Almost Human (6 page)

Reluctantly, I felt grateful
toward Fallon. He could have left me stranded and unarmed and feel
perfectly happy. Arming me right outside his house was a ballsy
move. Then again, the tiny gun probably couldn’t kill one vampire,
even if I pumped the whole clip into its brain.

Interesting though, I’d never
known a vampire to use guns. They wasted too much blood. Not good
if you were looking for a snack. Also, most vampires were
technophobes.

I dragged myself up the steps of
the porch. God, I could sleep for days. I didn’t knock on the door.
Everyone let themselves in unless the door was locked.

It swung open and the barrel of a shotgun was in my
face. Slowly, I started to put my hands up, but the business end of
the gun was already pointed at the ground.

I glanced at Astra. “Holy shit,
you trying to kill me? Should you even be up? I heard you were
injured.”

She backed out of the way and I
stepped over the thresh hold. “Where is everyone?”

She shook her head. “You mean the
ones that are left? I told them to get hotel rooms after they
patched me up. I’m waiting for that vamp I fought last night. He
threatened to find me. I didn’t want to lose any more friends to
him and his brothers.”

I nodded. “Well, hopefully it was
an empty threat. I think if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us
alone. Give it a few days before you call the others
back.”

I followed her as she limped to the living room. She
sank on to the couch with a relieved sigh.

“Damn, Astra. Are you all
right?”

“I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, I
have a sprained wrist, some bruised ribs, twisted my ankle and I’ve
lost a lot of blood.” She touched the bite mark on her throat. I
shuddered. It mirrored my own. “But the rest of them. They’re not
fine.”

“I know. They’re dead.”

The silence was heavy and seemed to stretch on for
hours.

Astra took a deep breath. “What
about you? How are you? I thought you were dead. Interesting
jacket, by the way.”

I ran a hand through my hair and
sat back on the couch. “I’m injured, upset, confused…I think
everything I’ve been told about vampires is a lie,
Astra.”

She straightened. “What do you
mean?”

I told her everything that had happened to me since
she dragged Jairdan away that night.

“Fine, so Casey is still the same
person. But those vampires aren’t. They’re evil.”

I shook my head. “Think about it,
Astra. We threatened them. We came into their house and picked a
fight. We tried to harm their loved ones. God, maybe we deserved
what we got.”

“But this Fallon? He’s evil. You
told me yourself that he kills his victims. And I’m sure the others
have killed, too. Just because it wasn’t recent enough for you to
sense doesn’t mean they haven’t.”

“I threatened Fallon’s family, but
yes I’d kill him if I thought I would survive the fight. But he had
some of the most intense power I’ve ever brushed. I couldn’t even
defeat Alaric, and he went easy on me because he was trying not to
kill me. Fallon would have no such hindrance.”

Astra stared at me. “So…what does
this mean?”

I shrugged. “For now, it means
that we leave the brothers alone. I want to give my sister time to
get out of town. Besides, we’re too injured to do much of
anything.”

She crossed her arms over her
chest. “You might believe that vampires aren’t what we thought, but
I’ve had my friends and family killed. Those things are monsters,
and Jairdan threatened me and my family. I’ll kill him if he comes
after me.”

“I’d never say you shouldn’t
defend yourself, but I wouldn’t hunt them anymore. They’re not the
usual loners we deal with. If you go after them, you face them
all.”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry.
I won’t be going after him.” She clenched her fists to stop their
nervous shaking. “He had me, Kori. It was the most disturbing thing
that’s ever happened to me since I started hunting them. I’ll be
staying right here, awake, waiting for him. So announce yourself
next time you come up the stairs. I’ll be going on very little
sleep and might shoot you by accident.”

I sighed and got to my feet. “Be safe,
Astra. I have to go break this happy news to my mother.”

* * * *

I walked the ten miles to my mother’s house.
I needed to clear my head and wasn’t looking forward to facing her.
I watched the sun creep over the horizon and immediately felt
safer. Vampires could come out in the daylight, but they didn’t
like to. A lot of other creepy crawlies had an aversion to the sun
as well.

I reached the driveway that led to
Mother’s home. I stared up at the house. This place had never held
any happy memories, but now it sent shivers of foreboding down my
spine. There was something wrong in that house.

I strode up the steps of the
porch. I’d also been practicing what I was going to say to my
mother the whole way here. She was not going to take the news that
Casey was still alive well.

I didn’t bother knocking. I
slipped through the door, closing it silently behind me. If Mother
wasn’t downstairs I was going to do some snooping. I took a second
to look around. Nope, no mother. She was probably sleeping off
whatever spell she’d cast.

I went to the living room and sat on the couch. If I
brushed something truly powerful I might faint, and I would hate to
die because I cracked my head on the hard wood. I closed my eyes,
leaned back, and stretched my magic out, looking for spells.

Every spell left behind a residue. I knew I was
looking for an evil spell, but how evil? And what had it
accomplished?

My magic took me to the family graveyard in the
backyard. The evil was so concentrated here that it choked me. It
got caught in my lungs like smoke, singeing them.

“Really, mother? The graveyard for
doing wicked spells? How cliché.” I muttered to myself.

The place had always given me the creeps. My
grandmother had the bodies of our ancestors exhumed from Europe and
moved here. She thought it would strengthen our spells to have them
near, helping us.

Personally, I believed that you
should let the dead rest. But I hadn’t even been born when she’d
made the decision, so I hadn’t had a lot of choice in the
matter.

I noticed that the dirt over one
grave had been stirred. What the F? No one had been buried here
since my father’s death. My stomach flip-flopped. This couldn’t
possibly be good. My astral body stepped closer to get a look at
the name.

