Fearless (The Blue Fire Saga) (11 page)

How much time passed—hours, days or weeks—Kristi did not know. The next time she
opened her eyes, she found herself lo
oking up into the face of a silver
-haired woman.
It was still daylight, but whether it was the same day or another one
there was no way to tell
.
The stranger was bent over her, and the woman’s
long,
wavy silver
locks hung down on either side of her cheeks like rippling curtains. The skin of her
face seemed
surprisingly sm
ooth for someone with hair
that
color
, making it impossible to guess her age.
Her eyes were almost the same shade of silver-gray as her hair.

“
Ahhh
, here you are,
dearie
,” the woman said in a soft but raspy voice. “I knew you weren’t dead,
but you weren’t asleep now, either, were you?”

Kristi did
no
t know how to answer that, and wouldn’t have been able to reply even if she had
known
, because her jaw was still frozen shut. Her arms and legs
remained
paralyzed as well. Nothing had changed since the last time she’d opened her eyes, except that instead of seeing trees and sky above her, she was looking into this woman’s pallid face. Since Kristi couldn’t move or speak, she simply blinked her eyes rapidly, hoping the woman would recognize that Kristi’s brain was fully alert.

The woman nodded in what seemed to be understanding. She grabbed Kristi’s limp wrist and
lifted her arm a few inches above
the ground. When she let go, Kristi’s arm flopped back onto the
blanket of
dirt
and dead leaves upon which she lay
.

“It seems you are clos
er to dead than I thought.”  The woman
brushed a lock of Kristi’s hair back from her forehead. “My name is
Jenna
.”

Kristi could not know it, but
Jenna
was a witch. She was more than
three
hundred years old. As a teenager
in seventeenth century Massachusetts
, she had managed to elude the zealots of the Salem Witch Trials,
even
while dozens of
women were
being
hanged as witches
, most of them innocent
.
If she could have helped any of them she would have, but there was nothing she could do except
save herself.
She had made a habit of keeping a low profile ever since.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,”
Jenna
said. “Blink once for yes, twice for no. Do you understand?”

Kristi blinked once.

“Good. Can you feel anything?
The cold?
My hand on your arm?”

Kristi blinked twice.

“Do you know what happened to you?”

Again, Kristi blinked twice.

“I have an idea what it was.”
Jenna
lifted Kristi’s long brown hair away from her neck and spied
the
two
dry, puckered puncture marks.
“Just a
s I thought.
It seems you’ve bitten by a vampire. You know what vampires are, of course?”

Kristi blinked once. She loved reading vampire stories. She thought that
wa
s all they were—
just
stories. She
had
never believed the c
reatures actually existed. N
ow this strange woman was telling her she’d been bitten by one.

“Vampires usually
either
turn their victims
into
vampire
s like themselves
,
or
merely leave them dead. Your attacker
seems to have left you trapped between the two. I wonder if
perhaps
Destiratu
pushed this vampire to go further than it
meant to. I myself have felt its effects.”

Kristi had no idea what this
Destiratu
thing
Jenna was talking about
was. She blinked three times
, hoping
Jenna
would understand what she meant.

“You don’t know about
Destiratu
, do you?”

Kristi blinked twice.

Jenna
sighed. “Well, no matter.”

She placed her hand softly against Kristi’s cheek.
Her
skin was cool, but not cold.

“There’s nothing I can do for you
” she said, “
at least not directly. I can
no
t even kill you
to put you out of your misery
, for you have been taken beyond my power to do so.
Trying to kill you might only make things worse.
”

Kristi blinked twice. She wasn’t really suffering, and wanted to make sure Jenna would not risk making her situation worse.

Jenna nodded. “I’m assuming that means you don’t want me to try to come up with some way to kill you?”

Kristi blinked once.

“Okay, let me think.”
Jenna
closed her eyes as she often did when she was brainstorming
. An idea was forming in her mind, an idea she was not completely comfortable with. She did not understand why she was getting involved in all this. Perhaps it was
Destiratu
at work again,
she thought, pushing her to use her powers. That was usually not a good thing. Still, she felt sorry for the girl.

She opened her eyes and brought her face closer to Kristi’s.

“Listen
to me
carefully. If you do
no
t want to exist like this for all eternity, you have but two choices
that I can see
. I can go to the volkaa
nes and
try to bring one of them back here
to
destroy you. Their fire is the only power I know that can do so
for certain
now. Or, I
can try to draw a vampire here
to complete your transformat
ion. Blink once for death,
twice for vampire.”

Kristi did not have to think very long. Vampires were cool, at least in her books. She blinked twice.

Jenna
nodded. “So be it.”

She closed her eyes again. She
ha
d gotten close to a vampire once and could still recall his unique vibrations. Sucking in a deep breath, she began chanting a spell, one she hoped would bring the vampire here.

“It is done,” she said
after a few moments
. “It may take awhile, but that’s all I can do.”
She placed her hand on Kristi’s forehead and leaned in close to add one final touch to her spell. “You will remember what I have done here for you, but you will not b
e able to speak of it to anyone, not even the vampire who turns you.
”

Jenna
hoped
she had not made a mistake by doing this
. Getting involved in such things went against her nature—the
same
nature that had allowed her to survive undetected for
more than three centuries. I
t was too late to do anything about it now
, though
. The spell was cast.
There was no undoing it. What would
be,
would be.

She allowed herself a small, hopeful smile.
In these dangerous times, p
erhaps it wouldn’t be
such
a bad thing to have a vampire beholden to her. On the other hand, if the vampire she
ha
d summoned
with her magic
ever found out what Jenna
had done, she could be in a world of trouble.
Vampires were not to be trifled with—their powers were great.
She wondered if she w
ould ever have done this had
Destiratu
not grown so strong.

Damn
Destiratu
, she thought as she disappeared back into the trees.
It
was always the end for more than just a few
.
She
just
hoped
that
she wasn’t going to be one of them
this time
.

7
. UNWANTED GUESTS

T
uesday, Leesa
had
only
two classes
, and despite each being half an hour longer than her Monday classes, they seemed to go by faster. Leesa thought it was a combination of t
he subject
s being more interesting—psychology was really fu
n and sociology was pretty good,
too—and her not being quite so
eager
to get to work with Dominic’s book as she had been the day before. Yesterday, she couldn’
t wait to use
the book for the first time. Now that she’d
worked a little with the spell
book—
and
successfully, too
!
—she was not quite as anxious to get to it. 

That wasn’t to say her eagerness was gone, just that it wasn’t quite so keen.
When Professor Moody—Leesa
thought Moody
was a wonderful name for a psychology professor—brought class to a close, Leesa was the first one out the door.