Vampires and Sexy Romance (41 page)

But why would they bother? 
After all, wouldn’t they know, couldn’t they all tell, that she wasn’t like them.  Andy remembered her mother swearing that she was indeed real.  What was it she had said?  Oh, yes.  That whatever in the hell she and the fae queen had formed her from, it had been naturally occurring in this universe.  So that was great, just great.  Maybe she had been formed out of some mystical mud…or maybe she had been a fae plant of some kind.

Either way, why hadn’t a human noticed this about her before?

Well, Min hadn’t noticed.  And Min was attuned to the flow and ebb of magical forces…wasn’t she?  Well, that was because Min had been affected by the spell that created her. 

Andy wondered if she now looked different to Min?  Maybe like an insect, or an alien, or whatever the hell they’d made her out of.

Oh god…what if she really had been made form some sort of magical bugs?

It made her flesh crawl.

Min strode through the streets of Augusta armed for battle.  She had an iron sword at her hip, two silver daggers, one strapped to each thigh, the Bellini shotgun she’d used on the werewolves strapped to her back, and a small arsenal of magical paraphernalia stuffed in a velvet sack, tied onto the scabbard of the sword.

Luca had gotten back to the house a few minutes after Andy’s grand escape, and they’d all three headed off to search the city for her.  Not that Min expected to visually find her.  She’d somehow taken the small white and silver stone Min had gotten in Scotland ten years ago and used it to make herself disappear.  Well, to turn invisible.  So she was pretty sure that tracking her would be a fairly silly thing.  All she could hope was that somehow she and Katarina would notice something out of place, or pick up on a magical aura, or that Luca would be able to sniff her out in the big, vast city.

Luca had gone east, and would swing up north, and then down south of the city.  Katarina and Min had gone west and were going to mirror his search pattern. 

They just had to find her.  Andy wasn’t a skilled practitioner or spell caster.  How she’d managed the disappearing act still had Min stumped.  Maybe the stone was some sort of magical conduit that Min had neglected to identify.  Clearly she needed to go through her personal belongings with a careful eye.  If they all survived the night, maybe she’d have Andy look them over.

If they survived…

Min looked over to her mother, and couldn’t help feeling a wave of happiness pass through her.  Their mother—her mother?  No, she was
their
mother, and she was alive and well, and with her, looking better and better every minute she was awake.  No matter what she’d withheld from them, it was still so wondrous that she was present again, not just some lifeless body, bereft of a soul and cold as marble to the touch.

And god help that treacherous faery bitch if Min ever got her hands on her.  Queen or not, Min was going to strangle her with her bare hands…or set her on fire and have herself a fae barbeque.

Suddenly her mother stopped and shuddered.  Min thought for a moment maybe she sensed something, some clue as to where Andy had gone off to, but when Min came over to her, she saw her mother had broken down in tears. 

Min gathered her mother in her arms and made the same sounds of comfort her mother had always made to soothe her and her sister.  Stroking her long silver streaked hair. 

“I’m so scared, Min.  What if something happens to her?  What if the winter queen’s forces have already seized her?”

“No, no…don’t even think that.”  Min said, though those thoughts had already passed through her own mind.  “If there had been any fae around the house, Luca would have smelled them when he was there.  She’s probably just walking around, thinking.  And with that invisibility spell of hers, she’s in absolutely no danger.”

But no spell is perfect. Min didn’t want to start thinking about what could be happening to her sister this very moment.  Logically her mind told her that Andy really wasn’t her sister, no matter what false memories her mother and the fae had dumped into her mind.  She remembered the real, Andy free history of her family as well as the alternative reality of having a sister.

A memory of Min once telling her sister that she’d wished on a shooting star that she would have been an only child.  Andy had been only seven, and had burst into livid tears.  Guilt welled up red hot and sticky, and Min had to force herself to breathe.

“Luca will find her,” Min said, her voice sounding far surer than she felt. 
Please, by the goddess, let him find her.

~*~

Luca swept through the city, letting his nose lead him rather than his eyes.  Min had already told him that her sister had gone all invisible, so looking for her with his peepers would be of no use.  So he let her mild, clean scent lead him from Min’s house out into the night.  She seemed to be headed toward downtown—but that was quite a stretch for a human on foot—but if she’d been running, and afraid, maybe not.

Thankfully Min’s little sister didn’t wear any kind of fancy, obtrusive perfume.  So, even with her scent being so mild, he wasn’t having too hard a time following it.  That was until that scent led him into a small, upscale neighborhood that seemed to appear like an oasis among all the midsized office buildings that were announcing he was getting closer to downtown and skyscrapers. 

