I pushed away from the table. I didn’t have to sit there and take that. When I stood up, however, I was hit by a wave of nausea that pushed me right back down. I gripped the table and concentrated on breathing.
Mom came over to see what was the matter. She put her arm around me, and I smelled her earthy, human scent.
My stomach growled.
Holy shit. I was hungry too, and and not for more cereal. My mom must have sensed it too, because her eyes went wide. Like tendrils, I felt her magic begin to twist toward me. I didn’t know what her spell intended, but I had to get out of there. I pushed out from under her arms and ran for the door.
Chapter Six
I got as far as the curb and stopped, trying to calm my beating heart. I couldn’t believe my own mother was going to entrap me in some kind of magical net, if that was what I’d sensed—not that she hadn’t done it before. She’d once put me under a zombie spell just to keep me placid and at home. And the way she talked about vampires!
“Ana? Come back here. We need to talk!”
I bolted down the street, sending scurrying a group of cottontails foraging for clover on the boulevard. A flock of starlings took to the air as well. I ran all the way to the end of the block before I slowed.
I wanted to see Bea. Talking to Mom had been more than a bust, but Bea had something no other witch did. She had an ancient grimoire that we’d stolen from the Elders of the coven. The book had the spell that made vampires. The words were useless without the talisman, of course. But if it contained a spell that powerful, who knew what else it had?
I checked over my shoulder, but no one was coming after me. Maybe I’d imagined Mom’s attack. Even though my sense of magic had never failed me before, it was better than thinking that both my parents had tried to do me harm within the same day.
Shit.
How was I going to get to Bea’s? I’d stuffed my emergency money and bus pass into this pair of jeans when I’d changed, but the city bus could be such a pain. Bea lived in a neighborhood that required several transfers. I could sneak around to the back and “borrow” Mom’s MINI. It would serve her right if I took off with it. But I had only a learner’s permit. I was getting pretty good, but I was super nervous about being busted by some cop or getting in an accident. My luck hadn’t been that awesome lately.
I did find myself turning down the alley, though.
St. Paulies can be so strange. Our block was one of those that had gotten into the recent fad of competitive alley scapes. People spent an inordinate amount of time and money on plantings to make the little scrap bits of yard in the alley into showpieces. The first one I passed had a gorgeous spray of deep indigo clematis climbing along a cedar plank fence. They’d also added clay pots full of white tea roses.
It was stunning.
Of course, everyone was gearing up for the annual Tea and Garden Stroll charity event. Lawn mowers had been running nonstop since this Saturday was the day when houses would open up their backyards to show off million-dollar landscaping and offer genteel cups of tea and other goodies to troupes of paying tourists.
Our own alley looked sad compared to the others. We had an asphalt slab next to the carriage house where Mom parked the MINI. A thick bunch of ferns had taken over the untended area near the drainpipe. Mom’s mountain bike was propped, unlocked, against the carriage house door.
I might not feel right taking off with the car, but the bike seemed a fine substitution. Not much of an eff-you, but I still felt a surge of rebellion as I pedaled off.
Twenty minutes later I felt more sore than rebellious. My shins ached, and my hair was a plaster of sweat underneath the helmet. I’d mostly stuck to side streets with low traffic, but by the time I had to venture across University Avenue’s constant construction, I thought I was going to die. How could my mom do this for fun? She must be crazier than I thought.
I smiled grimly to myself. That kind of you-baffle-me insanity would be a pleasant change, honestly. If I came up with a solution to the hunt, I might have to start being grateful for the normal kind of crazy my folks drove me.
Finally, I turned down Bea’s street.
Even though they were older, the houses on the block looked remarkably similar. They were all in the Tudor style, with brown beams and white stucco. Each was about a story and a half, and they all sat right in the middle of identically manicured lawns. It was kind of Stepford, but the uniformity also made me feel weirdly … safe.
I coasted onto the sidewalk. Hopping off, I let the bike drop to the kind of springy, stiff grass that only existed at other people’s houses. Our own was part clover with a dash of creeping Charlie, but mostly dandelions. I’d say Bea’s dad had worked some kind of green magic, but all the other houses managed the same trick. I hardly saw a single yellow or fuzzy ball on the entire block.
Before ringing the bell, I checked the time. My cell told me it was nearly eight. Though not exactly a “decent” hour to wake someone during summer vacation, it wasn’t ridiculously early either. I punched up Bea’s number and called.
“Mmmr,” she answered.
“I woke you. Sorry,” I said. “Can I come in?”
“In?” I heard rustling. I looked up in time to see her part the curtain of her bedroom window and look down. I waved. The curtain shut. “This had better be an emergency.”
My speaker picked up the sound of her huffing down the stairs, so I hung up. She opened the door a second later. Bea stood blinking at me in sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt showing a cartoon fluffy cat holding a garden spade and a potted flower. The words underneath said HAIRY POTTER. Her brown hair, streaked with pink, was flattened on one side, and her face was bare of makeup. I tried not to notice the zit forming just under her chin. At least she’d managed to get a little color this summer, and a spray of freckles dotted either side of her button nose. Normally, I considered Bea was the cuter one of the two of us, since she had that hourglass shape all the boys craved. But, at the moment, she looked ready to bite my head off.
