“
Of course,” Arianna said as
if it were obvious.
“
But why the hell would you
want that?”
Andy’s words practically
exploded from her lips.
The faerie Queen’s lips parted as she
took in a breath, and just as she seemed about to say something,
the bells that hung over the front door of the diner clanged,
heralding someone’s entrance. Arianna looked to the door, and a
slow, sweet sigh escaped her lips.
Andy turned to look too, startled by
the interruption and the way the Queen had looked. There stood
Min’s vampire, Luca—blonde, 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 faerie 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 imagined what had just
happened?
No. She certainly was not imagining any
of that. It had been real, and she knew enough about magick 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 faerie 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 snatched 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 your 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.”
Chapter 25
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 wild 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 onto 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.