Vampires and Sexy Romance (39 page)

Languishing in a rare dreamless sleep, Min finally awoke to the light of the full moon cascading through her bedroom window.  She stretched and rolled over, finding herself alone, but not much caring.  He was somewhere near,
her Luca
.  It wasn’t that she felt him, it was more an assumption. 

She took a few deep breaths and finally forced herself to crawl out of her nice, warm, comfortable bed, slipping into her silk bathrobe and padding barefoot to the door.  As she walked she felt how sore she was.  She’d been through quite a bit in the last week, and she’d be lucky if she wasn’t covered from head to toe with nasty black and purple bruises.

She almost turned back to crawl back into bed, but she knew she still had things that needed to be done—no rest for the wicked…or at least not for her.  She needed coffee, and lots of it.  She puttered into the dimly lit hall.  Maybe Luca would be waiting for her, in the kitchen, with coffee. 

The moment she entered the hallway she knew something was wrong.  She turned slowly, looking around her, her shoulders and spine straightening in alarm, until she found what was different.  The door to her mother’s room was standing wide open. 

Min’s heart lurched in her chest and she gasped in air. 
No, no, no, no, no…

She rushed into the room and flicked on the overhead light.  Her mother was gone.  Everything was as it always was, but her mother wasn’t there.  Min whirled around and ran down stairs, calling Luca’s name, over and over.  Someone had to have moved her mother…
Luca
had to have moved her.  Katarina couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, she was in suspended animation, a magical coma, and her soul was missing too. 

When she clambered down the stairs the first thing she saw was that the front door was open.

“No,” she whispered, stopping, frozen in her tracks.  The weight of what she had done was crushing. 
I let a monster into my house, into my bed.  And now he has her mother. 
Her comatose, defenseless mother.  
No, no, no.  It has to be a bad dream.
  She’d wake up screaming in just a moment.  But she didn’t wake up.  She stood there in her robe, the cold night wind roaring in through the open door, making her shiver. 

She thought for a moment she would be sick.  Then she thought she’d burst into tears.  Her mother was dead by now.  A vampire wouldn’t pass up a free, sleeping meal.   A niggling little voice inside her said,
But why didn’t he just kill her in her own bed?
  Min shook that thought off.  She shook off all the thoughts that were threatening to overwhelm her.  Even the guilt for bringing that monster into her house, into her mother’s very room. 

Instead she found a purpose, and clung to it with everything she had.  She raced upstairs, pulling on some clothes, gathering a few vampire-unfriendly objects.  She tucked a cross and a silver dagger in her belt.  Picking up a perfume bottle she checked her powers.  She’d used a lot of mystical energy in the past few days, and she needed the certainty that her magic was still there and ready to back her up.  They were stiff and hard to call up at first, as she floated the perfume bottle, and then shakily, the chest of drawers the bottle had been sitting on.  But they were there, ready.

She grabbed a scribing crystal and a map and headed into her mother’s room.  She’d use the crystal to locate her mother’s current location, and then use an enchantment she knew to form a glowing light on the page that would move with her mother. 

At first nothing happened.  Min was actually on her third recitation on the scribing spell when she realized her mistake.  She’d been reaching out to find her mother.  Maybe the wording and meaning was far too wide a request.  After all, these things looked for specific things, and to look for her mother was to look for her spirit and soul, as well as her body.  And there was nothing left to her mother right now other than her body.  She’d already tried scribing for her mother’s soul and spirit to no avail.  They hadn’t been in this world or the spirit world. 

She was just about to clear her mind, to let the spell melt, and to start scribing for just her mother’s body, when the crystal moved, pulling her hand down hard as it fell on the map.  Only three blocks over from where she knelt now. 

She wasted no time thinking over the impossibility of her spell actually having worked.  It had worked, and now she needed to act.  She didn’t bother with the little moving light spell, her mother was too close.  She just jumped to her feet, and ran down the stairs, forgoing her coat, or anything else, as she ran out of the house, leaving the door still wide open, and running down the street toward where the spell had indicated her mother lie.  Only one thought interrupted her as she sprinted down the street, and the next.  That she was going to burn that vampire to a cinder.  That love or not… and she almost stopped in her tracks, but shook off the thought and kept on running.  Love or not, he was going to die for ever laying a hand on her mother.  When she came to the place where the crystal had shown, she stopped momentarily to shake her head.  It was a large, nondescript brick building; the sign above it read Charlemagne Meat Packing Plant.  Sudden images of what he could be doing to her mother flashed in her mind, hitting her hard as a fist in the chest.  But she all that out of her mind as she raced into the building, pulling out the cross the silver dagger she’d put in her belt.  It wasn’t a stake, but silver would kill him…as long as she used it to hack him into enough pieces. 

