House Of Vampires (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy Book 1)

by Samantha Snow

  “Why is everything so perfect?” I asked.

  “Because that is the way of magic,” she answered.

  “That's not what I've learned.”

  “You are wrong.”

  Yeah, I thought, definitely a mom. Showed favoritism towards one of her kids and pretended like the other was absolutely screwed.

  “So what kind of witch are you?” I asked.

  She whirled on me suddenly, her robes becoming a swirl of gray. “I am not a witch. I'm a wizard.”

  I blinked. Maybe it was the Harry Potter talking, but were witches girls and wizards dudes? Wait...no, that wasn't right. Someone had already told me that witch meant both boy and girl and anything in between. So... what the heck was a wizard?

  “I'm sorry,” I said, trying to sound a lot more apologetic than I felt. “I don't understand.”

  She softened instantly. She reached a hand out and touched my cheek. “No, of course you don't. Maybe you can still learn. They haven't ruined you completely. Witches are...wild...chaotic. They just use the magic of the things around them. Their rituals are spontaneous, doing whatever feels right. They have no rules at all.”

  I didn't think that was completely fair. Witchcraft had plenty of rules, but yeah, a lot of it had to do with intuition. I'd been sort of fumbling with that, but it seemed to be working for others. “But wizardry is different?”

  “Oh, yes,” her face lit up with the fanaticism that could only be matched by a Cumberbatch fangirl. “Magic ritual, Lorena, is rules and meaning.”

  I nodded. I mean, I wasn't completely disinterested. I hadn't actually been doing all that great with the intuitive magic...at least, until tonight I hadn't. “Will you show me?”

  She gave me a funny look, like she didn't quite believe me. I wasn't lying, not totally. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I mean, I want to know about magic. I want to learn, to understand.”

  She put a hand on my cheek. “Of course, you do. But not tonight, it's late.”

  Well, that much was true. I was tired, my feet hurt, and if everything went the way I wanted it to, it was going to be a very long night. I nodded. “Alright.”

  She turned around and continued to lead me. At the end of the hall was a room. I could tell that ten people could have lived in there, it had enough bunk beds for it, but there were no robes or anything personal hung about. The shelves between the beds were empty. I was guessing there weren't many little wizards to join up.

  I plopped down on a bed.

  “I know it doesn't seem like it right now, Lorena, but this is for the best.”

  I wondered if my mom knew how much she sounded like every villain ever drawn. Probably not. “Yeah.”

  “Rest, we will talk more tomorrow.”

  I tugged off my heels and flopped over, and proceeded to count to one hundred. The moment I did, I jumped up and went right to the door. I was going to do the simplest escape ever. Just walk right out the front door and drive the SUV through that wrought iron fence.

  I put my hand on the doorknob and tugged. Nothing happened. I tugged again...and again...and again. All of the time had about the same effect. This wasn't the normal tugging on a locked door. This was more like pulling on a brick wall. Nothing moved. Great.

  It didn't take a genius to realize that I had been magically imprisoned. Frick. Double frick. What was I supposed to do now? My super simple escape plan had been thwarted by a door. I began to look around the room, trying to find all the normal escapes. A vent big enough for a chubby girl to squirm through. A ceiling tile that would let me up. Nothing. I was beginning to touch every available surface, looking for the secret door switch, when I heard a whisper of movement in the hallway. A moment later, the door opened and a girl peeked her head in.

  I didn't recognize her from the group that met me at the front door. I had assumed that they had been the entire cult. Apparently, I was wrong. She was a pretty girl. She had deep olive skin and eyes the color of honey. Her black hair was pulled into a long braid. She wore the same gray robe as everyone else, but it didn't seem to fit her right. The size was okay, but it didn't suit her.

  “Are you the girl from the prophecy?”

  Well, that wasn't as easy to answer as it had been half an hour ago. But I said yes anyway.

  “Follow me.”

  It was tempting to just shut up and do what she said...but I had never been one for just doing what I was told. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Reika. I'm here to rescue you.”

  “My very own Stormtrooper.”

  She gave me a funny look. “What?”

  “Never mind...why?”

  She sighed. “Do you really want to know that right now?”

  “Well...yes. Sorry, but it's been a weird night.”

  “Because I want to get out of this place, and you are how I can do it.”

  Ah, see, that I understood. She wasn't in this just to be nice and rescue the girl she didn't know; she wanted to get away from the creepy gray robed cult, too. That I believed. “Alright, let's go.”

  She handed me a gray robe, and I tugged it on. I didn't like it. It was itchy. We pulled up the hoods, and she tugged me until I was standing right next to her. I followed in her footsteps, trying to be as quiet as possible. She was looking down at the floor, so I did, too.

  “Keep your eyes on your feet; try to look normal,” Reika told me.

  I had not, in my entire life, looked normal. Typical or able-bodied, sure, but not normal. “Okay.”

