Vampire in Crisis (2 page)

“You’re wrong,” Cody roared. “Use my energy. My father is here too. Use his energy.”

She felt the surge of something old and powerful connect. Then another as her father reached out and grabbed her other hand. Suddenly there were dozens of other energies swimming around her, pouring into her, giving her the strength. Fainter energy joined in, distant but connected.

“Hortran, what is happening?” she sobbed, her head exploding.

You have received the finest gift that was possible to give,
he whispered in her head.
She has given you everything she had to give. Now use it wisely.

He collapsed in front of her, his hand falling from her head. In front of her shocked eyes, maybe from the electrical force, maybe because it had been his time, or maybe he’d just lost the will to live, he dissolved into ancient ash and dusted the top of Deanna’s dead body. Inside her head there was a roaring sound. A building up of something huge. Something she had no idea how to control.

And something that suddenly got out of control.

She cried out, trying to tug her hands free, only to realize there were dozens of people all joined in one massive circle around her. Speaking, yelling, and crying. A kaleidoscope of words fought for space in her consciousness. Yet she couldn’t get any to take form in her mind. There were too many.

But like any universe under too much pressure – eventually it becomes too much to contain.

The pressure became too strong.

The heat too hot.

The pain too much.

The black fury in her head exploded.

She shrieked and her back arched before collapsing backwards off the bed to crumple on the floor.

In the background, she heard her father screaming for her. Inside her mind, she heard Cody screaming at her. But there was more. So much more.

As she drifted away, she heard Cody’s cry resonate through her mind.

Tessa, don’t leave me. Please. Tessa—

And she knew no more.

“T
essa?”

Who was calling her? Why? She wanted to roll over and block out the noise.

“Tessa, wake up!”

“What’s wrong with her?” cried a young male voice she didn’t recognize. “Why won’t she regain consciousness?”

“Shh, she will. She’s just not ready.”

That last voice sounded almost familiar. But it was thin. Distant.

Voices rattled through her consciousness in an endless sea of noise. The voices were there but remote, connected but not clearly.

Ready, my ass. You will wake up when you feel like it.
Deanna’s voice floated through her subconscious as the other conversations drifted in and out with no end. It was distracting and painful and deafening. She couldn’t hear herself think.

Or sort out the voices. Were any of the messages important? Did she need to wake up? Or would she be better off just letting the words drift away unacknowledged? She wanted to ignore them and just keep on floating here forever. The air was peaceful. Gentle. She liked that. There’d been so much stress, so many shocks in the last few weeks. So much panic and pain and loss. This break felt right. It was good to be here. She could stay and enjoy. Let everyone else just drift away. Maybe they’d disappear for good and she could just relax.

Not going to happen.

Tessa froze. Who said that?

Her mind flooded with memories of a thousand conversations and a thousand answers to who’d said something over the vastness of her experience. No, correction – the vastness of Deanna’s experience.

With that, understanding slammed into her consciousness.

Deanna.

Hortran.

The One.

The one what? Oh, right, the only one to fit Deanna’s list of requirements. Supposedly Tessa had been tested and passed without even knowing about it.

And without having given her permission for what followed.

Hortran’s voice drifted through her mind on a faint whisper. She strained to hear, to make sense of the impression in her mind. Something about how she’d been given a gift like none other and to use it wisely.

Like an echo, the word triggered multiple associations in her head and conversation after conversation jumped to the forefront, all referencing the phrase “use her gift wisely.” In a sepia-toned movie rolling through her mind, she saw Deanna speaking to young vamps, old vamps, council vamps, and strange vamps, either being cautioned to use something wisely or to tell someone else to use something wisely.

All the while, Tessa shuddered as her brain filled to capacity and battled past into overload. With a hard bang, her brain hit the end and she shuddered as her mind blanked out. Not sure what just happened, she lay there on whatever surface she was on, unaware of her surroundings as she tried to sort out the still reverberating recoil in her head. Just what had happened? Her body, her sense of place, had no beginning and no end.

“Deanna, couldn’t you have at least left me an instruction manual? Something to show me how this works?” She felt more than saw a weird whisper through her mind.
Hortran?

“Is that you, Hortran?”

No, it couldn’t be. He was dead.

That whisper came again.

Or was he? She tried to remember what exactly had happened prior to the forced data transfer to her brain. Had he said something as to how to survive this? Hinted at a way out?

Instantly her mind was flooded again, the conversation as real as it had been the first time it played out in Technicolor with perfect audio pitch through her mind. And she realized there’d been no instruction possible. There’d been no time. It had been Hortran that had facilitated the exchange of Deanna’s memories. Her knowledge. Her life. But…had he left a piece of himself behind in the process? Was that possible?

There was a tiny nudge of that same energy.

With an intuitive flash, she realized that Deanna might be gone and Hortran might have exploded into ash, but a piece of his energy…his consciousness had remained behind. The connection required to do what he’d done remained.

Somehow that was a huge relief. But she didn’t know why.

