Min's Vampire (25 page)

Her mind had raced as her pace had
gradually slowed, and her body shook from cold and weariness. The
warm light seemed like a beacon. Watering some rather plentiful
hanging baskets of mums and geraniums, a woman in a blue and pink
waitress uniform looked over and smiled at Andy.

“
I just started a fresh pot
of coffee. Would you like a cup?”

It was the woman’s job to serve people
food and drink, but for some reason Andy couldn’t fathom, her words
felt more like an invitation than a sales pitch.

Andy nodded and started walking toward
the waitress and the warm light of the diner. “I’d love
some.”

“
Good, good. It’s been
one
hell
of a slow
night.” The woman’s voice was lovely, with only the slightest of
southern accents. She winked as she pushed through the door of the
diner. “And I could use the company.”

Andy followed, and was comforted by the
mingling scents of the diner: coffee and honey, bacon and pancakes,
and powdered sugar. The waitress pointed out a booth that was
halfway back the length of the restaurant, and right at the
entrance to the server station.

Andy slid into the Naugahyde-covered
seat and felt her body cry out in relief—to finally be off her
feet. In a flash the woman was back with a cup and saucer in one
hand, a pot of steaming, fresh coffee in the other. With practiced
skill she turned the cup over on its saucer and filled it up. She
placed a bowl of creamers beside the cup then asked if Andy was
hungry.

The coffee smelled wonderful, but not
only wasn’t Andy hungry, her stomach roiled just at the thought of
drinking anything either. She gave the woman her best smile and
shook her head. “Maybe later?”

“
We’re open all night,” the
waitress said with a beautiful smile, walking back to the server
station to start rolling silverware into paper napkins. She hummed
a tune Andy had never heard before as her graceful hands made quick
work of her side work. The song didn’t sound like something
current
. Maybe an old folksong?

The diner felt warm enough, nearly too
warm, but Andy still felt such a chill in her bones. As if they
were wrought from nothing more than frigid solid pieces of water.
Not to mention the arctic sensations that played in her stomach and
clung around her heart. She ran a hand up under her eyes, rubbing
away the threat of tears.

Andy sat, staring at the cup of coffee,
holding it between her chilled hands, inhaling the aroma of the
dark roast, but not taking even a sip. She just could not
reconcile, couldn’t believe, that her mother and her sister had
been lying to her for her entire life—well, for the last year,
since that was in actuality her entire lifespan.

I’m not real.

Not real. What in the name of god did
that even mean? Did it mean that she was only a magical construct?
Something temporary, an illusion fashioned out of some sort of
primordial mist? It made her chest hurt to even think it, but that
was all she really had, wasn’t it? Her thoughts? For her family was
not her family, and her life was a lie, and her
memories…

She pushed that thought aside. Noting,
nothing that had happened so far, not the spiders, or the wicked
faerie Queen—not even her mother’s news about her origins—felt
quite as horrid as the realization that everything she remembered
was a lie. Not even a lie. They had never existed, they had never
happened!

An hour ago she had been just a woman
standing in a park, waiting for the man she had a crush on to come
out and talk to her. And now she was…

“
What the hell am I?” she
said, closing her eyes and sniffling. The heat and burning of
imminent tears started to form behind her eyes. She hated crying.
It made her feel so ridiculous, so out of control.

“
You’re a star,” the
waitress said in her sweet voiced accent. Andy laughed, and blotted
her eyes on her napkin, looking up to the waitress. She stood there
with a pot of steaming hot coffee in her hand and that beatific
smile on her face. She leaned over and refilled Andy’s suddenly
empty cup.

Andy blinked at the cup, and the fact
that it was empty, and then she looked up again at the
waitress.

But the woman was no longer a waitress.
The woman before her was stunning, probably the most beautiful
creature Andy had ever beheld. Tall and voluptuous, with long waves
of fiery red hair that flowed down her back to her hips, skin so
pale yet so radiant, it literally looked kissed with sunlight. Her
lips were full and pouty, the color of strawberries, and her eyes
shone the radiant green of the rainforest—lush and so very, very
deep. Inhuman vertically slit pupils accented those eyes. She
smelled like a mix between a farmer’s market and a
forest.

She wore a diaphanous green silk gown
that matched her eyes, and though it covered every inch of her, it
did nearly nothing to conceal her.

The only thing remaining of the
waitress was the compassion in her eyes, tempered by a cool,
eternal patience. She smiled more deeply, sliding into the booth
seat opposite Andy. Andy looked around for anyone to call out to.
But the diner was empty.

Something came to her out of the
cacophony of terror that was her mind, something her mother had
said. That one Queen had come to her, to press some great power
into human form, and all just to keep it from the other Queen. The
Queen of Winter, the beautiful, terrible creature she’d glimpsed in
the frozen puddle. And though her coloring was all wrong, and this
creature seemed to radiate heat not bitter cold, there was a
striking similarity in the features of her face, and the features
of what had glared back at her from in that frozen puddle of
spidery craziness.

Andy gulped, that icy feeling spreading
through her with renewed intensity. Seeing how bad things had
gotten, and how quickly, this could only be the Queen that was
hunting her. Which seemed consistent with the sort of day she was
having.

Andy sighed, feeling her shoulders
loosen. She didn’t have anywhere else to run, and no way of
defending herself. “You must be the Queen that wants to kill me.
Well, good, I’m sick of waiting around for it. Go ahead. Get. It.
Over. With.”

The fae’s head snapped back and the
most beautiful peel of silvery laughter came out of her mouth, like
tiny bells. Sensations washed over Andy, as if someone was stroking
feathers over her every nerve. Then the faerie Queen held her
belly, the nonexistent thing that it was, and bore her startling
green eyes into Andy once more. “I put a lot of effort into shaping
you into this lovely form, I hardly think I want to destroy
it.”

