Theresa had waked late into the night.
She was laying on a hard table and she felt…well
,
heavy
,
as she thought about it now.
Getting up
,
she wondered for a minute as to why she was wearing her momma’s good dress until she saw all the tables around her.
She’d been in the funeral parlor’s back room.
Getting up made her dizzy and she couldn’t figure out why she felt so hungry yet the thought of food made her ill. She stumbled to the doorway when she heard music.
Following it up the long stairs from the basement
,
she saw the woman and a man standing next to her daddy.
Before she could go to him
,
the woman was suddenly there.
“You’ll obey me now.
I’m your new master.
You’re father thinks you’re dead and that’s the way it should be.”
She started to lead her away from her daddy and Theresa tried to fight her off.
“No, it will do you no good.
I am your master.”
By this time
,
they’d made it back to the little room where she’d
awakened
.
She thought for sure that the woman was going to do something to her and she wasn’t having any of that.
Grabbing the first thing she could touch, Theresa had turned and stabbed out with the long piece of staff.
The thing had gone right though her head and out the back
end.
Theresa had been so caught up in all the blood she’d nearly been caught down there with the body.
She was out the door and into the night before the first person could grab her.
Theresa had been running since.
~~~
“They didn’t know how the woman had managed to kill so many without being caught.
If they did, neither of them said it while I was there.
And the older man, Hooper, he left the area soon after.
I’m checking into where he’d been from.”
Phil looked around the room at the people assembled there.
“I really wish you would have kept this as quiet as possible.”
“Peeshaw,” his mother said.
“You need family when you do this sort of work and we’re going to stand beside you whether you like it or not.”
She looked around at her husband and sighed.
“Is that woman Sabalz still in charge of the Trustees?
Or have they maybe staked her out in the sun for us…I mean
,
for humanity
?
”
Phil glared at his mom.
She hated Anye and she’d never made any kind of bones about it.
When his mom smiled at him he turned to his dad who only shrugged.
It was as if he were saying,
“Y
ou know how she is
.”
“She’s still in charge.
She’s the one who called me in.”
He sat down next to Holly on the couch.
“You really should try and get along with her some.
She is the person who decides the laws.”
His mother snorted and Phil knew she’d do what she wanted, as she normally did anyway.
“So this council, the High Trustees of Vampires, you work for them?” Austin looked at Phil’s dad when he didn’t answer.
“And what is it he does for them
?
I mean
,
besides go when they tell him to
so they can
scrap
e
and bow at his feet.”
Holly giggled and he turned to her when she spoke up.
“It’s not my fault they figured that out.
All I said was the woman looked ready to have your baby when you took off your jacket.”
“You told them about my title. I thought we agreed to keep that just between the two of us.” They hadn’t
,
but he thought it was implied since he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I was trying to keep this in perspective
,
not have everyone wanting to make fun of me because I’m a flipping Knight of the Vampire
G
uard.”
He knew as soon as the words slipped out he’d said more than he should have.
He looked over at his father
,
who had paled
,
and his mother looked ready to burst.
“That happened a long time ago.
I told you she had rewarded me for my services.”
“She knighted you as the Vampire Guard?
Why that flipping bitch.
I swear to you
,
the next time I see her I’m going to take her head from her shou—
”
“Enough,” roared Austin.
Phil had heard him do that once before and the entire pack had been quiet around him for a week.
“This is not what we’re here to discuss.
There is a murderer out on the loose and this bickering isn’t going to help.
Now, if the knighthood or whatever doesn’t help right now can we please table it for later?”
Phil looked at his parents
,
who looked both shocked and impressed at Austin.
The man was a hell of an alpha to shut up his parents too.
Phil shook his head before answering Austin.
“Yes and no.
The why doesn’t play into this
,
but my being a knight does.
When they asked me to do this I regained several of my abilities that I’d asked to be taken from me when I stepped down.
I can now track as well if not better than you and I can…”
Phil looked over at Holly.
“You can now what?
Tell me. What can you do that you’re so terrified to tell me about?”
“Not terrified
,
but I am a little nervous about
it
.
It’s this.”
He shifted
,
or whatever it was that he did to become what set him apart from other vampires.
“I could do this since I’d been a child.
And it only got better as I grew older.”
His entire body was encased in armor.
Not just armor but silver armor.
Normally the silver was deadly to his kind
,
but something about him being able to pull it over him like a cloak made him able to wear it without any ill effects.
Holly stood and came toward him.
“This is what she meant when Anye told me that we were well suited.” She ran her fingers down his arm and he could feel it.