She glared at me for another second, then turned and stalked off to the kitchen. I followed her inside, shutting the door quietly behind me.
The interior of Bea’s house was a lot like the exterior. There were crisp, clean lines and carpeting so white I always felt as if I must be tracking filth on it even after I kicked off my shoes and left them in the pile by the door. Air-conditioning kept the temperature almost chilly, but the house never felt stuffy or closed up. In fact, it always kind of smelled freshly polished. There were no dust bunnies lurking in the corners, or cobwebs filling cracks in the crown molding.
I found Bea in the gleaming chrome kitchen, pressing buttons on a fancy coffeemaker. A sound like a buzz saw made me jump, as fresh beans were processed into grounds. Bea leaned against a sink completely empty of dishes and rubbed her face. “Spill.”
Where to start?
Might as well get right to the point. “Remember that book I asked you to hide? I need it.”
Bea gave me a suspicious look as the water in the coffeemaker sputtered and hissed. “You told me never to tell you where it was. Ever.”
I stood awkwardly in the archway. There were tons of chairs and stools to choose from, but they seemed so artfully placed, like something out of a magazine, that I wasn’t sure I was actually supposed to sit on any of them. “I’m getting hungry,” I admitted.
“Huh? Oh, well, we’ve got cereal you can have,” Bea said, turning to a cupboard.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said quickly. “Hungry.” I emphasized the word, watching her half-lidded eyes for comprehension. “You know, as in the hunt.”
Her expression widened a little, but she shook her head in confusion. “That’s bad,” she agreed, rubbing her face heavily. “But what does that have to do with the book?”
I explained my hopes that the grimoire might contain a spell that could substitute for the hunt. Bea took it all in slowly. When the chime rang on the coffeemaker, she poured herself a big
cup and added a ton of milk and sugar. I joined her at the polished oak table in the breakfast nook.
The room was a new addition, though it fit in seamlessly with the rest of the remodeled kitchen. Windows covered all four walls. Bea sat, sipping, for several minutes. I didn’t think I’d laid such a difficult proposal in front of her, but, well, I knew she wasn’t a morning person. I waited as patiently as I could, but this was getting ridiculous.
Finally, I broke. “Look—are you going to help me or not?”
“It’s not that.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Of course I’ll get the book for you, even though I don’t think you’re going to find anything in it. I’m trying to decide if I should tell you something.”
“You know you should! We’re supposed to be best friends.” Except, we weren’t always. We’d fought about pretty much everything at some point or another, and, of course, there was the whole witch versus vampire thing.
Bea must have decided I was right, because she leaned across the table. “There was a secret coven meeting called last night for the Elders,” she said, her voice dropping, even though we were very likely the only people awake in the house. “We discussed the vampire problem. Seems your mom already knows about the hunger that’s spreading through the kingdom, and, well, some people think this could be a ‘final solution,’ if you know what I mean.”
There was so much about what she just said that made my brain strip its gears, but I’d gotten stuck early. “‘We’? Since when are you an Elder?”
Color rose on Bea’s cheeks. “Keep your voice down!” she hissed. Looking around as if expecting spies, she leaned even closer. “My dad named me as successor, okay? That makes me a kind of an apprentice Elder. I’m not allowed to vote or anything. I just have to take notes like a secretary or an aide-de-camp. When he retires, I’ll take his place on the council.”
I couldn’t decide if I was mad, jealous, or both. Even though my mom was queen, Bea’s family had always been much better connected to the witch scene than mine. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised that Bea, who’d passed her Initiation with great success in contrast to my monumental failure, was invited to participate in high muckety-muck meetings. Yet I felt totally betrayed, as if she’d left me behind on purpose. Plus, I couldn’t help thinking that if I hadn’t been such a loser at the Initiation, we’d be doing this stuff together, as a team.
Bea must have seen it all in my eyes, because she sighed. “I knew you’d be like this. Try to listen to what I’m saying, though, would you? There’s a really large contingent of Elders who think the best course of action is to do nothing—to let all the vampires starve themselves to death.”
“That includes me!”
“Yeah, I don’t think your mom was counting on that.”
“Wait, are you saying that mass genocide was Mom’s idea?”
Bea tsked. “No, of course not. I just think she was more willing to entertain the idea when she thought it was, you know, just them.”
“I can’t believe that. I thought she was really starting to like Elias. God, how could I have been so wrong?” Of course, it seemed I’d generally put far too much trust in my parents lately.
Pursing her lips, Bea took a sip of coffee before answering. “I don’t know. Anyway, I thought she said something about his leaving to get married off in some political ceremony.”
That made a little more sense, at least. Mom was counting on Elias’s being away before letting the local vamps devour themselves, or whatever they thought would happen if they denied them the hunt forever.
Bea was giving me a funny look. “So it’s true?” she asked.
“Yeah, remember, I told you about this last night? Well, that prince wants Elias to marry his captain. Well, I guess ‘marry’ isn’t the right term. They’d enter a confarreatio.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Isn’t that just what they call vampire marriage?”
