“Mrs. Daisy Nicolescu…”
“Quit it, Monty.” He threw down his pen and gave me a furious glare.
I think in that moment I knew that he really liked Charlotte, and he knew that I knew. The temperature in the room seemed to drop to about thirty degrees.
“You don’t have the slightest idea about what you’re going to do with your life,” I said.
“Well, at least I haven’t destroyed mine yet.”
“You were always a bit of an ass, Harris, but you used to be a good friend. Ever since this happened to me—and I’m not sure you have ever appreciated that it was a traumatizing experience for me—”
“You used to be the guy who pulled me away from all this!” Harris interrupted. “You sold your car. We used to go out, talk to other girls…escape into another world for a night. Now—there’s nothing—but this.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I didn’t sell it! They took it from me.”
“They took…your car?” Harris snapped out of his own head. “What did they do with it?”
“They just took it! I don’t know! They said I couldn’t leave the Haven unless I left the car. The whole thing was basically a big brainwashing camp. They said I never should have been driving around, I never should have been hanging out with human girls, never should have gone to Cancun. Now I’m a vampire and it’s permanent and I have to take all these spells just to stave off the inevitable and it’s my fault. That’s what my summer was all about.”
“Oh.” Harris frowned. “I mean, I suppose I could buy you another one on the sly. How expensive could a twenty year old car be?”
“You can’t just buy me out of this problem,” I said. “And I don’t want another car. I spent the past three years scrounging every penny to make that one what it was.”
“So now none of us get to go anywhere on the weekends.”
“So that’s why you like Charlotte. She’s an escape in her own way.”
“I don’t like Charlotte. I just don’t want anyone else to like her. There’s a big difference.”
“All right. I get it. You aren’t concerned about me being a vampire and Charlotte’s safety or happiness.” I stood and grabbed my jacket off the bed post.
“Where are you going?”
“Asking her if she wants to get dinner.”
As I stepped into the hallway, my mind started to wander to the way Charlotte’s uniform hugged her curves, and how nice it would be to see her big green eyes and sexy full lips across the dinner table, but instead…
My brain crowded with memories of other girls. Girls across the centuries, the women my sire had wooed, only to see them die or be killed. Memories flashed across my mind of a girl slipping away from a vampire bite…mauled by some unknown creature…and an old woman crossing paths on the street and halting in shock before giving him a sad smile of realization. “It’s you, Rayner… At last…,” she whispered, and I actually knocked my head into the wall to get rid of the memory.
If anything else, I needed to see her just to root me in my own life.
I knocked on Charlotte’s door. Alec answered. “Hey.”
“Hey…I just wanted to see if Charlotte wanted company for dinner. Because I’ve decided I don’t particularly care what Harris thinks.”
She peered out behind him.
“Just as friends?” she asked.
“As you wish,” I said.
“Uh…okay. I do need dinner.” She grabbed a coat. “Firian—it’s okay. Maybe it’s better if everyone sees me without you once in a while.”
Firian and Alec both looked wary and a little annoyed.
Are we really all interested in the same girl?
Even the fox?
Even Harris?
But then, it didn’t seem that strange. I had met so many witch girls, and Charlotte was a breath of fresh air. She wasn’t caught up in all of that stuff. She seemed like a perfect balance of all the things I would want a girl to be. Cute and down to earth, sweet but willing to stand up for herself. I wondered if that was why Rayner wanted to take Lisbeth with him to London, even after he became a vampire and their worlds were far apart.
Somehow I knew it was. Five hundred years might pass by, but love was the same.
Charlotte stepped out into the brisk autumn evening with me, shivering a little, breathing into her cupped hands. “Princess Bride?” she said.
“What?”
“You said ‘as you wish’. I thought it was a Princess Bride reference.”
“That’s the movie with…Andre the Giant?”
“Well…yeah. That too, I guess. Like, ‘My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.’” She waved an imaginary sword around. I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but I approved in a general sense.
“I’ve never seen it,” I said. “But maybe I should. Inigo Montoya sounds like my people.”
“Do you ever watch movies at home? I think it was on Netflix. But maybe not. It was a few years ago that I watched it.”
“We didn’t keep a television in the home,” I said. “Most magical families don’t. But I used to go to a friends house. Every magical kid has that one normal friend who hooks them up with the good stuff like a drug dealer. Mostly we just watched wrestling, though.”
“It’s no wonder no one knows what I’m talking about half the time.”
“I used to take the guys to the Regal in town. And when I was a kid, my parents took me to the movies for a special treat. That was exciting. You can imagine, when you don’t own a television at all…”
“I’ll bet! What’s the first movie you saw?”
“It was the great cinematic masterpiece, the Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.”
“It could be worse…”
“My mother had to take me out of the theater because I was afraid of Martin Short and crying.”
She started laughing hard enough that I knew she was enjoying herself. “Oh, to be young again, when your greatest fear was a comedic actor.”
“Tell me about it.”
She looked at me with concern in her beautiful green eyes. Her face was like an open book, no deception, no pretense. And her skin smelled…quite delicious. “Is…any of what Alec said true? Do you have the memories of other vampires?”
