House Of Vampires (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy Book 1)

by Samantha Snow

  The trick to meditation, I had learned, wasn't to try to clear my head. It was to let all the thoughts I had go without dwelling on them. Did I want to think about my unexpected feelings for Wei? Nope, absolutely not. Did I want to think about the way Dmitri looked at me? Negative. Hard pass. Or Alan, who was pretty much destined to be stuck in Dmitri's not-even-a-friend zone? Not even a little. All I wanted to do was focus on Jenny and find her.

  My breathing slowed down to almost nothing, my chest barely rose and fell inside of my awesome little black dress. I was aware of the way my feet felt in my sandals, of the quiet ocean that was Wei on my left. Then, I felt the dance floor, the people and their hundreds of emotions flying through them. I felt the anxiety of servers, the lust and fever of horny college kids. The stress and the hope and the depression and the dreams and aspirations of all of them curled over one another in some grand miasma of humanity.

  “I...I can't...it's too much.”

  Cool fingers touched my chin, and my skin seemed to flare to life. When I opened my eyes, I could see Wei's face, rounded with his Asian features, and then I didn't see him. I saw the power of him. It was this well of energy that didn't really have a color. But I could have dipped my hands into it if I'd wanted to. I reached for it instead, brushing my fingers through it. Energy jumped into my grasp.

  He made a sound, and it was not an unpleasant one. I wanted to hear it again. I stroked that source of power once more and Wei hissed. “What are you doing?”

  “I....don't...know.”

  It felt so good, that power source. It jumped to my fingers and swam against my skin. I opened my eyes, and I could see everyone in the club. I mean, I couldn't see their faces, but I felt their energy, their souls, their lives, whatever you wanted to call it. Everyone had this little ball of energy tucked inside of them. Some were brighter than others, some were even color-coded for my convenience.

  A particularly angry guy was bright red, mixed with black, the dude to his left had a blue sphere of life, tinged with bile green. That didn't seem like a good pair. A moment later, they started to fight. A bouncer whose energy was a bright vibrant orange grabbed them both and tossed them out. I didn't know what it all meant, but I knew that this wasn't normal...that this was all me.

  I didn't dwell on it. I didn't want to understand just yet. Instead, I searched through one aura after another until I found Jenny. She was outside, tucked between the club and the closed bookstore next door. She was holding herself, and her own ball of energy was so dark blue that it was almost black.

  “I know where she is.”

  I broke out of the meditation suddenly. I was surprised to find that my hand was on Wei's chest. His eyes were wide, his lips were parted, and he looked as if I had just sucked the life out of him.

  “Wei? What's wrong?”

  “Well,” Alan said, “you found your source.”

  I jumped. I hadn't realized that he would be there. “My...source? What? I mean...I know what a source is but...”

  Wei pulled back, but he was unsteady on his feet. “It would make sense.”

  Alan nodded. “It would.”

  “Enough with the vagueness,” I said, stepping away from both of them. “What happened?”

  Wei shook his head. “Do not worry about it now. I saw what you saw. Go to Jenny. We will discuss it later.”

  I frowned at him. I didn't want to discuss it later, but I knew that understanding what had just happened wasn't nearly as important as getting to Jenny. I looked at Alan.

  “Go. I will see that he feeds.”

  “Feeds?” I asked. Jeez, what the hell had I done?

  “You took some of his magic and made it yours, Lorena. Go, I will tend to him.”

  I took Alan at his word and headed upstairs, ignoring the looks from the kitchen staff as I did. I didn't hear them demand to know what I was doing. All I heard were Alan's words telling me that I had taken some of Wei's magic. How had I done that? I didn't think it was possible. No, I thought, I knew that it wasn't possible. One of my grandmother's books had made that really clear. The only thing that could steal power from another person were a few particular types of faeries and one very specific kind of vampire that, according to the boys, didn't exist anymore.

  So what had I done...and why had it felt so good?

  CHAPTER 13

  When I got to Jenny, she didn't look like she'd stepped off a runway. She looked like she'd just had the worst prom ever. She was sitting on the ground in her cute outfit, trying to hide the fact that she had been crying.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She didn't look at me. “Hey.”

  I said a silent prayer of forgiveness to my dress and plopped down next to her. I didn't say anything. I just opened my arms for a hug. She plopped against me, a pile of human misery.

  “You okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but I couldn't think of what else to say.

  “Yeah...why wouldn't I be?” She tried to smile at me, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.

  “Because your crush is totally going on a date with some dude tonight.”

  She didn't say anything at first. She just sat there with her head pillowed on my shoulder as more tears ran down her cheeks. These ones she didn't bother to hide.

