Somehow using his telepathic gift, he linked us. He was not fighting me in any way. Filled with my feelings of pleasure through the link, I could see his shocked as me at the ecstasy I experienced. The light around him was still being absorbed by me, at a much quicker rate than it was coming out of him, but I could tell he wasn’t paying any attention to it.
As I drained him of light, he sipped some power back through the blood on my lip. I felt laughter and joy bubbling up inside me, and he swallowed them both along with a purely sexual groan. He held a hundred humans worth of power, and I pulled on it all. Electricity poured over me and I wriggled in his arms, unable to keep still. I wanted more contact. If I could touch more of him, I could get more, faster.
He let me go, let my body slide down his, and I pushed him into a wall. I could feel him becoming weaker, but in his mind, he didn’t care. He gladly gave, and I drank more and more. His kiss was power and food for the hunger, and I drank it. I wanted to drink it all.
Some still functioning part of my brain heard Mia say, “Sorry, Janie.”
And then everything went dark.
CHAPTER Eight
The cold ground seeped through my jeans like they weren’t there as I fought to open my eyes. Snowflakes fell down on me like a spiraling galaxy of white stars and a neon sign waved in the wind. It read,
Jefferson Diner
.
I blinked. Why was I laying on the sidewalk in the snow under the Jefferson Diner sign? I mean, I felt great. Better than I’ve ever felt. I blinked as snowflakes landed on my eyelashes.I tried out standing and giggled.
Standing?
Shit
,
I bet I could fly.
I looked over at two other people nearby. A woman in a floaty skirt stood over man prone on the sidewalk a few feet from me. It took a minute for my brain to identify Mia. And then I knew that the man was Vance.
That was about the extent of what I remembered. I wondered what we were doing here, but looking up at the falling snow was more interesting than that question.
Vance got up, catching my attention again, and rubbed his head. “God, I feel weak.”
“It will wear off. Aura is self-regenerating, like blood.”
He blinked at her silently for a moment, then made a gesture with his hand. “She’s a siren?”
Mia nodded. “Yeah, but she is the only one.”
I moved my mouth around. I was having a hard time remembering exactly how to form words. I felt really, really good, but in the way that you feel really good after a long fever. It was a loopy kind of good.
“And she just—”
“Well, she sang and—”
“She fucking fed off me!” His screamed the words, and his hands went to fists.
“Yes, but—” Mia didn’t get to finish. With what can only be described as vampiric speed, he dove at me. He knocked me off my feet and snapped at my throat like a wild animal. He looked, minus the emaciated part, more like when I first met him.
You know what they say about first impressions…
Instinctively, I held him off. I kicked out with my feet and threw him away from me. Apparently, I was stronger than I remembered because he landed a good five feet away. He stood and got ready to come at me again.
Mia tried to jump on him and hold him down. I yelled, remembering how to use my voice. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“You just tried to kill me!” He shoved at Mia’s hands to try and get to me.
“I did not! I just saved you!” I distinctly remembered saving him.
“By what? Eating me?” And he was free of Mia again and came at me.
This time, I braced my feet and pushed him off with my hands. He grazed one of my palms with his teeth before I again threw him away from me. Blood trickled out of my hand, and I balled it into a fist. He’d landed against the wall of Stutzman’s Newsstand, and the glass in the window cracked from the force of it.
He glared at me, rolled up his sleeves and prepared to come at me. Since I realized this was going to be a battle for my life, I bent at the knees and balled my other fist, too.
Then Mia waved her arms, and I was stuck like that.
“You idiots! So far tonight you wrecked my chances at getting any information as to why people are getting killed. Then—” She paced and waved her arms as she spoke. I managed to move my eyes enough to see that much, but the rest of me was cemented in place. A cramp formed in my leg where I had braced it. I couldn’t speak or move to do a damn thing about it. It was like freeze tag, but no one seemed inclined to unfreeze me.
I looked at Vance, also stuck in place. Caught mid-stride, only a muscle ticking in his jaw proved he’d not been turned to stone.