“Sometimes.”
“Is that strange? It seems like it would be…”
I felt like she deserved an honest answer. Was I ready to give one? Man, I don’t know…
“To be honest…the worst part isn’t the memories. It’s that when I was turned, I had to go to this…therapy to learn how to keep functioning as a human. So I can go out in the sun and stuff. They gave me some helpful spells, but I had to be there for eight weeks, and most of it was just getting berated by old warlocks.”
“Sounds like my life here,” she said.
“A lot of vampires end up being forced to stay there forever,” I said. “In order to be allowed to leave, I had to give up my car. I never thought about all these rules too much before that. Like the story about the St. Augustine witch and her familiar. I was always told that like it was a horror story, but I wonder if the witches who broke the rules were the smart ones. Then again, magic is pretty dangerous. I could hurt someone. So could Alec. Because of…Sinistrals. Corrupting us and our families.” I shrugged. “I didn’t mean to say so much. It’s a lovely night. The moon is full. I said I’d take you to dinner and we just walked past the dining hall…”
She smiled. “Actually, it helps a lot to hear that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just…confused, and I don’t fit in. Maybe there’s a reason for it all. Or maybe not, and I need to just not care. I’m sorry about your car.”
“Me too. It was a pretty sweet ride. I would drive us all to Asheville or Knoxville for the weekend.”
Her mouth opened. “Really? Can you do that? I feel like we’re in another world.”
Suddenly we heard screams. A moment later, I caught this scent on the mountain breeze.
>
Blood.
Fresh…
My teeth immediately turned to fangs. I staggered, trying to resist the urge to bolt toward it.
“Montague? What’s happening?”
“It’s so…strong… Blood…” My vampire senses wanted the blood. My human brain knew I had to keep control. Something terrible was happening.
Charlotte started running toward the screams.
“Wait—let me go first,” I said.
“Why, to be chivalrous or something? No one has to go first. Let’s both go!”
Chivalrous? More like, to keep her from seeing me hurt someone with my blood lust. But my resistance failed me. I went running toward the scent. It was coming from behind the conservatory, in a lonely and unlit part of campus. The screams were getting louder.
I turned the corner, and that was when the alluring smell of fresh human blood hit me hard, but even then, the sight terrified me more.
That demon beast was back, and it was ripping into Royce and Ronan Locke as they screamed and tried to cast some sort of defensive spells. It was hard to concentrate when a demon was trying its best to maul you to death. It was also hard to concentrate when you wanted to taste the tantalizing smell of fresh human blood that filled the air.
They never let me have the good stuff…
My mind went blank. All I could think about was the taste of blood. It was just being wasted spilling on the ground.
Charlotte grabbed me. “What the fuck are you doing?” she snapped, and then she ran toward Royce and Ronan and did what she does.
She spread her hands and set everyone on fire.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Charlotte
The beast screamed at me and then it hissed, “They hurt you!”
“Yeah—but—don’t kill them!” I said. Was this the same demon from the roller rink?
Royce and Ronan were running around with their clothes on fire.
“Stop, drop and roll, morons!” I screamed. “Please! I don’t want anyone dead!”
“Hurt her again and I will finish the job!” the beast screeched, and then it vanished into a shadowy rift in the universe, leaving the smell of burnt fur behind.
Montague had taken off his jacket and was beating the flames off Royce.
“Get off me, vampire!” Royce shoved him. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, now you are.”
Nothing kills a date or date-type moment like a good demon attack and saving the lives of some pissy bullies.
Montague grabbed Royce with an iron grip. Royce looked awful. There was a huge scratch on his arm, and another on his face. His clothes were torn and charred. Blood was everywhere.
“What the fuck was that?” Ronan shouted at me. “Is that demon working for you? And could you not burn us to death?”
“I saved you from the demon! I’m not working with it! My magic isn’t perfect but you’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Crazy bitch.”
Montague bared his fangs and, I’m not kidding, he bit Royce’s arm and took a drink of his blood.
“Stop!” I grabbed his hair and pulled him back.
He gave Royce a shameless grin. “I’m not sorry.”
“You’re both crazy,” Ronan said, while Royce was trying to staunch the bleeding with his shirt. They both started trying to escape the scene, and Montague, moving with unnatural speed and strength, grabbed them both by their bloody shirts.
“The demon attack was random,” he said. “The demon didn’t say anything. I didn’t drink your blood. Charlotte saved your lives.”
He let them go.
“I hope that worked,” Montague said.
Chaos broke loose from there. (I hesitated to say ‘all hell’ broke loose, because by now I felt like there was still a bottom we hadn’t reached.) As the Lockes fled to the professors, we went to Lancelot dorm to hide the blood on Montague’s clothes. Since he shared a room with Harris, there was no way to hide it from him.
Harris grabbed me. “Don’t tell anyone the Lockes attacked you the other day.”
“Why?”
“Because—if they think that demon is attacking other students to protect you, you’re gone.”
