by L.H. Cosway
“No, I haven’t..” I begin but Finn interrupts me.
“That scheming little bastard,” he bursts. We all look at him curiously. Finn levels his attention on me. “Remember today when you were coughing and Marcel gave you a glass of water that he just so happened to have conveniently lying around?”
Oh God. I let my head fall back into the cushion with a dejected thunk. I should have known not to trust Marcel when he said he wasn’t up to anything.
“Why would Marcel give her a lust potion?” Rita asks, confused.
“Because he wants to stir up trouble,” Finn mutters, raking a hand through his hair.
It takes me a moment to get what he’s talking about. Marcel took great pleasure in discovering that Finn might be a little jealous of my past with Ethan. By putting this lust spell on me he knows there’ll be drama to unfold. Causing dissension amongst the ranks of your enemies is a key strategy in wars. I know Marcel said we aren’t his enemies, but we clearly are. We’re certainly not on the same side, that’s for sure.
My stomach twists, as though trying to regurgitate the potion I so obliviously drank earlier.
“How long is this going to last?” I ask Rita in desperation.
“Usually a couple of days. There’s no antidote for a lust spell, you just sort of have to wait it out. You’re sweating so profusely right now because your body is trying to expel it as quickly as possible.”
“Oh great, so I’m going to be in heat for days? I’m not going to last.” I squirm on the couch, my skin feeling too tight for my body.
Finn reaches over and gives my hand a squeeze. “You’re strong, you can do it,” he assures me. “In the meantime, I’m going to have to go pay Marcel another visit. I’ll get some of the boys down at the compound to come with me, maybe Ira too. He needs to be schooled.”
When I look at Ethan again he seems to understand exactly why Marcel gave me the potion, even though it hasn’t been properly explained to him. He’s staring at Finn as though he wants to punch him in the face. Again, the lust that’s corrupting me writhes in pleasure that he’s jealous, even if it’s reluctant jealousy.
It makes me feel all strange to have Ethan hate me and want me all at once. I wish we could just return to the place where he thought he might love me. I’m such a naïve little fool. If he ever loved me at all then he would have forgiven me by now – wouldn’t he? This vampire turns me into a confused mess.
“Hey blondie, maybe you should go home, give my girl here some peace,” Rita suggests to Ethan. “Dee and Lucas have already left.”
Ethan nods, and without another word he exits the room. I instantly feel better that he’s gone.
Rita goes to get a cool damp cloth to put on my forehead.
“So you’re kind of all heated up right now, eh?” says Finn with a smirk. He would have to go running his mouth, as if this isn’t embarrassing enough as it is.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I say tiredly, too exhausted from whatever Marcel’s potion is doing to my insides to be snarky with him.
“I can help you out there, if you’d like. Give a little helping hand to get rid of the old vapours,” he suggests cheekily.
I gather just enough energy to give him a slap on the arm, but my heart isn’t in it. I’m in a strange sort of agony, an agony that’s just begging for sexual release. Suddenly Finn’s looking even hotter than normal, and that’s some feat because as I’ve mentioned before, he is one hot vampire slayer. I have to get away from him. Rita comes back in with the damp cloth and rests it on my clammy forehead.
“I think I’ll take a bath. I feel disgusting in all this sweat.”
“Okay, come on upstairs and I’ll run one for you,” she says, helping me up from the couch.
“Oh yeah, I know what women do when they have baths,” says Finn, looking like the cat that got the cream. He levels his bright eyes on me. “Why go for the DIY option when you could have all this sexy masculinity helping you out?” Well, no one can say that Finn doesn’t have a healthy level of self-confidence, that’s for certain.
I grab a cushion and throw it at his head, but he ducks and I miss.
“One more word from you and I swear…”
“You’ll what? Jump my bones in your state of unquenchable lust?” he asks laughing. “We both know I’d enjoy that punishment, Petal.”
I try to think of a good comeback, but my traitorous body is urging me to do exactly what he’s suggested. Instead I steel myself and dash out of the room before I do something I regret.
Chapter Four
You’re So Jealous, I’m So Lonely
I spend over an hour in the bath. For some reason, sitting in the luke warm water soothes my overworked hormones and puts them in check. I get out and climb into bed after putting on some night clothes, and drift off into an exhausted sleep. I wake up at about two in the morning when I hear shuffling noises coming from outside.
Hurrying to my window, I stare down into the darkness of Finn’s back garden. It takes a moment for my sleepy eyes to adjust, and when they do I make out the familiar shapes of the vampires lugging jars into the shed. The exact same jars as the one Rita used to catch the mist she and Delilah found yesterday.
I pull on a long cardigan and make my way downstairs, interested to know what’s going on. I can hear the not so mellifluous orchestra of Finn and Ira’s snoring, so I know they’re both fast asleep in their rooms.
When I open the back door and step out into the garden all eyes dart to me. Vampire eyes are far more intense than those of a human, so even when you’re not looking you can almost feel them on you, sliding across your skin. I pull my cardigan tight around me and walk over to them. Lucas, Dru and Will ignore me and resume stacking the jars in the shed. I meet Ethan’s stare head on. He’s just standing there watching me. I can still feel the heady lust for him, but it’s not as strong as it had been since I’ve sweated so much of it out. It doesn’t take as much energy to keep myself together now, thankfully.
