The Living and the Dead (Tyler G Book 3) (17 page)

Zack shook his head.

"I don't know for certain.
She probably meant her, Darla, Finias, Gregor, Lyn and... Then I'm drawing a
blank. I know some others of my kind, but none that would be bothered by what
happened to me. Maybe Anne? I doubt
that
. She and Xenses used to be
friendly. That's how I met her in fact. She was spying on me for him. Sleeping
with Troy, my old roommate, in order to watch me and see what I was doing. Then
we started to kind of date. Not that she still doesn't have sex with Troy on
occasion. He's mainly with Barb." There was a smile and a head shake.
"You should get her into bed sometime, if we're all going to be trading
around like that. Clear it with Ginger first, since otherwise they might have
to fight. Barb is her equal in rank, and older, but I
wouldn't
bet
against Ginger if they fought over you. You're her property after all, and Barb
is kind of a wimp, for a Master Vampire. She really needs to learn a lot more
about fighting. In fact, if you get the time you should work with both her and
Troy on that. He knows almost nothing, and is Human, so be careful there. Ben
too. They're both learning to be Vamps though, so they need it. It comes
up."

Tyler let the man talk and didn't
stop to think about how different his life had gotten over the last few months.
Sure, he'd been raised by a Demon, but he hadn't
known
that, which, in
the end, meant he'd lived a pretty normal life. After a fashion. It hadn't
really been that way, but it had
felt
like it to him.

Before they left, moving quickly,
they put the food away. It was a lot more than it looked like, since there were
a lot of cans and the boxes were huge things. There was also, for some reason a
whole lot of shortening and peanut butter.

Zack saw the look on his face and
tapped one of the red plastic lidded glass jars.

"Calorie density. My guess
is that you need to be getting about fifteen thousand a day. Minimum. Since
it's going to be transformed to magical energy, you won't have any real side
effects that way. Of course it all goes to Anne. Your mother. Then she'll pass
a bit back to you at need. If nothing else you can act as an extra power source
for her. Maybe you can even learn to collect energy from the universe for that?
That would be huge, in potential."

After they got the food put away,
Zack pulling several jars of things and a loaf of soft bread for later, they
went off to the bookstore.

It was order night after all.

The next days flew by fast and
hard, as far as Tyler was concerned. No one tried to kidnap, hurt, or kill him,
which was a great sign, and the work went smoothly. Books were shelved and
other than eating like a pig, pushed into it by Zack and Eve, of all people,
nothing much seemed to happen.

The meeting with the new
Coalition people went smoothly, and Ty was able to kind of pass work off onto
the others a bit more. The work in the music studio was harder than he'd
thought it would be, since there was a lot of repetition to get things right.
After they finished though, which took nearly a week of nights to get done, the
band's part was finished for a while. The songs were put together almost within
a day, since Keeley was on the job and she had a team of slaves to do the work.

So, as the next week came around,
his actual job was to sit in the house, and wait for things to be put together
for him. That part was really hard for him to get his head around. The first
album wasn't even due out for six months. That news hit him like a ton of
bricks, since he'd kind of figured that he was going to be working constantly
through that time. They didn't have live gigs even, though they met to practice
a few times a week. That was the plan anyway.

On the good side, he found that
he wasn't actually left to his own devices. He had two girlfriends after all,
and apparently an Eve now. She showed up every night to help him practice
magic. Or, to begin with, more and more complex meditation. The basis of what
he needed to learn, or so she kept telling him.

That part wasn't going to last
forever. He learned that after they finished with fighting practice one night
about two weeks later. Ginger kissed him, then went into the mansion, leaving
him with Eve in the yard. If it was a movie there would have been the sudden
testing then, given how it was set up. An epic fight to show that he was
finally ready.

Instead she sat on the ground,
just like always. It was a graceful thing, her black jeans tight but not
hampering her movements, which probably had to do with being a Vampire.
Otherwise he couldn't see how it would work. They pulled a bit, but Ty really didn't
see how a person could sit cross legged like that without splitting a seam. It
could have been magic. Possibly extra-stretchy fabric.

He followed along, having an
easier time of it, at least in theory. He was in loose gray sweat pants, and a
black t-shirt, which was tight enough to show that he wasn't fat, but hadn't
ripped when he struggled with the much faster and stronger girls. As far as the
fighting went, he didn't have any delusions of grandeur. Eve could take him in
a fight by making his head vanish. Oh, it did look like he might
survive
that,
but it would be hard.

