by Nina Bangs
Daria could see the amber glow of Ganymede’s eyes.
“You’re thinking if it can’t materialize, it might have a few buddies hanging around to do its dirty work?”
That would be Kal and her according to Declan.
“Makes sense.” Declan stared at the church. “Otherwise I don’t know how it killed Teilo and Sceolan and just left their fingers. I’ve known beings that could kill from a distance, but leaving the fingers behind makes it more close-up and personal.”
“You’re sure they’re dead?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Council members are connected. I felt it when they died.”
“Got it.” Ganymede stood. “So give a shout-out to the bas… bustard.”
Daria held her breath. Her stomach roiled with a mixture of excitement and worry. Harpies were addicted to the life-and-death stuff. But until she’d landed at the Woo Woo Inn, she hadn’t known what real excitement was.
The worry part made her uneasy. She shouldn’t care what happened to Declan, but she did.
Declan vaulted over the yellow tape into the clearing. Daria gulped. Without conscious thought, she gathered herself.
Whoa, she’d forgotten something. Quickly, she stripped off her clothes. Not so she could spare Sparkle’s outfit, but because she’d need something to change back into when she returned to human form.
“Hey, you there, under the church. I’m here. Let’s talk.” Declan moved a little closer to the ruined building.
Ganymede abandoned casual in favor of readiness. He crouched close to the ground, his back end doing the little back-and-forth swing cats did when they were getting ready to pounce.
It’s here. Daria felt the presence as a sudden rush of icy air that covered her bare body in goose bumps. Declan must’ve felt it too, because he hissed, curling his lips away from his teeth in a snarl that exposed lots of fang.
At the same time, he became true vampire. His eyes elongated and grew larger, their brilliant blue now a black that reflected no light, a death color. His body seemed subtly bigger, more muscular. But greater than these physical changes was the sense of power and danger that flowed from him, a warning that you didn’t mess with an angry vampire.
“You were wise to return, Declan, It would not have gone well with those at the inn if I’d had to come searching for you.” The voice was stronger, more menacing if possible; a deep rumble that almost seemed part of the earth itself.
Declan took a few more steps forward.
No.’ Daria’s silent scream didn’t stop him.
“Big talk doesn’t mean a thing if it isn’t backed up by a big body with lots of teeth. And what the hell do you want with me anyway?” Declan grew still, that complete lack of movement a human or harpy could never attain.
“You wish for a big body with lots of teeth? I can certainly accommodate you.”
The entity’s laughter was hollow, humorless, and totally terrifying. Daria hoped it was all bluff.
That hope came up a super-sized zero as the air shimmered and a shape emerged. Daria clapped her hands over her mouth to keep from shrieking. Nothing was supposed to scare a harpy, but she’d just found the exception to the rule. A big furry exception.
In front of the church’s entrance stood the biggest wolf she’d ever seen. No, not a wolf, a werewolf. He was the size of a pony, his glowing red eyes contrasting with his gray fur. And when he opened his mouth to growl, his teeth were very white, very big, and very sharp. And she was very impressed.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me. You have a form. Now what do you Want?” There was something strange about Declan’s voice. Not exactly fear, but a deep horror that went beyond fear.
“You know what I want. The prophecy will be fulfilled. You cannot stand against me.” With those cryptic words, the wolf padded toward Declan.
“Fenrir.” Declan breathed the name, disbelief mingled with dread.
Out of the corner of her eyes, Daria saw Ganymede leap past the yellow tape. But she was faster.
Her change was instantaneous. First the searing pain, then a rippling feeling as she became a giant vulture from the waist down. Six-inch talons were perfect for hooking and carrying off the unlucky. At the same time, with a tearing sensation, powerful wings sprouted from her shoulder blades. Her transformation was complete. In this form, she doubted anyone could match her strength.
She launched herself into the air and then swooped down over Declan. He barely had time to glance up before she hooked the back of his leather coat and lifted him into the air. As she soared upward, the wolf howled his fury and leaped high, his huge jaws snapping shut mere inches from Declan’s legs.