“You piss off Max and she casts some spell to make everyone attack us. So, I come up with a logical solution, which bombs because
you
are a drunken idiot—” She punctuated that statement by poking me in the chest. Then she rounded on Vance. “And
you
don’t put the bag in your pocket like I told you, so she gets a hold of it. Then,” she turned back to me. “You freaking drain him-which by the way, I could have stopped if you hadn’t
bit
her, epic fail—”
I moved my lips a little and tried to talk. It came out as, “Mmfph.”
“What?!” She threw her hands in the air, looking completely frustrated.
“Mmfphssss—” I tried again.
“I can’t understand you!”
I managed to raise a brow at her. Slowly.
When I got it up, she sighed. “Oh, you can’t talk.”
She waved her arm at me. I could move and I nearly fell back to the pavement. I gasped and rubbed my leg. “What did you hit me with?”
“Huh?” Her forehead creased and her brows dipped low in confusion.
“You hit me with something in the bar…?”
“Oh, a bowling trophy. It was the only thing available. Sorry.”
I sat on the sidewalk and blinked at her through snowflakes. “What in the hell happened in there? I mean, I know the whole siren thing was supposed to get stronger as I got older, but
shit
, Mia.”
“Yeah, I didn’t really expect that either.”
“Mmpphhhsshhh—” yelled Vance.
I looked at him and held back a smirk. Mia forgot he was there and went into comforting best friend mode. “You haven’t developed your ability, so you have no control over it when you do use it. I warned you years ago that with practice comes control.”
“Yeah, like either of us knew for sure.”
“Well, with my power it did, so it stood to reason—”
“Mia, I love you, but none of this stands to reason.”
She sighed and, behind her, Vance got louder. “Mmmphffffsszz!”
“I told you he would try to kill me.” I cursed myself for the wistfulness that crept into my voice.
Mia looked at Vance, too, facing him with her hands on her hips. “Vansickle Masterson, I will keep you in exactly that spot until the sun rises if you don’t agree to stop trying to kill my friend.” Mia had a good regal tone when she chose.
“Mmmffssss-s,” hissed Vance.
“She didn’t mean to,” she replied, as if she could decipher what the guttural hissing meant.
“Rrr-mm, sssssshhhh,” tried Vance.
“Sirens weren’t
all
bad, and besides, she isn’t even full siren. Her mom shagged one. Not
her
fault. She is half—”
“Not siren,” I finished.
“Yes, and she was trying to save your unworthy butt in there. Besides, she doesn’t even
use
her ability.”
“Mmmffffllllaaaahhhh,” he got out.
“It really
isn’t
my fault,” I put in, ignoring the fact that I was the one who pissed off Max to start with. Why rehash tiny details at a time like this?
Mia said something, and Vance’s face relaxed into a normal state.
“That is a neat spell. Does it work on kids?” I couldn’t resist asking. I could think of lots of practical applications for that particular spell, but Vance spoke over me.
“What is to stop her from doing it again? Not to mention, if I don’t kill her, every
other
vampire out there is going to try.”
“Well, they don’t know she is here, so why would they?” Mia’s tone was so logical, it was hard to refute her.
“They are all dead! We killed them off!”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think vampires were real. How did you word it? ‘Every so often, in life, we find that things are not as we thought them to be?’ Well, lookie here. Back at ya, buddy.” I waved my arm in anger and light followed it in a streamer. I furrowed my brow, for once not worrying about wrinkles. “Uh, what the hell was that?” I waved it again. Nothing happened. I looked to Mia.
She shrugged. “Have you ever fed the hunger before?”
She had her clinical, let’s-learn-something-new tone. I kind of hated when she used that one on me. “No, why the hell would I?”
“Quit swearing. If this is the first time you fed it, then who knows what you gained from it. And you fed it
good
. I mean a bar full of people and a vampire—”
“Speaking of
me
, let me go Mia or I swear—”
She ignored him. “No one really tracked what all you guys can do. I mean, in all my reading—”
“You read up on sirens?”
“Well, yeah, why not? Didn’t you?”
