“
They know each other. He
would not kill her.”
Elaina thoughtfully stuck out her lower
lip, tapping her chin with one crimson painted fingernail. “Maybe
not,” she said winsomely. “But he’s so going to try and kill you.
They all will, some two dozen werewolves, all lethally trained, and
all with a pawn to leverage against you.”
“
And what is
that?”
“
He may not wish to kill her
just for being with you, but he has his sister’s death on his mind.
He will see you as part of me, and he will readily use her to get
to you.”
“
As I said, Min can handle
herself.”
“
But she will be looking to
protect you from him. She won’t think to protect
herself.”
“
He won’t hurt her. He can’t
know I have anything to do with you.”
Elaina hopped down from atop the
chimney and sidled over to him, leaning in and kissing him. Her
cold lips so soft, the fresh taste of blood intoxicating on her
lips. He tried to turn away, but she deepened the kiss, and the
taste of the blood was too much to resist. He feasted at her mouth,
pushing his tongue into her, trying to get at every last trace of
the innocent’s blood. When she finally ended the kiss, breaking it
off, she smiled and glanced to the right, pointedly leading him to
look where her eyes were leading him. Günter and a squad of his men
stood on a neighboring rooftop. And like Elaina had planned, he
took the bait, his pack falling in around him, and then surging out
to jump from rooftop to rooftop.
“
New plan, my beautiful
sweet boy,” Elaina purred, and then in the tone of a master order
she said, “Go to sleep for one hour, lover.”
Luca tried to say something, but she
spoke over him, too loudly for even him to hear his words, “Run, my
love! I’ll hold them off!” And with that she pushed him off the
roof. He pitched over the side and the world turned to black as he
fell to the ground below.
Chapter 18
Min woke in her own bed, gasping for
breath. She’d been dreaming, and it hadn’t been good. It had been
horrifying. And somehow she already knew that it wasn’t just a
dream. It had a completely different feeling to it, a taste that
made her know, without a doubt, that it had been really happening.
Luca had left her bed, followed his maker out to a rooftop where
they spoke. He'd been so scared. And then she’d kissed him. And
he’d responded to her kiss. She had seen it; she had freaking felt
it. His hunger for both her and for the blood that tainted her
lips. But then came Günter and his pack, and then Elaina had pushed
him from the rooftop. Min woke as he’d blacked out. She knew the
building they’d been arguing on. She knew where the alley was where
he had fallen.
As she sat there, gasping
for breath, she looked beside her and his side of the bed was
empty. It hadn’t been a dream. He’d really been with Elaina, and
now he was…she couldn’t think of it anymore. She pushed the
thoughts that he could already be dead out of her mind.
He's a freaking vampire.
Unless he fell on a wooden stake, or a silver blade, or into a
vat of holy water, or into the freaking sun, then he’d live from a
fall.
But Elaina’s last words came to her.
“Sleep for one hour.” That meant that he would fall to the alley
below, but not stir, not run away, he’d be completely
defenseless.
Min pulled on some clothes,
shoes and her coat, and set out to the alley. Halfway there it
occurred to her.
Out in the middle of the
night with a homicidal, insane vampire thirsting for my blood, and
a pack of werewolves to boot, and I don’t have any weapons…just my
girlish charm and some magick.
Could she
hold it together enough to cast powerful enough hexes and charms to
outwit all those foes?
She raised her hands in
front of her and her hands gave a tremor before she could hold them
steady.
Shit, definitely not together
enough
. She walked on, but slower, her mind
racing, frantically trying to grab some brilliant idea out of thin
air. And just when she thought none would come she walked right up
to the magic shop.
Sometimes,
she thought as she pulled the key to the shop’s
front door from her pocket,
I am incredibly
dense.
~*~
Min missed the lock with the key a
couple times, scratching the old key hole. She gritted her teeth
and finally forced it into the lock, turned it and let herself into
the shop. Already halfway through the store, she finally realized
she hadn’t switched on the overhead lights. With a stamp of her
foot and a sibilant phrase the candles usually just for decoration
flashed and blazed to life and illuminated the store with a haunted
quality. She stayed her course to the back of the store proper and
whisked the beaded curtain impatiently out of her way.
Enchanted, the beaded curtain was
fashioned from blue green globs of glass she and Andy had collected
at the shores of the Dead Sea when they were children. As with the
curtain, humans that were not magically inclined never saw the
thousands of shimmering crystals scattered along the Dead Sea’s
shores.
The candles in this room were already
lit and she grabbed things she would need up in her arms as she
moved through the displays and shelves. Holy water, a cross—just in
case Elaina showed herself—wolves’ bane, a thick piece of yellow
chalk, some silver powder and some thistle. The thistle and silver
powder would help with any glamour she would need to do; the
thistle to trick the wild thing inside the werewolves, and the
silver powder to specifically work on the wolves.
She looked around the shop but couldn’t
see anything else that would be of use to her. These were all
defensive charms and ingredients for protection spells. She needed
something offensive, something she could use as a
weapon.
Then Min thought of some of the more
dangerous objects they’d kept away from the general public—and
their more supernatural clientele. She scrambled to the back of the
store, moving quickly back the length of the long, skinny hall,
taking the sudden right into the office she shared with her sister
and mother.
She went right for the desk she and her
sister shared, pulling a long, though subtle, sword from the wall
behind the desk. It had been made with enough silver content to be
deadly to a werewolf, yet was still hard enough to be deadly to
almost anything else. Min swung its scabbard over her head and
shoulders until it rested competently around her waist. She
scrounged through her desk, not finding much that wasn’t a stapler,
pens, a ridiculous amount of paper clips, and a plethora of tidy
sales slips—the last week of sales slips, to be exact. They had
turned over half the store inventory during the solstice sale and
the Sci-Fi convention.