It wasn’t like she could communicate with it – with him – as if there was a person attached to it. It did, however, add significance to the meaning to his name – Deanna had called him a Ghost. Now he was in spirit form – more ghostly than ever.

Could he help her with this transition? Or better yet – reverse the process?

Instantly pain slammed into her temples. She groaned as sharp claws bit into her consciousness.

She focused on her breathing, trying to manage the onslaught. After a moment, the weight in her chest eased.

She’d take that to mean reversing the process wasn’t possible. Or maybe not desirable. After the trouble Deanna had gone through to find Tessa, it would make sense to learn to manage this new state.

Instantly, the air around her lightened, as if a silent pat of approval had smoothed over her head.

She sighed. “Hortran, can you hear me?” Stupid question, but she wanted to know for sure that it was him. The pat of approval came again.

Good.

“Can you talk to me?”

No pat.

“But you can communicate somewhat.” Okay. She could work with that. Considering the option was no contact at all, it was a huge relief to know that he was there some of the time. “Any chance you can tell me what I’m supposed to do with this mess of information? I’ve barely got any memories of my own. To deal with hers is too much.”

No response. Lost as she was inside, whatever space in her mind she’d ended up with, she sighed and said in a needy whisper, “Please, Hortran, tell me how to push this back into some kind of filing system so I can open it only when I want to and keep it safe in an archive of some kind the rest of the time. I can’t live like this,” she cried out. “It’s her life. Not my life. Maybe I’ll need her memories, but maybe not.”

Instantly, a filing system popped up in her mind – by century. She stared in awe as the centuries opened to show decades, with the first of those opening to show years.

“Hey, that works. Now put all of those in a big folder called Deanna’s Memories.”

Instantly there was a folder with Deanna’s name and, oh wow…a second folder appeared with Hortran’s name on it.

“Hortran, do I have all your knowledge and memories as well?”

That warm whisper of energy slipped across her face this time.

“Why? Why would you do that too?” She was so confused. She had seen a lot of vamps die lately and none had a chance to pass on any information. Had they wanted to? Could any vamp do this?

Was it a common thing? A gift that each vamp could bestow as a gift on their loved ones? She didn’t understand how that could be a good thing. And if it was so easy, how come she’d never heard of it?

Then she remembered the things Deanna had said about her prison and her partner. She shuddered at what information she could have access to. Instantly she threw up a mental shield and said, “Section off all intimate memories Deanna might have so I don’t inadvertently see them.”

There was a weird shuffling in the files. She stood in the center of the maelstrom as folders flew around her. When it was done, she could see a red folder off to one side for each century, decade, and year.

Good. It felt more respectful that way too. And much less like she was a voyeur into Deanna’s personal life. It was a different story to have access to her business life and clan knowledge. There’d be any number of other bits and pieces in there she could use, but she didn’t want to intrude on Deanna’s most private memories.

Who would?

Okay, anything else? Could she organize this in a better way? Maybe add a search function? It was hardly a computer, but it was a database. Then she realized all the folders were there, but they were empty.

Shit. She had to fill them.

*

Cody’s fingers spasmed
with the effort of holding back from giving Tessa yet another hard shake to wake her up from the dead – or whatever unholy place she’d gone to. He
needed
her to respond – in some way – in any way to let them know she was okay. Her head lolled to one side. Her eyes closed and her mouth fell slightly open. The only reassuring thing was the steady rise and fall of her chest.

She was alive, and he had to believe she was fighting to stay that way.

He hated what Deanna had done. He didn’t know why Tessa had been chosen or why Hortran would have helped facilitate what had just gone down, but just thinking about it made him angry all over again.

He bowed his head and once again called out to her,
Tessa. My love. Answer me, please
.

The blankness in his mind terrified him. He hadn’t been able to mindspeak for very long but the absence – the sense of loss – by her silence shook him deeply. He wanted to reach in there – wherever
there
was – and grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she yelled at him to stop. He wanted to hear her voice snap at someone – even him, to say the real, the normal, the defiant Tessa he knew and loved so well was there.

And yes, the word was love. He was no longer afraid of it, of the feeling and definitely not the commitment. He’d like nothing better than to plan on being old and gray with her at his side.

He’d had no warning of how important she’d become to him, but he’d done well adjusting. Or at least he thought he had, but now this sense of grief at the thought of something finally being too much for her to handle – that realization that for all she’d done and managed to do, all she’d had thrown at her and had surmounted – she might have finally come up against something she couldn’t deal with.

And that thought was going to kill him.

“Cody, lay her down so she can rest.” Serus hovered in front of him.

“She is resting.” Cody refused to do anything that would mean no longer having her in his arms. Sitting beside her wasn’t good enough. He had to hold her.

“She could take hours recovering,” Goran said quietly at his side.

Cody snapped his gaze towards his father. “This is Tessa.”

A lopsided grin slipped out from his father’s face. “I know. We don’t know which way she is going to handle this. We have to assume it could take time. She is under a tremendous amount of pressure right now. She might need to adapt…”