Declan didn’t fight her, but she could feel the angry tension in his body. Daria carried him beyond the yellow tape just as an explosion ripped apart the silence and a blinding light lit the night. A quick glance assured her that Ganymede was doing his thing.
“Put me the hell down.” Declan’s voice was tight with anger.
“Gee, thank you very much, Daria, for saving my ungrateful butt.” She dropped him from a little higher than she’d originally intended. Maybe the jar would knock some sense into his thick skull.
When she turned to see what was going on in the clearing, the wolf was gone and only Ganymede stood there. The cat turned those amber eyes toward her. For a nanosecond she felt the push of his power. She swallowed hard. Good thing he wasn’t on her to-do list.
Not that he scared her… Okay, he scared her. It wasn’t normal for anything to frighten a harpy, but she’d found two scaries within five minutes. Another weakness she had to work on. Thank the gods the judge didn’t carry a fright-o-meter. This would be her little secret.
She returned to human form and immediately began to search for her clothes. The silence behind her crawled up her back, forcing her to turn around. Vampire and cat stood, eyes wide, staring at her. “What?”
“Hey, babe, lookin’ good. Never saw a harpy with a body like that.” Ganymede’s unblinking gaze didn’t waver. “How about you, bloodsucker? Ever see anything like that?”
“No.” Declan had the good sense to look away.
But before he did, Daria glimpsed sexual hunger in his eyes. And even with the threat of a bionic werewolf hanging over them, she felt a rush of happiness. Sure, she wanted him, but her joy wasn’t just because of that.
As she pulled on her clothes, she examined her reaction.
Only a few male harpies had ever desired her, and not with the red-hot-burning-love kind of desire. Daria felt proud that she didn’t need male approval and interest, because, well, she wasn’t waterfront property in the harpy world. Ugly was the yesterday, now, and tomorrow look for harpies. No use yearning for what you’d never have. But here was a man who looked at her with lust in his eyes, his heart, and parts farther south. This was so cool.
Daria frowned. What wasn’t cool was having to put Sparkle’s shoes back on. Then she returned to thoughts of Declan.
She hoped he wasn’t the judge, because she intended to make love with him, and if he was the judge he’d have to mark her down for having too much fun on the job.
Was this a weakening of her commitment to be the best harpy she could be? No, she was just allowing herself a little more flexibility in how she reached her goal.
As Daria took a few tottering steps in Sparkle’s ankle-breakers, she admitted she wasn’t completely without guilt, though. She shouldn’t be desirable to anyone in the mortal world, even a vampire. It made her unworthy of greatness in Harpyland. Come to think of it, why did Declan want her? Okay, he’d just seen her body, but he’d shown interest before that. Hmm, a mystery.
She glanced up to find Ganymede looking all broody as he stared into the woods. Depressed? Ganymede and depressed didn’t seem to go together. “Where’d the wolf go?”
“Back under the church, I guess. When he saw me coming, he just sorta sank into the ground. I tried to blast him, but he was too fast for me.” Ganymede looked at Declan. “You know him? He s
ure knows you.”
“Fenrir.” Declan said nothing more as he started to walk back toward the inn.
“Hey, wait just one minute there.” Daria ran after him. “Ganymede and I just put our lives on the line to save you. Maybe you owe us an explanation, huh?”
“I owe you nothing.” He gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “And never pick me up like that again. Fenrir wasn’t about to kill me.”
Ganymede’s disbelieving snort expressed Daria’s thoughts exactly. “Could’ve fooled me, bloodsucker.”
Declan didn’t turn to look at them. “Fenrir doesn’t have the power yet to break free of the binding, but he’s close. It’s me he wants, but keep the guests away from there anyway. You don’t want any innocents nearby if that happens. Oh, and I won’t need the help of either of you guys. I’ll handle it from now on.”
