Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) (18 page)

             
“Hit me again.”

             
I gave it another shot, but I was back to plain old me.

             
“Doesn’t matter, it’s starting.” He was smiling again now. He was relieved. I thought he had been sure I would change, but now I realized he had had his doubts too.

             
“Why are you so happy that I’m going to become a monster like you.” I took a halfhearted dig because I was still mad, but he wasn’t fazed. It had been empty and he knew it. The guys called each other monsters all the time.

             
“Because even though you can’t see it, now you at least have a chance. Will you come downstairs now?”

             
The more it sunk in to my head I became too tense to be mad at him anymore with my angst now directed at this new beginning. It was actually happening. It was no longer something in the future, but the now. What would happen to me? Would it change how I thought? How I felt?

             
“I need to know who I am.” I looked at Caden desperately hoping he would have something, or someone, he hadn’t thought of that could give me some answers.

             
“You’re going to know soon.”

             
“I’ll know what, but not who. It’s the difference between knowing your hair is dark brown and knowing your Italian.”

             
“If you come downstairs tonight, I’ll make a call tomorrow. But it’s a long shot.”

             
“Why is it such a big deal if I sleep here?” I asked him genuinely curious.

             
“I just feel better with you in the room next door in case there is an issue.”

             
“Like what?”

             
“I don’t know. Are you coming?”

             
My question made him angry, but I didn’t know why. “You’ll call your person tomorrow?”

             
“Not exactly a person, but I’ll call.”

             
“Then ok.” The fact that he was so intent on having me stay in his apartment did help smooth my ruffled feathers. And he wasn’t sleeping with her, at least not tonight. That really smoothed my feathers. I’d have to hang my hat on that because it was about all I was going to get.

Chapter Nineteen

His cell phone vibrating against the table broke my train of thought. I saw Dave’s number before Caden picked it up and answered. “Send her down,” he said into the phone than hung up.

             
“That’s my curtain call. I’m outta here!” Mike who had been hanging out with us waiting, quickly got up to leave.

“I could really use you here,” I said to Mike. I was nervous already from what I had heard.

“Come on Lex! You don’t need me here, you’ve got Caden! He’s way tougher than me.”

“I don’t want to be here either. You don’t think she creeps me out?” said Caden.

“Who would turn a seventy year old into a vampire? Don’t they have any standards?” asked Mike.

“She had been a brilliant physicist and doctor. They didn’t want to let someone of her mental caliber go,” Caden explained.

“It’s just creepy. What if she was all Alzheimer’ed out by then?” Mike continued.

“It wouldn’t matter. The transition would heal her brain.”

The elevator door slid open and a woman who looked more like she was in her nineties walked in, leaning heavily on her cane.

“You owe me big!” Mike whispered to me under his breath.

“What do you think, I’m deaf boy? I could hear you carrying on before I even got in the elevator,” the older woman chastised. “You think I wouldn’t have been a little happier being stuck in a twenty year old body you young punk? I’m not the idiot that waited until I was on my death bed, those stupid jerks. Then they wonder why I’m so pissed off all the time!”

She walked up to the three of us and gave Mike a healthy whack on his shoulder with her cane, then turned her attention to me.

“You the little gal?”

I nodded as I motioned for her to sit.

“My name is Magda. Caden explained some, but I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do.” She spoke in what sounded like a German accent. She took my chin in her thin old hands and lifted my face to hers looking for something. “Now let me see one of your arms,” Magda asked me as she started to push up my sleeve, “You know what I have to do now, right?”

She looked at me with all seriousness, and I nodded for her to go ahead. 

Then I watched as a single fingernail grew and sharpened from Magda’s finger into what looked like a razor .

“I thought you would bite her?” asked Mike.

“Not until I smell and see her blood first. Blood is like a fine wine that you must appreciate with all the senses. Now if I just wanted a quick snack off a normal mortal, that would be different, but that’s not what we are doing here. Fetch me a glass.”

Mike handed her a glass tumbler.

“No, I want a wine glass, fine crystal only. I detest drinking from thick glass ware.”

He replaced the tumbler with a wine glass.

She made a small slice into my skin and a well of blood came to the surface. I noticed Magda’s nail instantly returned to normal as she held the wine glass beneath my arm, filling it a third of the way up. Once she was finished, she rubbed her fingers together and then rubbed them over the wound sealing it.

She lifted the glass of my blood to the light and swirled it around in the glass, murmuring this and that about its legs and body. She then inhaled deeply of it. It was like watching a wine tasting. I didn’t know that vampires could get goose bumps, or what that could possibly mean, but she did. I’d never met a vampire before or even knew that they existed, so maybe goose bumps were normal.

“Well?” Caden asked impatiently.

She shushed him with her hand as she gave the blood her full concentration.

“I shouldn’t taste it, but I must. Just a small taste,” she said as she tilted the glass back and took the tiniest little bit, then smiled with a look of pure satisfaction like the cat that ate the canary.

“I thought you always tasted it?” At least that is what I had seen in movies. I glanced over at Mike and Caden and they were looking just as intrigued as I was over her out of character actions. I guess the movies had something right.

“Not with her I can’t. I shouldn’t have even tasted the small bit I did, but I couldn’t resist.” She looked at the glass she had put down with almost remorse.