Ginger could probably do that
too, or get close enough to it that he wouldn't notice the difference.

It was really clear that she'd
been holding back a lot as far as raw power. Being delicate with him, like he
was the one that had to be coddled and protected. Which was, he knew, probably
true enough. Thankfully not all of the Vampires were like that. He'd practiced
with Rebekah and Scotty the day before and easily dominated them. They were
stronger and a bit faster, but his greater skill made up for that pretty well.
That, or they'd realized that his battered ego in that way needed them to
sacrifice their own to let him feel all right about himself.

If so, they were darned good
friends.

Eve looked at him peacefully, and
gave him a small smile.

"So, you've practiced a lot
lately. You've learned to hold concepts and can do three at once and add them
together into a single thing. That's a great skill, as far as magic goes. Now
we need to get you attuned to what magical power is. I want you to try and feel
it." She put her hand out toward him, palm up, and nodded at him.
"Put your hand over mine, but don't let our palms touch. About six
inches?"

 Without saying anything he just
did it, actually trusting her more or less. Oh, he half expected her to grab
him, and possibly blackmail him into kinky sex, but that was all Keeley's fault.
She had come to him in her normal form to gloat. So at least it wasn't
really
his mom. It still shook him when he thought about it, so he took a moment to
hold the concept of being open and focused.

Eve nodded at him, like she was
able to read what he was doing. Which, he understood almost instantly, she
was
.

"Now, feel the changes.
That's all. Don't do anything else."

To him it felt... Like nothing
really. There was no particular warmth, being that they were both dead, and
kind of cold. No buzzing or anything that would have been expected that way.
What he found though, after about ten minutes of sitting there was that he
knew
what she was doing. It was soft, and gentle, but there. A concept of projection
that interacted with his hand.

In short it was simply subtle on
a level that he'd never thought of before.

After he got it, the Vampire
nodded.

"You have it. Now, hold that
feeling, and interact with my hand. Gently. This is stronger than it seems like
it should be, if you have an energy source for it, which you do through your
link to The Rotted. Don't for a second think that she can't, or won't, cut you
off if you start to take too much. So, slowly, not using too much energy,
return the concept to me."

She seemed to tense, like there
might be an explosion, or a rush of power. There wasn't. He just held the idea
that was being shared, and slowly let it become more powerful until it was
about the level that the girl had done herself.

She grinned at him and nodded.

"Perfect. Hold that now.
What you are doing is putting a small trickle of magic into the world. This
isn't a lot, but if you can do this, you can do magic. I wasn't really sure you
could control it. Zack and Keeley both thought you could, but theory and
practice are two different things, right?"

Ty could see that, but didn't
speak, since it was hard to do that and hold a concept at the same time. He
could kind of do that, if he was picking a simple idea to go after, but adding
magic was new to him. There would be no dancing while he did this kind of thing
for a long while. More like sitting and focusing deeply to get anything done.

After a long while, a time that
was over half an hour, Eve nodded a few times.

"Good. Pull it back now.
Excellent
."
Her grin was wicked then, and she let her face hold that while she talked.
"Now, I want you to try and add magic to a few basic concepts. You have
healing down by your nature, so we won't bother with that. First, why don't you
try something simple, like flame. Everyone can generate fire pretty easily.
Then we'll work the other basic elements to see which is your personal
strongest one." There was something in the way she said it that seemed
off. Sly and like she was lying to him.

He wasn't buying it.

"So, you don't think I can
do any of it?" It didn't bother him really, since that seemed farfetched
anyway.

Brushing her shoulder length hair
back she shook her head.

"Honestly? If you throw
enough power at it, you can do
anything
you can hold mentally. What I
want you to do is focus so intently that you do it without using much power.
That's the key here. Magic takes energy, but the key to mastery
isn't
in
blasting the world into submission, but finding the lowest use of power while
still doing what you want to accomplish. So, work on the smallest point, hold
the concept of flame and trickle magic to it as slowly as possible, until it
burns where you want it to. Hold it in the air, about here."

