Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) (13 page)

“Philip!  Don’t!”

Caroline hissed at him in a whisper from behind.  He had thought that she wouldn’t be able to follow him (she hadn’t ever been as fast as him and she wasn’t much for tracking) but here she was.  He had underestimated his sister, hadn’t taken into account all of the training she must have done since the last time they saw each other.  He hadn’t done that because he hadn’t known about it and he hadn’t known about it because he hadn’t asked.  Once they sorted through this mess (if they did?) he needed to make more of an effort with her, with all of his family.  “
Just one more thing to add to the list of fuckups,”
he told himself, allowing himself one tiny moment of self-pity.  But then she was standing beside him and there was no more time for self-pity or doubt.

“Why?” he shot back, not understanding but still keeping his volume as low as hers.

She didn’t answer but took out a little pickpocket set and jimmied the door open.

“I’m impressed,” he whispered, glancing at her in surprise. 

She held up a finger in front of her lips, the universal sign to shut the hell up.  They moved inside and Caroline shut the door before walking into the middle of the disheveled room.  There were clothes everywhere. 

Philip realized that might just be the way she lived, he didn’t know her well enough to know whether she was tidy or disorganized, but it was also more than that.  Left halfway on and halfway off her naked mattress was a knapsack half full of clothing that looked like it had been in the process of being hastily packed. 

The worst part, the part that sent cold jolts of fear through his body, was the money.  There were bills leaking out from under that same mattress and several fistfuls of it laying on the floor.  He didn’t care how disorganized a person was, there was no way she had just left her money lying around as carelessly as all of this.  He turned to look at Caroline and saw that she had a grim, set expression on her face.

“She’s not here,” he said with the wounded wonderment of a child expecting a superhero who never came to the rescue in the end.

“No, she’s not.  She’s gone.  They’ve taken her.”

“How do you know?  How do you know it was them?”

In lieu of an answer she pointed to the wall beside her and he squinted.  Even in the dark of the room, he could see what she wanted him to get.  He still didn’t understand what it meant, but along the wall and the floor as well, there was a fine film of what looked like purple sand.  He knelt down as if to touch the stuff and Caroline rushed forward, grabbing him with more force than he had given her credit for having.

“No!” she whispered harshly. “Don’t, Phillip.  Don’t touch it.  You don’t have any idea what it can do and we don’t have time for you to go hurting yourself.  We’ve got to move.”

“To where?  We don’t have a fucking clue where she is.”

“You may not,” grim set of the mouth, cold eyes, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t.  I think I know exactly where they went.  It looks like you’re going to have to actually listen to me for a change.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Why did you go, little magpie?  Why did you leave him?  Things are dangerous now, very dangerous indeed.  You’ve got to be careful, to make the choices of your light ancestors.  You’ve got to be so very careful or all will be lost, and lost, and even more lost.  All will be lost and nothing will ever be the same again.”

“But nothing ever
will
be!” she cried out in the dark, turning wildly from one direction to the next in the hopes of pinpointing exactly where this voice was coming from.  It was an impossible task and although she kept trying, she knew that it was impossible. 

She knew that the same way that some separate part of her knew that she was dreaming again, dreaming of the magpie woman and all she had to foretell.  There was that same sense of clarity and her mind’s stubborn desire to reject it, the way she had before when the magpie woman had told her to stay by the dead man’s side. 

She understood what that meant now, that she had always known on some level that things in the world weren’t exactly what she thought and what people in the general population wanted so badly to believe.  Vampire. The dead man was the phrase used for vampire by somebody from so long ago that there hadn’t really been a commonly known word for it. 

She had known that in the dream in Philip’s house, but still she had done exactly the opposite of what she had been instructed.  The voice had been very clear that it was imperative that she stay close to her vampire lover and instead she leaped out of bed and ran as far and as fast as she could do.  She ran and ran herself straight into the arms of the enemy.  Was that right?  She moaned in her sleep, writhing with the uncertainty of it all, still fighting against the magpie voice still speaking to her in a soft, steady voice.

“It will be the same and not the same,” that voice said with an almost irritating calm, “it will be the same as it has always been inside of you in the places you dare not visit and nothing at all like the life you’ve lived before.  Awakening is like that, little magpie.  Learning means having to change and change is not the same.  You know that, little girl, you know that and the time for your awakening is now.  Wake up now, magpie.  Wake up.  Megan, WAKE UP!”

