Vampires and Sexy Romance (40 page)

There was such silence in the room.  Andy shook her head.  “Wow.  Your bedside manner needs some work.  Ever hear of tact?” 

Katarina looked completely confused.  Andy sighed and it was her turn to roll her eyes.  It was a family trait…or so she’d thought until about thirty seconds ago.

“So you’re telling me I’m adopted?”

Katarina looked to Min, and Andy saw tears welling up in her sister’s eyes. 
Oh, this is going well.

“No.” Katarina finally said.  “What I mean is…you were not born to me.  You were not born to any woman.” 

A question tried to form in Andy’s head, but her mother began to speak again before she could pin it down. 

“Arianna, The Summer Queen of the Sidhe came to me.  Her blood has run through the veins of our family from time in memoriam, so she used that link to…to call me to help her.

“She had a thing of power waiting on the other side of the Ethereal Mists.  I didn’t understand what it was, precisely, but she needed my help in hiding it.”  She took Andy’s hands in hers and peered deep into her eyes.  “And the best way to hide something is to place it in plain sight.” 

Andy wasn’t following her mother one bit.  Why was she talking about the fae?  Katarina had always told her daughters that the faery people were just folk tales.  Creatures of lore.  And now she was talking about them like…well, like she knew them.

“Using my blood and my magicks, I helped the Queen mold that…the power…into a human being.”  

Andy looked up to her sister, her mind jumbled and confused.  She had thought they were talking about her.  That Katarina was explaining how she—and then it hit her.  Her mother
was
talking about her.

She saw it in her sister’s eyes.  She knew too. 

So it was true.

Andy pulled her gaze back to her mother and said, “So I’m not real?”

“Of course you’re real.”  Katarina said, holding all the tighter to her daughter’s hands.  “No matter where you came from, or how you came to be, you are as real as I am.”

Andy felt her entire body turn cold as her stomach bottomed out.  She pulled her hands from her mother’s grasp and stood on wobbly legs. 

“Real?”  She staggered past her sister to the fire place, wishing the flames of its fire would warm away the ice that was flowing in her veins.  “Real…like one of your spells?”

“Well, yes.  But much more.  Since—“

“Since a faery Queen pitched in, is that it?  You made me into a real little girl, like some stupid Disney cartoon?”

“It wasn’t like that!”  Katarina shot off the couch and tried to get nearer to her daughter, but Andy would have none of it, skirting around her and putting the couch they’d been seated on between them. 

“I don’t know you.”  She looked at her mother, her eyes burning, her breath coming in rapid, hoarse pulls.  “How could you do this…how could you keep this from me?  You’ve been lying to me my entire life!”

At that Min turned away and Andy watched her sob into her hands.  Min was crying like…oh god, she hadn’t seen Min cry like that since the day they’d found Katarina, cold and lifeless on the floor of the magic shop.  What could be worse than—
dear goddess
. 

“When did you and this faery queen make me?”  She could hear the sharpness in her voice, and didn’t care.  Her mother was still hiding something back from her, and she was going to hear the whole damned thing, and now.  “How long ago did this happen?”

Now tears were filling her mother’s eyes.  Katarina Boccherini never cried.  She was a kind and loving mother, but she was also cast from freaking steel.  But now she was crying…for the love of god!

“A little over a year ago.”

What?  Just a year ago…

That wasn’t possible.  She was twenty-four years old.  She’d gone to college for business before going to work at the family magic shop.  And before that there had been High School and Junior High school, and…and…

But almost anything was possible when it came to magic, now wasn’t it?  She may not have any real talent or knowledge of the craft, but her mother did.  Who knew for certain what all her mother could do?  Or her sister—

Andy wheeled around and shot Min a razor sharp glare.  “Did you know?”

Katarina walked between the two, shaking her head.  “I had to place the spell on her as well.” 

So it was spells all around.