His hand was still being held
out, and she flipped his palm, then gestured about half a foot over his palm.
Her hand was hard, he noticed. All the Vampires were like that, as far as he'd
seen. For that matter he kind of was too, if not as much. It was apparent when
Ty was with Calley. That got him to think about the orgy that had happened. It
had been entertaining, but he found something very interesting.

He preferred having one partner
at a time.

Taking a deep breath he didn't
really need, old habits being hard to break, Tyler recalled the sense of flame.
The image was powerful at first, but then, with a lot of discipline, the idea
formed. There above his hand, there was a flame. It wasn't visible, but he
knew
it was there. Then, like he'd done earlier, he started to put out a bit of
energy.

Nothing seemed to happen visibly.
Moving slowly, holding two ideas at once, he pushed a tiny bit harder. Then
again, after taking another breath. There was only the tiniest hint of magic to
it all, but on the third try a flickering blue flame came into being.

Then he firmed it up, not adding
power, but by making the flame smaller, now that he could tell where it was
exactly. The air burned in an oblong space about the size of a sugar cube.

Softly, Eve sighed. That was
meant to signal him, he knew, since she didn't breathe all the time, even if
she was better about that than most Vampires.

"Not bad. Freaking great,
actually. Now, hold it. Try to firm up the idea, and lower the amount of magic.
Use only what you need to keep it going." It was a soft whisper. A gentle
thing that tickled at the base of his brain.

In a way it wasn't really fair,
since it was distracting and made him want to have sex with her, rather than do
the cool new trick that he'd learned. Ignoring her as the flame flickered, he
did it. The concept grew sharper, and a bit smaller, making the flame respond.

Then he pulled the power back. It
was a bit of a shock, but after a while he understood that he only needed about
half the power he was using to get the job done.

After a while Eve waved at him.

"And take the power all the
way down..."

He did it and the flame just died
away.

Rather than reward him with
pleasant words or the blowjob that he kind of wanted from her, Eve gave him
another task instantly. He had to grin about that, since she was being a good
instructor, and he knew it.

"Now, hold the sense of
water, in the same place. As little magic as possible." Again her words
were tense, but the drop of liquid that was pulled from the surrounding air
just hung there in space, until he removed the power, and the large fat drop
hit his hand.

She gave him a look that was
darker then.

"Earth. Do the same thing.
Now."

That was a bit harder, and took
more power, but he responded by making the whole thing smaller. Then he slowly
allowed the whole thing to grow, making a ball about the size of a dime after a
while. It was floating there, the collected dust and detritus of the world
hanging in space without extra effort for some reason.

When it came time to do air, the
Vampire waved at him.

"I want a blast of air from
your hand, about as strong as a circular fan. You get the idea."

That was particularly easy for
him for some reason. It should have taken more magic, but it really didn't. The
air just flowed, in a blast of fresh air that he aimed at Eve, moving it back
and forth, so her hair moved. After a bit of holding that for the practice, she
nodded.

"Okay, you need to work on
using less magical power to get things done. A lot of that will be in how
clearly you can hold a given concept. So, for the next few days, that's what I
want you to work on. Now, we have one more thing to do before I get off to work
for the day." She still had her crew of trainees to see about. They were
all doing well, and Rebekah was already doing it perfectly, with Scotty not really
needing her either, but they were still meeting to practice staying up all day
with the others, since the newer Vampires needed the moral support.

Tyler laughed a bit and took a
deep breath.

"Is it that sex you wanted?
I know how you are."

Rather than take offense at him
actually having a sex drive, even if she didn't, the girl shook her head.

"Oddly enough,
no
.
What I want you to do is to try and feel what I do when I move fast. It doesn't
take a lot of energy really, even if it seems like it should. It's really a
kind of time manipulation, not speed. It's a little subtle, but if you can do
these things, you can hold and power that too." She stood up, and gestured
to him to do the same. "Okay, I'll try to do this without moving at first.
Try to feel it, then reproduce the field until you can talk to me, okay?"

He nodded, and then moved a
little closer to her. She wasn't wrong about what she was doing. The idea was
incredibly soft and gentle. It felt like a bubble that rippled out from her.
There were little waves to it, but he could kind of get it. Then he added a
tiny bit of power and tried to speak. She was just standing there flickering a
bit the whole time, like a person in time lapse photography.

"Hello?"

She didn't respond so he increased
the flow a tiny bit more. It took ten tries before she spoke, her words
sounding like she was a chipmunk from a Christmas special.