Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) (2 page)

2

Back in Criminy’s
bloodred wagon, I unpinned my hat and slipped off my remaining glove. I’d lost or destroyed more pairs of gloves than I could count since arriving in Sang. Most humans grew up covered from head to toe to keep the scent of their blood hidden from Bludmen, but I knew that was pointless and hated being confined. The magic that allowed me to move between Earth and Sang was peculiar, but I knew from experience that there was no point in suffering from sweaty fingers or crushing a perfectly good bonnet when I’d lie down, put on my locket, and awaken to my other life on Nana’s couch in my scrubs, seconds after I’d fallen asleep. I lost no time on Earth, which meant Nana never even knew that I was gone.

The fact that she was still alive defied everything we’d been told about her third round of cancer. She was old, impossibly frail, and barely hanging on by a thread. As her hospice nurse, I felt it was a privilege to help her die with as much comfort and decency as possible, in her own home. For a magically cursed woman traveling between two worlds where time made no sense, it meant that six years in Sang was only a few weeks on Earth, and to her knowledge, I’d been by her side almost constantly, except for when I went home to feed my cat.

Nana believed she was playing chess with my new boyfriend, who texted his moves to me via iPhone. It was one of my greatest sorrows that she would never get to meet Criminy herself, as I thought she would have adored his devil-may-care attitude and, as she called it, sass. And I knew he would have charmed the heck out of her with his suave near-British accent and sly remarks.

Clad only in my night shift, I used the key around my neck to open the coffin-sized box hidden behind a sliding panel in our wagon. The inside was padded with a lovely velvet Criminy had obtained from a Turkish merchant, the locking system cleverly designed by our own Mr. Murdoch, artificer extraordinaire, so that only I could open it from the inside . . . or Criminy from the outside. We’d grown a little paranoid about keeping me safe when I was unconscious and traveling between worlds. After all, just after Criminy’s locket had magicked me to Sang six years ago, a genocidal maniac had stolen the necklace and kidnapped me as part of his plan to destroy the race of Bludmen and return Sang to humans.

That man, Jonah Goodwill, had been from Earth. Like me. And now he was dead. That was perhaps the first step on my journey from human to beast: I had killed the human Goodwill to save Criminy and predators like him, predators like I would one day become. And I had no regrets whatsoever.

At first, the box had felt like a coffin, my heart beating frantically and claustrophobia descending each time Criminy kissed me gently and closed the glass top. But now, knowing how little time my Nana had left, it felt like Willy Wonka’s great glass elevator, and I all but slammed it closed before slipping on Criminy’s charmed ruby locket and sprinkling a few grains of his sleeping powder over my head. Sleep fell like a bludbunny on an unclothed ankle.

Almost instantly, my eyes opened. I was on Nana’s old striped couch, facing the only non-flat-screen TV I’d seen in years. Her favorite news channel was on, muted so that I could sleep through all the righteous indignation. Under the ticking of the clock, I heard soft sobs.

“Nana?”

A surprised and guilty snuffle was followed by the sound of a Kleenex box falling to the floor. “You didn’t hear nothin’, sugar,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

I sat up, my back aching and my arm asleep. Each time I woke up on Earth now, I learned a little more about what it felt like to be old, to feel your body giving up. The magical aging meant my hips popped and loosened when I walked, and I could feel arthritis settling in my knuckles. I couldn’t imagine the kind of pain Nana was in, even on her high doses of morphine.

And that meant, of course, that she wasn’t crying from pain.

Her health had gotten worse quickly, and we both knew what that meant.

Despite my protesting body, I was on my feet and in her room in seconds. There was barely anything left of the Nana who’d mostly raised me and who’d been my savior when I left an abusive fiancé. She was all bones and stretched skin and sunken yellow eyes. Even though she’d been crying, she barely had enough juice for tears, and I went immediately to switch out her IV.

“Nothing my butt, Nana. What aren’t you telling me?” I crossed my arms and loomed over her, hoping she hadn’t noticed my new wrinkles and the age spots on my hands. Without her glasses, she was practically blind, but she was still sharper than she had any right to be.

