Vampire Innocent (Book 9): An Introduction To Paranormal Diplomacy

by Cox, Matthew S.

  I accept the seemingly empty pouch, and peek inside—at shiny gold coins. “Gah! Are you serious? I can’t take this from you. It’s too much.”

  He waves me off when I try to hand it back. “Tis but a small nibble. A token o’ me gratitude fer puttin’ an end ta the brownie problem.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Indeed.” He grabs his lapels, rocking heel to toe. “I’ve plenty. Enjoy ’et. Ye ought’a be gettin’ goin’. Be daylight in a tick.”

  “Good point.” Since everyone here seems taken with overacting genteel customs, I curtsey to Mardle. “Thank you for helping me.”

  “Bah. Nothin’ compared ta ye stealin’ me entire fortune. Sides…” He bumps his derby to tilt forward on his head, then winks. “’Ad a wee bit o’ fun.”

  I shake hands with him, collect Addy, and head off to the brownie camp.

  As soon as we spot brownies, Addy gasps and clings, seeming terrified of them.

  “What’s wrong?” I whisper.

  She rambles in Irish, too fast for me to tell where one word ends and the next starts. The child looks around frantically for a moment, then pulls the drawstring out from the base of her winter coat. She ties one end around my left wrist, the other around her right wrist while muttering. As soon as she cinches the second knot, using her teeth to help, she calms.

  “What’s all that about?” I ask.

  “Brownies!” she whispers. “I’m only eight!”

  “Yeah. Seven to ten… gotta be eleven to get into the Girl Scouts.”

  Addy rolls her eyes. “No. Real brownies. They steal kids.” She waves her arm, making the thin cord dance about. “This will stop them from taking me.”

  Oh, hmm. Wonder if this is where ‘kid leashes’ came from?

  “If you say so. Cord’s a bit flimsy. Even you could probably snap it.”

  “They can’t make me get lost or separate us. It’s a spell.” She smiles. “You’re too big for them to steal.”

  Since she’s calmed down, I keep walking with her into the camp. The brownies all stop in their tracks, staring at us. Imagine a new ‘must have’ doll comes out on the market two months before Christmas. The brownies fixate on Addy like a pack of jealous kindergarteners whose classmate brought one of these ultra-rare and hard to find dolls to show-and-tell after no one else got one. Their creepy too-cute eyes brim with desire. Oh, holy crap. Addy’s right. Any one of these little goobers look like they’d grab her if they could. No wonder the witches blamed them for a missing kid.

  For some reason, they aren’t looking at Sophia the same way. Could be, she’s too old to count as a ‘little kid’ to them, or the brownies think of her more as a powerful magic user rather than a child. Speaking of Sophia, she’s still hanging on the tree in a root cocoon, looking rather bored.

  “No!” shouts three brownies, running up to us. “Take girl away from here now! The witches will know she is here.”

  “I’m going to take her home right away. The witches will stop bothering you. I’m here for my sister.”

  “Make witches stop first!” shout the brownies.

  “I’m going to do that next. You’re on the way.”

  “No!” they shout. “Witches first!”

  “Bringing her home is going to stop—”

  My surroundings change in an instant.

  Addy and I are standing on a paved street in a small town. The cord connecting our wrists glows like Wonder Woman’s lasso for a few seconds and dims.

  “Eep!” She gawks at it. “They tried to take me!”

  “Didn’t they demand you not be there?” I scratch my head.

  “Yeah, but…” She grabs my hand. “They can’t help it. Stealing kids is what they do. I’m double chocolate cake and they’re like a bunch of pregnant ladies. If they didn’t try to keep me, the string wouldn’t glow.”

  I chuckle—for a second. “Umm, what do brownies do when they take a kid? Hope they’re not really going to eat you like cake.”

  She offers a nervous shrug. “No idea. Grandma says kids taken by brownies don’t come home again. I think they get turned into brownies, too.”

  I cringe, thinking of the dark dryads. Yeah, fits the theme around here.

  “Okay, now I’m scared,” whispers Addy.

  “What happened?”

  Addy points. “This is the street I live on. The brownies know where my house is.”