That’s where a cacophony of scents nearly made Luca lose her trail.  It wasn’t just the inundation of human scents, because there were certainly too many in this small parcel of homes for him to weed out.  No, there were other scents that practically screamed out to him.  First was the redolent musk of wild fae.  They were not part of either the winter or summer courts.  But they still served the courts to a point.  There had been three, and their aromas were as far from human kind as he could imagine.

The other scent was pure sidhe…and fucking familiar.  It was the same scent he’d gotten a nose full of when Min had tried that spell on him, to try and bring her mother back to life.  It was the thing that had come into Min’s very home, merely in shade form, and had kicked Min to the side like she was nothing. 

The Winter Queen. 

Well shit.
  As if things weren’t bad enough, now the big bad Min and her mother were trying to keep Andy from was already in town.

If she was physically in this realm—and by the overwhelmingly heady scent of her, she most certainly was—then he needed to find Andy, and now.  There was absolutely no time to waste.  If the winter queen was there, the only place on the planet she might be safe was in her family’s home.

That home’s threshold was strong with only Min’s magic to buffer it.  But it hadn’t been able to hold the queen back before.  But Katarina had lit some rather odd shaped candles—that smelled like they were made out of belly fat of the Creature from the Black Lagoon—and had told he and Min that they were gifts from the Summer queen.  Reinforcements to her own rather powerful wards.  They were to be used for exactly a time like this. 

The flames had been green, purple and blue, and he could feel the energy they threw off like the heat from a fire.  He wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he was hoping they’d be strong enough to stop anything that was going to attack the house.

But that was before he knew the Winter Queen herself was coming to the party. 

Of course, what good was a threshold when Andy was running all over town, her only defense invisibility.  For as surely as he’d tracked her scent, so too could the wild fae, and the Queen.

He was about to leave the area, try to extricate himself from all the olfactory sensations, then try circling the area until he picked up her scent again—hopefully they hadn’t already caught her, for the queen could have simply just opened a doorway back to her realm and took Andy with her—then a breeze brought a odor so strong he could almost taste it. 

Blood. 

Before he could even tell himself to, he was across the street and touching the sharp point of a cast iron flue-de-lei that stood sentinel atop a yard’s iron gate.  He touched that point, and the blood was still fresh enough to be sticky.  He brought it to his nose and took a long whiff.  Andy, most assuredly.  But it certainly wasn’t her naturally mild scent.  Her blood was just full of power.  Power that made the tiny patch of flesh he’d touched it with start to sizzle.

He wiped his finger against the iron gate, letting the nighttime moisture of dew help take the trace of blood from his burning flesh.  Min had said Andy wasn’t human…and she hadn’t been kidding.

But that was a good thing, for now he could follow a scent that was far more redolent, one that literally burned the smell of fae right out of this nose.

Andy was exhausted as she rounded a corner in downtown Augusta and found herself across the street from a small all-night diner.  The place was the only light coming from the entire city block, and that illumination seemed to make the night warmer, softer.  As if it weren’t the middle of winter.

Her mind had raced as her pace had gradually slowed, and her body shook from cold and weariness.  The warm light seemed like a beacon.  Watering some rather plentiful hanging baskets of mums and geraniums, a woman in a blue and pink waitress uniform looked over and smiled at Andy. 

“I just started a fresh pot of coffee.  Would you like a cup?”

It was the woman’s job to serve people food and drink.  But for some reason Andy couldn’t fathom, her words felt more like an invitation than a sales pitch.

Andy nodded and started walking toward the waitress and the warm light of the diner.  “I’d love some.”

“Good, good.  It’s been one
hell
of a slow night.”  The woman’s voice was lovely, with only the slightest of southern accents.  She winked as she pushed through the door of the diner.  “And I could use the company.” 

Andy followed, and was comforted by the mingling scents of the diner: coffee and honey, bacon and pancakes, and powdered sugar.  The waitress pointed out a booth that was half way back the length of the restaurant, and right at the entrance to the server station.

Andy slid into the Naugahyde covered seat and felt her body cry out in relief—to finally be off her feet.  In a flash the woman was back with a cup and saucer in one hand, a pot of steaming, fresh coffee in the other.  With practiced skill she turned the cup over on its saucer and filled it up.  She placed a bowl of creamers beside the cup then asked if Andy wasn’t hungry?

The coffee smelled wonderful, but not only wasn’t Andy hungry, her stomach roiled just at the thought of drinking anything either.  She gave the woman her best smile and shook her head.  “Maybe later?”

“We’re open all night.”  The waitress said with a beautiful smile, walking back to the server station to start rolling silverware into paper napkins.  She hummed a tune Andy had never heard before as her graceful hands made quick work of her side work.  The song didn’t sound like something current
.  Maybe an old folksong?

