“It’s not that easy, Emilia. You may be able to manipulate my feelings. You may be able to force me to feel this love.” She said the last word as if it literally left a bad taste in her mouth. “But I can still see the big picture. I’m not a naïve little simpleton like you. I won’t be manipulated like this. Luckily, you brought me access to so much more hatred.” She shook Drew by the head again. “Get me the doll, Drew.”
He whimpered again.
“I said get it!” She whipped his head back and in a lightning flash cut his other cheek.
Drew screamed and pulled a voodoo doll from his pocket. He held it in front of him with trembling hands.
“Dip it in the blood,” she directed him.
Drew lowered the doll’s feet into the bowl that held his blood next to him. A second later, I was on my knees. My feet felt as if they’d been burned away from beneath me. I didn’t remember shrieking, but the echo of my own scream rang in my ears.
“You left a few souvenirs when you broke into my home, Melina.” Rosalinda smiled at me.
I cursed myself. Of course, the dreamcatcher that had caught at my hair. The broken nail when I’d popped the sliding glass door off its track. Not to mention the blood and hair the crows could have brought home.
“You have plenty of hate in you, don’t you? Although yours takes such an interesting twist, doesn’t it?” She smiled at me and then forced Drew’s hand down again so that the doll with my hair and my fingernails dipped into the bowl of blood again.
Even prepared as I was for the pain, I cried out again. I shut down my senses as hard as I could. Still, the pain seared up through my flesh like a fire that burned me from the inside out, sucking the air from my lungs. She let Drew lift his hand and the pain stopped. I fell the rest of the way to the ground, gasping in air.
“You don’t like yourself very much, do you, Melina?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just reduced me to a puddle on the ground. “Or, at least, you don’t like what you are. It embarrasses you. It shames you. Yet it is who you are at your very core. Tricky emotional waters to navigate, certainly, aren’t they?”
“Let her go,” Emilia said.
“Who’s going to make me?” Rosalinda laughed, and now, finally, I could hear the tinge of madness to it.
“I will,” Emilia said. She rushed to my side and put her hands on me.
Every place she touched burned. I writhed away from her.
“Self-hatred is a tricky one, isn’t it? It’s so hard to accept ourselves as we are, with all our faults and foibles. You’re much more forgiving of the people around you than you are of yourself, Melina. You should try to use that same compassion for yourself.” She dipped the doll again. The pain sliced into me once more, shooting through my body like flames, eating me from the inside until I thought my heart would burst.
“Others love her,” I heard Emilia say. “Many others.”
“She does her best to deflect it, not to accept it. She keeps them all at arm’s length, even her own family.”
My mind was going fuzzy with the pain, but even so I knew she had a point.
“I love her,” Ted said.
How sad. I was going to hear his voice as I was tortured to death and I wouldn’t be able to tell him how much better it had made me feel. I mean, it didn’t lessen the pain any, but it somehow made it seem as if it were happening to someone else.
“I love her, too,” Meredith said.
I had sort of known that. I had at least suspected that she liked me okay. Loved? Well, I was useful to her. Maybe I was something more?
“I love her, too.” Another voice chimed in.
Now that surprised me. Clearly the pain was making me hallucinate. I could have sworn I heard Norah. I didn’t expect to hallucinate that Norah was there while I died. In fact, she was about the last person I thought I would wish into the situation, but that was clearly her voice that I was hearing. Or manufacturing.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Rosalinda asked Drew, tipping his head back to expose his throat a little more. “Her little friends came here, too. I don’t think they’ll be able to help much, though, do you? They have no magic. Not a shred. Silly of her to waste her time with . . . what does she call them? ’Danes?”
That was weird. Was Rosalinda hearing my hallucinations? Had she linked herself to me psychically with the doll enough that she could hear my thoughts?
“Then there’s me,” a deep voice said. “I’m quite fond of her as well.”
I knew that voice all too well.
Rosalinda hissed. “Vampire.”
“Yep. That’s me. Your friendly neighborhood bloodsucker at your service,” Alex said.
