That wasn’t creepy at all.
When the car stopped, I just sat there. I might have had basic control over my eyes and mouth, but everything else was still under the dominion of my enchantress-mom. I was, by now, pretty sure that she was my mom. If she wasn't, she really believed that she was, and that was just as dangerous.
I stayed in the car while she approached the crowd. There was a guy among them. I was pretty sure he was in charge, because he was wearing this big necklace around his neck. I was hoping his name wasn't Jim Jones or anything. Whatever his name was, I wasn't going anywhere near the Kool-Aid. The pair of them embraced and I was sure, if nothing else, that he and my mom had the same Facebook status.
Gross.
A moment later, my body started moving again. I was beginning to hate this. Okay, I'd been hating it for a while now, but I was extra hating it now. I didn't like it when people decided things for me, and I wasn't even getting to choose if I wanted to put up a fight. This sucked.
“He didn't even train her...” my mother was telling the guy. She sounded like she was about to cry. That's okay. I was on my way there, too.
The guy she was clinging to was pretty average looking. He had brown hair, hazel eyes, and a tall and slender build. He wasn't attractive, but then again, after having been around the boys for the past month, who would I consider attractive anymore?
The rest of the group watched me like I was a freak. That was nice of them.
I knew a decent amount about cults. The joys of anthropology was that you learned a heck of a lot about subcultures and fringe groups since they were the really interesting parts of your very own culture. Cults were all about taking away your identity and making you a pawn in some manipulative dude's (and yeah, it was almost always a dude) personal fanatic daydreams.
“Shhh,” the man said, wrapping his arms around my mom. He gave me a look, and I felt an immediate need for the world's hottest shower. It was worthy of every creep in every subway that there had ever been. It was as if he looked past my skin to everything that lay beneath. “Welcome to The Homestead, Lorena.”
Yup. This was totally a cult. Neat. He said Homestead like it deserved capital letters, like there ought to be rituals held in a creepy basement. I wondered if he had multiple brides, or if he was just waiting for the right group of doe-eyed, not-quite-legals to show up for him to pick from. Well, he could keep his skeevy eyes to himself. I already had enough men in my life.
When I didn't say or do anything, he gave me another look, this one less creepy but no less invasive. “Flower? Is she under your control?”
Flower? Was that my mom's cult name? What were they going to try to name me? Cookie? Honey? Something else sweet and uber-feminine? No, thanks. I'd stick with Lorena.
“She tried to run,” my mom said. “She didn't want to come with me.”
He gave her a slight tsk and took her face between long fingered hands. “That's not how we do things here, Flower. You know that.” He gave her forehead a kiss I might have called tender and then reached a hand out towards me. A moment later, all of my muscles were mine again. He bowed his head. “Forgive your mother, Lorena, she was...overzealous.”
“She's a necromancer,” my mother whispered, but it was loud enough that I could hear it.
Everyone, save for creepy dude, took a step back from me. My mother even shuffled away. Nothing like feeling like the weirdo in a group of cultists.
He eyed me with interest. “Is that so?”
I shrugged. “Maybe? I dunno. I just heard about all of this, you know, right before I was kidnapped against my will.”
He waved his hand again. Now that I was all my own self, I could feel the sudden sweep of magic around me. I had begun to notice that everyone's magic felt a little different. Jenny's, who I was most familiar with, had a steady strength to it.
That made sense, because Jenny was pretty much the steadiest person I knew. Connie's magic felt a little...wilder. The guy? His magic felt...old. You know that feeling when you walk into a museum, or a massive forest? It was like that, ethereal and mystic. The car turned back on, the wrought iron fence swung open.
“You are welcome to leave, Lorena. No one will try to stop you. I swear it.”
I hesitated for just a second. “What's the catch?”
His chuckle was light and charming. His eyes twinkled. He went from average dude to kinda-cute, and I wondered if that was natural or magical. It didn't really matter; he still skeeved me. “No catch. I would, of course, ask you to hear us out.”
“About what?”
“About the prophecy,” my mother interrupted. Her eyes were bright with righteous indignation. “You've only heard one side of it! You could-”
The man placed a hand on my mom's shoulder, and she quieted. She turned her head towards him and started to whimper something under very sudden tears. I have to admit, I was a little freaked out. I wasn't one of those chicks who thought that women always had to be strong, that they were never allowed to turn to a friend or loved one and sob out their feelings, but I was always a little leery of the ones who clung to their lovers. A person, dude or chick, ought to be able to stand on their own from time to time. As far as I could tell, the only decision my mom had made so far that day was to kidnap me...and that wasn't really counting in her favor.
Even so, I found myself asking, “What about the prophecy?”