  I was trying really, really hard to be absolutely normal when I felt something. It was hard to describe. It was like something was tugging at my mind or my spirit, or maybe a little of both. I turned my head and looked down the hallway that I was almost sure the sensation was coming from. I wanted to ignore it. I knew that it would be smarter to, but the moment that I felt it, I knew that I had to go find out what was happening.

  I was walking down the hallway before I even realized I had fully made the decision. Reika grabbed my arm and tried to tug me back. “Where are you going?”

  “This way...I have to.”

  I swear it made perfect sense to me at the time. When Reika started to hiss that I was being an idiot, I knew she was right, but I knew that I couldn't ignore it either.

  “Seriously, I have to,” I said.

  She frowned at me. “You are going to ruin my chance for escape.”

  “Go on, then. I'll meet you at the door.”

  She didn't believe me. To be fair, I didn't believe me either. I was pretty sure that I was about to walk into the trappiest trap that ever trapped, but what was I supposed to do? Ignoring it just didn't seem to be an option. I walked, and Reika followed.

  “We aren't supposed to be down here,” she whispered at me. I was getting the feeling that my rescuer was also a bit of a worrywart.

  “We aren't supposed to be breaking out of here either, but that doesn't seem to be bothering you.”

  She smiled. See, at least someone in this complex thought I was funny.

  I ignored all the doors along the hall until we got to the very last one. Of course, it was. It couldn't be something normal like the first door on the right. It had to be all the way at the end of this place that was so boringly white and geometric that it was almost impossible to navigate.

  “What's in there?” she asked.

  “I don't know...but I need to find it.”

  I tugged on the door. It didn't open. She pushed me aside. I let her. Hey, she knew more about this place than I did. She tugged out a container made of dark wood. She unscrewed it, and the scent of chalk filled the air. It was blue and stood out on her fingers as she began to draw a perfect circle on the door. She bisected it with lines so perfect I'd have needed a ruler and a prayer to accomplish them. Then, she added symbols that I didn't understand. The next thing I knew, magic surged out and the door opened.

  “What the heck was that?” I wanted to know.

  She shot me a look. “Wizardry
.”

  Right. Of course. What had I been thinking?

  The room was as boringly decorated as the rest of the place, but that wasn't what caught my attention. In the very middle of the room was a bed, and in that bed was a man. He was tall and brown-skinned. His head was perfectly shaved, and a series of tattoos were imprinted on the flesh. There was an attractiveness to his features, high strong cheekbones and good form, but it was all muted by the fact that he looked like he had been bled dry...which wasn't too far from the truth.

  A strange apparatus was hooked up to him. It had needles sticking into his skin and there were like...six jars sitting at six equal points inside of a circle that was made of what I could only assume was blood.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  Reika tugged on my arm. “We need to go.”

  “I'm not leaving someone like that!” I said, all full of righteous indignation.

  “He's already dead.”

  I blinked. How could she say that? I could feel that he was alive I could... “He's a vampire...oh my god...that's Zane.”

  “Who?”

  I knew it had to be. It had to be the last of the four sons of Vlad. He was a vampire. That's why I knew he was alive. Check one in the pro column for necromancy. “We have to get him out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if we don't, then Connie gets to have the prophecy baby.”

  She gave me another funny look. “You don't want her to? I heard-”

  “Listen, I've got a lot of mixed feelings. Sue me. But one thing I am not cool with is tying up a person in your bedroom and sucking them dry. Like...I don't know a lot about magic...but killing something to make yours happen doesn't seem like a great idea.”

  “You don't know they are killing him. It's a vampire.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  I knew. I did. I knew it in a way I couldn't entirely explain. Call it witchcraft, call it intuition. But I was absolutely one hundred percent sure that this was hurting him. I was sure what I felt was his undead soul calling out for me. I surged forward just as Reika said “Wait!”

  The magic surged towards me and then through me, tossing me back against the far wall with so much force I was left breathless. It did not feel good. Not even a little bit.

  The vampire turned his head in my direction. “Help.”

  “Working on it,” I gasped out. I charged forward, my ribs aching. “I need to get into this circle thing.”

  “We should go. Someone will have heard that.” She was looking down the hall, as if waiting for people to suddenly appear. I hadn't heard anything, but the pulse of magic was strong enough that other people might have felt something. Was that the same thing? Maybe Reika actually heard magic when I just felt it. I didn't know. Magic was weird.

  I took a deep breath, deep enough that it hurt my already tender body. I looked at the guy laid out and half dead...re-dead...more dead? I didn't know. I just knew that I absolutely could not leave him like that. “Please?”

  She frowned, but she began drawing symbols in the bloody circle, her lips twisted in dislike.