The diner felt warm enough, nearly too warm, but Andy still felt such a chill in her bones.  As if they were wrought from nothing more than frigid solid pieces of water.  Not to mention the arctic sensations that played in her stomach and clung around her heart.  She ran a hand up under her eyes, rubbing away the threat of tears. 

Andy sat, staring at the cup of coffee, holding it between her chilled hands, inhaling the aroma of the dark roast, but not taking even a sip.  She just could not reconcile, couldn’t believe, that her mother and her sister had been lying to her for her entire life—well, for the last year, since that was in actuality her entire life span. 

I’m not real. 

Not real.  What in the name of god did that even mean?  Did it mean that she was only a magical construct?  Something temporary, an illusion fashioned out of some sort of primordial mist?  It made her chest hurt to even think it, but that was all she really had, wasn’t it?  Her thoughts.  For her family was not her family, and her life was a lie, and her memories…

She pushed that thought aside.  Noting, nothing that had happened so far, not the spiders, or the wicked faerie queen—not even her mother’s news about her origins—felt quite as horrid as the realization that everything she remembered was a lie.  Not even a lie.  They had never existed, they had never happened! 

An hour ago she had been just a woman standing in a park, waiting for the man she had a crush on to come out and talk to her.  And now she was…

“What the hell am I?”  She said, closing her eyes and sniffling.  The heat and burning of imminent tears started to form behind her eyes.  She hated crying.  It made her feel so ridiculous, so out of control.  

“You’re a star.”  The waitress said in her sweet voiced accent.  Andy laughed, and blotted her eyes on her napkin, looking up to the waitress.  She stood there with a pot of steaming hot coffee in her hand and that beatific smile on her face.  She leaned over and refilled Andy’s suddenly empty cup. 

Andy blinked at the cup, and the fact that it was empty, and then she looked up again at the waitress.

But the woman was no longer a waitress.  The woman before her was stunning, probably the most beautiful creature Andy had ever beheld.  Tall and voluptuous, with long waves of fiery red hair that flowed down her back to her hips, skin so pale yet so radiant, it literally looked kissed with sunlight.  Her lips were full and pouty, the color of strawberries, and her eyes shone the radiant green of the rainforest—lush and so very, very deep.  Inhuman vertically slit pupils accented those eyes.  She smelled like a mix between a farmer’s market and a forest.

She wore a diaphanous green silk gown that matched her eyes, and though it covered every inch of her, it did nearly nothing to conceal her.

The only thing remaining of the waitress was the compassion in her eyes, tempered by a cool eternal patience.  She smiled more deeply, sliding into the booth seat opposite Andy.  Andy looked around for anyone to call out to.  But the diner is empty. 

Something came to her out of the cacophony of terror that was her mind, something her mother had said.  That one Queen had come to her, to press some great power into human form, and all just to keep it from the other Queen.  The Queen of Winter, the beautiful, terrible creature she’d glimpsed in the frozen puddle.  And though her coloring was all wrong, and this creature seemed to radiate heat not bitter cold, there was a striking similarity in the features of her face, and the features of what had glared back at her from in that frozen puddle of spidery craziness.

Andy gulped, that icy feeling spreading through her with renewed intensity.  Seeing how bad things had gotten, and how quickly, this could only be the queen that was hunting her.  Which seemed consistent with sort of day she was having.

Andy sighed, feeling her shoulders loosen.  She didn’t have anywhere else to run, and no way of defending herself.  “You must be the queen that wants to kill me.  Well, good, I’m sick of waiting around for it.  Go ahead.  Get.  It.  Over.  With.”

The fae’s head snapped back and the most beautiful peel of silvery laughter came out of her mouth, like tiny bells.  Sensations washed over Andy, as if someone was stroking feathers over her every nerve.  Then the faerie queen held her belly, the nonexistent thing that it was, and bore her startling green eyes into Andy once more.  “I put a lot of effort into shaping you into this lovely form, I hardly think I want to destroy it.”

Andy’s eyes felt like they were about to pop right out of her skull.  “
You
made me?”

“Yes my dear.  Let me introduce myself.  I am Arianna, Queen of Summer, of Light and Water.  And I molded you into what you are.”

Andy jerked forward, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could catch them.  “What am I?”

“You’re human…well at least, on the most part.  But I already told you what you were before your mother and I interceded.”

Andy just stared at her without comprehension. 

“A star my dear.  Well, a piece of one.”  The fae woman glanced out the window of the diner and smiled secretly to herself.  “I believe you came from Andromeda.  That is why you are so named…Andy.”  Just the way she said her name made an invisible string pull at her heart.

Andy sat back in the booth and clutched the napkin that was by her right hand.  “No…that’s—” 

“Impossible?”  The Summer Queen waved her hand dismissively.  “As if humans know anything about what is possible.  They know not even the limits of their own world, yet they seek to find other worlds to be ignorant of as well.”