Then, reluctantly, she looked across
the room at her mother’s desk. Unlike Min’s simple oak business
desk, Katarina’s desk shined with high polished cherry wood and
elegant carvings. She could be in the room for hours without really
ever looking over to the desk. Not that she wished it gone. No, her
sister and she had left it exactly as it was. Min had tried to dust
it once, to put the small stack of letters that were on the desktop
in a drawer, to straighten the three pens Katarina always had at
hand. But she couldn’t. So after that she just left the desk alone.
But now she walked over to it, and very cautiously sat down in her
mother’s sleek yet comfortable swivel chair.
There was a thin layer of dust on
everything on top of the desk. Apparently Andy had found the
thought of dusting the desk unthinkable too. In fact, Min couldn’t
remember Andy setting foot in the office at all since their
mother’s disaster, opting instead to do her paperwork, or the
ordering, from the stool behind the counter up front. She even
employed a laptop computer—so very civilized, if not verging on
technologically savvy.
Min placed her fingers on the intricate
bronze handles of the center drawer. She felt no magick there, so
her mother must not have felt anything contained within the drawer
was dangerous or of importance enough to rate anyone stealing it.
Inside the drawer Min found nothing but the usual clutter a desk
might acquire over a few decades of use. There was a hairbrush and
a lipstick—her mother’s favorite color—and a neatly folded
monogrammed handkerchief. It was pearl white with a delicate fringe
of lace. Min took it in her hand and brought it up to her face,
inhaling deeply. It smelled of her mother’s perfume, and of sage
(her mother’s favorite incense to burn. It cleansed the very air of
dark energies.)
She put the handkerchief back and
closed the drawer up tight. She went for a side drawer, and feeling
yet again no wards, she opened it. Nothing of use, just some
takeout menus, an old rolodex and a half-full box of
tissues.
The bottom drawer on that side, though,
did have a ward on it, one Min recognized. It was one they used
often—easily put up, and easily dropped. With a mumbled phrase and
a push of her will, the ward melted away in her fingers. In this
drawer she found some interesting things: a talisman—one that made
the bearer unnoticed (not invisible, just unnoticed)—a potion that
caused light confusion when exposed to air, and a stink-slash-smoke
bomb. If nothing else, if she got Luca away from the pack it might
cover their tracks for a time.
But all of this, she had to admit, was
pretty flimsy. Maybe if she were in her own house she could keep a
pack of werewolves at bay. But she was going to have to face them
out in the open city. There she had greatly reduced power, not to
mention the long in place wards and counter measures of her
home.
They would take her down in a few
minutes. She’d be lucky to get herself away, not to mention their
captive. She needed something with a lot more kick.
She remembered her mother showing her a
few of the dangerous things she’d collected over the years. Some of
it was inter-dimensional stuff. But Min remembered her mother
showing her what she thought was just a Chinese finger-trap, but
was in actuality a small vial of Dragon’s Breath. It would have
only two or three good doses in it, but when aimed and ignited by a
force of will, it could burn through anything.
Min went through the top side drawer on
the other side of the desk, finding no ward and nothing inside of
use. But in the bottom drawer on that side she did find some things
that made her pause. This drawer was nearly bare compared with the
middle drawer of the desk. This one held only three objects. A
framed photograph of Min, Katarina and Andy looking happily into
the lens of the camera, lay in the bottom of the drawer. It had
been taken on Andy’s last birthday, her twenty-second, and they had
celebrated at a small bistro in Oakland.
Atop the photo sat two pieces of
origami. Min recognized them immediately, though she hadn’t seen
them since she was a child, when she and Andy had folded them and
presented them to their mother as birthday presents. Min had been
nine and Andy would have been six. One was a blue paper
dragon—Min’s creation—and she could still feel the sharp fire she
had imbued the thing with on that day, for she had enchanted it to
move, and to snap, and to puff smoke.
Andy’s had been a yellow bird—a
hummingbird—and she had cajoled the thing to flit and streak across
the room, fluttering and nattering close to their mother’s joyously
beautiful face.
Katarina had loved the presents,
because they had made them for her—especially since Min and Andy
had done such a good job enchanting the things to life.
Min remembered, though Andy’s bird had
been sweet and obedient, her blue paper dragon had been moody and
bit.
Min let her hand hover over the two
pieces of origami, feeling with her senses that neither piece had
any magick left in them. No snapping dragon remained in the blue
paper, and the hummingbird was just folded yellow paper. But Andy’s
bird gave her an idea as to how to track down Luca and the pack, so
she folded the thing up and slipped it into her pocket.
After looking through the remaining
drawers of her mother’s desk, Min stood and glanced through some of
the books her mother had collected on the shelves behind her desk.
Tax journals sat beside murder mysteries, and magical histories
covering the last four centuries. There was even a copy of a
Chelsea Handler book, a slender volume of vulgarity her mother had
read with unveiled disgust, though she could not wipe the smile the
obscene woman’s words elicited from her face.
She remembered her mother having been
working on a memory erasing conjuring, the book she’d used for
referencing the spell sat askew on the shelf. The thought of making
the werewolves simply forget that they had even seen Luca was most
enticing. But she knew from her conversations with her mother, that
using memory spells was tricky business, and unless you had the
antidote on hand—and someone to administer it to you—you might want
to sew your name into your clothes before you flirted with that
most certain of disasters.
But then, of course, why had her mother
been working on the spell in the first place?
Again, something flickered
in the periphery of Min’s memory, and once again she couldn't grasp
hold of it before it darted off into the shadows of her
mind.
So freaking irritating!
But she didn’t have time to ruminate over it. She
needed to find more firepower. And she needed to find it fast. The
werewolves weren’t just going to wait around patiently for her to
show up.