Vampires and Sexy Romance (42 page)

Andy turned to look too, startled by the interruption and the way the queen had looked.   There stood Min’s vampire, Luca—blond, tall, pale and to-die-for gorgeous.  The look on his face as he caught sight of Andy was one of huge relief.  But that look was replaced a heartbeat later with a murderously angry one.  He started toward the booth Andy and the Summer Queen were seated at, and suddenly she was filled with the terrifying thought that the fae queen might hurt or kill her sister’s beloved vampire.

She whipped her head around, a plea for the queen not to hurt him on her tongue—but the Summer Queen of the fae was gone.  Not even her scent remained.

The vampire suddenly stood beside her, looking down scornfully at her.  Andy looked to him, and back to where the faerie queen had been sitting, and she shuddered at the sudden change in her reality.  Had she imaged what had just happened?

No.  She certainly was not imaging any of that.  It had been real, and she knew enough about magic and the Otherealm to know that it was most assuredly, and lethally real.

The vampire’s face screwed up until his shoulders shook, his hands held in fists at his sides.  Then his voice exploded from his snarling lips.  “Where the hell have you been?” 

Andy gulped, looking fearfully up at the undead stranger that had only hours before saved her life.  But then his words abruptly ticked her off. 

Who does this bloodsucking fiend think he is?

His eyes were green globes of fire set into his handsome face, and she stared right back at him.

“Out. For. A. Walk.” she said evenly, then added, “Asshole.”

Luca’s flaming green eyes widened, and he growled like some sort of animal.  But then those fiery eyes dimmed to their normal sparkling gemstones, and he started laughing.  It was a delicious, touchable laugh that would be nearly infectiously irresistible—but he was laughing at
her
, and that just pissed her off even more.

Andy looked away, wishing she had a brick or a crucifix to throw at him.  “Dick.”

That only made the vampire laugh harder.  Bonelessly he poured himself into the booth, taking over the very spot the Summer Queen had vacated.

“It’s not safe for you out here.” 

Ignoring the fact that a fae queen had just been there, Andy looked around at the empty diner and gave him the iciest of smiles.  “That’s funny.  Do you think I’m about to get attacked by a horde of coffee mugs?” 

From the back came a clamor and Andy felt every muscle in her body tense.  She glanced over at the vampire and found him pulling something sharp and deadly from inside his jacket, its sharp edge gleaming in the florescent lighting.  He held perfectly still, his green eyes ablaze again, and focused on the door leading back to the kitchen area.

The swinging doors opened and a short, curvy middle-aged blonde appeared, laid eyes on the two of them and said, “Oh shit!”

Andy looked back to Luca, and magically the knife and his burning green eyes were gone.  He didn’t look relaxed, but he didn’t look ready to kill anymore.

The waitress—Madge her name tag read—hustled over and snatching a pot of coffee from a burner on the huge, ancient looking industrial sized coffee brewer.  Swiftly she came forward and said, “Sorry about that.  I just stepped out for a ciggy.  Coffee?”

Andy was about to say she already had some, but when she looked down her cup was not just empty but turned upside down on its saucer, untouched. 

Guess my coffee split with the Summer Queen. 

Andy and the vampire turned their cups over so the waitress could fill them. 

“Can I get you two somethin’ to eat?”  The waitress asked.  “Henry, the cook, makes great waffles.”

“No thank you,” Luca said with a dazzling smile.  “We’re not staying that long.”

“Andy shot him a look and gave the waitress a dazzling smile of her own.  “That sounds great.  I’ll have waffles with lots of butter.  Thank you.”

The vampire glowered at her, but she couldn’t help but smile back at him.

“Nothin’ for you, honey?”  The waitress looked like she was sensing the tension between the two.

“Coffee’s fine,” Luca said stiffly.  “Thank you.”

When the waitress smiled and turned to go place her order with the kitchen, Luca shook his head.  “We don’t have time for this.  I talked to you sister and she says you need to get back to the house, immediately.  It’s the only place where they can keep you safe.”

“Yeah, sure…they just want to keep me safe.”  Andy cringed inwardly at how sharp her voice sounded.  But the feeling behind that tone was no lie.  “They aren’t even my—” she stopped.  Good god it was hard to say.  Her mother and her sister weren’t really her family.  It was all just some elaborate, mystical joke.  And now not only was she minus a family, but she had a faerie queen from the bitch dimension and her hordes hunting her down like a dog.

Luca sighed and his brilliant green eyes softened.  “So why does this faerie want you so badly?”