Andy felt her stomach lurch.  “So I’m some sort of meteor?  A big piece of space rock?”

“Heavens no,” The faerie chuckled, “you landed on this earth, but not in this world.  You came to rest in Faerie, and once there you became what you were meant to be: living energy, pure radiant light.”

A sphere of some sort of energy.
Her mother had said.

“So I did the only thing I could do,” Arianna continued, “I transformed you into this form, and gave you guardians, a family to love and protect you.”

“But why?  And why is the other queen after me?”

“Both questions have the same answer.  My cousin, Sliva, Queen of Winter, of air and darkness, well…she’s gone quite mad you see.  Happens sometimes to the very old.  But not usually one of our station.  She’s family, and I love her…and I hate her.  We’ve been battling for thousands of years, so it’s hard to keep a concise track, but it seems like forever.  And every year we both win, and we both lose, and that keeps the balance of power between the two courts.  But as I said, she’s been driven insane, and she’s seething for more power.”

Arianna looked out the window of the diner again and sighed. “Why she’d ever want more power is beyond me.  Our powers are so great already, one nearly has not enough things to put it into.  But for the last few millennia she has been very active in trying to gain more power.  Her dream is to someday plunge the world into one endless winter.  As I said, crazy. 

“Our powers were created equal, to make sure they canceled each other out.  That is our purpose, that is our reason to exist.  I am the beginning of things, and she is the end.  She is the queen of winter, of darkness and air, and of the end of things.  She does not create anything, only destroys and kills.  I on the other hand, am the queen of beginnings, of creation.” 

She fell silent, staring out the window, her warm green eyes haunted. 

“So, she’s looking for me, to…”  Andy’s stomach churned and she felt nauseous. 

“To devour you, yes.”  Arianna said cheerfully.  “She will take you into herself, to finally make herself more powerful than I, to upset forever the power of the courts.

“That’s why you hid me with my…”

“With your family, yes.”  Her green eyes bore into Andy.  “They are your family, I made you from them, molded you into their lives.  Do they not feel like they belong to you, and you to them?”

Andy had to admit, they did feel like they were her family.  And she felt as if she belonged with them.  Even with the lies, they loved her, and she them.  Actually, she wanted nothing more for them to show up right then and there. 

“Alas, I think my dalliance in subterfuge has not been good enough, for my cousin searches this very moment to find you.”  Arianna sounded almost bored, certainly not as if she were nervous about the winter queen finding her. 

“Yeah, she found me in the park across the street from my apartment building.”

“It’s not your fault.  I imagine I could have hidden you better.  Maybe I could’ve made you into a blade of grass in a forest in the Ozarks, or one of the roses in that quaint little garden at your White House.  My cousin may have never found you.  But she has, and that’s…well,” Arianna eyes radiated with satisfaction, “that’s just marvelous.”

Andy blinked.  Then she sat forward and looked upon the fae queen with bewilderment.   “What?”

The Summer Queen gave a silent chuckle as she waved away the scorn in Andy’s voice. 

“What I mean is I had to make the crazed old girl want you in the worst way.  How else could I get her to ignore the fact that you are a star, a being of light.”  She leaned forward and touched a single finger to the hand Andy still clutched the napkin in.  That one touch was like being struck by lightning, like having every molecule in her body catch on fire at once, her mind turned on as if the rest of her life had just been some kind of fuzzy dream.  Perfect clarity, and the roar of the most terrible, blinding power—and she liked it. 

The Queen broke the contact, pulling back her hand, and the instant she did Andy felt as if a part of her—no, not part of her, that she and the creature sitting across from her were one and the same.

Andy trembled, pulling her hand back and cradling it against her chest, her breathing suddenly rapid, her mind spinning, though her thoughts nowhere near as clear or as brilliant as they were a moment ago.

Arianna sat back, and she too was breathing hard, her eyes glowing and wild.  And she looked as if she were as disturbed as Andy had been. 

She glanced at the hand she’d touched Andy with, and then clenched it into a shaking fist, drawing it under the table top of the booth.  She took a few more ragged breaths, and then turned her gaze back upon Andy.  They no longer glowed, but there was still that wild intensity.

“My cousin only sees that you are a thing of power, and that I am hiding you from her.  That makes you absolutely irresistible to her.”

Andy had fallen back against the padded back of the booth, still clutching her hand to her. “So you
want
her to find me?”

“Of course,” Arianna said as if it were obvious.

“But why the hell would you want that?”
Andy’s words practically exploded from her lips. 

The faerie queen’s lips parted as she took in a breath, and just as she seemed about to say something, the bells that hung over the front door of the diner clanged, heralding someone’s entrance.   Arianna looked to the door, and a slow, sweet sigh escaped her lips.