“What’s going on?” I ask, shivering in the chilly night air.
“We continued our search of the city tonight,” Ethan answers, his voice as cold as the air around us. “We found nothing of Theodore, however we did find these things everywhere. Delilah said that she and the witch only saw one today. It seems that night is the time when they come out to…feed, if that’s what you’d call it.”
The lack of emotion in his voice when he speaks to me makes me feel terribly lonely. Perhaps it’s just down to the hour. I’ve always felt more alone in the middle of the night than I do during the day.
I stare inside the shed at the stacks of jars. The dark mists contained within them move frantically, struggling against being captured.
“There are so many,” I whisper, unable to fathom a way of getting rid of them all. Rita can’t even figure out how to kill one.
“This is barely half of what’s out there. Look at the news in the morning, I’m sure there’ll be reports of fights and riots just like the other day. It’s almost as though they’re multiplying. The human population is fracturing. Things are only going to get worse.”
“What can we do?” I whisper.
My heart sinks as I think that this could be it for Tribane. The mists could just keep growing and growing, infecting more and more people until they all go so mad that they end up annihilating one another.
“Perhaps I’m the one who should be asking you that question,” says Ethan, glancing away into the darkness.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
His eyes cut back to me. “It means I’d like to know how exactly you managed to burn half of Eliza’s face off with nothing but the palm of your hand. You’re not all that I thought you were; there’s magic in you.”
Ethan looks at me differently now. His hostility is still there, but it’s like he’s fascinated too.
I suck in a harsh breath. I’d almost allowed myself the luxury of thinking Ethan had forgotten about my performance at Whi
tfield’s. “That was…that was something I don’t quite understand yet.” I go quiet for a moment, not sure how to explain things to him. “Anything you see me do, anything magical that is, it comes out of nowhere. I’m not like Rita, I’m not really doing any of it with a conscious purpose. It just comes out of me like I’m possessed.”
“You’re lying. I can sense your anxiety,” Ethan states, tilting his head.
“I’m not bloody lying. I’m anxious because you make me anxious. You’re a vampire and not exactly my number one fan right now. Not to mention I’m standing in the dark in my pyjamas with no method of defending myself if you decide to let those fangs of yours get the better of you.”
Ethan laughs joylessly. “You know how old I am, Tegan. Long gone are the days when my fangs could get the better of me as you call it.”
He goes quiet for a moment, like he’s thinking of doing something but isn’t quite sure if he should. The next thing I know his eyes have morphed from dark blue to crimson, his fangs are out and he’s advancing on me. He hisses and crowds me up against the wall of the house. Lucas, Dru and Will don’t even give him a second glance.
My heartbeat goes haywire and I let out a high pitched yelp. Every tiny hair on my body stands on end. In a fight or flight response my magic comes to life. My hands whip out at him, overflowing with burning sparks like a sink where somebody’s left the tap running too long. He rears back out of range of the sparks and his fangs retract. His eyes go back to normal and he gives me a slow grin, looking satisfied.
“So you weren’t lying. It seems you’ve got a nifty little defence mechanism there. When you feel threatened your magic comes out to keep you safe. Interesting.” He rubs at his chin ponderously.
“Are you shitting me? I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack because you went all Count Dracula on me as a fucked up lie detector test? You scared me half to death.”
“I needed to see if you were telling the truth. And please spare me the Dracula references, I find them at best tiring and at worst excruciatingly irritating.”
I scowl at him and at the same time feel like kissing his face off. Stupid lust potion. “I’m going back to bed.”
As I reach out to turn the handle on the back door and go inside, I feel Ethan’s arms slip around my waist. He nuzzles his nose into the side of my neck. “How it kills me to know you sleep under the same roof as that slayer,” he whispers, and butterflies consume me.
A second later his tender hold on me goes hard and tight, too tight. “And oh how I long for the day when I don’t want you anymore. Perhaps then I’ll have the courage to walk away.”
Air gets trapped in my lungs, but just before I have the chance to question what he means I turn around and he’s gone.
The next day I join Rita in her trailer and we hit the books. Gabriel left her with two big boxes full of magical texts as research material before he, Alvie and Noreen departed on their travels. I’m kind of envious of them, because with everything that’s going on right now I really wouldn’t mind a road trip to get away from the city.
We sit and read for most of the morning and well into the afternoon, taking notes here and there. Rita’s looking for information on how to either destroy the mist or send it back to wherever it came from.
I’m simultaneously looking for details on how to hide the Ultimate Power blood from vampires and how to retrieve a human from hell. I read for so long that it feels like my eyes are going to fall out of their sockets. I put down the dusty old hardback when Rita suddenly slams her hands onto the surface of the table.
“That’s it! I can’t believe how simple it is,” she exclaims, grinning from ear to ear.