Oh…so Min and her mother were as tight lipped with him as they had been with her.  Cover ups all around. 

“And they aren’t what?”  Luca’s expression was so concerned, so genuine, Andy felt—though his treating her like an object to protect was just so middle ages—that she could truly trust him.  After all, he’d risked his own afterlife just to save her from a faerie queen and her scourge.

So she told him, all of it.  That six months ago Min and she had found their mother in the magic shop, in some sort of suspended animation, that they’d spent the last six months trying to cure her.  That somehow her sister and he—and that was a whole other story she only had the cliff notes on—had somehow broken whatever spell that had kept her mother in that frozen stasis. 

“And then came this faerie queen named Sliva, the spiders,” she raised her brow at him, “a vampire, and I was suddenly sucked back to the house using that ring you brought me.  And there was Min and mom…and mom was good as new and telling me I wasn’t real.” 
Not real
.  Andy trembled.  “That I’m some sort of ball of energy that the summer queen helped them mold into human form.”

Andy paused.  It just sounded so freaking insane, like some sort of schizophrenic nightmare.

“Plus mom was burdened with the task of keeping my origins secret and me safe.”   

Luca raised his own eyebrows and shook his head.  Looked like she wasn’t the only one to think the whole situation was a head scratcher.

Andy sighed and rolled her eyes. 
Might as well keep him up to date.
  “Then enters the summer queen posing as a waitress.” 

Luca’s head snapped toward where the waitress had disappeared to place Andy’s order.

“No, no.  That’s a real waitress.  The faerie queen took off when you came through the door.  Well, not so much took off as simply vanished without a trace.  Even took the coffee she’d poured me with her.”

Luca’s mouth was open, as if he was about to say something.  Even the way his eyebrows were scrunched together made him look ready to say something.  But nothing came out.

Andy cleared her throat, took a sip of her coffee, which was pretty good, and said, “So this faerie queen told me I was…”  She started laughing uncontrollably.  It was too stupid, too insane to be true.  To think that any of this was real, that any of it could be serious.  It just couldn’t be.  Andy pulled herself together and started to speak again. 

“She said I was a fallen star, and that…that I was going to stop this Sliva from causing a permanent ice age.”

Andy took a breath.  She was about to say she didn’t know what Sliva was going to do with her, but it couldn’t be anything good, when the vampire reached over and put his cold finger against her lips.

“You never want to say something’s name three times.  It can call them to you.” 

“Too late.” A smooth, dark voice purred from directly behind Luca.

Andy’s eyes snapped past Luca to the woman suddenly sitting in the booth behind them, her back to Luca.  But in the blink of an eye the woman stood, turned and grabbed Luca by the back of the neck, and carelessly tossed him some odd fifty feet to the back wall of the diner.  The vampire hit with a sickening crunch and fell to the floor. 

Andy looked up at the woman and gasped.  She was tall and built with a mix of sinewy grace and luscious curves.  Her hair was long and loose, black as pitch, and writhed like snakes around her face.  Her skin was impossibly white and as smooth as ice, and her smiling lips were a frozen blue-red.  Her crisp blue eyes stared down upon Andy, their pupils inverted slits.

Andy’s breath came out in frozen puffs, the air so cold the moisture in it turned to sparkling dust and drifted around as wind began to blow through the restaurant.     

“Finally,” the Queen of Air and Darkness said.  “I have you all to myself.”

The faerie had a hell of a throwing arm on her.  Luca had to have been traveling at about eighty miles an hour when he’d hit the back wall of the grungy little greasy spoon.  He’d hit hard enough that part of the wall crumbled on top of him when he hit the blue and yellow tiled floor.  It took a second, but he shook off the impact and pushed himself off the floor and back to his feet.  He pulled the sword and dagger from their scabbards and started back to where the faerie queen still stood over Andy.  The world pitched and he stumbled, but he didn’t fall. 

“Get away from her, you faerie ice bitch!”

The Winter Queen barely even turned her head, but the smug, satisfied look on her face would have made anyone sick to their stomach.

“So gallant…” she said to Luca.  “You should be commended.” She smiled and looked around her.  “Kill him.”

As if they’d been hidden behind a curtain of invisibility, which they obviously had been, a cadre of twenty odd wilde fae lurched out of nowhere and surged toward him.  There were goblins, a goat-like gruff, a few elves with red eyes and pointy silver daggers,  and one great green ogre—he looked like the Incredible Hulk, but with stripes of dried blood running over his arms and bare chest, and around his mouth.