Then she rounded a corner and had to duck past thick pieces of plastic.  Once through she was surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands of naked, raw sides of beef.  Her stomach turned, and she had to breathe deep and hard just to keep herself from throwing up.  She moved through the crowding sides of beef.  And with every stride, her anger rose.  Before she knew it her hands started to burn.  When she came to the end of the meat she saw Luca standing beside a huge steel door, leaning nonchalantly against a generically painted white wall.  Min dropped the dagger to the ground, both her hands bursting into flame.  She launched a ball of it at his feet and watched as he jumped and danced out of the flames, trying to keep himself from combusting. 

She surged forward and brought up a gale of fire, holding it in a huge sizzling ball only inches from his face. 

“Where is she?  Where have taken my mother?” Her voice crackled with power. 

Luca’s face wasn’t frightened, and he wasn’t smiling in evil ecstasy either.  The look on his face was devoted and …and…true.

“She’s in the cooler,” he said. 

Min’s eyes widened and she moved to the door. 

“Wait,” Luca called out.  “She hasn’t been in there long enough.”

Min shot a torrent of flames at Luca that he barely had time to duck.  She had never done anything with such force; the magicks simply blew like a gale through her hands.  It left her hands burnt, but left her feeling so much better. 
Would’ve felt even better if I’d hit the bastard.
 

“Time for what?” Min said, breathlessly.  “For her to die of hypothermia?”  She reached out, her hands sizzling as she grasped hold of and then yanked open the heavy steel door of the cooler.  It was old, and heavier than you’d see anywhere nowadays, lots of iron.  Its hinges creaked and whined as it swung open. 

Frozen mist wafted thick and obscuring from the cooler, and Min couldn’t see inside for a moment.  The overhead light flickered and sputtered, and then finally died out.  The only light came from the room she was standing in, and it barely illuminated anything but the fog rolling around inside the room.  And then something moved. 

In the middle of the room something stirred, and Min couldn’t…wouldn’t believe her eyes as she watched her mother sit up in the middle of the mist.  Katarina breathed deeply and struggled for a moment to bring her legs over the edge of the boxes she lay on, and then stand up, wobbling on her feet and holding onto a steel shelf for balance.  Before Min eyes Katarina’s ghostly white hair turned back to its usual salt and pepper, and her ice blue eyes reverted to the beautiful obsidian they once were.  She looked to Min and smiled. 

Min stumbled, her knees going out on her.  But something caught her, keeping her from falling to the cold, ice caked floor.  Luca looked into her eyes as she shook her head in utter disbelief, and then she looked back to her mother, standing there so strong and alive once more.  She stood back up on her own, pulling gently away from Luca, then rushed to her mother, pulling her to her in a savage embrace. 

Her mother hugged her back, chuckling, and then telling her, “I’m an old woman…you’re going to break something on me.”

Min released her, and Katarina looked around her at the cooler.  “Smart work, my little Devol.  Using one of the fae’s only weaknesses to break the curse.”

Min shook her head.  “What?” 

Katarina raised her arm that wasn’t holding fast to her daughter, to indicate the giant freezer.  “The room is lined in iron and steel. 
Her
power was cut off for long enough that the curse just dissolved.”  Her smile flickered with wicked satisfaction.  “
There’s
a bit of her power she won’t be getting back.”  And Katarina’s eyes flashed with a silvery light they had never before had. 

She absorbed the spells energy.  I didn’t know she could do that…
Min felt a shiver of fear, and the look in her mother’s eyes had caused it.

“My daughter,” Katarina said with false politeness, her eyes fading back to their normal near black as they flicked to Luca and then back to Min.  “What are you doing with a vampire?”

Min opened her mouth to speak, but there were just so many things to explain, to say.  Too many. 