“But Min was too strong to permanently change her memories.  Once I released the spell, her memory returned.”

Min came up beside her mother, her eyes swollen and red.  “So now I have both:  all my original memories and those with you.” 

“But that’s just magic!”  Andy turned her back on them both.  “It’s just tricks.  Not real.  Just like I’m not real!”

“It doesn’t work like that.”  Katarina said, the sound of her voice coming closer.  “Whatever you were before the Summer Queen and I…before we molded you, you were real.  Not a thing of magic, but a naturally occurring power that came from this world, this universe.  That makes you real.  That, and…we used my blood to cast you with.”

Andy spun around to face the two women, hot tears running down her cheeks, making the room blur and pitch.  “So I’m some experiment?  You cooked me up like a batch of mystical cookies, and now what?”  Her breathing heaved and then stopped.  “Why?”

“Because…”  Katarina blinked, and then very slowly she shook her head.  “The fae are not much for sharing their reasoning.  I know she said she needed to hide you away from her nemesis: Sliva, the Winter Queen, the queen of air and darkness.”

“Sliva…”  Andy repeated the name.  It even tasted cold on her tongue.  She was about to say it again, but her mother raised a hand and hushed her.

“Never say a thing’s name more than twice, or you’ll call that thing to you.”

Andy’s mind whirled and turned in her skull, a rather dizzying experience.  But suddenly it all came to a halt, and she felt her shoulders loosen.  “So that’s who I saw in the frozen puddles in the park.  Who sent those horrifying spider things after me, and…and who put you in a coma.”

Katarina nodded.

“So why hide me from her?  I mean, she knows who I am now, what’s the point of trying to hide me?  We might as well invite her in for some coffee; just let her have me.”

“We can’t!”  Min and Katarina said in unison.  Min continued, “We could never do that.”

Katarina patted Min’s hand as she walked closer to Andy.  “If she gets her hands on you, she will devour you…”  And that’s when Andy stopped hearing what her sister and mother were saying.

Andy had her back to them both, facing the mantel of the fire place.  She wanted to be anywhere on the face of the Earth, anywhere but there.  Her breath started to catch, and she couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs. 

Oh god, oh god, oh god…

It was all just crazy.  It couldn’t be real.  She had to have snapped, and this was some sort of psychotic nightmare.  What did the shrinks on television call it: a dissociative break from reality?  Maybe her entire life was just a hallucination?  But then, that’s what they had been telling her, hadn’t they.  A spell.

And then she finally really looked at what was right in front of her on the mantel.  There between a blue and pink carnival glass vase from the 1940’s and a six inch tall green marble geisha statue that predated the Ming Dynasty, sat a small white and silver stone, worn smooth, longer than it was wide or high, and nearly cylindrical.

Andy hadn’t gone around to all those conventions and out of the way estate sales for nothing.  She may not have the practical magical knowledge her sister and mother had, but she did now her magical artifacts.  Shamlus stones were naturally occurring marbleized limestone quarried in the highlands of Scotland, and they had a singularly innate enchantment to them. 

And that white and silver stone was a Shamlus stone.

Andy reached out and took it in her hand.  Cold, smooth and hard in her hand, she held it tight and closed her eyes, pushing all her will into the stone.  She felt it warm in her hand, and then she thought a word three times:
Shamlus.  Shamlus.  Shamlus
.           

A tingling sensation spread over her flesh, covering her completely in the space of only a few heartbeats.

Her mother and sister gasped at the same moment, and her mother called out her name.  But Andy didn’t even look back at them.  She needed to get away from them—from all of it.  So she ran for the door, clawing at the door locks and racing outside and through the darkened street.  She just couldn’t stay there and hear another word.  She needed to get away, to get out…to get anywhere they weren’t.

She had a vague feeling that things waited in the shadows, watching the house—watching for her.  But the Shamlus stone must have done its job thoroughly, for nothing so much as stirred in the surrounding night.