“Yeah, until I find your finger on one of my morning strolls.” Ganymede mumbled his disgust. “Look, if you’re not giving out any more info, I have to go back to guard the church until all the guests are tucked up in their beds. Remind Sparkle to bring me a snack—a piece of Katie’s apple pie, a slice of that birthday cake from last night, and a couple of candy bars. Nothing heavy.” He turned and padded back along the path.
Daria watched Ganymede disappear around a bend in the path before turning to Declan. “He won’t try to take on this Fenrir by himself, will he?”
“Not much chance. I think Ganymede understands male pride. He knows I have to be the one to take care of this problem.” He still didn’t turn his head to meet her gaze.
“Male ego, you mean.” She trotted a few steps to keep up with his longer strides. “And ‘this problem’ could take out half of New Jersey if he gets past you. Not that I don’t have complete faith in your awesome vampire power or anything.” All the sarcasm she could muster was packed into each word.
He made an impatient sound and then finally met her gaze. “Sit down.”
“Here?” She glanced around.
“Here.” He sank to the ground and reached up to pull her down beside him.
“Are there bugs? I can’t see what’s under those leaves. There might be bugs.” She hovered uncertainly.
The corners of his lips turned up in the beginning of a smile, but Daria was too focused on searching the ground for signs of things that went scritch-scratch in the night to celebrate the break in his bad mood.
“I don’t believe it. You’re a dreaded harbinger of death and you’re afraid of bugs?” His smile widened.
“Bugs are ugly, and they don’t have any respect for harbingers of death.” She thought about what she’d just said. “Not that ugly is bad.”
“I’ll get rid of the bugs for you.” His gaze grew unfocused as he stared at nothing.
Suddenly Daria heard rustling sounds all around her. With a squeak of alarm, she watched small dark bodies emerge from everywhere—under the leaves, the roots of nearby trees, and even drop from overhead branches.
She took a deep breath, ready to scream and run like hell, when she noticed all the bugs were moving away from them. Like a tide of many-legged lemmings, they flowed into the surrounding forest.
Daria stared in disbelief. “Let me guess. You’re the Pied Piper of woodsy creepies. Have you considered a career in pest control?”
He watched her sit gingerly beside him before he answered. “It’s one of my powers. I can drive things away. I’ve been doing it for nine hundred years.”
His smile was bitter, and she had the feeling they weren’t talking about bugs anymore. “You don’t have many friends, do you?”
Oops, that was kind of rude. Not that rude was bad. For a harpy. She didn’t want a harpy-to-vampire interaction right now, though. Daria wanted the man-woman thing going on. She’d better hope the judge couldn’t read her mind, because that thought would mean instant disqualification. But in this place, with this man, she didn’t give a flying flip.
She smiled. It felt forced, but at least her lips were curving up instead of down. “I understand. I mean, the no-friends experience. I’ve had to work on self-esteem affirmations my whole life.”
“Self-esteem affirmations?” He looked puzzled.
At least that was a step up from insulted. “I have appearance issues.”
“And they would be?”
Real interest gleamed in his eyes, warming her in a way a male’s attention had never warmed her before. “My body’s too curvy for a harpy.”
“I noticed.” The gleam softened to a sensual glow.
The sensual glow tied her tongue in knots. “I mean, curvy isn’t a good thing when you have to fly. It’s, um, an aerodynamics thing.” Had that just come out of her mouth?
“Right. Aerodynamics. So I guess you need a spoiler to guide your airflow.” He was openly laughing at her now.
Time to move away from body issues. “Then there’s my face.”
“It’s not a harpy face.” He seemed definite about that.
“Why not?” Sure, she didn’t look like Eris, but Kal had worked hard on her.
He slid his gaze over her face. And where it lingered on jaw, cheek, and lips, she felt it as a feathering of his fingertips. “At first glance, someone would get an impression of unattractiveness.”
“It’s okay to say ugly.”
“Not ugly.” He frowned. “Never ugly. Interesting is the word I’m searching for. When I first saw you, I felt there were layers and layers to be stripped away and examined.”