  The magic shuddered as she added her own to it, and I waited. I let my eyes gloss over until I could see the lines of the Weave as they worked in this room. The lines were...well, they were certainly more orderly here. They followed perfect paths regardless of what they were moving through. When I had seen them before, they seemed to follow the lines of nature and carpentry. Here, it was like everything had been built around them. It made me vaguely uncomfortable.

  Several of the lines were focused into the circle, pushing into the vampire that I was assuming was Zane. They didn't look like normal magic lines...they looked spiky, like they were supposed to hurt. Lines were pouring out of him too, filling up the six jars. This all felt strange and wrong and I didn't like it at all.

  “They are coming!” Reika hissed.

  I didn't ask who. I could guess.

  “Hurry!” I told her.

  The magic broke, and I surged forward, plucking out the tubes from his body. He gasped, but not because he needed to breathe. It just hurt. A moment later, my mother and Connie and several of the gray-robed wizards were all pouring into the room. Oh, this wasn't good. They radiated magic. Their hands linked, and that power built and focused around me. I could tell they were trying to hold me still. It wasn't working as well as it had before, and I wasn't sure why.

  “What's going on here?” my mother wanted to know.

  “Gee,” I snapped out. “I was pretty sure that was my question. What are you doing to him?”

  Connie gave me the biggest sneer that I had ever seen. “How else do you make a baby with blood?”

  Okay. Ew. Not cool. I didn't want to know any more. “We are leaving.”

  My mother shook her head. “No, you aren't.”

  I wanted to say something cool, like “try and stop me,” but that was when I heard a great big commotion going on downstairs. Their heads turned, and I shouted, “Run!”

  Zane couldn't run, not on his own. He was too weak and drained. He tried though, bless him. His long legs struggled to try to get under him. I put one arm around him, but I wasn't tall enough or strong enough to be of much help.

  “Help him!” Reika shouted over her shoulder, trying to dart through the doorway.

  “Trying!”

  “Some necromancer you are,” Connie sneered.

  That, quite possibly, was the most helpful thing that anyone had ever said to me. I'd played enough video games to know that necromancers were all about the undead. Sure, the flavor of that connection differed from one thing to the next, but undead were totally their jam. I remembered the power pouring into the jars, and I focused on it.

  The power jumped to me, rushed into me. I felt like I'd exercised every day of my life and had just gotten done with my most recent world tour of martial arts. I was strong, fast, powerful...but I knew the power wasn't mine. With nothing but my force of will, I shoved all that power into Zane, and he damn near jumped.

  This was why their magic wasn't working as well, I realized. It didn't matter that their lines of magic were all perfectly laid out. Blood was on the ground, and that was the essence of life energy. That was necromancy, and it was all mine. Well, okay, it was Zane's...but still.

  One moment he was leaning on me, the next he was moving. I had Wei to compare him to, and Dmitri for that matter. I knew that vampires could be fast. I just didn't expect the blur of motion that left three wizards on the ground and me scooped up in a pair of slender arms. The next thing I knew, we were downstairs, and Reika was on our tail. The front door was open.

  “Wow,” she whispered to herself. I was feeling pretty much the same. I had expected an epic boss battle, lots of magic being flung this way and that. Instead, all I had gotten was a blur of commotion. I'd complain about it later.

  I was just about to walk out the front door when I heard the last thing that I expected.

  “Lorena!”

  “Wei!” I cried out, completely shocked.

  The room where the cult and I had gone about our little conversation was a wreck. Markus stood in the center of it. His entire body glowed with circles of magic, tattooed into the skin, which had been covered by his gray robe earlier. Circles upon circles of interconnected glyphs glimmered against his skin. The power that rolled off of him was so much that my ribs, already tender, screamed with painful indignation.

  Wei had his sword in hand, still wearing the jeans and the t-shirt that he had been wearing at the club, but both were soaked with blood. I hadn't even known that vampires could bleed. Wounds were visible on his flesh, but I didn't know what had made them. To one side was Alan, gripping his stomach, leaning heavily against the wall, and to the other was Dmitri…or at least, I thought it was Dmitri. He looked...well, he looked more like a massive man-bear than the boy I had grown to care about. Wei was bloodied, and his eyes were a shock of red.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

&nb
sp; “Rescuing you.”

  “No!” Markus shouted, and the word was filled with arcane power. The room seemed to shake with it. I had never felt anything like it, even from Marquesa. “You will go nowhere. I will not have magic running rampant through the world. I will not have it!”

  That sounded...weird. What else was magic supposed to do?

  “Let us go!”

  He shook his head and raised his hands in the air. I knew that he was going to do something terrible, so I did the only thing I could do. I stole magic. I stole it from Alan, from Dmitri, from Zane. I stole parts of that essence that made them what they were, and I shoved it into Wei. Wei, who I knew could be so strong. Wei, who I knew to be the most powerful of the sons of Vlad. I poured it into him like water into a cup. I filled him with everything that I could, and when he couldn't take any more, the magic flashed back into me. Oops.