  “Oh. We’ve been teleported—and no flying through a void of blackness thing like when the mystics grabbed Sophia and me. I should be freaking out.”

  “Brownies are scary,” whispers Addy. “They only go out at night, but they can’t get me when I’m in bed.”

  “Gotta love the ‘blanket of defense.’”

  She smiles, then whispers, “It’s true. Old laws. Most elder fey can’t get past an item of protection like a blanket, or cross the threshold of a house when the door is closed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Unless you do something to deserve revenge, they can’t just walk in.” Addy walks off the road to the sidewalk, following it to the third house. She knocks, barely making any noise. No one inside notices. She knocks again a moment later, still nothing.

  “I got this.” I hammer on the door like a pissed off cop—stronger than mortal Sarah, but not enough to break anything.

  A man upstairs erupts in a fit of shouting. Addy blushes and gasps. Okay, I’m not going to ask her what he’s saying. His yelling soon sets a woman to shouting who sounds too young to be her grandmother. Lights come on inside. Three, maybe four adults based on tromping, come down a flight of stairs into the room behind the door.

  It whips open inward, stirring up almost enough wind force to suck us into the house. A tall guy with a mop of disheveled curly black hair stares down at me, one eye wider than the other. He’s about to lay into me for bothering them at such an early hour—but spots Addy.

  “Papa!” she yells, leaping into a hug.

  The nylon cord around my wrist drags me into the house as the guy gathers her up and spins, erupting in emotional cheering. I could snap the cord pretty easily, but no need yet. Superhuman agility lets me avoid wiping out, hurting Addy, or being thrown into the wall.

  Three women watching from the base of the stairs—one older, one mom’s age, one early twenties—also erupt in joyous shouting. I’m going to assume they’re grandma, mom, and older sis, or maybe her mother’s sibling. Grandma notices the cord and grabs hold of the father, bringing an end to his wildly swinging Addy around.

  “Brownies? Ahh, I knew it.” Grandma unties the cord from my wrist, then undoes it from Addy’s arm. “Don’t need this in here.”

  “Yes, we saw brownies, but they didn’t have her. She used the cord when we got close to where they live. I know there are witches throwing energy into the forest to attack the brownies.”

  “What do you know of witches?” asks Grandma.

  The young woman stares at me. She has a feeling I’m more than an ordinary human, and senses darkness. Okay, I am a vampire. Some darkness can’t be helped, so I don’t take it as an insult.

  Addy’s mother is too busy squeezing her and crying to pay any attention to me whatsoever.

  “I know some witches are tossing curses at the brownies either as punishment for Addy’s disappearance or to get her back… but the brownies had nothing to do with it. Dark dryads took her.”

  Grandma’s cheeks go as pale as white granite. “The withered ones…”

  “Yeah. I found her on the Dark Mother.”

  The young woman gasps, covering her mouth in both hands. Tears brim in her eyes. Ack. She obviously understands what happened to Addy.

  Young voices upstairs call out in Irish. Three boys in pajamas, aged roughly six to twelve, appear at the top of the stairs. I can’t understand them, but ‘what’s going on; why is everyone awake’ is somewhat universal. Upon seeing Addy, they rush downstairs to join the cheering.

  Whoa. Big family.

  I loo
k back and forth between the young woman and grandma. Addy knew about brownies, enchanted the string. These two aren’t calling me crazy for talking about brownies and dryads. Aha. “So, could you please stop throwing magic at the brownies? I’d really like them to give me my sister back.”

  Grandma regards me for a moment. “Well, I suppose. Are you sure they had nothing to do with takin’ her?”

  “They’ve got your wee sister?” asks the younger woman.

  “They definitely looked at her like they wanted to steal her, but… no. Brownies didn’t have Addy. They do, however, have my sister. Sophia’s got a little magic, so they thought she could blow up the leprechauns.”

  Everyone looks at me like I’ve got five heads.

  “I’m still somewhat confused by what they said. Either the brownies thought the leprechauns had Addy, or they knew the dryads did and needed the leprechauns out of the way to get there. Talking to them was one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever done. They wanted to get Addy back so they could return her to you and make whatever ‘the witches’ were doing to them stop.”