“Why don't we go inside?” he asked, patting my mother's hair as she continued to whimper. “You're mother needs rest.”
I frowned. I looked up at the house that looked more like a fortress than anything else. I glanced at the SUV, still humming, and the open gate. I could leave right now; at least, I thought I could. All I had to do was swing myself into the driver’s seat and navigate my butt back to familiar territory. Heck, I wanted to do just that. But...but what did he know about the prophecy? What hold did he have on my mother? What was going on?
I had always needed to understand the 'why' of things, even when it got me into trouble.
However, I wasn't completely stupid. I jumped in the SUV and took the keys out of the ignition. My little black dress, cute as it was, did not come with pockets. Curse women's clothing designers. I took off my tassel necklace and added the key to the chain. It ruined the look, but I no longer cared.
“Okay,” I said flatly. “Lead the way.”
The group, all of us, headed inside the great big scary building. I didn't know a whole lot about architecture, but it looked like a perfect gray box. There were slits of windows, equal in distance from one side of the building to the other. I didn't have a ruler, but I was ninety-five percent positive that the door was in the exact center of the first floor. OCD much?
The inside was just as perfect as the outside. It was nothing like the vampire mansion. Sure, they might have been as equally large, but that was where the similarities ended. The place that I had called home for the past month was all rich wood floors and pretty paintings and warmth. This house was...cold. The walls were stark white. The ground was covered in the same cheap gray carpet you saw in equally cheap apartments. There weren't many pictures on the walls, and what pictures there were would have made M. C. Escher fanboy. I was lead to a room with a big square table that had twenty seats equally distant around the edges.
Yeah, this house was a little...much.
Everyone moved like they were part of some play that I hadn't rehearsed for. They all took seats around the table, and one was left open. Belatedly, I plopped down.
“So...” I said, when the room remained quiet, “nice place you have here. Lots of...squares.”
“Magic needs rules, Lorena,” my mother said in her best mother-knows-best tone yet. I was impressed, or I would have been if she wasn't still holding on to Creepy Dude's shoulder.
I blinked. I was aware that magic had rules, but I wasn't entirely sure that it needed them. Those felt like two different things. “Oookay,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
“
What your mother means is that there is a Law of Magic, and that you've been...breaking that.”
If he was hoping to win me over with this, he had another thing coming. “You wanna...explain that one to me?”
He smiled at me, and I felt an urge to punch him in the face. It wasn't a nice smile or even a welcoming one. It was the kind of smile a person gave a kid when they'd just said something adorably naive.
“You've been learning lesser magic,” he said softly. “The magic of mountain witches.”
He said 'witches' the way I said 'jerk'. I tried my best to be like Alan, keep my face neutral and politely interested, but I was beginning to feel defensive, maybe even upset. Getting kidnapped could do that to a person.
“Uh-huh,” I prompted.
“It is best to picture magic like a great grid work, a perfect pattern of lines equidistant from one another.” He placed his hand on the table, and magic swelled around the room. For a second, nothing happened, and then the rest of the group, me excluded, placed one of their hands on the table, palms flat, hands down. A globe blossomed in the middle of the table. It didn't look particularly magical, even though I could feel the magic coming off of it like a breeze. It looked sorta futuristic. “In the best of times, these lines were the same size, shape, and thickness across the world. They cross at exact intervals, and they allow magic to freely flow over the world.”
A perfect grid popped up over the globe they had conjured.
I looked around at all the perfectly geometric patterns in the room and was beginning to see a pattern of my own here. “Okay.”
It didn't match what I had seen. I had seen a weave of magic, kaleidoscopes of colors that ran through everything, but who was I to say that everyone had to experience the world exactly as I did? That seemed kinda crappy.
“Those who are more...frivolous...in their studies have disrupted that. Their unstable magic has caused the grid to swell in some places, or be completely nonexistent in others. It is what has caused the predicament that we are in.”
The lines on the globe moved, sliding from one place to another until the world looked more like a kid trying to draw straight, even lines without a ruler.
For a full twenty seconds, I thought this dude was messing with me. I thought he was going to break out in some big cheesy smile and tell me that he was just joking...but he continued to watch me with a level gaze that made me wish I was wearing the same gray robe to blend in with everyone else.
“The...low magic...predicament?” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else.
“Yes, which brings us to the prophecy.” He sighed and stood up. The globe remained in place, slowly revolving. “This idea that you will, by virtue of a child, bring magic back.”
“Lemme guess. You don't interpret it that way.”
His eyebrow darted up his forehead, his features all shifting to mild confusion.
