Dark Surrender (20 page)

She stood there, quiet as the tomb, listening to the surrounding woods, to the sounds of cars encroaching from the city that surrounded the park, sending out her senses to check for any preternatural presence, until she was satisfied that the pack had indeed left.

She moved to Luca and helped him to his feet, but the sight of him lying there, bleeding from so many long tears in the flesh of his chest stopped her in her tracks. His wounds weren’t healing. “What’s wrong?”

Luca chuckled painfully as he pulled himself clumsily to his feet. “Silver heals almost human slow for vampires as well as shapeshifters. But it will heal, in time.”

*****

Min took Luca home. After she warded her home from the werewolves with more than overkill, and blacked out the windows of her bedroom with blankets, she crawled into bed with him and shivered against his cold body. But finally fell to sleep as she felt Luca fade from his body. Vampires really did just turn back into beautiful corpses when the sun came up. A tear fell from her eye to his smooth pale chest. But he would come back to her the next night.

*****

When Luca came too, the sun had just set, the sky still had the slightest blue to it, and Elaina was standing, staring at him through the window with that maniacal smile on her face. He saw her lips move, but couldn’t hear her voice. But he didn’t have to. She was ordering him to the front door of the house. He rose from the bed that held Min, passed out of her room and down the hall, down the long stair case and then to the front door of the house—no control at all over his movements, just doing as Elaina commanded.

He opened the door and walked out onto the porch. He was naked, and Elaina chastised him; though, she was laughing as she did it. “Could you not take the time to pull on a pair of pants? My, my…you really do not have any resistance to me, do you?”

Luca wanted to resist her. He’d tried to pull himself from her control every step of the way, but as it had always been, he had no control over himself once his mistress gave him a command. He sucked in the night air, trying to stanch the fear that was welling up inside him, threatening to drown him. If Elaina didn’t just outright kill him there and then, she would most assuredly command him to go back into the house and kill Min. The thought made him tense all over, his blood turning cold as he desperately tried to break free. It became all the cooler as he saw the inevitable: that he was hers to control, no matter what she wanted him to do. He was but a slave to her whims, again.

But instead of giving Luca any further orders, Elaina started talking.

“
It matters not how long it’s been since we last laid eyes on each other, or how so very long since we have enjoyed each other’s touch.” Her cold, hard, dainty hand slid down the flesh of his chest, brushing over the smooth skin, and digging into the wounds the silver chains had left behind. “I will always have absolute power over you,
my Luca
, and there is not a thing you can do about that. It is as unchangeable as the seasons, as the passing of time. It is finite.”

“
What do you want, Elaina?” Luca asked, and then gasped as she pushed her finger into one of the gashes on his chest.

“
I don’t want anything.” Her eyes flashed with heat as she pulled her fingers free of his flesh. That malicious insanity that had heralded Luca into this long, dark journey into the afterlife…his afterlife. She licked his blood from her fingers. She bared her teeth, her words heated with anger as she circled him. “If I’d wanted you, I would just take you. If I wanted you to gut your pretty little witch, you would rip her into as many pieces as I asked you to. And if I wished you to walk into the sun itself—” She moved in and pushed herself against him, her hands on his shoulders as she lunged toward him, until he could feel her cold breath on his cheek. Her white teeth opened as she moved in closer, as if she was going to take a bite out of him, and then she smiled and let her teeth snap closed with a clink worthy of a bear-trap. She backed away, giggling in a demented stream that bordered on musical. “Then you would be nothing but a mound of ash.”

She whirled about, as if dancing to music only she could hear, and then came to rest sitting delicately on the railing of Min’s porch. “All I wish to do is pass along a bit of knowledge to my only child. You know, give him some
motherly advice
.”

The tension seemed to melt form Elaina’s body and the volatile energy that was close to erupting from her just seemed to die, as if it had never been there to begin with. But Luca knew it was there, and would always be. It just showed itself when it wanted to.

“
As I was telling you, no matter how long it has been, my power over you remains the same. No matter how powerful you may become, my control over you will continue, unchanged.” She stood again and slinked silkily over to him, her big black eyes glittering like a night sky filled with stars. “The lesson, my beautiful boy, is that everything has its limits, no matter how powerful it has become. You just have to figure out the boundaries.”

“
What are you talking about?”

“
Like your Min. She found the boundary the wolves could not cross or overcome. And tonight I’ve shown you your own boundary. Though I cannot force you to love me”—a flash of real pain flickered across her features—“I can force you to kill all that you do love.” She leaned against him and rested her cheek against his chest, right over his heart.

In a weary, sad whisper she asked, “What other situation, one in this very house, would you wish to find the boundary to?”

She’s crazy…what the hell…

Luca gasped, realization dawning on him as he looked down upon his creator. She smiled beatifically up at him, perfect understanding sizzling between them.

“
Thank you,” Luca said breathlessly.

Elaina stepped back, her expression dimming as he gazed at her. Whatever she saw in him, she wasn’t sure she liked. “Just remember, no matter how powerful a thing is, they always have the same limitations, the same boundaries as any other of their kind.”

“
The same weaknesses,” he said.

She bit her lip, moved to him and kissed him, moving her body against his. His body reacted to her, hardening. Was it fear, was it lust? He couldn’t tell. For the first time in their long history, he was grateful to his maker. The kiss deepened. She moved away. Looking at his hardness, and smiled.

“
Such splendid attributes.” She looked him in the eye. “Enjoy your freedom, my beautiful boy. I’ll come for you when I hunger for you again.” And with a graceful turn she vanished into the night.

