Min's Vampire (22 page)

Katarina raised her arm that
wasn’t holding fast to her daughter, to indicate the giant freezer.
“The room is lined in iron and steel.
Her
power was cut off for long enough
that the curse just dissolved.” Her smile flickered with wicked
satisfaction. “
There’s
a bit of her power she won’t be getting back.” And Katarina’s
eyes flashed with a silvery light they had never before
had.

She absorbed the spell’s
energy. I didn’t know she could do that…
Min felt a shiver of fear, and the look in her mother’s eyes
had caused it.

“
My daughter,” Katarina said
with false politeness, her eyes fading back to their normal near
black as they flicked to Luca and then back to Min. “What are you
doing with a vampire?”

Min opened her mouth to speak, but
there were just so many things to explain, to say. Too
many.

Katarina gave her daughter a puzzled
look, and then smiled, closing her eyes. Min felt a cool, tingling
sensation on her arm where her mother’s hand held her. A heartbeat
later Katarina’s eyes opened again, flashing fleetingly of that
other, silver light. “A vampire with a soul? You’ve bedded a
vampire with…oh, and they all have one? Well, who knew? No wait, it
wasn’t just that he had one, your power awakened it.”

“
My witchcraft?” Min asked,
genuinely interested in the why and how.

Katarina smiled enigmatically. “No,”
she looked to Luca. “I see I owe my recovery to you, vampire. For
that I thank you.”

There was more of the tingling
sensation on Min’s arm. It made her squirm, but she didn’t tell her
mother to stop. But Katarina did let her go, as if something had
burned her. Her face turned frightened, and she shook her head.
“You fought the Winter Queen?” Her eyes were so wide, so glassy,
Min wanted to grab her and tell her that everything was alright,
but then her mother said, “Does she know about Andy?”

And just like that a mystical damn
broke—no, it was more like a curtain that held back Min’s
memories—it just disappeared like mist: evanescence. And Min knew
two things at the same moment. One was that the mystical curtain
that had kept her memories at bay had been put in place by her own
mother. The other thing she knew was that her sister was in grave
danger…and that she was not truly her sister.

Chapter 22

Andy strode through the little park
that sat adjacent to her apartment building. She liked this time of
night: no one around except her…and her tough little Jack Russell
terrier, Brutus. But, of course, there was a certain other
night-time dog-walker she ran into from time to time, and was
hoping to run into again tonight.

Sam.

Tall, broad shouldered, wickedly
handsome in that whole white knight sort of theme. Maybe it was the
serious muscleage he was toting, or maybe it was the shoulder
length red-brown hair he always had pulled back in a
ponytail—whatever it was about him, he looked like a guy who could
sweep a maiden off her feet…and then some.

Andy never knew when he and his part
Great Dane, part Mastiff, Shylock, would be out in the park,
seemingly waiting for her. One night she had been pretty sure that
she’d caught him rehearsing asking her out, sitting on a swing and
running lines to Shylock that were suspiciously close to romance
movie ask-you-out-on-a-date lines. She’d cleared her throat to let
him know she was there, and he’d practically fallen over backward
off the swing. Somehow she thought that he’d lost his nerve after
that, for he had failed to even try to ask her out. She already
told herself that she’d tell him yes at the first hint of the
request. But the words “will” or “would”, or “maybe we could” never
left his lips.

So two weeks had gone by, and he’d been
out of town—due to return tonight. He had said he was in law
enforcement of some vague sort. From the look of him, and his huge,
ferocious dog (who was such a baby he’d cowered when Brutus had
trotted over and nipped at him right off the bat) it
fit.

So Andy was there, pathetically hoping
that he would be out and about, back from whatever vague business
he was off on. It was freezing, even for the middle of
February—Augusta, Georgia never got as cold as it was that night.
Brutus had led her out through the monkey bars, over past the
nearly overflowing trash bins, to the swing sets.

Yes, she’d thought, that’s
exactly what I was thinking too. That she wished he would be there,
right there, where she could talk to him…maybe go ahead and ask him
out instead of waiting for him to build up the courage. But that
was absurd! He was a big strapping guy,
gorgeous
, and in law
enforcement…

And he was afraid of little
old me?

Well, that
was
kind of appealing. The
thought that he was shy, or at least felt enough about her that he
got all nervous around her. Now that was a thought to warm the
cockles of any young maiden’s heart. She took in a great lungful of
the night’s cold air, and sighed…and then started to cough because
the air had suddenly dropped twenty degrees colder than it had been
only a breath before.

It had rained earlier in the evening,
and there were puddles under the swings, where years of young feet
had created shallow craters. Andy blinked as she watched the
puddles freeze over, shimmering in the moonlight. The surface of
the ice striated into grooves, making almost a web of Jack Frost on
the outer rim of the puddle. As she walked closer, the ice turned
black, like water on a moonless night.

Brutus sniffed at the puddles and then
backed away growling. Andy reached down and scooped the little dog
up in her arms, his chest vibrating in her hands.

And then Andy heard a voice. It sounded
sweet, almost too kind and lovely to be real. And as her body
responded, her feet moved her forward even as her mind told her
that that sweet, kind voice was a lie. Even worse, it was a magical
lie of some sort. She marched right over to that voice and looked
down into that pitch black ice, and a face most unreal and
beautiful stared back. Pale alabaster skin, frigidly blue eyes, and
succulent lips the color of frozen mulberries. The face smiled and
licked her lips, as if she was hungry, and Andy was a t-bone
steak.

But then the face hissed in a most
inhuman voice, looking over Andy’s shoulder with angry menace. A
hand took hold of Andy’s shoulder and pulled her upright again. She
turned, half expecting to see her handsome neighbor, but instead a
beautiful stranger stood beside her, staring down into the dark
puddle of ice.

