by D. D. Miers
"Fascinating," he said. "You could do great things with training. It is unfortunate that will not happen."
He raised a hand, dark with his killing power, and stepped toward me. I pulled energy out of him as quickly as I could, but he simply had too much. I would never be able to stop him before he reached me. I closed my eyes, bracing myself to fight whatever he was going to do to me.
Someone's cell phone rang.
Everything ceased as the cheery default digital ringtone played in the abruptly silent room.
Aethon straightened up, reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, and pulled out a cell phone while I stared, baffled both that he had a cell phone at all and that he would answer it in the middle of this.
"Yes," he said, holding the phone to his ear. "Of course. Don't do anything until I arrive."
He hung up and tucked the phone back into his jacket. He straightened his tie as he looked down at me again.
"I have more important matters to attend to," he said, milder than he had been this entire encounter. "I will give you some time to consider. But I will see you again soon, descendant. Do me a favor and do not die in the meantime."
And with that he turned and left, walking casually out of the room as though this had been just a dull business meeting and not a fight for my life.
The other necromancer had recovered at some point during the fight, and he scrambled to his feet now to chase after Aethon.
"What are you doing?" I shouted after him. "He'll kill you!"
He paused in the doorway long enough to glance back at me.
"I'm getting that candle," he snarled. "And then I'm coming back for you."
He took off before I could say anything more, leaving me alone with Ethan who, now that the danger had passed, fell unconscious. I held him as he shrank back into a naked man.
The dog sat down beside me and put his shaggy head on my shoulder. I sighed and patted him thoughtfully, scrutinizing the room.
Dead insects, mice, lizards, and one raccoon littered the floor among the splinters of two broken chairs and plaster from the broken ceiling tile.
"We made quite a mess, didn't we, Mort?" I said, scratching his floppy ears. He chuffed happily. "Well, at least I finally found a name you like."
I pulled out my phone and dialed Aunt Persephona. I was going to need help.
Chapter 12
I lay on the bed of Aunt Persephona's guest room, Ethan sleeping next to me, and stared up at the ceiling, wondering what was going to happen to me.
Mort lay across our feet, looking more alive now that I'd had time to put some effort into stitching him back together and padding out his fur. In the chair on the other side of the room, a fluffy, black three-legged cat sunned itself, freshly returned from the vet. Aunt Percy had named her Morgana. The events of two days ago still played in a loop in my head.
I'd sent the dead animals back into the walls of the funeral home and promised to pay for the chairs and ceiling tile. After Mr. Gould had let me have it—and then some—he’d finally calmed down enough to listen. I’d explained that the strange client had been a nasty ex-boyfriend, which had earned me a few shreds of sympathy—but not nearly enough. If I hadn’t been able to cover up naked Ethan with scattered debris and a tarp, gods know what would’ve happened.
Replacements of my caliber aren’t easy to come by. If they were, he’d have thrown me out in a second after this last debacle. It’s not like little girls and boys lined up for a career serving the undead. Now, I had the distinct feeling my job hung by a thread . . . and that thread was called "a lack of options."
At least Aunt Persephona had been willing to let us stay at her house a while. She didn’t like the situation in the least, but some things take precedence. Her love for me far outweighed her hatred of werewolves. Not the most magnanimous reason, but I’d call it progress.
There'd been no sign of Aethon or the other necromancer since the fight at the funeral home, but I was uncomfortable going back to my apartment. I knew one or both of them was bound to show up again eventually. Probably sooner rather than later. And I didn't know what to do about it.
Aethon had been right. I wasn't strong or well-trained enough to take on either one of them. Aunt Percy didn’t have much to offer. She was weak and untrained herself. What was I supposed to do? Wait for one of them to torture me until I broke my connection to the candle? Maybe Ethan's contacts at the library, the curators, would be able to help. They'd been planning to buy and hide the candle, right? I didn't want anyone else to get hurt and what had nearly happened to Ethan struck me as a dangerous move.
The stack of books I'd taken from the other necromancer, along with several from Aunt Persephona's library, sat on the bedside table.
I'd been studying them, trying to learn more about my powers and what I could do with them. If everything I'd read so far was anything to go by, what I'd done to save Ethan was pretty unheard of. Taking back energy once it had been put into something, dead or otherwise, was broadly considered impossible. That I'd pulled Aethon's death out of Ethan, then dragged Aethon's own energy out of him—there was nothing like it in any of the books. It was going to be even harder to figure out my powers, when I couldn't even accurately tell what they were.
As I lay there contemplating the future, my phone buzzed from on top of the stack of books. I grabbed it, frowned at the unknown number, and then answered anyway.
"Hello?"
"It's Cole."
I sat up, skin prickling. "Who?"
"The guy you fought a lich with day before yesterday," he said. "Never got a chance to give you my name. I'm Cole."
"How the hell did you get my number?" I asked in a low hiss, glancing at Ethan to make sure he was still asleep.
"Magic, genius," Cole said with a snort.