Standing there on the porch Luca could only hear his own breathing, slowly feeling the paralysis Elaina’s power over him caused melt away in mere seconds. His mind was racing, things connecting, Elaina’s words touching on what he knew already about Min’s mother. He turned and rushed into the house, and up the stairs. He had work to do, and not much time to do it.

*****

Chapter 21

Languishing in a rare dreamless sleep, Min finally awoke to the light of the full moon cascading through her bedroom window. She stretched and rolled over, finding herself alone, but not much caring. He was somewhere near,
her Luca
. It wasn’t that she felt him, it was more an assumption.

She took a few deep breaths and finally forced herself to crawl out of her nice, warm, comfortable bed, slipping into her silk bathrobe and padding barefoot to the door. As she walked she felt how sore she was. She’d been through quite a bit in the last week, and she’d be lucky if she wasn’t covered from head to toe with nasty black and purple bruises.

She almost turned back to crawl back into bed, but she knew she still had things that needed to be done—no rest for the wicked…or at least not for her. She needed coffee, and lots of it. She puttered into the dimly lit hall. Maybe Luca would be waiting for her, in the kitchen, with coffee.

The moment she entered the hallway she knew something was wrong. She turned slowly, looking around her, her shoulders and spine straightening in alarm, until she found what was different. The door to her mother’s room was standing wide open.

Min’s heart lurched in her chest and she gasped in air.
No, no, no, no, no…

She rushed into the room and flicked on the overhead light. Her mother was gone. Everything was as it always was, but her mother wasn’t there. Min whirled around and ran down stairs, calling Luca’s name, over and over. Someone had to have moved her mother…
Luca
had to have moved her. Katarina couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, she was in suspended animation, a magical coma, and her soul was missing too.

When she clambered down the stairs the first thing she saw was that the front door was open.

“
No,” she whispered, stopping, frozen in her tracks. The weight of what she had done was crushing.
I let a monster into my house, into my bed. And now he has her mother.
Her comatose, defenseless mother.
No, no, no. It has to be a bad dream.
She’d wake up screaming in just a moment. But she didn’t wake up. She stood there in her robe, the cold night wind roaring in through the open door, making her shiver.

She thought for a moment she would be sick. Then she thought she’d burst into tears. Her mother was dead by now. A vampire wouldn’t pass up a free, sleeping meal. A niggling little voice inside her said,
But why didn’t he just kill her in her own bed?
Min shook that thought off. She shook off all the thoughts that were threatening to overwhelm her. Even the guilt for bringing that monster into her house, into her mother’s very room.

Instead she found a purpose, and clung to it with everything she had. She raced upstairs, pulling on some clothes, gathering a few vampire-unfriendly objects. She tucked a cross and a silver dagger in her belt. Picking up a perfume bottle she checked her powers. She’d used a lot of mystical energy in the past few days, and she needed the certainty that her magic was still there and ready to back her up. They were stiff and hard to call up at first, as she floated the perfume bottle, and then shakily, the chest of drawers the bottle had been sitting on. But they were there, ready.

She grabbed a scribing crystal and a map and headed into her mother’s room. She’d use the crystal to locate her mother’s current location, and then use an enchantment she knew to form a glowing light on the page that would move with her mother.

At first nothing happened. Min was actually on her third recitation on the scribing spell when she realized her mistake. She’d been reaching out to find her mother. Maybe the wording and meaning was far too wide a request. After all, these things looked for specific things, and to look for her mother was to look for her spirit and soul, as well as her body. And there was nothing left to her mother right now other than her body. She’d already tried scribing for her mother’s soul and spirit to no avail. They hadn’t been in this world or the spirit world.

She was just about to clear her mind, to let the spell melt, and to start scribing for just her mother’s body, when the crystal moved, pulling her hand down hard as it fell on the map. Only three blocks over from where she knelt now.

She wasted no time thinking over the impossibility of her spell actually having worked. It had worked, and now she needed to act. She didn’t bother with the little moving light spell, her mother was too close. She just jumped to her feet, and ran down the stairs, forgoing her coat, or anything else, as she ran out of the house, leaving the door still wide open, and running down the street toward where the spell had indicated her mother lie. Only one thought interrupted her as she sprinted down the street, and the next. That she was going to burn that vampire to a cinder. That love or not… and she almost stopped in her tracks, but shook off the thought and kept on running. Love or not, he was going to die for ever laying a hand on her mother. When she came to the place where the crystal had shown, she stopped momentarily to shake her head. It was a large, nondescript brick building; the sign above it read Charlemagne Meat Packing Plant. Sudden images of what he could be doing to her mother flashed in her mind, hitting her hard as a fist in the chest. But she all that out of her mind as she raced into the building, pulling out the cross the silver dagger she’d put in her belt. It wasn’t a stake, but silver would kill him…as long as she used it to hack him into enough pieces.

Then she rounded a corner and had to duck past thick pieces of plastic. Once through she was surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of naked, raw sides of beef. Her stomach turned, and she had to breathe deep and hard just to keep herself form throwing up. She moved through the crowding sides of beef. And with every stride, her anger rose. Before she knew it her hands started to burn. When she came to the end of the meat she saw Luca standing beside a huge steel door, leaning nonchalantly against a generically painted white wall. Min dropped the dagger to the ground, both her hands bursting into flame. She launched a ball of it at his feet and watched as he jumped and danced out of the flames, trying to keep himself from combusting.

She surged forward and brought up a gale of fire, holding it in a huge sizzling ball only inches from his face.

“
Where is she? Where have taken my mother?” Her voice crackled with power.