  “I shouldn't care,” she finally said. “She's never given me any reason to think that she was into me. We've just been friends. I'm not some jackass who is only nice to girls so that they'll date me.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “I shouldn't care,” she repeated.

  “But you do.”

  She sat back so suddenly the ground shifted beneath us. It was impressive since she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. Then again, we were sitting on concrete, which was a bunch of smashed up rock, and Jenny was all about the power of rocks. “I do. I do care, and it's stupid.”

  “It's not stupid.”

  She gave a snort that told me just how little she agreed with me. I gave her another hug and said again, “It's not stupid. You can't help who you like. It doesn't matter if they are everything you are sure you wouldn't like...stuff just seems to happen that way.”

  I didn't know who I was talking to, her or me. I didn't want to dwell on it either, no matter how many times those thoughts popped into my head.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked.

  “Well, tonight, we are going to go back in there, we are going to dance, and when we can't feel our legs anymore, we are going to go stop at the shop and buy a zillion bags of goodies and go back to my grandmother's house and play video games, okay?”

  “Why your grandmother's place?”

  “Because I need some space from the guys.”

  “What happened?”

  We were breaking the ‘let’s not talk about Lorena’ rules for the countless time that night, but it was okay. Jenny was feeling heartbroken, and I hadn't told her the rules anyway. “Alan and I broke it off.”

  “Oh,” she said, “so you’re with Dmitri?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “I'm confused.”

  I nodded. “So am I. It's why I need the space. But first...let's dance.”

  She laughed, and I was grateful for it. I stood up, swiped off my dress, and offered her my hand. She took it and frowned. “Woman, what did you do?”

  “We can talk about that when we get back to my grandmother's house.”

  A moment later, the world exploded. Magic slammed so hard on me that I literally fell to the ground. Jenny was right next to me. I rolled over, and there my maybe-mother stood. Not just a flickering, bad-stream image of her, but the real one. She wasn't wearing the robe, but her dress was the same color gray that it had been.

  Power flowed off of her in waves. Not just a little power, but wells of it. I could taste it like ozone on my teeth.

  “It's time to talk.”

  I shook my head. I had no desire to talk to someone who scared the daylights out of me. My finely-tuned sense of s
urvival told me to run. I listened. I grabbed Jenny's hand, and we scrambled away. We got maybe five feet away before power slammed around us again. It hit me so hard that I bit my tongue. The taste of blood was thick in my mouth.

  “I wanted to be gentle about this, Lorena, but tonight was too close. We are leaving.”

  Well, even if she wasn't my mom, she totally had the mom voice down. Guess that meant I got to be the angsty teenager.

  “No, thanks.”

  Yeah...close enough.

  I took Jenny's hand in mine again. I had every desire to run, but magic spilled over me with a strength that I could only call titanic. My head spun, and I made the smallest movement to get further away, but my body just wouldn't cooperate.

  I stood up. Well, I didn't, but my body did. It was the strangest feeling. I wasn't telling my body to move, but it was doing it anyway. I dropped Jenny's hand, and I just started walking towards my mom. I should have looked weird, like some kind of ragdoll, but I didn't. I strutted...which was weird enough, because I didn't know how to strut, but that's what I did.

  I moved with an effortless grace that I didn't have and followed my mom to a car I hadn't known before. I wanted to look back at Jenny to see why she wasn't calling after me, but my head wouldn't turn that way. All I did was get into a shiny black SUV and buckle in.

  A moment later, my mom got into the driver's side and we were off.

  I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but my mouth was acting the exact same as my body. I did not like this feeling. I felt...trapped...locked inside of my own skin. No, not even in my skin. That wasn't mine anymore. I was trapped in the very depths of my soul.

  “Don't bother trying to move,” my mom said. “It won’t work. I have you.”

  I didn't like the way she said that. It was creepy, beyond creepy. My eyes, fixed on the road in front of me, watched as the pseudo-metropolitan city of Blackburn, Virginia disappeared behind us. She navigated the SUV through the curving mountain roads with ease.

  “A necromancer,” she scoffed. “Of all the things, my daughter could have been...she's a necromancer.”

  I had played enough video games to know that a necromancer was a wizard with power over the dead. What that meant and why varied from one game to the next. I just didn't know what that had to do with me. Is that what had happened earlier? Had I drawn my power from Wei who, despite his mostly animated appearance, was a dead body? Is that why he had looked so sick?

  My mom didn't sound happy with the idea. I didn't know why it bothered her, but it made me feel a little uncomfortable.

  “I wanted to come get to you before this. Hell, I'd tried a hundred times to find you, but oh no. Your dad just kept moving you around. As soon as I showed up in one town, I'd find out that you had left just a few days before.”

  If I would have had control over my own body, I would have blinked. As it was, my eyes were drying out. It kind of hurt.