They were all so very strong and quick, and though Luca was injured he smote three of their number in as many seconds, and barely kept to his feet when the gruff battered him in the chest with his horn-adorned Billy goat head.  But it was the ogre that really rang Luca’s bell, bashing him with a boulder-like fist that flattened him to the floor. 

Luca looked up in time to see a shimmering, web-like portal open in the wall of the diner.  It was night on the other side of the door, and there was nothing but the harsh whiteness of snow as far as the eye could see.  The winter queen had hold of Andy by the wrist, and though she was pulling against and fighting the fae, the Queen simply dragged her along through the portal.

The ogre stamped his foot down on Luca’s chest, causing ribs to crack and the world to fade out for a moment.  When his vision returned he just barely saw the portal snap shut, and just like that the bitter cold that had permeated the diner just evaporated.  Drool from the ogre’s gaping maw dribbled down into Luca’s face.

“Groth like tasty blood rats.”  The ogre smiled with the most terrible dentition and pressed down with his anvil sized foot, making bones in Luca snap and cave in.  “They taste like humans if they’ve fed recently.  Have you fed recently?”

Luca could take in no breath to answer, so he shoved the dagger still in his hand to the hilt in the ogre’s calf, and flicked him the middle finger of his other.

The ogre roared in pain and rage, raised his foot for a beat, and then made to stomp down again, to crush what was left of Luca’s nearly flattened chest.

But just then Luca heard a small metallic click, one he remembered from the night before.  The next thing he knew the ogre’s head exploded and rained chunks of gore and ogre brains all over the back wall of the diner.

Luca scrambled to pull himself out of the way of the ogre’s mammoth falling corpse.  He made it by a fraction of a second—the floor shook, and the tiles shattered under the ogre’s weight.

Luca looked to the door to find Min standing there holding the smoldering barrels of the Bellini she’d used to back off the werewolves the night before.  She looked like a dark goddess of the hunt, or at least the sexiest pissed off witch Luca had ever seen.  Her mother, Katarina, stood behind her, a double sided axe in her hands, and the same primal glint in her eyes as her daughter.  They were there to kill whatever got in their way. Suddenly the small faerie army looked less than certain of their odds of winning.

The shot gun had worked with hellfire and silver.  It had been built by her grandfather to hunt lycanthropes, and utilized a sliver of dragon’s tongue as its power source.  To have blasted off the ogre’s head like that she must have added iron to the mix. 

Quite effective.

Luca’s mouth twitched, and even though he was in mortal agony, he was smiling.  If he could breathe he’d be laughing about then.  The ribs that were crushed started to push back out and heal, as were the holes those broken ribs had torn in his lungs.  Even for a vampire like himself that was unheard of healing.  Ten times as fast as usual.  But just the sight of his violently beautiful Min filled him with a hellish jolt of fiery strength.  It was their connection—whatever it was inside her that had sparked and lit whatever now burned inside him.

He pulled himself to his feet and picked up the fallen sword.  His first breath was torture, but it felt good to do it, even if technically he didn’t need to.

“You have great timing,” he wheezed, the taste of his own blood thick on his tongue.

Min raised an elegant eyebrow at him, her curvaceous lips a pleased smile.  “Nobody lays a hand on my boyfriend…or a foot.”

Their eyes locked and for a long beat there was nothing but utter silence.  And then one of the remaining goblins let out an inhuman cry and lunged for Min.  She shut him up by blowing his misshapen, scaly, lop-eared head off his bony shoulders.  With that the fight was on, and the remaining wild fae fought with bloodthirsty abandon.  But between bursts of iron laced hellfire, Luca’s slicing sword and Katarina’s ruthless precision with that double headed axe of hers, there was nothing but chunks of their enemies left a few moments later.

Luca looked up and saw Madge the waitress and what must have been the waffle slinging cook, Henry, peering out the oval Plexiglas peep holes in the twin swinging doors that led back to the kitchen area.  A moment later they were gone.  Most probably out the back exit. 

Min met his eyes again, and he felt that sudden rush again, as if her mere presence was what animated his every fiber.  It was love.  It couldn’t be anything else.  Love and whatever ethereal, metaphysical connection they now had.

Then Katarina gasped and said, “Where is Andy?”

Min’s eyes jerked away from his and she blinked hard.  He could see her inwardly berating herself for not noticing sooner.

“That faerie bitch opened a portal in the wall,” he pointed and his shoulder popped back into place with a nasty, thumping crunch.  “And she dragged Andy in with her.  Looked like some sort of winter wonder hell.  All darkness and snow.”  He paused as he remembered seeing something strange in the pitch black of the shadowy backdrop he’d seen.  “I think I saw a huge mountain in the background.  It was blacker than the night.”