Katarina gave her daughter a puzzled look, and then smiled, closing her eyes.  Min felt a cool, tingling sensation on her arm where her mother’s hand held her.  A heartbeat later Katrina’s eyes opened again, flashing fleetingly of that other, silver light.  “A vampire with a soul?  You’ve bedded a vampire with…oh, and they all have one?  Well, who knew?  No wait, it wasn’t just that he had one, your power awakened it.”

“My witchcraft?” Min asked, genuinely interested in the why and how.

Katarina smiled enigmatically.  “No.”  She looked to Luca.  “I see I owe my recovery to you, vampire.  For that I thank you.” 

There was more of the tingling sensation on Min’s arm.  It made her squirm, but she didn’t tell her mother to stop.  But Katarina did let her go, as if something had burned her.  Her face turned frightened, and she shook her head.  “You fought the Winter Queen?”  Her eyes were so wide, so glassy, Min wanted to grab her and tell her that everything was alright, but then her mother said, “Does she know about Andy?”

And just like that a mystical damn broke—no, it was more like a curtain that held back Min’s memories—it just disappeared like mist: evanescence.  And Min knew two things at the same moment.  One was that the mystical curtain that had kept her memories at bay had been put in place by her own mother.  The other thing she knew was that her Sister was in grave danger…and that she was not truly her sister.

Andy strode through the little park that sat adjacent to her apartment building.  She liked this time of night: no one around except her…and her tough little Jack Russell terrier, Brutus.  But, of course, there was a certain other night-time dog-walker she ran into from time to time, and was hoping to run into again tonight. 

Samuel.

Tall, broad shouldered, wickedly handsome in that whole white knight sort of theme.  Maybe it was the serious muscleage he was toting, or maybe it was the shoulder length red-brown hair he always had pulled back in a ponytail—whatever it was about him, he looked like a guy who could sweep a maiden off her feet…and then some. 

Andy never knew when he and his part Great Dane, part Mastiff, Shylock, would be out in the park, seemingly waiting for her.  One night she had been pretty sure that she’d caught him rehearsing asking her out, sitting on a swing and running lines to Shylock that were suspiciously close to romance movie ask-you-out-on-a-date lines.  She’d cleared her throat to let him know she was there, and he’d practically fallen over backwards off the swing.  Somehow she thought that he’d lost his nerve after that, for he had failed to even try to ask her out.  She already told herself that she’d tell him yes at the first hint of the request.  But the words “will” or “would”, or “maybe we could” never left his lips.

So two weeks had gone by, and he’d been out of town—due to return tonight.  He had said he was in law enforcement of some vague sort.   From the look of him, and his huge, ferocious dog (who was such a baby he’d cowered when Brutus had trotted over and nipped at him right off the bat) it fit.

So Andy was there, pathetically hoping that he would be out and about, back from whatever vague business he was off on.  It was freezing, even for the middle of February—Aurora Georgia never got as cold as it was that night.  Brutus had led her out through the monkey bars, over past the nearly overflowing trash bins, to the swing sets. 

Yes, she’d thought, that’s exactly what I was thinking too.  That she wished he would be there, right there, where she could talk to him…maybe go ahead and ask him out instead of waiting for him to build up the courage.  But that was absurd!  He was a big strapping guy,
gorgeous
, and in law enforcement…

And he was afraid of little old me?

Well, that
was
kind of appealing.  The thought that he was shy, or at least felt enough about her that he got all nervous around her.  Now that was a thought to warm the cockles of any young maiden’s heart.  She took in a great lungful of the night’s cold air, and sighed…and then started to cough because the air had suddenly dropped twenty degrees colder than it had been only a breath before. 

It had rained earlier in the evening, and there were puddles under the swings, where years of young feet had created shallow craters.  Andy blinked as she watched the puddles freeze over, shimmering in the moonlight.  The surface of the ice striated into grooves, making almost a web of Jack Frost on the outer rim of the puddle.  As she walked closer, the ice turned black, like water on a moonless night. 

Brutus sniffed at the puddles and then backed away growling.  Andy reached down and scooped the little dog up in her arms, his chest vibrating in her hands.