“What are you doing,
Daughter?”

I jerked upright, snapping back
into my body. My mother glared down at me. She looked like hell.
Her face was pale, with a slight sheen of sweat, like she’d been
vomiting for a couple hours. Her irises were pitch
black.

If no one had died, then there was only one reason
the dirt would have been shifted. I gaped up at her. A raising.

“Mother, what have you
done?”

She shook her head. “Did you kill
the vampires? Your sister?”

I told my story for the second time that day. When I
finished she was seething with rage. Red lightening flashed in her
eyes, highlighted by the black irises.

“I won’t kill my own sister. And
as much as I’d love to kill her boyfriend for what he’s done to
her, I won’t do that either. It would break her heart.”

She curled her lip at me and spun
away. “That bitch doesn’t have a heart,” she screeched.

I covered my ears and glared at
her before I stood. “Mother, we need to talk about what went down
in that graveyard. What have you done?”

She spun and delivered a punch that knocked me flat
on my ass. Pain exploded in my jaw. I spat blood and a tooth on to
the floor.

She delivered a kick to my stomach
and I rolled over, gagging. Fuck. She’d never hit me
before.

She wrapped a bony hand in my long
hair and jerked. “I knew you were too weak to get the job done.
You’re too sentimental. You’re lucky I’m not going to order her to
kill you.”

“Her?”

“Sherra, the originator of our
line. I raised her to kill those vampires, because I knew you
couldn’t.”

“You raised her
yourself?”

“Of course. A necromancer would
never do it for me.”

“Because you can’t raise witches
from the dead without severe problems! Mother, there’s a reason
only necromancers raise the dead. Witches don’t have the power. The
zombies come back wrong. You’re lucky it didn’t kill you.” Though
at the moment I was wishing it had. She might be my mother, but I
owed my sister more loyalty.

A wave of nausea rolled through my
stomach. “God, and you vowed to protect humans, but you would have
had to kill one to complete the spell.”

She sneered at me. “Don’t be
ridiculous, Daughter. I’d never kill a human. I raised her with a
vampire.”

My jaw dropped, and I wasn’t sure
I’d ever be able to get it closed again. “Do you know what kind of
repercussions a vampire sacrifice would have on a spell like that?
Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve created something virtually
unstoppable, and you’ve unleashed only God knows what evil on this
planet.”

“It’s a myth that evil comes when
a witch raises the dead.”

I wished I could shake her. Or
beat some sense into her. “Bullshit. Evil followed the power you
used. I can feel it. It contaminates you.”

“Enough. I want you out of my
house. I disown you.”

She pulled me to the door by my hair while I
struggled to get her to release me. Whatever demon tainted her left
her stronger than before.

She opened the door and hurled me
out. “I’ll gut you if you come back here, traitorous
whore.”

I laid on the porch for a second and contemplated
the deep shit we were all in before pushing myself to my feet. I
almost fell right back over. I caught the porch rail and managed to
keep myself upright.

When I was sure I wasn’t going to
bust my ass, I made my way down the steps.

My magic was still sensitive from
my psychic tour of the graveyard, so I felt it before I hit the
bottom step—that feeling that I was not only being watched but it
was close by. Yep, another fucking vampire. This day was riding to
hell in the express lane.

I pulled a knife from my belt and
approached the abandoned Harley sitting at the end of the driveway.
The vamp owned a damned fine bike, but he wasn’t anywhere near
it.

I glanced at the bushes and thick
trees in the yard. Too many hiding places. There were at least ten
places he could jump me from. Too bad my powers couldn’t give me a
better fix on his location.

A gigantic hand wrapped around my
wrist and I suddenly didn’t need my powers to find him. The vampire
ducked under my arm and pinned it behind my back.

“Ouch, asshole. Can you be
careful? I’ve had my ass handed to me twice in less than
twenty-four hours. I’m not feeling so hot and I’d like to use that
arm again.”

He pulled me out of view of the
house and swept my feet out from under me, following me to the
ground. He stripped me of my knives like he’d been present when I’d
dressed. He removed the final knife from my hand and released
me.

“I’m not here to hurt
you.”

I turned over on my back and
glanced up at the vampire. Holy shit. He had to be close to seven
feet tall. He was covered in black from head to toe, literally. He
wore a leather jacket over a sweatshirt, the hood of which cast a
shadow over his face, hiding everything but his mouth and
jaw.

I propped myself up on my elbows.
“Then you could have, oh, I don’t know, said something. Maybe as an
alternative to jumping me.”

His mouth curled into a cruel
little smile. It was the kind of smile that could make grown men
run screaming, and I couldn’t even see his eyes. “Witches aren’t
exactly known for listening first and killing later.”

He had a point; I hadn’t planned
on letting him speak. “All right, so now that you’ve got my
undivided attention, not to mention all my weapons, what are you
going to say?”

He jerked his head toward the
house. “I felt the demon come through. Thought I’d come check it
out.”

“How did you feel
that?”

“You felt it, too. Everyone with
even a tiny bit of power felt it. I bet even some humans did.
However, I’m connected to it, so I could locate it.”

I frowned. “Connected to
it?”

There was that cruel smile again.
“It’s a long story. The short version is evil is a part of me. I’ve
done some naughty things. It’s tainted my soul. Or taken it, I’m
never quite sure.”

Great, a vampire with some added evil. That was what
the world needed.

He held a hand out to help me up.
“Get up, we’ve got work to do. We have to stop not only the witch
she raised, but also the demon she brought with it. You’re going to
need help, and someone with experience. I’m Dagger, by the
way.”

I smacked his hand out of the way
and stood on my own. I brushed the dirt off my knees. “What kind of
a name is Dagger?”