"How do you magic a phone number?" I slipped off the bed and closed the curtains, shutting out the sunlight. There wasn't anyone in the yard. I half expected to see Aethon standing in the pansies.
"Fine, I got it from your work. Happy?"
"No, I am definitely not happy," I said. "I've got two assholes trying to kill me and my life force is tied to some random candle which, by the way, Aethon still has."
"He doesn't want you dead," Cole said with strange confidence. "He practically said as much and judging by his actions, when he could’ve ended you—he didn’t. I'm guessing it would interfere with however he wants to use the candle. And he knows more about it than either of us, so I'm not going to kill you, either. At least not until I know what's keeping him from doing it."
"Well that's reassuring."
"You did pretty well in that fight," Cole said. "I was actually kind of impressed. I mean, it was pretty obvious it was your first fight, but still. You did all right. For future reference, if you want to control a bunch of things, smaller and simpler is better. Insects are easy to coordinate, a ton of them at once. But something as complicated as a raccoon takes more focus and energy. You had to leave it and the birds on autopilot, so you couldn't take full advantage of controlling them."
“Are you seriously offering me guidance?”
He sighed into the receiver. “It would seem so.”
“I thought you wanted me dead.”
He remained silent as if debating how he wanted to respond. A full thirty seconds passed and just as I thought he’d hung up, he added, “Take it or leave it.”
Odd. But I refused to dwell on it. I had other pressing matters to deal with.
“Well, thanks for the advice," I said, rolling my eyes. "I'll keep that in mind when I'm kicking your ass next time I see you."
"I don't think it'll be too long until you get your chance," he chuckled. "Aethon slipped away from me with the candle, but he's bound to show up again, and when he does he'll be coming for you. I'm going to be staying close."
I shivered uncertain—or perhaps unwilling—to acknowledge why.
"Come anywhere near me or anyone I care about and you're dead," I warned him. "We
'll see how good you are at controlling your little bug swarms after I've hit you in the head with a baseball bat a few times. And that's before I sic the werewolf on you."
"You might want to save that fight for your freaky-ass ancestor," Cole replied. "He's a lot more dangerous than either of us. Whatever he's planning for the candle, it's probably not good. We stand a better chance working together."
"Except, in case you've forgotten, you tried to kill me and still want to kill me, too," I said.
"I left a mountain lion in your apartment," Cole said. "Which you vaporized. I don't think it's quite on the same level."
"I don't have any reason to trust either of you," I said.
“Never heard of the saying, ‘Better to lie with the devil you know?'"
“I’m not lying with anyone.”
I could tell he was smirking into the phone. “I didn’t mean in the biblical sense.”
“Like I said, I don’t know who to trust.”
“You’re really giving Aethon the benefit of the doubt? Especially after last night?”
“Aethon might have the best intentions in the world, but he didn't exactly share them with me before torturing me and trying to kill my friend. I don't know what you're after, either. You could be just as bad as he is. All I know about you is that you're the kind of guy who's willing to wreck someone's apartment to get what he wants, and then leave an undead mountain lion behind out of spite when he doesn't get it."
Cole was quiet for a few moments.
"It's personal," he said at last, voice soft. "What I want the candle for. It's personal. I don't want to hurt anyone or take over the world or whatever. I just want to . . . fix something. Once I'm done, you can have the candle back. Or give it to whatever secret society has been hiding it all this time or whatever."
He sounded sincere, but I still wasn't sure I could believe him. Or that I even wanted to. It’s much easier to simply hate someone you’re uncertain about, then to spend time pondering over their true motives.
I didn’t answer and he took my silence as the perfect time for goodbyes.
"I'll be around, Vexa. Try not to die before I get that candle back, all right?"
"Yeah," I said, shaking my head. "You don't die either. I'd be pissed if you croak before I get a chance to kick your ass."
He laughed, a brief but pleasant sound that evoked as much surprise from him as me.
"Deal," he said, and hung up.
I sat on the bed putting the phone on top of the books, wondering what I was going to do next. I looked over at Ethan, sleeping peacefully, and smiled. At least, whatever happened, whatever was coming for me, I wouldn't be facing it alone. I cuddled into him until his arms instinctively wrapped around my waist, cradling me protectively against his chest.
Sure, I was a woman, a necromancer, who could probably kick more ass than the werewolf at my back, but sometimes, it’s nice to know that if you wanted to be saved, to be protected instead of having to fight, you could. I closed my eyes and accepted the respite his arms offered me, even if it was only temporary.
Chapter 13
Aunt Persephona once told me that Déjà vu was never to be ignored.
To the mundane, that odd sensation of already having experienced events was shaken off as just nothing more than a "weird unexplainable occurrence" everyone went through at one time or another.
In actuality, it served a higher purpose in the cosmic order. A warning. A prelude of something dark to come. Not set in stone per se, but alterable events that could come to pass if one didn’t acknowledge the sign they’d been gifted.
In simpler terms, Déjà vu was never a good omen.
So the fact that I watched an obsidian-headed Magpie circle and land on the branch outside Aunt Percy’s kitchen window in an all-too-familiar way irked me to my very core.