“She said with my abilities to track and yours to keep me safe
,
we were an unstoppable team.”
He pulled back on the armor that surrounded his face and looked at her.
Holly wasn’t at all upset, she didn’t even seem to mind that he could change into something that she should have feared.
When she touched him again he shivered in anticipation.
Holly grinned and then stepped back from him.
“What else can you do
,
big boy?
Do you have anything else that can make you worthy of being my mate?”
“I can do all sorts of things
,
love.
Most of which I’m pretty sure I don’t want to show you in front of your family.”
He grinned when he heard her brother
’
s growl.
“Come here
,
Holly.
I need to see what the armor does to you when you touch me.”
He thought she’d shy away.
He should have known better. She was nothing if not the bravest woman he knew. When she touched him again, this time running her entire hand down his arms then his chest
,
he felt her every touch.
She looked at him when he said her name.
“It doesn’t seem to bother me.
Is it really silver or something…I don’t know
,
something someone made to replicate silver
?
”
Holly stepped back when her brother Connor stepped forward.
“Let me try.
Maybe it’s a mate thing.”
Before he could touch the armor,
there was
a glimmer then a woman was standing before them.
“What the hell? Who the hell are you and how did you get past my guard?”
“I’m with him,” Anye said with a frown.
“And don’t touch him.
It will mean your certain death.”
Phil noticed that she didn’t touch him either and started to ask about Holly and if she would now die from touching him.
Phil was suddenly afraid of losing her.
He shifted and pulled her into his arms as Anye spoke to the room in general.
“She can touch him because she is his mate.
Any other person, foe or friend
,
will die and die a horrible
,
slow death.”
Connor stepped back and put his hands behind him as Anye turned to him.
“You should have been told that when you were given this gift.”
“He wasn’t given anything.
This is something that he’s had all his life.”
Phil smiled at his dad
,
who was quick to jump to his defense.
“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head
,
Annie
,
else I
’ll
take a switch to your hide.
You know I will too.”
Anye looked ready to say something but Hope, his mother
,
simply took a step forward.
Few people knew how powerful she was and fewer still lived to tell about it.
Anye took a step back and bowed before her.
“I ask your forgiveness
,
my lady.
I was sent here to find out what had been decided with the rogue
,
not to cause a problem between myself and the Campbell family.”
This time when she spoke Anye sounded like she was there to help and not to accuse. Phil was glad. He’d hate to have to explain to anyone why the head councilwoman was suddenly incinerated.
“See that you keep a tone befitting his title.”
Phil flushed at his mom’s words.
“What news do you have of this person?
And what can we do to help get her under control?”
Anye looked confused and Phil decided to help her out.
His mother
,
for all her toughness
,
didn’t like to use certain words when dealing with people.
“She knows that she is going to be killed. To her
,
that’s getting her under control.”
“Oh.
We know that she is in the area.
As is the man you told us of at the meeting.”
Holly snorted and it was all Phil could do not to laugh at Anye’s face.
“I have brought you what we have on the other killings.”
Phil took the file and read it over before handing it to Austin.
He looked at it a sheet at a time and handed those to Phil’s father.
The two of them seemed to be making some notes on what was there.
But he was still confused about the holes that were in the reporting.
“It does not say who her maker is.
Do we know who is responsible for this rogue?
Or how long she’s been turned
?
” He didn’t like the way that Anye looked away. “What is it you’re not telling us or
,
better yet, what you think you know?”
“The rogue was turned in the year nineteen hundred and sixteen.
We know only that she was thought to be dead and when she rose
,
there was a…there was a problem.”
Anye didn’t speak for several minutes and no one told her to get on with it.
Phil thought everyone was afraid of what had happened.
“She was taken to an undertaker.
It was a poor providence so in that the girl was lucky.
There was no money for her body to be preserved.
And they were set to bury her.”
“They didn’t embalm her?
How is that even legal?”
Austin asked her
,
suddenly a fierce tone in his voice.
“Are you telling me because there wasn’t much money
,
this woman was going to be buried and would have r
isen
anyway?
Christ, please tell me that someone noted what had happened.”
“She killed her maker.
It was several…months before we figured it out.
It wasn’t until another vampire happened upon the town that he heard the story how a being was almost buried alive and that
,
in her anger, she burned another woman alive.”
She flushed a deep red before she continued.
“The ash. The ash was in the room and they assumed that somehow
,
someone got into the morgue and set fire to a person.
It wasn’t discovered who the person was
,
nor the one who might have
been the murderer
.”