Nana took a deep breath and leaned back against her pillows, thin lips turned down in grim determination. “You want to do this now, you go to the cabinet over the fridge and bring me the bourbon.”

“You can’t drink. You know that.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do! I’m dying here, pretty damn soon, and we both know it. I’d rather meet my maker full of good whiskey, so you get your sassy little ass into that kitchen and pour it.”

I was too shocked to move. The anger, fear, and cuss in her voice told me just how close she was, and before I knew what I was doing, I was on tiptoes feeling around the high cabinet over the fridge until I found a heavy glass bottle. I didn’t even know she drank, and there was no way she could have reached it without a ladder, but the damn thing was half empty. I slopped some into a jelly jar, sniffed it, took a sip, and added another pour. Then, on second thought, I poured myself a glass, too. I needed it.

She reached for the jelly jar but couldn’t hold it, so I helped her with shaking hands. My sweet old Nana took down the ninety-proof bourbon in deep gulps until the glass was empty, then doubled over in a coughing fit.

“You’ve got a fifty-percent chance of vomiting that up and a forty-percent chance of getting alcohol poisoning, so you’d better make it fast,” I said, mainly because if we both focused on being angry, we wouldn’t break down crying.

“Guess that gives me a ten-percent chance of saying what needs to be said, then.”

She took a swipe at my glass, so I followed her lead and chugged it. It went straight to my head, and I went and poured us each another glass. After we’d both glugged it, I hopped up on the other side of the bed, leaning against the headboard and letting my hand hold hers where it had fallen on the flowered coverlet.

“When I’m gone—” she started.

“Don’t say that.”

“Somebody has to, sugar, and for a hospice nurse, you’re pretty bad at saying it. When I’m gone, you know all this is yours.” Her hand flapped up like a waving queen’s at her two-bedroom mill house, and she gave a short laugh. “Ain’t much, but there’s some money set aside, too, and it’s bigger than your apartment, anyway. Now, don’t let that cat of yours mess up my afghans. Your great-grandmother made those herself, you know.”

“I know.”

“Closed casket. It’s in the will. Nobody needs to see me looking like a damn shrunken head on a pencil. You invite folks here after. Food’s already in the freezer.”

“The food . . . is in the freezer?”

She nodded fiercely. “I know you can’t cook for shit, and I wasn’t sure if Ella Bird would die first and be able to make the right spread, so it’s all in labeled Tupperware. Table’s already pulled out, you see.”

I stood, wobbly after the bourbon on my empty stomach, and headed for her kitchen. I’d been so busy focusing on Nana that I hadn’t paid attention to keeping house; it must have been weeks ago, when she still had enough strength to heft a casserole. Hell, maybe she’d done it before I’d come back to take care of her. The table’s leaf was in, making it big enough for twelve people, and the freezer was packed solid with foil-wrapped blocks labeled in Nana’s scratchy writing.

“When the hell did you do all this?” I asked, sliding back onto the bed.

“While back. Food’ll keep six months, and I knew I wouldn’t have that much.”

I hadn’t even noticed, and it broke me. “Oh, Nana. I’m so sorry there’s nothing I can do for you.” I clutched her hand hard enough to make her wince and pull away. “I only know how to help people die. I can’t fix anything.”

“Some things, nobody can fix ’em. Except that Eric Northman. Mm-hmm. Wish he’d come to Georgia instead of Louisiana.”

“Wait. What did you just say?” My head rolled over to stare at her, and I was surprised by the dreamy smile on her lips. She winked at me.

“You stay in bed for a few years unable to sleep, and see if some tall, handsome vampire on TV doesn’t start to look pretty good. I never got why Sookie wouldn’t become a vampire. Fool girl.”

“You watch
True Blood
?”

“I did up till I couldn’t lift the damn remote.”

Guilt shot through me as I noticed it half-buried in her blankets, just out of reach. I instinctively turned it over and slid it under her hand, but she shoved it off the bed and grinned, all sly, when it broke on the parquet floor.