Andy almost smiled, almost decided to
play off her hallucination of the face in the ice and start
flirting. After all, her white knight hadn’t bothered showing up
yet, though she’d been out in the freezing park for almost…well,
six minutes tops…but still. Why not indulge in a little flirtation
with the inhumanly gorgeous man standing before her?

Brutus growled at the man before her,
baring his teeth.

And in that moment it hit
her:
he was inhumanly
gorgeous
. Hell, his green eyes were
practically glowing like flames in the relative darkness of the
little park, and just the sight of him seemed to have a magnetic
quality all its own—
and no human male has
ever had that good and pore-less of skin!

Oh crap…first frozen puddles
start talking to me, and then a…a…

“
Vampire!” the voice from
the puddle hissed. “She is mine. Dare touch her and I will pound
you into the ground!”

Andy rolled her eyes.
“A
vampire
—of
course you’re a freaking vampire!”

He looked to her as if she was
crazy.

“
What?” Andy shot back.
“First I get hung up on a guy that’s too shy to ask me out, and now
I’m being hit on by a freaking dead guy.”

The vampire got this look on his face,
like he was appalled. “I’m not hitting on you,” he looked nervously
around, and then back to Andy. “I’m here to—”

“
Oh yes, to kill me. That’s
what you vampires do. I feel so popular!”

He reached out and grabbed her by the
shoulders. “I’m here to—”

The inhuman voice from the puddle
screeched and interrupted him. “You’ll do nothing but
die!”

The vampire roared in outrage. “Can’t
either of you let me finish what I’m trying to say?”

With a crack like thunder the puddles
under the swing set broke open, and huge spider creatures crawled
out and started toward them, chittering menacingly.

Andy screamed and jumped back a
heartbeat before one of the spider thingies caught a hold of her.
The vampire grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her even further
away from the oncoming spiders.

“
I’m here to save you,” he
said. But one of the spider things jumped on his back, and another
three started to chase her across the park.

She started to run, but more spider
creatures started crawling out of the puddles in that direction as
well.

The vampire growled and roared, and one
of the spider creatures made an agonized squeal as he slayed
it.

And just like that the vampire stood
beside her once more, a sword in his grip as he hacked away at a
spider that was just about to jump on Andy’s leg. And that’s when
Andy saw that he was carrying her sister’s sword.

“
How did you get my sister’s
sword?” she gasped.

“
Min sent me to get
you.”

“
Yeah, sure,” Andy pushed
him away. “My sister would’ve sent a vampire to save me…a blood
sucking, soulless thing. Tell me another one.”

He gritted his teeth and let out a
haughty sigh. Then he held out his hand as he simultaneously struck
down another spider. In the palm of his hand gleamed Min’s ring.
The one their mother had forged. An item of singular power: the
ability to allow Min to teleport whoever wore the ring back home:
in effect, pulling them to safety.

Originally it had been so that Katarina
could teleport Min to safety. But their mother was still asleep,
trapped somewhere that wasn’t her body.

Alone…

Funny thing—until that moment it had
never occurred to her that her mother had never created a ring for
her to wear. Maybe she was just one hundred percent certain that
Andy would never get in any trouble. She looked around her at the
ever-increasing horde of spider creatures encroaching about her,
and then at the vampire standing before her, holding out her
sister’s ring, offering her a direct path to safety.

Thoughts flashed and pitched through
Andy’s fear and adrenaline-spiked brain, and her next thought just
dropped from her lips.

“
By the pestilent gods…are
you my sister’s boyfriend?”

The vampire’s inhumanly
handsome features softened, his eyebrows knitting with a half shrug
of his shoulders—body language saying,
Well…yeah.

“
Get out of here!” Andy
whispered in disbelief, not knowing herself if her excitement was
from horror or happiness.

The vampire shook his head and pressed
the ring into her palm. “We don’t have time for introductions right
now. You need to put the ring on. They will pull—”

“
Yeah, I know. They can pull
me back home using the…did you just say ‘they’?”

This time the vampire lunged to the
side, and spun, the portrait of skill and grace, and hacked an
airborne spider thing in half. Andy squeaked. The vampire rolled
his eyes, reached out and with preternatural swiftness took Brutus
from her arms, and the ring from her palm and placed it on her
middle finger.

Andy was about to repeat her
question:
They?
and,
What are you doing with my
dog?
But the sudden sensation of having
your physical and spiritual self folded in on itself, and then
sucked through a teeny-tiny straw, sort of took the breath she was
about to speak with right out of her. For a nauseating, dizzying
moment she shot through that tight, confined, crazy straw of
energy, and in a handful of beats she appeared, whole and ready to
throw up, in the living room of her sister’s house. Everything
around her was a blur of colors as she fell forward, losing her
balance and the starch in her legs. Two pairs of arms caught her
and dragged her across the floor and deposited her on the old
chintz couch. The upholstery was cool and familiar, and Andy let
herself relax into the worn softness of the cushions. She blinked
about ten times, and at last her sight began to clear. She looked
up to see her sister looking down upon her, her expression filled
with worry and concern, and a mirror image of that expression
limned the face of her mother.

Andy gasped and felt the surge of
shocked surprise jolt through her body. She shot up off the couch
and threw herself into her mother’s arms.

“
You’re
awake
…you’re really
awake
!”

Katarina’s arms enveloped Andy and she
whispered comforting words, more instinctive sounds a mother would
emit at any point in the last million or so years, to calm and
soothe a child. She stroked Andy’s hair as she gently pulled her
back onto the couch with her.