It began to dawn on me that I wasn’t hallucinating. I would totally have read all of them the riot act if excruciating pain wasn’t forcing me to keep my jaws clenched.
“Good luck doing anything with that. She’s closed tight as a drum,” Rosalinda said.
A decidedly leaky drum, since I could feel her magic seeping through.
“She’s right,” Emilia said. She laid her hands on me again. I cried out in pain. Every spot she touched burned like it was being thrust directly into the flames. “I know it hurts. You have to open yourself to us. We can help you fight her, but not if you don’t open yourself to us.”
Open myself? Was she crazy? I had all my defenses up at DEFCON 1 and I couldn’t even stand up. If I opened myself, I’d be reduced to nothing. I’d incinerate on the ground in front of them. Not only would I be gone, but it would probably scar them all for life. Well, except for Alex, who really didn’t have a life. He’d still be really sad.
“You have to, Melina. Stop fighting us. Start fighting her. Use us. Use our love to fight the hatred.”
I could feel the four of them battering at my defenses. I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. They weren’t strong enough. We couldn’t defeat her, not when she was using my own emotions against me.
“Please, Melina, let us help.” Norah. It was Norah. Poor sweet Norah, who hadn’t asked for any of this in her life. Norah, who’d been so scared for the past six months that she’d barely been able to leave the apartment, was in a cemetery during a full moon trying to help me face down a pissed-off
bruja
.
I supposed the least I could do was try to let her help. I let my walls down a fraction. If I had thought the pain was searing before, it was because I’d had no idea how much worse it could get. It thundered at me, through me, around me. My skin stung like a thousand angry bees had covered me. My lungs burned as if I were trying to breathe in fire. A twisting agony roiled my guts. Somehow, though, deep down inside, I found a kernel of peace.
“We’re there, Melina. Fight for us. Fight with us,” Meredith urged.
“Please, Melina,” Ted said. “Don’t give up. Stay. Stay with us.”
A cold hand touched my forehead. I knew it was Alex.
I dug for the kernel. I fought down through the swirling pain to find it and hold it. It was such a tiny place of peace in the cacophony of pain that hammered at me. How could it do any good? How could it make any difference?
“Don’t give up,” Ted said. “Stay. Stay here.”
Rosalinda laughed and the pain grew in intensity.
“Open the doors, Melina,” Emilia urged. “Trust us.”
I didn’t think I could get myself to open to such agony. If Rosalinda could inflict this much pain when my defenses were half up, how bad could it get?
On the other hand, maybe it would be like pulling off a bandage. The pain would be intense, but only for a few moments. Then either it would kill me, in which case it would be over, or I would be able to fight back, in which case it would be over.
It was a lose-lose proposition turned on its head into a win-win one. One way or the other, I’d be out of pain soon. I grabbed hold of someone’s hands. I don’t even know whose they were, just that they belonged to somebody who cared about me.
Then I dropped everything.
Every wall to my self was down. Every door and window was open. I let all my defenses drop. Everything. The pain that rushed in was excruciating. Knives twisted in my gut. Fire ran through my veins. My head felt like it would split in two. I was afraid that my heart was going to burst and then I wished it would because the agony would be over.
On some level, I was aware of my friends still around me, but the physical world seemed terribly distant. All I knew was the pain. I gave myself over to it. I let myself swirl down in the dark whirlpool of agony, ready to drown in its choking, reeking maw.
Just as I was about to let go, something pulled me back.
It was that little kernel of peace. Like a bright flickering light at the end of an extremely long, dark tunnel, it beckoned to me. I reached for it with my mind, worried that it was a mirage, some kind of illusion that I had created out of whole cloth. It was there, though. It was real.
It was hard to focus. The pain kept pulling me toward it like a magnetic force. The flickering light so far away receded a little farther. I couldn’t reach it. The blackness would swallow me whole. I was sorry that Ted, Norah, Alex and Emilia would have to watch it. I doubted it would be a pretty death. It couldn’t hurt any more than what was happening now, though.
I didn’t have the strength to fight it, but the kernel of peace did. It reached for me. It grew on its own. I marshaled my forces. I didn’t have much strength left. I made one last major effort to reach toward that light and away from the swirling chaos of darkness that wanted to rip me to shreds.