“What? Did you find something?” I ask, scooting along the bench to sit closer to her and peer over her shoulder at the book spread out before her. I flip over to the front cover for a second to see the title. It reads: On Other Dimensions and Their Inhabitants by E.J. Edwards. Seriously, where does Gabriel get all of these books from? More to the point, who writes and publishes them? I guess there really is a whole other world out there that I don’t even know about. I’ve only unearthed a tiny grain of it so far.
I open it back to the page Rita had been on and she taps her finger down on a small paragraph.
“This bit here explains what the mists are. They’re a kind of physical manifestation of chaos, but not just a manifestation, a parasite too. When they manage to break out of hell and into other planes where there’s a moral life-force they infest it and drive it to self-destruction. In the case of earth, human beings are the life-force that they corrupt. It’s likely that they can’t get to the vampires or to you and me because we’re a mutation. I need to warn Finn about this. He and the majority of Pamphrock’s slayers are human and susceptible to the corruption. It says that once these chaos creatures mix with a foreign atmosphere they multiply, kind of like bacteria in a Petri dish.”
I let out a sigh. “Ugh. We never get an easy run of it, do we?”
Rita smiles. “Oh don’t despair, my friend. This page also contains directions for how to kill them.” She lets out a little laugh. “It’s so simple too. All we need is a mixture of salt, holy water and vinegar. We spray it at the mists and they disintegrate.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Holy water? So like, all that God stuff actually means something?”
She shrugs and pinches me on the nose. “Maybe. But it’s too late to go and start getting all holy now, Tegan. If you’re friends with me then you ain’t getting into heaven any which way you try to spin it.” She’s joking, but I also sense a sadness in her. All this business with Theodore is really making her second guess who she is.
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll be the one most likely to get in out of all of us. I say it’s the people who don’t know they’re good who really are. The ones who go around acting all pious always turn out to have secret sex-torture dungeons under their houses.” I make the joke to try and cheer her up, but it doesn’t have the desired effect.
She shakes her head and leans back, all smiles gone from her face. “You don’t know what it’s like inside my head. Ever since Theodore tried to lure me to him the other day I’ve been feeling the part of me that comes from him getting stronger. It’s like it’s growing.”
I squeeze her arm in reassurance. What she’s said worries me, but I don’t want her to know that it does. “You’re just going to have to try harder to hold on to the part that comes from Noreen, okay?”
“Okay,” she sighs, and a moment of quiet elapses between the two of us. “Come on, there’s vinegar and salt in the kitchen. Let’s find Finn and see if he knows where we can get our hands on some holy water.”
A half an hour later we’re belted up in Finn’s car, driving towards the church he attends in the inner city called St. Peter’s. Apparently, Finn’s a practising Catholic and goes to mass whenever he has the time to spare. I never would have taken him for the religious sort. I tell him so and he shrugs, explaining that he’s Irish and Catholicism was drilled into him so much growing up that going to mass is a comfort to him. It makes him feel at home.
It sounds kind of nice when he puts it like that. I wish I had something that made me feel at home. It used to be going to visit my dad, but now there’s a strange family living in our house and he’s lost in a world he should never have even known existed in the first place.
The traffic is thick on the way into the city centre, so Finn turns on the radio to pass the time. A news bulletin starts to play and a male announcer’s voice streams through the speakers.
“There has been a traffic accident involving a number of vehicles in the city today causing unexpected delays. The area around Renfrew Avenue has been cordoned off so that emergency services can take care of the injured parties and clear away the wreckage. This event comes heavy on the heels of a string of violent attacks, which occurred late last night. Like the riots two days ago, these attacks are thought to be gang related. The authorities are advising citizens to avo
id the inner city at night, as this is when the bulk of the attacks have been taking place. I’m Dean Jones bringing you the afternoon news. We’ll be back at six with an update.”
Oh no, Ethan was definitely right when he told me to watch the news today.
“Well shit,” says Finn, letting out a frustrated breath.
“Do you think we should turn back? The announcer said the accident happened around Renfrew Avenue. That’s close to St. Peter’s, isn’t it?”
Finn runs his teeth over his bottom lip, deciding. “We’ll have to be in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, buy as many bottles of holy water as we can and then get the feck out of there. There’s a little shop to the left just as you go inside that’s run by nuns; they sell funeral cards and all that sort of stuff. I’m willing to take the chance if you two lovely ladies are.”
He eyes Rita who’s sitting in the back through his overhead mirror and gives her a wink.
She grins. “Taking chances is my middle name.”
I guess that’s her in then. “Alright, let’s just hope none of those chaos creatures have wormed their way into any of the nuns. Have you got any weapons on you if we end up being attacked? I know the violence has been more frequent at night, but you can never be too careful. It was broad daylight when I got caught up in it.”
Rita pats the brown leather satchel at her side. “I came prepared. I’ve got a few potions in here that will drive away any nutty humans – or nuns,” she laughs.
Finn keeps one hand on the steering wheel, while reaching into the glove compartment with the other. He pulls out a narrow, rectangular leather box and drops it into my lap. “Little present for you,” he says, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.
I open it up to discover a vintage barber’s razor sitting inside. It folds in half and has a carved wooden handle.
Finn eyes me warily. “Now be careful, I wasn’t going to give it to you so soon. I’d been hoping to train you first, but the current situation calls for desperate measures.”