  Grandma shakes her head. “They’d not have given ’er back. Maybe they said so. Maybe they even believed they could… but soon as they looked at ’er, they’d ’ave kept ’er.”

  I’m inclined to agree. They certainly seemed to try taking her when they punted us to the village. “Yeah.”

  “All right. We’ll have enough to do helping her recover. On the Dark Mother, you say?” Grandma swoons. “Goddess give me strength.”

  The parents and brothers bring Addy upstairs. She waves bye to me over her father’s shoulder. I wave back to her, smiling.

  “She’s okay. The other dryads cleansed her body of the dark ones’ corruption”—wow, I really feel like a character in Skyrim talking like this—“and I made sure she didn’t remember that horrible tree.”

  Grandma blinks. “You altered her memories?”

  “Yeah. She’s way too small to remember anything so horrible. Hell, I wish I could erase it from my head.”

  “You survived being close to the Dark Mother.” Grandma leans slightly back, eyeing me. “You’re no mortal girl.”

  “Darn.” I fake snap my fingers. “You got me.”

  The young woman stares at me for a long moment. “You are… how did you get inside the house? We didn’t invite you in?”

  Hah. “Old wives’ tale. Just like the one claiming everyone like me is bad.”

  “Thank you for bringing my granddaughter home alive,” says Grandma.

  “You’re welcome. Apologies if it’s a little rude of me, but I’ve got to be going.”

  “Aye. Sun’ll be up shortly,” says the younger woman.

  “Yeah. And the brownies still have my sister. Need to get her back before the little goobers get too attached to her.”

  The women nod. Despite their gratitude, they’re both obviously relieved to have ‘the vampire’ leaving the house as fast as possible. They graciously show me to the door, thank me again, and go back inside.

  “Great. Now where the hell am I?”

  37

  Cosmic Encouragement

  Considering Addy and her family went mushroom picking in those woods, it can’t be far.

  I zoom into the air, circling for a view. Sure enough, the forest is only about three miles north of here, not a long flight. From the air over the trees, the only place I truly recognize is the approximate location of the light dryad’s circle, as I’d flown straight up from that point earlier. The brownie camp is southwest of it, but this forest has some weird internal distance distortion stuff going on.

  Rather than waste hours confusing myself, I dive into the trees near the dryad circle and make my way to the brownie camp within the forest. Sophia’s still on the damn tree. Klepto’s clinging to the roots around her chest, licking her nose/face as necessary to deal with random itches. My little sister has epic amounts of patience. She’s been stuck there for hours unable to move and appears quite calm.

  At least she’s bundled in her winter coat and not freezing. Maybe she even fell asleep standing up. It is, after all, way past her bedtime.

  I land in front of her.

  “Sare!” She squirms. “Do something! I really gotta pee!”

  “We’re going home now… or at least back to a hotel.” I look around at the crowd of brownies filling in behind me. “The human girl is once again with her family. The witches have given me their word they will stop attacking you. The leprechauns will not retaliate against you unless you attack them again. Everything is back to normal.”

  Kezbit, the brownie in the slightly fancier outfit, wriggles out of the crowd and walks up to me. “We feel the witch magic stop. Deal is deal.”

  “My sister is still mummified in roots.”

  “Yes, yes,” mutters Kezbit. “I am deciding if you stealing the other child from us broke agreement.”

  “Addy being taken was the cause of your entire problem. If you had her, the witches would attack again. Besides, I couldn’t steal her from you because she’s not yours. You would’ve had to steal her from me first… and you couldn’t do so because she protected herself using the string.”

  The brownies rumble angrily, but it’s the sort of ‘dammit, she’s right on a technicality’ anger my Mom gets from opposing counsel sometimes in court—and experiences herself quite often as well. Though, if you ask me, I’m correct on way more than a technicality here.

  “Fine!” shouts Kezbit, flinging his or her arms up.

  The roots cocooning Sophia slacken and fall to the ground in a wreath of brambles. As fast as my vampiric self can move, I reach out and grab her hand. I don’t have a cord handy to tie around our wrists, nor any idea how to go about enchanting one. Hopefully, the string linking Addy to me had been equivalent to holding hands.