  “He must still have one of Loretta's looking glasses,” she muttered to herself. “Damn that witch. Damn her.”

  That seemed unfair. I didn't really know my grandmother, but everything that I had read and heard about her so far hadn't led me to think that she was a bad person.

  “I should have run away the day I knew I was pregnant with you. Oh sure, everyone thinks your grandmother is the one who spoke the prophecy. Perfect Loretta Quinn, perfect little witch of the mountains. They all waited on her hand and foot.”

  Who had waited on my grandmother, I wanted to ask, but my mouth was still clamped shut. The more I tried to move, the more rigid it felt.

  “But I knew. I knew. I had the dream first. I saw you give birth to magic. I saw it!”

  Okay...maybe my dad had taken me away because my mom was friggin’ nuts. Not like the “I need medication because my brain won’t let me feel happy” kind of nuts, not even the “I hear voices so I have to live in the special ward of the hospital” kind of nuts either. She was beginning to sound obsessive to the point of disquieting.

  “I saw it first. I saw it all. But no. I was stupid. I thought I loved your father. I thought he loved me. I was stupid. Fucking stupid. He was just another boy. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

  Okay, now I really wanted out of the car. My dad and I might not get along, but I didn't want him dead. Also, I totally believed she would do it.

  “Stop struggling!” my mom said.

  She snapped her fingers, and suddenly I had control of some of myself back. I could blink. I could breathe on my own, and I had autonomy over my own voice. Well, that was something.

  “Where are we going!?” I demanded, trying not to let my voice be a terrified squeak. I almost succeeded.

  “We are going to the temple.”

  That sounded far more ominous than it should have. Temple should have sounded more like sanctuary and less like hell-prison. Then again, I was pretty sure that nothing coming out of my mom's mouth was going to be sounding like sanctuary.

  “What is that?”

  “It's where I live; we all live there.”

  Okay, that wasn’t helping anything.

  “What's a necromancer?” I demanded.

  “My god, he really taught you nothing. He taught you absolutely nothing and then expected you to take part in his mother's version of this prophecy? That sounds just like him.”

  That wasn't entirely accurate, but I got the feeling that letting her rant was the best possible thing that I could do. She sounded mad, and not just angry but the old definition of mad.

  “A necromancer,” she spat the word like it was gross. “is someone who bonds with the undead. They can command them, control them, steal power from them, and give power to them. If they are talented enough, they can even rip the souls from living people.”

  Oh. That sounded...well...intimidating.

  “They are disgusting.”

  Well, that was just rude. I wasn't disgusting. I also wasn't sure that I was a necromancer. Then again...maybe it wasn't so crazy. It would explain what happened with Wei. Maybe it also solved the 'how do I make a kid with the undead guy” question, too.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  She sat up in her seat. Her shoulders squared. She stuck her nose just a little in the air. “I'm an enchantress.”

  Now that was a word I knew. It even had a whole section in my grandmother's famous book. An enchantress, or enchanter if you were a dude, was a witch who could use magic to manipulate a person, not just their mind, but their bodies, too. Huh, my mom thought someone who could take over a living person's head was totally cool, but a person who could bring dead stuff to life wasn't...that seemed a little weird, but okay.

  “What do you mean my grandmother's version of the prophecy?”

  Her lips curled into a sneer. If feelings could kill, I would have feared for my life right then.

  “Your grandmother told this cute little story about you bringing magic back by making some love child with a vampire. But oh no, that's not what I saw; that is not what I saw at all.”

  I was almost afraid to ask, but my mouth did it anyway. “What did you see?”

  “You have a child, and that child unleashes magic on the whole world, but it's not some arcane utopia, Lorena. Magic isn't all faeries and rainbows and unicorns. Magic brings back all the things from our nightmares. It's an apocalypse.”

  I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it made my stomach twist up in knots.

  “Can you imagine what people would do, Lorena? Can you imagine what our government would do if they saw a dragon flying in the sky?”

  I could imagine it. I wasn't stupid enough to think that people were just like me. In fact, I had been to enough schools around the country to know that while there were plenty of people who liked books, comics, and video games...not everyone got as involved with them as I did. They didn't connect with the story, with the characters. They just wanted to not think about life for a while. That was cool, there was no wrong way to have fun, but I want
ed to live in those worlds. But I was the minority. Not everyone wanted magic, and certainly the resurgence of it would make some people afraid.

  I knew exactly what people did when they were afraid.

  My mother pulled into a long driveway complete with a wrought iron gate and fancy touch-screen access codes. It asked for her name, her palm print and some series of codes that I didn't hear. A moment later, she drove us towards a house that was more fortified and complex than anything else. There were a slew of people standing out front, maybe twenty or thirty, and all of them were wearing the gray robes that I was used to my mom wearing.