And then Andy heard a voice.  It sounded sweet, almost too kind and lovely to be real.  And as her body responded, her feet moved her forward even as her mind told her that that sweet, kind voice was a lie.  Even worse, it was a magical lie of some sort.  She marched right over to that voice and looked down into that pitch black ice, and a face most unreal and beautiful stared back.  Pale alabaster skin, frigidly blue eyes, and succulent lips the color of frozen mulberries.  The face smiled and licked her lips, as if she was hungry, and Andy was a t-bone steak.  

But then the face hissed in a most inhuman voice, looking over Andy’s shoulder with angry menace.  A hand took hold of Andy’s shoulder and pulled her upright again.  She turned, half expecting to see her handsome neighbor, but instead a beautiful stranger stood beside her, staring down into the dark puddle of ice. 

Andy almost smiled, almost decided to play off her hallucination of the face in the ice and start flirting.  After all, her white knight hadn’t bothered showing up yet, though she’d been out in the freezing park for almost…well, six minutes tops…but still.  Why not indulge in a little flirtation with the inhumanly gorgeous man standing before her?

Brutus growled at the man before, baring his teeth. 

And in that moment it hit her:
he was inhumanly gorgeous
.  Hell, his green eyes were practically glowing like flames in the relative darkness of the little park, and just the sight of him seemed to have a magnetic quality all its own—
and no human male has ever had that good and pore-less of skin!

Oh crap…first frozen puddles start talking to me, and then a…a…

“Vampire!”  The voice from the puddle hissed.  “She is mine.  Dare touch her and I will pound you into the ground!”

Andy rolled her eyes.  “A
vampire
—of course you’re a freaking vampire!”

He looked to her as if she was crazy. 

“What?”  Andy shot back.  “First I get hung up on a guy that’s too shy to ask me out, and now I’m being hit on by a freaking dead guy.”

The vampire got this look on his face, like he was appalled. “I’m not hitting on you.”  He looked nervously around, and then back to Andy.  “I’m here to—“

“Oh yes, to kill me.  That’s what you vampires do.  I feel so popular!”

He reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders.  “I’m here to—“

The inhuman voice from the puddle screeched and interrupted him.  “You’ll do nothing but die!”

The vampire roared in outrage.  “Can’t either of you let me finish what I’m trying to say?”

With a crack like thunder the puddles under the swing set broke open, and huge spider creatures crawled out and started toward them, chittering menacingly.  

Andy screamed and jumped back a heartbeat before one of the spider thingies caught a hold of her.  The vampire grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her even further away from the oncoming spiders. 

“I’m here to save you.” he said.    But one of the spider things jumped on his back, and another three started to chase her across the park. 

She started to run, but more spider creatures started crawling out of the puddles in that direction as well. 

The vampire growled and roared, and one off the spider creatures made an agonized squeal as he slayed it. 

And just like that the vampire stood beside her once more, a sword in his grip as he hacked away at a spider that was just about to jump on Andy’s leg.  And that’s when Andy saw that he was carrying her sister’s sword.

“How did you get my sister’s sword?” she gasped.

“Min sent me to get you.” 

“Yeah, sure,” Andy pushed him away.  “My sister would’ve sent a vampire to save me…a blood sucking, soulless thing.  Tell me another one.”

He gritted his teeth and let out a haughty sigh.  Then he held out his hand as he simultaneously struck down another spider.  In the palm of his hand gleamed Min’s ring.  The one their mother had forged.  An item of singular power: the ability to allow Min to teleport who ever wore the ring back home: in effect, pulling them to safety. 

Originally it had been so that Katarina could teleport Min to safety.  But their mother was still asleep, trapped somewhere that wasn’t her body. 

Alone… 

Funny thing—until that moment it had never occurred to her that her mother had never created a ring for her to wear.  Maybe she was just one hundred percent certain that Andy would never get in any trouble.  She looked around her at the ever increasing horde of spider creatures encroaching about her, and then at the vampire standing before her, holding out her sister’s ring, offering her a direct path to safety. 

Thoughts flashed and pitched through Andy’s fear and adrenalin spiked brain, and her next thought just dropped from her lips.

“By the pestilent gods…are you my sister’s boyfriend?”

The vampire’s inhumanly handsome features softened, his eyebrows knitting with a half shrug of his shoulders—body language saying,
Well…yeah.