  “Oof,” mumbles Sophia, stumbling into me. “My legs feel funny.”

  “Probably because you’ve been standing so long.”

  “No, I was hanging.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Except for not being able to move, it was kinda comfy.” Sophia gives me a ‘still gotta pee really bad’ stare.

  I look her over. Nothing appears to be wrong. “You’re surprisingly calm.”

  “I wasn’t really scared. Brownies aren’t dangerous if you’re nice to them.”

  The brownies watch us walk off. They’re not looking at Sophia with the same fierceness of greed as Addy, but a few seem tempted to grab her. Deciding not to take chances, I scoop Sophia up and fly us into the air, out of the forest. Klepto’s snuggled inside her coat, only her head peeking out the neck opening. My sister doesn’t have her helmet and I left my climbing harness behind, but neither is too big a problem. So we go a little slower.

  “I’m tempted to handcuff myself to you until we get out of Europe.”

  She laughs. “Won’t help. Magic stuff keeps grabbing me. It won’t exactly obey the laws of physics.”

  Sigh. “So I’ve arranged the end of a brownie-leprechaun war.”

  “You did.” Sophia squirms from having to go so bad.

  “At least the negotiations were short.”

  “Boo.” Sophia moans. “Okay, Dad.”

  I laugh. “We are going home.”

  “Wait!” she yells. “We still have to stop the spirit. I had a lot of time to think while stuck to the tree. What if stuff keeps happening to me because we’re trying to leave?”

  “Seriously? The brownies grabbed you after we decided to deal with the ghost.”

  She shrugs. “I dunno. Magic works weird. The timing could be off.”

  “You think the mystics hexed you to stay here until you helped?”

  “No, not really. More like the universe wants me to do it. I messed up letting him out of the soul jar even if it felt like the right thing to do. I understand I’m too nice.”

  “Hah. Okay. You’re right. We’ll try going after the ghost one more time, but Christmas is coming up and Mom is g
oing to kill me if we’re not home in time. Speaking of time…”

  Sophia wails when I go into a sudden dive, heading for the same town where I found five men for the dryads. The instant I spot a house with someone emerging from their front door, I swoop in to land behind them, drop Sophia on her feet, and grab the man, shoving him into the wall beside the door and covering his mouth.

  He starts to scream, but goes limp as soon as I’m in his head. Sophia stands there doing the pee dance while I program this guy to unlock the door for us, then forget we exist. He’s on his way downtown to open his little grocery store for the morning, and won’t be back home before dark. Excellent. No need to give him a compulsion to ignore our presence in his house. We’ll be gone by the time he returns.

  I drop the connection to his thoughts.

  Like an automaton, he unlocks the front door and walks to his car, ignoring us. Sophia looks freaked out, but follows me inside. It’s not the mind control or the flying she’s unnerved by. I’m sure she doesn’t like ‘stealing someone’s house.’ The instant we’re inside, my breath catches in my throat. It’s stuffy in here and stinks like someone used to smoke a crapload, like serious ‘light a cig with the previous one chain smoking’ kind of stink. It’s old smoke, and I don’t need vampiric heightened senses of smell to pick it up—but having amplified senses turns it from a background nuisance to horrible. Yellowed wallpaper and trim confirm this house has seen a lot of nicotine. Fortunately, nothing too recent. Guess the current resident doesn’t smoke.

  “I’ll be in the basement. Try not to do too much damage.”

  Sophia scoffs at me, but still runs off in search of a toilet.

  I re-lock the front door and start my search for the stairs, locating them a few minutes later behind a door I initially mistook for a hall closet. The basement is small, dusty as hell, and filled with a mixture of antique furniture and disassembled steel store shelves. Two small windows are a potential problem, but uncontrolled weeds outside kinda block them, and they’re really damn dirty. Still, I take a few minutes to reposition old curtains for additional security, then walk over to a sofa from 1910 I plan to use as a bed. The fabric reeks of cigarette smoke even more than the house upstairs. Ugh. Talk about the worst smell in the world.