“No,” I said. “This seems like a completely different thing. My mom said she insisted on getting a real marriage to my dad on top of a confarreatio.”
“But it still binds two people, right?”
“Seems to,” I agreed.
“Well, I thought you and Elias were together.”
I had no idea what to say about that. I mean, I’d thought Dad had broken us up, but now Luis suggested we were forever bound by some kind of “trust blood bond.” So I just shrugged.
“Is he really going to marry a dude? I didn’t know he was bi.”
Wow, my mom must have told the council everything. I guessed Bea just needed me to confirm it. “I don’t know if he’s bi. We never talked about that. I have to say that the confarreatio seems very arranged and political, not so much on the romantic side. I’m beginning to think vampires don’t marry for love, only politics. I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to have kids together.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Bea agreed. But she really didn’t want to let the subject of Elias’s sexuality go. “So you’ve never asked him? He’s been alive forever, and you’re not even curious if he ever kissed a boy in all that time? I mean, Constantine, right? That’s Greek, or Roman—whatever. I watched Spartacus. There was a whole lot of sex with dudes in those days.”
“Oh, would you stop it? Don’t we have bigger things to worry about than whether Elias has kissed a boy?”
She gave me a serious, measuring look. Setting her cup down, she declared, “You don’t like the idea, do you?”
“Well, would you? Would you want to know if your boyfriend had boyfriends?”
Bea smiled lasciviously. “I’d think it was kind of hot.”
“You are so weird.”
“Oh, come on! You don’t think the idea of two Roman dudes together is kind of sexy?” she continued. “The point is, that’s like total yaoi fantasy.” Bea referred to a subset of Manga written for girls that features boys in love. We’d both gone through a phase when we read a lot of it, though apparently it had made a much bigger impression on Bea.
“Yeah, but see, that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s fantasy. Elias is my real boyfriend.”
Bea cocked her head. “So you are still together. Does Thompson know?”
I was seriously getting frustrated with this conversation. It had spun away from me—and from the point. “For the hundredth time, I’m not dating Thompson.”
“I don’t know if he knows that.”
Crossing my arms in front of my chest, I sat back. “Can we just go look at the book?”
Bea laughed. “You know what? No. Not until you promise on your witch honor that you will ask Elias about his past relationship with men.”
“Seriously? You are such a pervert.”
“I know I am, but what are you?” she said in that singsong tone we used when we were kids. Bea got up and put her coffee cup in the dishwasher. “Just ask. I’m curious, okay? I just told you a whole bunch of stuff I wasn’t supposed to, and that could get me in a whole shitload of trouble. You could at least do this for me.”
I raised my hands in defeat. “Okay, okay. You win!”
“Good. Now let’s go fetch the grimoire.”
When I told Bea to hide the book, I’d had visions of secret caves or, at the very least, a wall safe with multiple combinations. She pulled a cardboard box out from under her bed.
“This is where you hid the grimoire?”
“Don’t act so horrified,” she said. At least she’d put a few decoy papers on top. As she shifted them to the side, I thought they looked like old school papers. Bea sat in a clear spot on the floor of her room. “No one knew I had it. It was as safe here as anywhere else.”
The walls of Bea’s room were covered in movie posters and pencil sketches of celebrities. In a corner she had a wooden drawing table and a stool, which I perched on. There were art supplies everywhere. Magazines and books littered the floor and all other flat surfaces. Discarded clothes draped over everything else. Bea was a slob; I felt completely at home.
She h
anded me the book. It was leather bound and smelled of red rot. The pages were brittle and so thin as to be nearly transparent. Spidery, cursive handwriting and illustrations filled all the spaces. Here and there pressed flowers, which had been pasted to the paper, crumbled into the book’s gutter.
I looked at the words for a clue, and I discovered I couldn’t read it.
“Is this English?” I asked.
“Kind of. It’s Old English,” Bea said. When I gave her a how-did-you-know-that look, she shrugged. “I looked it up on Wikipedia.”
“Can you read it?”
“If I work at it, but I never even really learned cursive, did you?”
Actually, I had. I’d suffered through hours and hours of rote practice because my mother, being a college professor, said she would be damned if a child of hers couldn’t read historical documents such as the Constitution because no one in the St. Paul public school system could be bothered to teach it. Still, it wasn’t something I used every day. “A little,” I admitted.
I joined Bea over on her bed, and we sounded out the titles to most of the entries. There were effective poultices for the treatment of gout and other ailments, botanical lists, and even a spell for the “discoverie of a familiar” that both Bea and I kind of wanted to try.
Outside of that and the one very important spell for the “creation of the vampyr,” nothing in the book seemed terribly outside of what you might find in a modern grimoire. I copied down everything written on vampires, all three pages of it, but it seemed everyone had called this one: the grimoire wasn’t going to be much help.
At least not in any obvious way.
Resting my back against the headboard, I felt defeated. Bea sat beside me adding sketches of the symbols and other illustrations to my notes. She hummed to herself as she drew. Under the surface of reality, I could feel another vibration, not unlike when Bea worked magic. Her fingers dashed lightly over the paper, and I was amazed, and, as always, just a little surprised at how good she really was.
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