A cold numbness settled in around her heart as she ran down the street.  They had betrayed her.  Her own kin…but then again, if the insane things they had told her were true, they weren’t even that to her.  They were just…just…

No, they weren’t j
ust
anything—
she
was what wasn’t real. 
She
was the no one.

Andy made very good time, for before she knew it the streets turned unfamiliar, and she knew without a doubt she was well away from her family—the word brought a jolt of intense anguish with it, as if a shard of ice were clogging one of the chambers of her heart.  She had to wake up.  She had to get out of this nightmare.  It had to be a dream, it couldn’t be real…because nothing in her entire life had hurt an ounce as much as this did. 

Her legs started to give out on her, and she slowed to a terrified though weak jog.  Her body wanted to slow down desperately, but her mind was still racing, and she could no more stop and catch her breath than she could keep running. 

She slowed down enough that she started looking around her and behind, seeing if anyone or anything was following her.  She didn’t want to see them…to see Min nor Katarina, but a new riff of paranoia was starting to speak up.  What if this wasn’t a dream?  What if what they had said was indeed the truth? 

But that was impossible.

But so were magic…and vampires and werewolves and…well, a million other things that she knew damned well were absolutely, unalterably real. 

She ran into something while she was looking back over her shoulder.  She jumped and cried out, pushing against and trying to push through whoever or whatever it was.  She felt something cold and sharp cut into the palm of her hand, and reflexively she wrenched herself away from it, staggering across the sidewalk and backing up into a parked car. 

The car’s alarm went off, wailing at a deafening pitch.  It made her jump again as she swung around to find the black, high end sedan blinking its lights at her, filling the night with lights and sounds galore.  She whirled back to what she had run into, and found a wrought iron gate swinging in the night breeze, topped by sharp looking fleur-de-lis. She looked to her aching palm and found the flesh there torn and smudged with her blood.

Is this really blood?  If I’m not real, then what is this stuff?

She looked from her bloodied palm, then to her other, and realized with a start that she had somehow lost the Shamlus stone.  She turned round and round, looking over the pavement beneath her feet, but saw nothing. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”  It was an angry male voice, and it spun Andy on her heel.  He was leaning out the front door of the house she’d run into the fence of, and he had a cell phone and a baseball bat in his hand.

“I’m sorry…”  Andy tried to say, but even she couldn’t hear her voice over the ruckus of the car alarm.  The baseball bat wielding man sighed, and reached into the pocket of his robe, fumbling as he exchanged his cell phone for the alarm controller.  With a queer beep like a sneeze, the alarm stopped, and she could hear the echo of it dissipate. 

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.  She pointed at his gate.  “I accidentally ran into your gate, there, and it scared me.  So I jumped back and ran into your car too.”

The man grumped and his shoulders loosened.  He was a big man, with huge shoulders, tousled brown curling hair, and a five o’clock shadow you could use as a scouring pad.  He ambled out of his house and toward the gate.

“You hurt?” he asked as he shut the gate.

“W-what?”  Andy was distracted.  Whether it was just paranoia or not, she felt like there were more than just human eyes watching her.

“You’re holding your hand.  Did you get hurt?”  They guy seemed genuinely concerned, which was at odds with his bruiser exterior. 

Andy worked up a smile to placate him.  “No.  I just scared myself.  I’m sorry to have bothered you.”  And she started walking away, leaving behind the Shamlus stone and any protection it might have offered her.

Before she knew it, residential streets grew to more granite and steel buildings.  She was approaching down town, and even though it was late at night, there was a steady stream of traffic moving in every direction.  She didn’t feel any safer, though, until she began to run into pedestrians.  People in cars can always just shut you out when you scream for help.  At least with people out walking around, there was a one in ten chance someone would stop and help.  At the very least there would be two out of ten that would be witness to your abduction, and one of those people would probably actually talk to the police…if they got to the scene before the witness got bored and left.