“Layers? Like a head of lettuce?” Fine, so she was leading him.
“You’re not ugly. Discussion ended.”
Okay, that should really depress her, but no matter how much she tried to sink into a sea of despair, little bubbles of happiness kept her afloat. This was not a good thing.
“Kal and I take after Dad.”
Uh-oh. Declan’s expression was way too thoughtful. She’d babbled six words too many.
“Let me pull this together. You both have the same father, and you both take after him. Because of Dad’s side of the family, you have a face that lacks a certain gruesome harpy quality. I’d bet your father isn’t a harpy.” He didn’t ask for her input as he made his deductions. “But you say that Kal takes after your father too. So why does your brother look like a real harpy?”
Because he’s spent a lifetime working on his face. “Haven’t a clue. Gee, it’ll be dawn soon. Shouldn’t you get back to the inn before that wicked old sun rises?”
Declan was beyond distraction. “I sensed magic when I first met you, but it wasn’t yours, it was your brother’s.”
This was excruciating. She might as well hurry along the process. “Look, Kal and I are twins. Our father is Apollo, and Mom doesn’t let a week go by without apologizing for not choosing an uglier god for us to call Daddy. Kal can never rise in the harpy ranks because he’s male, so he’s dedicated himself to making me a success. He received strong magical powers from Mom, and he’s used them to make both of us more acceptable in the harpy world. He’s done a better job on his own face, though.”
“Wow.” And that was a sincere wow. He might’ve eventually figured out she was artificially augmenting her ugly factor, but not that Apollo was her dad. Declan wondered if the old guy ever saw a female he didn’t lust after.
“So, now that I’ve told you something intimate about my life, I think you should do a little revealing.” She waited.
The words intimate and revealing sidetracked Declan for a moment. They conjured images of naked bodies entwined on a bed complete with tangled sheets and a night breeze cooling heated skin but not passion.
Okay, back to the real world, which was pretty crappy right now. All he’d meant to do when he told her to sit down was to distract her from questions about Fenrir, not end up blurting out his life story.
He wouldn’t tell her about Fenrir, but it couldn’t hurt to give her an abbreviated history of the Mackenzies. “Were you born or made?”
“Neither. We’re born human and then become
vampire in our late twenties. It’s a natural progression, so we never have to go through the death process. I was twenty-nine when I changed.”
“Can you only have kids while you’re human?”
Declan nodded. “Clan members marry young. I married when I was fifteen. We had four children.” Such a long, long time ago. He couldn’t remember faces or voices. Sometimes when he was alone he wished he could. “So you won’t have to ask, my wife died centuries ago, the victim of her own bad judgment in choosing the wrong midnight snack. My kids?” He shrugged. “Who knows where they are or even if they’re still alive? Until recent times, it was tough keeping track of people.”
“You should search for them. Family is important.” She sounded militant about that. “I don’t know what I’d do without Kal and Mom.”
“How old are you really?” He knew harpies were immortals, but something about Daria conveyed a freshness, a vigor, that didn’t feel centuries old.
She hesitated, and then tipped her chin up in defiance. “Twenty-eight. But even if I live to eight hundred twenty-eight, I’ll still feel the same about family.”
“No, you won’t.” She couldn’t possibly understand how the centuries sapped life’s energy and enthusiasm until the only things left were the senses. The enjoyment of all that was carnal still made existence somewhat worthwhile. When even that didn’t matter anymore, it was time to die.
Her expression said she didn’t believe him. “Let me get this straight. The Mackenzies are vampires, but they’re not undead.”
“Right. We change genetically, but we don’t die.”
“The Mackenzie vampires have been around a long time, first as Vikings and later as Highlanders. We’ve been a powerful force in the vampire world for over a thousand years.”
“How old are you?”
“About nine hundred years old, give or take a century.”
She blinked. “Incredible. When’s your birthday?”
“I don’t remember. Sometime in the spring.”