Megan gasped and shot up, thinking vaguely that she had to stop waking up this way.  It was the second time in...in how long?  How long had she been asleep this time?  For a woman with chronic insomnia, she had sure been doing a lot of sleeping these days and in the most inconvenient times and places. 

How long, it was one question and one she wanted answered, but it wasn’t the most important one.  It wasn’t the most important one at all and after a moment of confusion in which she shook her head quickly, trying to shake out the beginning of a pounding headache, she realized which one was. 

“Where am I?” she whispered, her voice sounding like a scared little girl.  It reminded her of the way she used to wake up in her foster homes, in the group homes that never felt safe, terrified until she got some grip on where she was.  It was the fear that had been the root cause for her insomnia, her body’s cranky unwillingness to let go and get some sleep. 

She hated coming to and not knowing where she was.  And in that respect, this was kind of her nightmare, wasn’t it?  Because no amount of struggling to swim away from the remnants of her dream would tell her where she was this time.  Because she didn’t know. 

You couldn’t remember something you didn’t know, no matter how good you were or how hard you tried.  Her head pounded more and more with the effort of it all but there was nothing she could do.  She didn’t know where she was and as she started to recall the details of her having been taken, she knew why.

“What was it?  What did they do to me?”

She could see it now, the scene with her and the strange men in her pitiful apartment.  For a moment, she turned away from it, not wanting to see.  Again with the mindset of a child, she did her best to turn away.  She didn’t want to see because seeing it would make it real.  Seeing was believing and Megan Wright wasn’t interested in believing. 

She would gladly have gone straight back to the dream with the magpie woman (except that she was the magpie, wasn’t she?  In the dream the woman used the nickname magpie for
her
) if it meant not having to look at things for what and how they really were.  But it was the way things usually were when you tried not to think about one particular thing; it became the absolute only thing she could think about, the only thing she could see. 

There she had been, kneeling practically on all fours in order to get to the money stuffed under her bed when she had been made painfully aware that she was not alone.  There had been two men there, one who didn’t seem to be able to stop talking and one who would not talk at all.  It was the one who spoke she had paid attention to, but it was the one who wouldn’t that she should have kept an eye on because he was the one who had caused the real trouble.

He was the one who had opened his hand and revealed a palm full of what looked like purple dust, had blown it into the air like a kid playing with the pieces of a dandelion.  Except that if it was dust it would have acted like dust, and whatever the hell this was didn’t act like dust at all.  At least not any dust that Megan had ever seen.

Because it didn’t settle in any kind of a way.  It just kept going and going, traveling across the room and through the air like a bullet that was meant for her and her alone.  It was dust with a target in mind and it was going to hit that target, come hell or high water. 

She did her best to hold her breath but she couldn’t go on without breathing forever, could she?  No, she couldn’t, it wasn’t a reasonable thing to ask of her and so she opened her mouth and took in a deep, gasping breath and saw with horror that the purple dust happily made its way inside. 

Inside of her.  It was inside of her now and whatever it was meant to do, she wasn’t going to be able to stop it.  She might have figured out a way to try, or at least to ask some questions about just what the hell was going on, anyway, but she was getting so tired.  So goddamned tired!  She wanted to keep her eyes open, but there was no way.  She simply wasn’t strong enough.  All of the sleep she had missed since she was a child seemed to be coming upon her all at one time and she wasn’t strong enough to keep it down and out of her way. 

Her eyelids grew heavier, heavy in a way that made Megan imagine little bricks tied to the lashes and pulling them down with the confidence of one who knew that he was absolutely going to get his way.  And so she slipped into an uneasy sleep or if she was in the mood to be really brutally honest, passed out, blissfully unaware of what was happening to her for the time being.

The last thing she remembered was hearing the two men bicker like brothers or old, old friends. 
They were both talking now
, she thought passively, both talking just fine.  Maybe it was because she wasn’t watching or looking anymore.  Maybe the poor guy was just shy, in which case perhaps breaking into women’s apartments in the middle of the night wasn’t really the best line of work for him, after all.

He seemed perfectly vocal with her on the way out, though.  Didn’t seem to be having any issues at all.  At least not with his ability to speak, which wasn’t to say that he didn’t have any issues. 