Katarina choked back a mournful cry and fell down to her knees.  Min turned and knelt beside her, wrapping the arm not holding the Bellini in it around her mother’s shoulders.  “What is it?  Where has she taken her?”

“To Winter’s Keep.  It’s her seat of power in Faerie.”  The older woman’s strength seemed to crumble as she fell against her daughter.  “Our only hope was to keep the fight on this mortal plane.  If she’s already crossed over, and into her own kingdom, we haven’t a chance of saving Andy.”  Her eyes, the same chocolate brown as her daughter’s, gleamed with impending tears.  “We’ve failed…”  She shook and her expression melted into anguish.  “She’s gone…she’s really gone.”

~*~

Min couldn’t breathe.  Kneeling there on the tiled floor of the diner, her mother in her arms, she couldn’t believe what her mother was telling her.  “What do you mean?  We’re not going to just give up and let that bitch have her!”

Katarina’s mournful cries only became more strident.  “Don’t you see?  Don’t you see?  We can’t fight Sliva at her power center.”  She pulled Min down to look into her eyes.  “We wouldn’t have a prayer even if she was just in faerie.  But at her stronghold nothing would have a chance…nothing…”

The bottom of Min’s stomach dropped out.  Her mind and her lungs both locked up on her.  No thought passed through her mind, and no air passed through her lips.  She felt a pressure building in her chest, and was sure she’d throw up any second.  She gulped and forced herself to take a breath. 

This can’t be true…

Luca, blood covered and still limping, stood at her side and put his hand on her shoulder.  His mere touch seemed to push back the rising panic inside her.  It helped clear her head as well.

“It isn’t true.”  He said, as if to answer the question she’d only voiced in her mind. 

Min looked up and his eyes burned with green light.  Not the vampire fire she’d seen before, but with actual light, a ghostly glow.  She gasped and shuddered, but could not look away.

“Before you came Andy told me the Summer Queen came here and talked to her.”

“Arianna?”  Katarina sputtered.

Luca nodded.  “The queen told Andy that only she could destroy the Winter Queen.  That that was her true purpose.”

Min slowly stood up, pulling her mother to her feet.  “So…this Summer Queen wanted the other queen to find Andy?”

“Looks like.  And it looks as if the Winter Queen took the bait.”

“What the devil are you two talking about?” Katarina demanded.  “My daughter is going to die and you’re talking about faerie tricks!”

“No,” Luca said, his face somber, his eyes glowing with intensity.  “We’re talking about why we need to go into faerie and rescue your daughter.  She isn’t going to die.  She’s going to end the winter queen.”

Katarina laughed hysterically.  “End the Winter Queen.  My daughter is her prisoner.  Any moment she’s going to…”  She wobbled where she stood and Min caught hold of her, steadying her.  She pulled herself together and regarded the vampire once more.  “She’s her prisoner.  Andy doesn’t have a chance against her, and neither do we.”

Luca looked to Min.  The green light radiating from his eyes was more than hypnotic; it was full of power, full of hope.  And full of life! 

Min gasped as she realized what she was looking at.   Somewhere inside Luca was a piece of Summer, a thrumming, very alive spark of the faerie magic of Summer. 

“I know we don’t have a chance against the faerie queen or her minions.”  Luca said, and he picked up the cold iron sword he’d dropped in battle.  The blade steamed as faerie blood sizzled down its blade.  “But The Queen of Summer thinks Andy’s going to destroy the Queen of Winter.  And I think…no,
I know
that we need to be there to watch her back.  And to get her out of Faerie safely afterwards.”

Katarina stepped closer to Luca, her eyes suspicious.  “How could you know that?”

Min reached out and laid her hand on her mother’s shoulder.  “I believe him, mother.  I know it’s crazy.  But it’s what we have to do.”  She stepped in front of her mother and looked her in the eyes.  “And even if we’re wrong, we can’t leave Andy there.  We have to try.  We have to go.”

Katarina’s breathing was labored and her eyes frightened and brimming with tears.  But before Min’s eyes Katarina pulled herself together again, the fierce, iron determination Min was used to seeing in her mother solidified and she swiped the tears out of her eyes. 

“So, what do we do next?”  She asked.

Min looked to Luca.  Every time she even laid eyes on him her strength built and grew.  She returned her gaze to her mother and smiled.  “We rip a freaking hole into faerie, go in and take her back.”