I glared at her. “Because there aren’t any.”
“Well, there is
you—
”
I brushed off my pants. It was really snowing good and the cold seemed penetrate my very bones. I just noticed that I was only wearing the leather halter top and jeans in a snow storm. All the power seemed to have thrown off my natural senses. “I told you and my mother, I am not going to be a siren.”
“What? That’s like me saying, oh, I am not going to be a vampire. You don’t really get to choose what you are.” Vance looked at me like I was crazy. It was kind of comical, really. His body was still stuck in ready-to-attack pose, but his head was tilted and his expression incredulous.
“I choose what I am and am not going to do with my life. I
am
a normal woman.” I stomped my foot and the entire sidewalk shook. The sign above my head flickered and waved a little more furiously.
I blinked balefully.
“Yeah, cause that seems to be working out great,” muttered Vance. “Let me go, Mia. I won’t try to kill her…now.”
“Whatever.” Mia waived her hand, mumbling something.
He dropped to his knees and sighed. “You are one bitchy witch.” Vance brushed snow off himself meticulously.
“And you are one arrogant son of a bitch.” Rounding on Vance I had to resist stomping my foot in anger.
“Children, if we are going to fight, Mama Mia is going to put you back in time out.”
We both glared at Mia. “Between the two of us, we could take her, Vance.”
“Tempting,” he muttered.
“So, Vance, you aren’t going to try to kill Janie?”
“Nope. Tempting.” He looked at me, and I felt a flash of anger. “But no, I won’t kill her. And I did feed off her, so I guess we are almost equal, for the moment.”
I glared at him. “Don’t expect a repeat performance. I don’t do encores.”
“What in the hell is wrong with me? I go hundreds of years sane, and then meet some bimbo siren—”
“Hey!”
“In denial and it all goes down the can,” he finished.
“I am not a bimbo,” I defended. “Or in denial. We choose our fates and I choose to be normal.”
“Right, like a snail chooses to be a snail, or a flea chooses to be a flea. Honey, the free choice thing only gets you so far. The rest is nature.”
“I choose not to use that portion,” I filled in.
“You might not have as much of a choice, now.” Mia said it quietly, while spinning her car keys on her finger.
“What?” Vance narrowed his eyes.
“What is that supposed to mean?” My heart raced, as if I knew she was about to say something important.
She looked away in an evasive gesture. “I am not sure about anything. I mean, like I said, I really haven’t found out that much about what sirens were supposed to be like.”
“But—” I sputtered in frustration.
“Okay, Vance, before you were a vampire, did you ever want to drink blood?”
“No.”
“Before my powers awakened, do you remember me doing anything magical?” Mia continued to twirl the keys and didn’t quite meet my eyes.
“No. Get to the point.” I tried hard not to grit my teeth in frustration.
“I think I see where this is going.” Vance did not look happy. “I may want to rethink that whole promise not to kill her if this is going where I think it is.”
“Too late,” ordered the witch. “Anyway—”
“You don’t think I can go back to ignoring it.” My voice was flat and barely above a whisper. My palms sweated and I could hardly breathe.
“Well, you might be able to…” But she still didn’t meet my eyes.
“Why
wouldn’t
I?”
“Look, it’s like this. Before, you kept that part of you in a kind of deep sleep. Like cancer—”
“I really don’t like the analogy.”
“It was in, like, siren-remission. Well you cut it open and let it out. Now it spread, and I don’t know if you can put it back where you had it put away.”
“And yet, you are the one who told me to use it?” Disbelief and anger pulsed equally in my voice.
“Well, you sang before and kept it put away. How was I to know that you would loose it and start draining the bar tonight?” Mia answered.
“Wait, which parts can’t she, theoretically, put back?” Vance asked.
“Well, she might be as trapped in what she is as, for instance, you are.”
“Meaning?” I tilted my head.
Mia sighed and wiped snow off her car with a finger. She had parked in front of the diner, which was probably why she brought us over there. The diner was across the road from the Galley, which looked like it’d slipped back to business as usual. “She may have to feed it regularly, now.”