“What the fuck, man?  Why’d you blow so much?!”  That was the first man, the one who had seemed to find himself exceedingly charming when he had talked to her.  He had lost all of his sound of pompous self-assurance in a real hurry. 

“Would you have like to do it instead?  I was under the impression that you weren’t so confident in your mastery of the powder elixirs.  If I’m mistaken, then by all means, you can handle it the next time.”

“No!” the first man interjected quickly, even Megan in her stupor able to detect that there was real fear in his response, “No, that’s not what I was saying.  I just want to make sure that we get this shit right, that’s all.  You know what’ll happen if we don’t.  You know how the boss feels about mistakes.”

“Of course I do.  Doesn’t tolerate them.  I’m the last man on the face of this earth who needs a reminder on that one.  You’d do well to remember that when you question my methods.”

“Shit.  Shit, Gordon, I forgot.  I’m sorry, man, that was tasteless of me.  I just want to get this right.  If we bring this little bitch to the boss in anything less than pristine condition, well, I don’t even want to think about what’s going to happen to us.”

“No,” the formerly mute man growled low in his throat, “you don’t.  So we better not fuck it up then, wouldn’t you say?”

Later, Megan would think that there was undoubtedly more to the conversation than that, but she would never know exactly what it was.  That was about the time she went from being on her way out to all of the way out and there was nothing left but deeply rooted dreams that felt like more than that, up until the magpie woman brought her back to life (because what was sleep if not some small bridge between life and the afterlife?).  She had gone from that to this, this process of her rude awakening, and she had zero idea what had happened in the interim.

“You wanna give me a hint, magpie lady?  Feel like helping a girl out?”

But apparently the magpie woman had said everything she was interested in saying and, for the moment, she was content to stay silent.  Of course.  Things would have been too damned easy if the little fairy godmother inside of her head decided to do a little voice-over and lead her through her current predicament and straight away from her captors.  If there was one thing Megan had learned, it was that things rarely came easily.  At least not for her.

“Thanks for nothing,” she muttered moving her fingertips gingerly to her temples and rubbing experimentally.  God, if she had ever thought she had suffered a headache before, she had been wrong.  Sickeningly wrong. 
This
was a headache.  What she had now was the kind of headache that made a person wish she could just lay down and die.

It was the kind that started in the base of her skull and crept up like a thief in the night, moving along so swiftly that even the follicles of her hair hurt before settling with happy little thudding movements in her temples.

Thump, thump, thumping so raucous that waves of nausea wracked her body and she moved to all fours, her hair hanging in her face and sure that she was going to vomit everywhere.  Her mouth filled with a metal flavored saliva and no amount of swallowing did her any good.  She spat, unladylike but what the hell, it wasn’t like there was anyone there to watch her (not that she was aware of) and that taste was making the sick feeling SO much worse.

She spat again, once, twice, and squinted in the gloomy light.  Was that blood in her saliva?  Was she bleeding?  But no, on closer inspection she saw that it wasn’t blood but some of that purple dust.  Just how much of that shit had she taken in?  It must be the reason for her headache, she couldn’t think of anything else that could have caused such an unnatural kind of pain to vibrate through her skull. 

Thinking about that, about how those two fuckers had blown some weird stuff in her face and now she was on her hands and knees while she decided whether or not to sick up her insides, made her all of the sudden blindingly angry.

As a rule, Megan tried to avoid getting really wrapped up in any kind of emotion but in this instance it actually felt like it was helping.  The anger had a kind of a focusing effect and Megan imagined that it was even reducing the feeling of her pain.  If that was the case, then bring on the anger.  As far as she was concerned this was a time when it was warranted and if it was going to help her get out of this, then she was going to roll with those particular punches. 

After the gut-wrenching sickness started to dissipate some, Megan sat back on her heels and looked around her.  It was the first time she really thought to do it and the first thing she noticed was how very dark it was.  Megan was a girl who
liked
the dark, but something about this dark made her feel uneasy.  It wasn’t a normal darkness.  It felt like the complete absence of light, like somebody had managed a trick so that light would never touch it again.  

“Shut up, Megan, you’re being an idiot.”

She tried to tell herself that she was still trying to shake herself loose of her dream, but she knew that wasn’t the case.  It was getting harder and harder to convince herself that things around her were still at least kind of normal when it was so clear that they weren’t; they weren’t at all.