“What is she?” Caden and Mike asked at the same time.

“I don’t know. But it’s potent. I’m afraid it would be poisonous to me in a larger quantity, possibly even deadly, but what a way to go. Her blood is simply delicious,” she said as she brought the glass back under her nose and inhaled deeply.

“She’s going through a change. I can taste the activity. The blood feels like it’s fizzing when a creature is undergoing any kind of metamorphosis. ”

“Am I part demon?” I asked hoping she would say no. Couldn’t I be something else? Anything else?

“She tastes of demon, but much stronger than a Drauth. There is something else too, something delectably tasteful, but deadly, atleast to me.”

“What?” Mike, Caden, and I asked in unison.

“Sorry, but I have no idea. I’ve never tasted it before.”

“Are you sure? Could you take a guess?” Mike asked.

“It’s potent. That’s all I know. I’ve got to go now. I’ve got Blood Bingo in a half an hour,” Magda said.

Magda looked like she was having an internal debate then looked at us again, then turned toward me. “I don’t know what you are, but I do know it’s powerful. Wherever you come from is old, very old. I’m not talking thousands of years.” She looked at me intently then as if she wanted to impress this on me. “I’m talking millions of years.”

“I’m only twenty-four, how can you say something in my blood is millions of years old?”

“You keep thinking in human genetics. We, including my kind, don’t work like that. What we have passes with a cumulative age. We don’t pass down DNA, we pass down cells that multiply. That’s why it takes so long to change and it’s so unpredictable. The cells don’t become active until they feel like they are in optimum conditions.” She rose to her feet now, seeming a little too spry for the cane she carried, and I started to believe it was just for show. “Good luck to you,” she said to me. She turned to Caden with a bit harsher tone, “Don’t call me again. You know better than to drag me into this.” She pointed her fragile little finger into his shoulder to accent her point. “I don’t need the kind of trouble this is going to bring.” It looked comical as she stood next to Caden lecturing him. She was all of maybe 4’11” and probably weighed no more than 95 lbs.

She picked up her cane and grabbed a bottle of 150 year old scotch off the table. “Thanks boys, have a good evening.”

“Did she just take that scotch with her?” Mike asked as we all watched the doors close on her.

“It was her payment. She was rich before she became a vampire. She’s even richer now, she doesn’t need the money.”

“What did she mean when she told you that you knew better?”

“Only that there’s obviously going to be interest in you. The vampires might be interested too if they knew. You’re a novelty and an unknown. That tends to cause nerves. We’ve got a tentative balance going. Nobody likes when the balance of power shifts. Asking her to come here puts her in the uncomfortable position of withholding information from her kind.”

“Oh my god! Why would you even have her come then? I don’t want vampires after me too!” That was the last thing I needed. I don’t even know which was worse, crazy Drauths, or curious vampires who didn’t like the unknown. At least the Drauths wanted me alive, the vampires might just kill me with no chance to fight another day.

“Relax, she won’t say a word. She’d never cross me.”

I believed him, not that I had a choice now. I guess I’d just hope everything worked out okay. That’s all I seemed to be doing anymore. Sitting in this bar, day after day, just hoping everything would work out okay. It was getting old quickly.

Chapter Twenty

“Come on Lex! Concentrate!”

“Mike, I’m sorry, but it’s not happening.” I collapsed a sweaty mess onto the exercise mat. We’d been sparring for hours, and not even a flicker of super strength, or any kind of super anything had shown itself. “I’m not sure about this changing Mike, I know Magda said it was starting and the other night with Caden, but I feel nothing, less than nothing. I feel like a limp, weak jelly fish right now. Maybe it was a fluke.”

He collapsed next to me on the mat. “Nah, it’s happening, you heard Magda. This is how it happened for me too. I was just trying to rush you. I was hoping if you changed and got stronger it would be easier. I wouldn’t have to worry so much.”

“Worry about me?”

“Yeah, getting hurt. You know, if there’s an incident. You’ll be tougher once you change. Plus then we can start having fun.”

I was touched that he worried for me.

“How exactly did it happen for you?” I asked. I was always hesitating to ask the question before now. I wasn’t sure how personal of a subject it was, but it seemed the perfect opportunity and the curiosity was killing me.

“I was twenty-eight and working on a tobacco farm in Virginia as an indentured servant when it happened. It started slow. It took about four months before I totally changed. It was scary as shit, I had no idea what was happening. I was afraid to tell anyone. Back then, if something weird happened, you kept it to yourself unless you wanted to be swinging from an oak. People got real weird back then. About five months after it started Caden found me. He said he had sensed my energy. My life had been a hard one, so when he offered to take me with him I jumped at the chance.”

“Do you know who your parents are?”

“My mother died in child birth. My human father died young as well. It was a tough life back then. Not many of us lived that long.”

“Do you know the demon that changed you?”

“My demon father? No.”

“But Tamara is your niece so you have some family.”

“She’s not my blood niece. I found her in a crack den, with her mother dead from an overdose, when she was five. It was either us or the foster system. I just didn’t have the heart to put her into the system after what she had already gone through.”

Tamara was an orphan; didn’t I feel like the biggest heel?