It grew more. The pain receded. It didn’t go away. Not by any means. But for a moment I could breathe again. I reached more. It grew more.
Inch by inch, I moved closer to the light and the pain loosened its grip on me. I was so close. I could almost reach it. I stretched as far as I could stretch to touch it.
It’s hard to describe what happened next. I touched the light. I touched the kernel of peace that my friends had created to pull me out of the jaws of death and torture.
It was like touching lightning.
Everything around me sizzled and popped. I snapped back into my corporeal self, but now everything was flooded with light. It was as if a thousand lamps had been lit. I stood. The pain was gone. Vanished. As if it had never been. I could feel electricity coursing and snapping through my system as the pain and chaos had moments before.
I turned to Rosalinda and pointed at her. “Back off, bitch.” A jolt of electricity shot from me and hit her square in the chest.
Rosalinda stumbled backward, but she didn’t let go of Drew’s hair or lose her grip on the knife.
I stepped toward her. “I said to back off.” I zapped her again. In the sizzle’s aftermath, I heard the faint sound of sirens. Fabulous. Why was it always sirens? Didn’t Chief Murdock have anything better to do? Rosalinda still didn’t let go of Drew. She wasn’t looking so good, though. She was shaking now and a little pale.
“Let him go, Rosalinda.” I walked toward her and kicked one of her black candles out of the way. She sagged a little.
“The cops are coming,” I said. “They’ll be here soon.”
“And what?” She sneered. “You’ll tell them that I talked Emilia into cursing those boys? I think you’ll end up locked up in the loony bin before I end up locked in a jail.”
She had a point.
“I think they might want you on charges of kidnapping at the moment,” Ted said from behind me. “I doubt Drew’s here of his own free will. Are you, Drew?”
Drew shook his head.
I kicked over another candle and kicked dirt over the circles that had been drawn on the ground in salt. “Let him go, Rosalinda.”
“And then what?” she asked. “You’ll let me go? We’ll all walk away from this like nothing ever happened?”
“I don’t know.” What would happen? What could happen? I couldn’t just let her go. She had dabbled in things she shouldn’t and it had tainted her. I couldn’t allow her to simply walk away.
The sirens were closer now. I kicked the third candle down and squished the flame out under my boot. Drew began to struggle against Rosalinda in earnest now. I’d been right. He had been too docile earlier. The circle had held him in check as much as Rosalinda’s knife had.
I zapped her again. She sagged and stumbled but still didn’t loosen her hold.
Suddenly Rosalinda was framed in the beam of a high-powered flashlight. “Freeze!”
The cops had arrived. I kicked over the fourth candle. Drew reared back and twisted. Rosalinda let him go, but she still held the knife.
“Set the knife down, ma’am.” It was Chief Murdock. I had a bad feeling we weren’t going to have a friendly chat about this one after it was over.
Rosalinda smiled. “No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Just set it down, ma’am. No one will get hurt.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Drop the knife, and we can all go back to the station house and have a nice long talk. I’m sure we can sort this out.”
Rosalinda laughed her lovely trilling laugh. “You’re sure, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sure. I’ve found there’s very little we can’t sort out by talking it over, but we can’t talk it over while you’re holding the knife.”
Rosalinda nodded as if she understood. Then she raised the knife and slit her own throat.
THINGS GOT A LITTLE CHAOTIC AFTER THAT. SOMEONE THREW me to the ground and handcuffed me. Norah, Meredith, Emilia and Ted got similar treatment. Alex had disappeared. Sometimes being a vampire was a good thing. Melting into the night was pretty much one of their specialties.
I was hauled to my feet and summarily shoved into the back of a cop car, but no one closed the door. There were lots of cop cars and ambulances. Drew was taken away to a hospital, presumably. I was pretty sure that Rosalinda’s knife work was going to leave some permanent marks. He’d carry the scars of his dalliance with her to his grave and not just the ones on his face. There are things that leave marks soul-deep and I was pretty sure that Drew’s alliance with Rosalinda was one of those things.