented them to their mother as birthday presents.  Min had been nine and Andy would have been six.  One was a blue paper dragon—Min’s creation—and she could still feel the sharp fire she had imbued the thing with on that day, for she had enchanted it to move, and to snap, and to puff smoke.

Andy’s had been a yellow bird—a hummingbird—and she had cajoled the thing to flit and streak across the room, fluttering and nattering close to their mother’s joyously beautiful face.

Katarina had loved the presents, because they had made them for her—especially since Min and Andy had done such a good job enchanting the things to life.

Min remembered, though Andy’s bird had been sweet and obedient, her blue paper dragon had been moody and bit.

Min let her hand hover over the two pieces of origami, feeling with her senses that neither piece had any magic left in them.  No snapping dragon remained in the blue paper, and the hummingbird was just folded yellow paper.  But Andy’s bird gave her an idea as to how to track down Luca and the pack, so she folded the thing up and slipped it into her pocket.

After looking through the remaining drawers of her mother’s desk, min stood and glanced through some of the books her mother had collected on the shelves behind her desk.  Tax journals sat beside murder mysteries, and magical histories covering the last four centuries.  There was even a copy of a Chelsea Handler book, a slender volume of vulgarity her mother had read with unveiled disgust, though she could not wipe the smile the obscene woman’s words elicited from her face.

She remembered her mother having been working on a memory erasing conjuring, the book she’d used for referencing the spell sat askew on the shelf.  The thought of making the werewolves simply forget that they had even seen Luca was most enticing.  But she knew from her conversations with her mother, that using memory spells was tricky business, and unless you had the antidote on hand—and someone to administer it to you—you might want to sew your name into your clothes before you flirted with that most certain of disasters.

But then of course, why had her mother been working on the spell in the first place?

Again, something flickered in the periphery of Min’s memory, and once again she couldn't grasp hold of it before it darted off into the shadows of her mind. 
So freaking irritating!
  But she didn’t have time to ruminate over it.  She needed to find more firepower.  And she needed to find it fast.  The werewolves weren’t just going to wait around patiently for her to show up.

Min sighed and rolled her eyes at the preposterousness of the wolf pack sitting on their thumbs.  She was still way low on fire power.  She spun around the room, looking about her trying to find what she was so obviously missing. 

And then something caught her eye, gleaming from above her mother’s desk where it had hung for as long as she could remember, something she’d passed by so often, something that was just part of the background of the office.  Until that moment, only a decoration, an artifact from the family’s rather sorted past.  Something she’d forgotten.  It glinted silvery in the dim light of the office, and Min reached up and took it from where it hung. 

Would it still work?  Holding its weight in her hands, she could feel its power just waiting to be unleashed, anxious to be put to work. 
Hungry

Min raised an eyebrow and smiled.  It was crazy, and stupid—old magic like it would have easily degraded, and using it could turn suicidal—but it could just work.