“Get out of here!”  Andy whispered in disbelief, not knowing herself if her excitement was from horror or happiness.

The vampire shook his head and pressed the ring into her palm.  “We don’t have time for introductions right now.  You need to put the ring on.  They will pull—”

“Yeah, I know.  They can pull me back home using the…did you just say ‘they’?”

This time the vampire lunged to the side, and spun, the portrait of skill and grace, and hacked an airborne spider thing in half.  Andy squeaked.  The vampire rolled his eyes, reached out and with preternatural swiftness took Brutus from her arms, and the ring from her palm and placed it on her middle finger.

Andy was about to repeat her question:
They?
and,
What are you doing with my dog?
  But the sudden sensation of having your physical and spiritual self folded in on itself, and then sucked through a teeny-tiny straw sort of took the breath she was about to speak with right out of her.  For a nauseating, dizzying moment she shot through that tight, confined, crazy straw of energy, and in a handful of beats she appeared, whole and ready to throw up, in the living room of her sister’s house.  Everything around her was a blur of colors as she fell forward, losing her balance and the starch in her legs.  Two pairs of arms caught her and dragged her across the floor and deposited her on the old chintz couch.  The upholstery was cool and familiar, and Andy let herself relax into the worn softness of the cushions.  She blinked about ten times, and at last her sight began to clear.  She looked up to see her sister looking down upon her, her expression filled with worry and concern, and a mirror image of that expression limned the face of her mother.

Andy gasped and felt the surge of shocked surprise jolt through her body. She shot up off the couch and threw herself into her mother’s arms.

“You’re
awake
…you’re really
awake
!”

Katarina’s arms enveloped Andy and she whispered comforting words, more instinctive sounds a mother would emit at any point in the last million or so years, to calm and soothe a child.  She stroked Andy’s hair as she gently pulled her back onto the couch with her.

“It’s really you?  You’re really awake?”  Andy laughed and cried out, but then stiffened against the feel of her mother’s familiar arms.  She pulled away and looked up to her sister.  “This isn’t some trick.  Not just some glamour or spell?”

Min shook her head and tried to bring a smile to her lips.  “No, no.  This is real…I swear to you.”

Andy’s hands shook as she reached out to her mother, hesitating for a moment, and then taking the older woman’s hands into her own.  “But how?”  Her voice betrayed how enormous her joy was. 

And why the hell isn’t Min overjoyed to have our mother back with us?
 

Katarina spoke, and her lightly accented voice was music to her daughter’s ears.

“It was all your sister’s vampire’s doing.” She looked up and rolled her eyes and sighed, then continued.  “He figured out what was keeping me from reentering my body.  That a thing’s magic was only as strong as its greatest weakness.  He broke the Winter Queen’s spell using cold iron.”  She looked to Min with troubled eyes.  “Rather clever, that young man of yours…for a centuries-old, soulless vampire.”  Her tone turned cool and harsh as her worlds played out.

Andy shot her mother a hard look.  “Yeah, I just met the guy—and wow, what a looker—and since he just helped save my life, and apparently just gave my mother back her life, I’m going to cut the man some slack when it comes to the whole soulless thing.”  She lifted her eyebrows.  “I think we all should, don’t you, mother?”

Katarina looked nonplussed, but she nodded.  Andy threw herself at her mother again, grasping the woman to her for dear life.  Her voice choked with tears, “I never thought we’d get you back.  Everything Min tried failed.  And now…” she cried out with such joy.  Words just failed to form anymore in her head. 

“It’s alright now,” her mother cooed, stroking her fingers through Andy’s wild tangle of hair.  “We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re not stumbling around blindly anymore.”

What did that mean?

“
Mother,
” Min’s voice was harsh and disapproving. 

“Now Min…”

“No.” Min demanded.  “We have to tell her. 
You
have to tell her.  We won’t have time enough soon, and she deserves to know.”

Andy pulled away from her mother’s embrace, looking at her face.  It slowly changed expression, from one of cool detachment to worry.  When she met Andy’s gaze, her eyes were beseeching. 

“Know about what?”

Katarina took a deep breath, her lips parting as if she was about to speak, but she hesitated.  “I’m so sorry for lying to you all this time.”   She took her daughter’s face in her hands and then let go.  “I’m not really your mother.”