“Why would a demon protect me?”
“I don’t know.”
I had to admit, the demon made it sound like it was protecting me from the Lockes. What if its appearance in the roller rink had been to protect me from Montague and Alec? I wondered if I should tell someone. The Lockes could have been killed.
Before long, every student was being questioned. No one had seen anything. Of course, they knew I had already caused a lot of weird stuff to happen, and that I had a tendency to burn things. Master Blair wasn’t stupid. I expected him to challenge me about this incident, maybe even expel me just to end all this trouble. Instead, he said,
“Charlotte. Don’t tell the council that the Locke brothers were hassling you.”
“But what if that thing kills someone else?” I was shocked that he was trying to protect me, and it only reinforced my disconcerting sense that he was using me. “Something is really wrong. I mean, Samuel got me into this school with some…male impersonation of me, then he gets killed, now I keep getting attacked by a demon, and the Lockes almost died!”
He came up close to me. “Do you really think they are fit to be ethereal warlocks?”
I had wondered that same thing, of course, but was he suggesting they deserved to be mauled by demons?
“Charlotte,” he said. “Nothing is wrong.”
“If you know some master plan, I’d appreciate you telling me.”
He gave me a smile I didn’t quite trust. “No master plan. I’m just not sorry to see certain institutions…rattled.”
“I want to know what’s going on.”
“What’s going on,” he said, “is that no one was hurt.”
I could tell I wouldn’t be getting anything more out of him.
By the next day, members of the council had arrived to investigate the incident. If Master Blair didn’t want the council in his business, this had definitely ruined things for him. The campus was suddenly crawling with ancient-looking warlocks in cloaks and a variety of hats that no one except the most pretentious hipsters—or a warlock council member, I guess—would dare to wear. All night, the lights in the main hall stayed on, and warlocks were poking around the scene of the crime.
In the morning, the entire school was gathered for an assembly inside the grandeur of the campus theater, complete with paintings of the Knights of the Round Table on the ceiling, for a talk about campus safety.
The Lockes didn’t seem to have learned anything from the incident. Seriously. They walked in, looking worse than they did yesterday. Royce had one arm in a sling. Ronan had stitches all over his face and was limping. They didn’t even look like they should be getting out of bed.
As they walked in, Ronan gave me a look of death and said, “If you somehow think that casting your little fire magic everywhere means you belong here, you’re dead wrong. You brought this on us.”
“You brought it on yourselves!” I snapped.
You know the phrase “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy?”
Obviously, I really would not wish ‘mauled by demons’ on anyone, ever. But the fact that anyone has to say that phrase to begin with does imply that you may have considered it for a second. I can’t say I had not imagined, in some dark part of my brain, something terrible happening to my tormentors, who had never seemed hard-working or sweet or funny to me. More like the kind of guys who would enjoy beating up a familiar and making a girl cry.
Despite all that, this seemed like way too close a call. Master Blair was covering something up. Maybe I should say something. But I hardly knew where to begin.
I went back to my room, clutched my stomach, and hunched over.
“Are you okay?” Firian asked. “Stomach ache? Maybe you need some peppermint tea.”
“It’s not the kind of stomach ache that
tea will solve. I hate those guys…but I’m not being honest. The demon was going to kill them because they were bullying me! And they’re still bullying me! What if that thing comes back?” I started crying myself, thinking of how my dad would feel if something happened to me.
“Maybe—in the end—“ He stopped himself, and went to the window, leaning his arms on the frame, his lean and graceful form silhouetted in the bright light of the setting sun.
“What?”
“Forget I said anything.”
“Don’t do that evasive thing,” I said. “Please, Firian. I’m already feeling very scared.”
“You could have your magic taken away. Then you would be fully human, and the entire magical world would shut its doors to you. Maybe you’d be happier that way. You’d damn sure be safer.”
“You mean…you too? I’d lose you, right?”
“I…could become human too. I’d lose my magic as well. And my ability to transform, or travel to Etherium.”
“You would hate that.”
“Charlotte…I told you. I live for you.” He prowled back over to me, his face still in the shadows, but looking at me. “It’s never been and it never will be…” He swiped the back of his hand across my cheek, getting rid of my tears. “…about what I want.”
“Firian…”
All of a sudden, I was breathless with a need for him to put his arms around me. To hold me and dry all my tears. There was no human in the world like Firian—so graceful, practically glowing from the inside with some magical fire, even when his clothes were always rumpled and untucked. I knew I was in enough trouble already, but I so wished his hand would linger.
I wondered how I had spent all this time without knowing he existed. He was weaving himself into my life so quickly that I felt a little naked when he wasn’t with me.
The door burst open and Alec walked in.
“Charlotte…are you okay?” he asked.
“Don’t I look it?” I sniffed. My face just felt like a mess.
“Monty was pretty…shaken.” he said. He paused. “I’m sure it took a lot of effort for him not to eat Ronan and Royce.”
“Gah…”
“Well, let me know if you need anything, huh?” He walked over to his easel and picked up a red paint tube.
The Fairer Hex Page 14