Min's Vampire (12 page)

But when Min finally fell to
the floor, unconscious, the flames flickered and died, and the
darkness seeped from the room in a quiet, orderly flow. The room
was still cold, and the candles were snuffed out. And just as the
sweet smell of Sidhe faded, Luca felt Min’s magical control over
him evaporate. The cold, cruel voice of the faerie whispered in his
ear.
Now
it’s your
turn to play, vampire.

Moonlight streamed into the bedroom
from an open window. Min lay on the floor, her limp, bloodied body
framed beautifully in that cool, silver light. Inside, somewhere
far from his mind, his beast called out, howling for Min’s
blood.

Her body looked so warm and tempting,
like the most delicious banquet he had ever imagined. So much of
him wanted to take her, to glut himself at her neck, to end his
servitude and his newfound pain and guilt. He knew right then that
if he just let his beast take over again that he would never feel
again. It would be so easy. He saw the outline of her breasts as
she slept, and the pulse at her throat, but he pulled
away.

The beast inside him howled
incredulously, baying for the blood. He tried pushing the beast
back, tried to walk away from Min’s bloodied, placid form. When he
looked up he saw something that he’d never thought to see again.
His reflection in Min’s vanity mirror. He hadn’t seen his
reflection in three hundred years, and it was terrifying to see it
now. Especially since it wasn’t really him. It looked like him, and
was dressed like him, but there was blood trickling from the corner
of his mouth down his chin. The image of him licked at it with his
tongue and smiled at him, a knowing look on his face.

“
Don’t waste this,” it said
to him. “If you really don’t want her to die, you should bring her
over. Then she would truly,
always
be ours, ours to hunt with, ours to fuck…and you
know from Elaina that she would have to do as you command. That no
matter where she was, she would have to come back and answer your
call. She would be ours, forever.

Luca closed his eyes and balled up his
fists until the bones creaked. “No,” he said to both his beast and
to the image of himself in the mirror. He moved back to where Min
was and scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to her
bedroom, laying her down in her unmade bed. She was bleeding. Cuts
and some nasty gashes on her hands, her forehead, and the side of
her face where she hit the wall, looked poised on
bruising.

If that filthy fae were there he would
latch onto her throat and suck her dry. That would, after all, be
the only way he would have a fighting chance against one of the
Sidhe. Even if it had been one of their weaker lot, he’d have a
hell of a time killing it by himself. But this creature was
powerful. Maybe the most powerful.

A chilling and sobering thought. Most
powerful or not, all Luca wanted to do was rip her throat
out.

Luca pushed thoughts of vengeance out
of his head. He ministered to the cuts and the soon to blossom
bruises, easily finding first aid supplies in Min’s bathroom, and a
bag of frozen peas in her freezer.

He sat there by the bed and waited. An
hour went by, and just when he began to think she would not wake
again, finally she stirred.

Chapter 13

Min woke to find her head a riot of
pain. Nausea caught in her throat and she forced herself to swallow
it. Then a wave of regret and disappointment washed through her.
She’d been in the middle of the ceremony, she had felt that it was
working, that somehow the soul of the vampire was calling to her
mother’s, drawing it from wherever it was, back to her body, as a
vampire can push a mortal to do just about anything, if they want
to and don’t hunger to fight with them. But some love such
violence. To use their vampire wiles takes the fun out of it for
some.

She felt fear well up in her, the sight
of her mother sitting up in bed with those frosted blue eyes, and
that black flame in her hand. How much it had hurt as that power
had shot out and beat her into the wall. She’d panicked as all had
gone black…and now her head hurt and…

Her eyes shot open as she
realized what had happened. She had passed out. Passed out alone
with the vampire. Not Luca, but
the
vampire
. She gasped in fear as she looked
around the candle lit room—her bedroom. And there sitting in the
chair in the corner, staring into her eyes, was the
vampire.

Oh god, I’m at his
mercy
. Her wards may not depend on her
being conscious, but the gris-gris hex she’d used was voodoo, and
necromancy, and if she wasn’t awake to control it, it evaporated
completely. She reached out with her senses and found nothing.
She’d been unconscious too long. The magicks were gone, and she
wouldn’t be able to use them upon him until he passed into the
house again, and passed under one of the talismans.

But he didn’t have a triumphant smile
on his face. He looked…relieved. And why hadn’t he taken her,
killed her while she was out? Why hadn’t he bound and gagged her?
She could still work magicks on him, and if she was lucky she might
just be able to destroy him. Or maybe he wanted to play with her
before he tried to kill her…or turn her into a soulless thing like
him…but then, of course he did have a soul. If he sired her, would
she have a soul too?

But when he finally spoke it
wasn’t about any of the things racing through her head. “We really
should get you to the hospital. You’ve hit your head pretty
hard,”—Min could see herself being flung across the room and into
the wall, a vision seen through his eyes. And then of her lying
defenseless on the floor of her mother’s room. The hunger had been
so strong in him—“and you’re still just human.” She blinked at him,
and gulped—her mouth and throat were so dry. He reached out and
handed her a glass of water, as if he’d read her mind. “And then we
need to talk about what you tried to do to me.”
Okay, there’s that other shoe I’ve been waiting on to drop.
He’s still going to rip my throat out…well, after he gives me a
tongue lashing for trying to sacrifice him to wake my
mother.
“I don’t pretend to understand the
magicks you were doing, but I’m quite certain it wouldn’t have
worked.”

Min scowled at him. “It would’ve
worked. I mean, why else would fate send me that spell and the one
vampire in-all-the-world to use for it?”

He got a cold, detached look on his
face, his young, handsome features hardening. “All vampires have a
soul, Min.”