Andy’s eyes felt like they
were about to pop right out of her skull. “
You
made me?”

“
Yes my dear. Let me
introduce myself. I am Arianna, Queen of Summer, of Light and
Water. And I molded you into what you are.”

Andy jerked forward, the words tumbling
out of her mouth before she could catch them. “What am
I?”

“
You’re human…well at least,
for the most part. But I already told you what you were before your
mother and I interceded.”

Andy just stared at her without
comprehension.

“
A star my dear. Well, a
piece of one.” The fae woman glanced out the window of the diner
and smiled secretly to herself. “I believe you came from Andromeda.
That is why you are so named…Andy.” Just the way she said her name
made an invisible string pull at her heart.

Andy sat back in the booth and clutched
the napkin that was by her right hand. “No…that’s—”

“
Impossible?” The Summer
Queen waved her hand dismissively. “As if humans know anything
about what is possible. They know not even the limits of their own
world, yet they seek to find other worlds to be ignorant of as
well.”

Andy felt her stomach lurch. “So I’m
some sort of meteor? A big piece of space rock?”

“
Heavens no,” the faerie
chuckled, “you landed on this earth, but not in this world. You
came to rest in Faerie, and once there you became what you were
meant to be: living energy, pure radiant light.”

A sphere of some sort of
energy,
her mother had said.

“
So I did the only thing I
could do,” Arianna continued. “I transformed you into this form,
and gave you guardians, a family to love and protect
you.”

“
But why? And why is the
other Queen after me?”

“
Both questions have the
same answer. My cousin, Sliva, Queen of Winter, of Air and
Darkness, well…she’s gone quite mad you see. Happens sometimes to
the very old. But not usually one of our station. She’s family, and
I love her…and I hate her. We’ve been battling for thousands of
years, so it’s hard to keep a concise track, but it seems like
forever. And every year we both win, and we both lose, and that
keeps the balance of power between the two Courts. But as I said,
she’s been driven insane, and she’s seething for more
power.”

Arianna looked out the window of the
diner again and sighed. “Why she’d ever want more power is beyond
me. Our powers are so great already, one nearly has not enough
things to put it into. But for the last few millennia she has been
very active in trying to gain more power. Her dream is to someday
plunge the world into one endless winter. As I said,
crazy.

“
Our powers were created
equal, to make sure they canceled each other out. That is our
purpose, that is our reason to exist. I am the beginning of things,
and she is the end. She is the Queen of Winter, of Darkness and
Air, and of the end of things. She does not create anything, only
destroys and kills. I, on the other hand, am the Queen of
beginnings, of creation.”

She fell silent, staring out the
window, her warm, green eyes haunted.

“
So, she’s looking for me,
to…” Andy’s stomach churned and she felt nauseous.

“
To devour you, yes,”
Arianna said cheerfully. “She will take you into herself, to
finally make herself more powerful than I, to upset forever the
power of the Courts.”

“
That’s why you hid me with
my…”

“
With your family, yes.” Her
green eyes bore into Andy. “They are your family, I made you from
them, molded you into their lives. Do they not feel like they
belong to you, and you to them?”

Andy had to admit, they did feel like
they were her family. And she felt as if she belonged with them.
Even with the lies, they loved her, and she them. Actually, she
wanted nothing more for them to show up right then and
there.

“
Alas, I think my dalliance
in subterfuge has not been good enough, for my cousin searches this
very moment to find you.” Arianna sounded almost bored, certainly
not as if she were nervous about the Winter Queen finding
her.

“
Yeah, she found me in the
park across the street from my apartment building.”

“
It’s not your fault. I
imagine I could have hidden you better. Maybe I could’ve made you
into a blade of grass in a forest in the Ozarks, or one of the
roses in that quaint little garden at your White House. My cousin
may have never found you. But she has, and that’s…well,” Arianna’s
eyes radiated with satisfaction, “that’s just
marvelous.”

Andy blinked. Then she sat forward and
looked upon the faerie Queen with bewilderment. “What?”

The Summer Queen gave a silent chuckle
as she waved away the scorn in Andy’s voice.

“
What I mean is I had to
make the crazed old girl want you in the worst way. How else could
I get her to ignore the fact that you are a star, a being of
light?” She leaned forward and touched a single finger to the hand
Andy still clutched the napkin in. That one touch was like being
struck by lightning, like having every molecule in her body catch
on fire at once, her mind turned on as if the rest of her life had
just been some kind of fuzzy dream. Perfect clarity, and the roar
of the most terrible, blinding power—and she liked it.

The Queen broke the contact, pulling
back her hand, and the instant she did, Andy felt as if a part of
her—no, not part of her, that she and the creature sitting across
from her were one and the same.

Andy trembled, pulling her hand back
and cradling it against her chest, her breathing suddenly rapid,
her mind spinning, though her thoughts were nowhere near as clear
or as brilliant as they were a moment ago.

Arianna sat back, and she too was
breathing hard, her eyes glowing and wild. And she looked as if she
were as disturbed as Andy had been.

She glanced at the hand she’d touched
Andy with, and then clenched it into a shaking fist, drawing it
under the tabletop of the booth. She took a few more ragged
breaths, and then turned her gaze back upon Andy. Her eyes no
longer glowed, but there was still that wild intensity.

“
My cousin only sees that
you are a thing of power, and that I am hiding you from her. That
makes you absolutely irresistible to her.”

Andy had fallen back against
the padded back of the booth, still clutching her hand to her. “So
you
want
her to
find me?”