“Nana.” I paused, drunkenly considering how to phrase it. “Are you saying that if a vampire would show up and offer you his blood, you’d take it?”

The old lady snorted. “Hell, yes, I would. You look death in the face for a while, and see if being young and healthy forever wouldn’t look mighty fine. Teeth’re better than needles, ain’t they? It’s not like I get to see the sun much these days, anyway.”

I jerked to my feet and pointed a finger at her chest. “Can you stay alive for five more minutes?”

She shrugged. “I reckon. Maybe. If you bring me more bourbon.”

I couldn’t bring Criminy’s sleeping
powder with me to Earth, but Nana had a buttload of sleep aids in her cabinet. Desperate times called for desperate measures, so I dry-swallowed an Ambien and lay down on the couch, willing my frantic mind and body to still. It took entirely too long for me to fall asleep, and the moment my eyes were open, I sat up and bonked my head on the thick glass. It took even longer to unlock the box, considering the alcohol and excitement in my system, and I dropped the locket onto the velvet and jumped out, quick and clumsy.

As I frantically hunted through Criminy’s cavernous pigeonhole desk, he appeared as if summoned. Which, after all these years, further confirmed that he’d put an intruder-alert charm on the cabinet that held much of his magic in its multitude of drawers—or at least had his clockwork monkey guarding it most of the time.

“Looting for something in particular, love?” he said, a possessive hand on the scarred wood. “Mind that drawer—things tend to disappear in there. And come back dead.”

I softly burped bourbon. “Shh. Looting.” I switched drawers, found what I wanted, and held it up for him to see. “Hepzibah’s potion.”

His smirk turned into a stern frown. “Whatever you’re doing with that, darling, it looks terribly rash. And although I’m generally in favor of you doing terribly rash, sexy things, this exercise does carry the peculiar stink of liquor and permanence.”

He tried to snatch the potion bottle from me, but I held on to it for dear life and hurried back to the box, talking in a slur I could hear but not stop. “I traded my cute butt to that witch for this dumb bottle, and now I’m going to use it. Nana said she wanted to be a vampire, and you’ll make her a vampire, right? I mean, blood’s blood, right? Because there’s not much time. I need to get back. You will, won’t you?”

“Love, if I’m correctly interpreting your drunken ravings, you wish to bring your grandmother to Sang and have me blud her, yes?”

I nodded viciously and almost fell over as I stepped into the box.

“And you actually believe there’s a possibility that Hepzibah told you the truth regarding how this charm works?”

I slipped on the locket and arranged the nightgown around my legs. “I do.”

“And you don’t anticipate any sort of trouble arising from this brash action?”

I grabbed his ponytail and yanked his face to mine, kissing him ferociously, with the fire of bourbon still hot on my tongue. “Trouble doesn’t matter,” I said, releasing him and closing the top of the box. “I have to save my Nana.”

“But, Letitia—”

I popped the top off the bottle and poured its contents into my mouth. The liquid was red and viscous, like blood mixed with metal filings and harsh herbs. I knew well enough, after my first time smuggling liquids between worlds, that the bottle wouldn’t translate. I had to keep it in my mouth and not swallow, no matter what. A sprinkle of powder later, and I was asleep before I even had time to take Criminy’s warning to heart.

And then I woke on Nana’s couch, groggy and disoriented and panicked. I almost swallowed the bottle’s contents, but I still had enough self-control to lurch into Nana’s room. She was splayed against the pillows beside a little yellow dribble of vomit, all acid and liquor.

“Sugar, you okay? Look like you’re about to puke up my good bourbon, and I already had enough of that today.”

I shook my head and made calm-down motions with my hands. I couldn’t speak, thanks to the potion in my mouth, but it’s not like any explanation I could offer would make her understand that I was here to answer her prayers. Maybe I wasn’t a seven-foot-tall ex-Viking vampire, but I could get her to Criminy, which was the next-best thing.