Its ebony eyes blended into its matching head, contrasting harshly against the white-and-blue feather’s adoring its lower half. I stood unmoving, dirty dinner plates in my hand as it did exactly as I had known it would. It crossed the lawn, swooping into the birdbath, then landing atop the square feeder in the center garden, before taking its fill and ending up perched on the tree branch just beyond the kitchen sink.
I held my breath. Maybe it’ll just fly away. Maybe it won’t . . . nope . . . it completed my sense of Déjà vu. It took a few paces forward, the branch bouncing with each hop, and pecked its beak against the glass three times.
“Vexa?”
Startled by my aunt’s voice, I jerked and the wet plate in my hands slipped. It caught the glass tumbler on the counter’s edge along with it, and both hit the floor in a resounding smash. I dropped down to my knees, using my fingers to scoop up the mess of porcelain and glass coating her wood floor.
“Don’t use your bare hands,” Aunt Percy said as she walked over to the pantry and grabbed a broom. “Here.” She crouched down beside me, handing me the dustpan.
I picked up a few of the large pieces and set them on top. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, honey. Nothing a little glue can’t fix.”
The plate had only broken into six pieces, so it wouldn’t be much trouble to mend, but the glass couldn’t be saved. She cleared out the remaining shards and together we swept and vacuumed, making sure our bare feet wouldn’t get any painful surprises later.
“Are you all right?” she asked, leaning her back against the counter, the wet dish towel hung limply over her shoulder.
“Yes—I’m sorry.”
“It was an accident, Vexa. No need for so many apologies.”
“I know, I just . . .”
“Spit it out, love.”
“I saw something familiar.”
Aunt Persephona raised a brow. “Familiar?”
“Déjà vu.”
“What was it?”
I sighed. “Does it matter? You’ve told me. A bad omen is a bad omen. Unless there’s another way to interpret Déjà vu?”
“No.” She shook her head. “The omen is clear. Darkness is coming.” She sat down in the nearest chair at the kitchen table, her hands threaded together, gaze thoughtful. “When was the first time you saw it?”
I sunk into the empty seat beside her. “The day before Uncle Ptolemy’s funeral, and then just now.”
Her eyes focused intently on the bowl of fruit residing in the center of the oak table. “So, after the candle.” It wasn’t a question, merely her confirming the suspicions we both had. After Aethon’s arrival, my great-great-great ancestor and current nemesis.
“I mean he’s already here, so maybe that’s all its saying.” I lied to myself. “Just a reminder.”
“No. Aethon’s mere presence wouldn’t draw a sign like this.” She tapped her knuckles along the tabletop, deep in thought. “We have to be careful.” She looked to me. “You have to be careful.”
“I always am.”
“You know what I mean.”
I reached my hand across the table and set it on hers. “I know—and I will.”
“I mean it, Vexa.” She stood. “There’s something happening here. Something I can’t place or explain. Necromancy can lead you down many paths. Several of which are not good ones. This magic could affect you in ways even you won’t understand. Be cautious. Not just of your enemies, but yourself as well.”
Cautious of yourself. Three words no one wants to hear, especially anyone who deals in magic. That’s the equivalent of being told you may be losing your mind.
“I’ll be careful, I swear.”
“And you’ll tell me if anything strange happens? Or anyone new shows up?”
I smiled. “Of course.”
It was kind of a lie because I had yet to tell her about Cole. Why hadn’t I said anything to Aunt Persephona? Probably for the same reason I hadn’t told Ethan about the phone call the other night. I was afraid to.
Strange things were happening. I wasn't ready to acknowledge them . . . not yet. I’d show Aunt Persephona and Ethan most of the deck
but keep a few cards hidden in my pocket, at least until I figured out what they meant. And hopefully, that choice doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.
Besides, what harm could a few small secrets really do?
Continue Reading Vexa’s story in Grave Debt,
Coming July 17, 2018!
Continue on for an exclusive sneak preview of Aurora: The Kresova Vampire Harems Volume One!
Aurora: The Kresova Vampire Harems Volume One
Sometimes, it takes a pawn to dethrone a queen.
The Kresova
Blood.
The source of life—and the emblem of death.
For humans and vampires alike, blood determines the difference between survival or doom. For the ancient race of Kresova vampires, blood spilled in a centuries-old feud has forever changed the course of their future.
Many may know their name, and books may tell their stories, but little truth is actually known about those who stalk the night—especially by the vampires themselves—and the vicious Kresova queen plans to keep it that way.
She kills without prejudice. Eliminates anyone whose existence threatens her rule. Through fear and violence and her unmatched ability to anticipate her enemies, she’s secured her reign.
She’s thought of everything.
Done everything.
But her plan is flawed.
She didn’t prepare for her . . . for them.
Prologue
The Chamber of Morana, Queen of the Kresova Vampires
Paris, France
Shades of crimson coated the walls of the small coliseum-like room. Smears of blood trailed along the steps like a winding river leading down to the dais. Every few feet, puddles formed in the crevices of the stone floor, staining the white grout a coppery brown.