I held up my hands. I was quickly approaching done. “Dude, let me tell you a thing. I've played this game. I've read this comic. Pretty sure there are like...a thousand movies with this in them. You've got a prophecy, and two or more groups who interpret it differently, and everyone is fighting to see that it turns out in the way that benefits them most, am I right?”
“I-”
I stood up. “Of course, I am. So why don't you tell me what you think I should be doing with myself? Because let me tell you, I looooove being told that. It's my favorite thing.”
I sent him a look I hoped was as full of the frustrated disgust I was currently feeling. Tonight was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be relaxing. Heck, it very nearly was until everyone got involved. Crap like this was why I stayed home on Friday nights.
“Well, that's just it. We don't want you to do anything.”
Okay, that one threw me. “What?”
“They want me to.”
I don't know what I expected, which had been the theme of my life recently, but it certainly wasn't to turn around and find Connie standing there. She was still wearing her jeans and a tank top. Her riot of hair curling around her freckled face. For a split second, I was absolutely ecstatic to see her. I thought, for some reason, that my buddy was here to rescue me. Then, the full weight of her words hit me like a Mac truck.
“Wait...what?” Then, it hit me. I knew her face had looked familiar. It looked a little like mine. “Holy crap.”
“Lorena, this is your sister, Connie. She's your twin,” my mother sounded so proud of herself, like she'd just made the perfect soufflé or something. “Well...half-sister.”
I blinked in confusion. Wait, was that even possible? Could a woman actually...you know what...why was I questioning that? Like, there was magic in the world; I was sure that there were a billion things that were possible regardless of what science said.
“You?” I asked dumbly.
“What?” she asked. “Did you think you were the only one?”
Well, yes, but I didn't say that out loud. No one had ever told me that I had a sister. No one had ever even insinuated that could have been a thing. I didn't know if I was lied to or if no one knew.
“Okay, back up. What?”
“The prophecy that Loretta gave said that my daughter would give birth to the child of magic. That the child would be born of the blood of a son of Vlad.”
I didn't like that phrasing...that sounded bad. “What?”
Connie barely even glanced my direction as she walked around the table and stood next to Creepy Dude, who still hadn't bothered to tell me his name. “You said you didn't want to have the child. I do. I know magic better than you. I've been training for this all my life.”
Yeah, okay. That might be true. There was even a part of me that was totally down for passing the pressure of having the magic-baby off to someone else, but, to quote the king of all nerd movies, I had a bad feeling about this.
“I really hate to repeat myself, but what's the catch?”
“Don't worry about it,” Connie told me.
The very fact that those were the first words out of her mouth had me worrying triple time. But what was I supposed to say – “don’t tell me what to do? I'll worry if I want.” Somehow, that lacked gumption. “So...you want to have the child?”
She shrugged one freckled shoulder. In her typical non-vocal way, she was answering me.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to your father,” my mother said.
Something about this made no sense. My mom had tried really, really hard to get me here. There had been kidnapping involved. Why were they so willing to just let me leave? My spider-sense was totally tingling.
“After Connie gives birth,” the Creepy Dude amended.
Ahh, there it was. They weren't willing to leave everything in the hands of fickle fate, were they? Nope. They wanted to lock me up in their citadel of doom for the next nine months. “Is she pregnant?”
“Not yet.”
Make that a year. I mean, she had to get one of the vampire guys to fall for her. Maybe that wouldn't take too long. I was pretty picky. Then again, maybe she didn't care if they liked her. They wanted magic in the world, too. Right?
“Great,” I said. “Imprisoned again. This time without hot dudes.”
“Lorena,” my mother started. I held up a hand.
“Don't. Like...just don't. It's pretty much bad enough that you weren't in my life, but to find out you've been pretty active in the life of the sister I didn't know I had is enough for a Maury Povich-Dr. Phil crossover show that I really don't need. And you know what? I can't leave if you don't really want me to, even if Creepy Dude over there promises that I can.”
“Who? Oh, Markus.” My mom offered him a smile.
“Sure, whatever.” I shook my head and sighed. “With the ability to take over my body...I know I'm stuck here, so why doesn't one of you gray-clad freaks show me to my room-slash-prison so I can get the hell out of these shoes before this becomes an episode of Jerry Springer?”
My hu
mor, apparently, was lost on them. It was my mother who came over eventually and led me out of the room. I followed her, because I knew that trying to run away was stupid, and it might ruin my plans for later.
Instead, I worked on memorizing the layout as best as I could. It was both easy and difficult. Most houses had different-sized rooms to use up the space in a way that was useful as well as pretty. This one seemed to have a whole other purpose in mind. Every room I saw was pretty much the same size as the room with the table. The bathrooms were more like the showers for gym or something, stalls and such.
House Of Vampires (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy Book 1) Page 15