No, they don’t!

“
Yes, we do.” Min felt a
stab of panic as the vampire answered her mental objection. “It
tortures us when we’re first brought over, but the hunger helps us
ignore it until it fades to only a memory. Once you get past that
part you will never suffer from it again. You know the phrase,
‘Better, for lack of use.’” He looked so thoughtful sitting there.
“Something about what has happened between us has reawakened
mine.”

Min shook her head, but it made her
nausea all the harder to ignore. “But it was working. I could feel
it. A presence was in the room. My mother’s soul.”

“
So that’s what she is to
you? Your mother?” He looked to the door and Min got a brief chill.
“Well, believe me, what animated your mother’s body wasn’t her
ghost, or her spirit, or anything like that.”

“
Alright, smart-guy! What
was it?”

“
The Sidhe.”

“
The what?”

“
The Sidhe…faeries…but not
Tinkerbell, the kind that rule over the ethereal mists…”

Min just stared at him like he was
crazy.

“
You’ve had to have heard of
them: The Summer and Winter Courts—Seelie and Unseelie.”

“
You’re trying to tell me
little faeries did that to my mother, and that they smacked me
around upstairs like I was a piñata?” she laughed at
him.

“
You’re a gypsy, a witch.
You can’t tell me you’ve never heard of them?”

“
Faeries are just…the stuff
of
fairytales
.
That’s all.”

“
No, they are most certainly
real…and they aren’t little. At least the ones you’re dealing with
aren’t. They’re also so strong they can smack a mightily powerful
witch like you around,
like a
piñata
, and not even be in the same room as
you. They probably weren’t even in this world when they did
it.”

Min waved him off, feeling like his
words were simply madness. “How in the world would you know
anything about such creatures, even if they did exist?”

Luca’s face turned from hard cold to
almost winsome, a smile touching his lips, and then there was
torment. She could suddenly feel his grief. And then Min was
slammed with another vision: one of his memories.

An injured fae, a woman, and even
injured he would never have been able to take her by himself. There
had been half a dozen vampires, all so hungry for the creature’s
blood, the scent of the faerie so powerful and alluring,
intoxicating and absolutely irresistible. They had fallen upon her
in concert, like ravening dogs. One had lost his head to her sword,
but the other five sunk their teeth into her and drained her,
though it took all their strength to subdue her, her strength
finally faded as her blood was sucked away.

They drank her until she was stone cold
and dry to the bone. Then they tore her body apart to get at what
little was left inside her. It was terrible.

And all the while one of the vampires
had Luca’s hand in hers. He loved her, hated and feared her, her
glittering black eyes and pale skin—so beautiful and
crazed.

Elaina.
The name wafted into Min’s mind, cold and sharp. And she knew
that this horrifying creature had made Luca into a
vampire.

She ripped herself from the vision and
she spoke the words that fell from Luca’s lips. “Hard to kill.” And
she knew he enjoyed the thought of having killed the fae as much as
he loathed himself for ending the life of something so powerful and
beautiful.

She was suddenly frightened, for as he
spoke again of the Summer and Winter Courts of the fae, and that he
could tell just from the smell, and the feel of power, that
whatever fae had been in her mother’s room, that it was one of the
Winter Courts, the Unseelie Court.

But somehow, someway, it all seemed
vaguely familiar. Like, as he spoke of it all, she realized she’d
already heard it, knew it once. Yet as she listened, as she tried
to pin down and touch those thoughts, they slipped away. As if
something were obscuring those things from her mind’s eye. Magick,
it had to be. But who had done it? Was it the same thing that had
stolen her mother’s soul and life, or was it something else
entirely?

Min felt the coldest of
sensations trickle like the blood of a corpse down her
spine.
What else do I not remember? And for
how long has this been going on?

After a fuzzy, dizzying
moment, Min tried to stand on her own. She couldn’t even pull
herself to sit up on the side of the bed.
How hurt am I?

Min finally agreed to let Luca carry
her to the hospital. Moving with his preternatural speed, they
arrived only moments after he departed her home. He took her in,
setting her oh so gently in a waiting room chair that seemed to
magically become vacant, and he talked to the woman at the desk.
For a moment the woman flatly told him to fill out the paperwork
and they would get to her eventually. But then Min felt a twinge,
something cold and dead, and then she realized that the vampire was
pushing, glamouring the clerk. Abruptly she was smiling at him, and
saying that she would have her in a bed in no time.

Min glared at him, ready to hit him,
but as her stomach turned over--just sitting there was making her
so very, very dizzy—she let it go. Maybe having him around wasn’t
all bad. She cringed at the thought.

The nurses and the doctor seemed a
little surprised that Min was in the bed she was. Obviously the
desk woman had pulled a bit of clerical sleight of hand, but they
shook it off and were quick on the pickup. Min was wheeled off to
radiology, where they took some x-rays and a CT scan. Once back in
the ER, the nurses cleaned and dressed her wounds, and the doctor
breezed in, looked at the results for a couple moments, and
declared that Min didn’t have a concussion. And that she was very
lucky.

“
How did you sustain these
injuries?” He was looking over her chart, the one the clerk had
dashed off so quickly. He was looking for the cause, and was
noticeably irritated that it wasn’t there.

“
She had a fender-bender
with a fire hydrant,” Luca said, rolling his eyes in an
intentionally irritated display. It made Min want to reach out and
smack him.

The doctor looked down at her, a
condescending smirk on his face. “Well, drive safely little lady.”
And just like that he turned and disappeared through the
curtain.

Min glared at Luca. “You’re not
funny!”

Luca gave an elegant shrug that meant
nothing and everything all at once. He grinned. “Get dressed and
I’ll take you home.”