by Sara Snow
When I drew that image into my mind, things in my mirror became clearer. I was so excited I almost dropped it. Carter looked up at me, studying my face.
“I see her!” I told him. “This is her just last night. She’s wandering the halls. She looks… frustrated. The halls are like a labyrinth and it seems like she’s just ending up back in the same spot over and over again.”
Carter’s eyebrow raised curiously. “What does that mean?”
“It seems to mean that Paimon has some pretty heavy magic altering the palace so that she can only wander the maze for a little while before ending up back at her room. It’s probably to give her the illusion of freedom while not actually letting her go anywhere.”
I saw Carter’s eyes narrow, his anger written all over his face. Whatever he was thinking, though, he kept to himself.
“So how will we get her out?” he asked.
I looked again to the mirror, trying to feel the magic in the palace. It was faint, but I could sense that its strength was waning. A thought occurred to me and I urged the mirror to show me the morning following this vision. Georgia was just rising from her bed when someone knocked at her door, and at that point, I could feel the spell start to gain its strength again. That was a good sign.
“It seems like whatever the magic is loses some of its potency around midnight and only starts to get stronger in the morning. If we try to get her out during its weakest time, we may have a shot,” I told him. “Probably around 3 AM. I bet whoever is responsible for keeping up the magic has to reset whatever ingredients or tools are responsible for the actual casting. I would guess for a spell of this scale that requires this much constant magical output, they have some sort of device that takes the caster’s magic and amplifies it so that it reaches the whole castle. It probably needs to be refueled, depending on what they use to keep it going. Kind of like nightly magical maintenance. They probably assume that that’s the safest time to do it. You should be able to easily get in and the hallway scrambling spell will be negligible. It’s the best time to try.”
He perked up, a glint in his eye appearing. “So we can really do this?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to say for sure, but I think so,” I said honestly. “Now that we know for sure that there’s magic altering the castle’s layout, I think I can figure out a way to use a clairvoyance spell in conjunction with my mirror to be able to navigate through it. I’ll keep working on it, but it shouldn’t take me too long.”
“How about that invisibility potion? Is there any left or did Jacob and Eli get the last of it?”
“No, not yet. What I gave them was all I had. I’m brewing more, but this one takes time. It probably won’t be ready until at least the middle of the night tomorrow, if not the following morning.”
“Damn,” Carter mumbled. “Oh well. I don’t have that long. I have to go.”
He rose from his seat on the floor, a new determination seeming to have set in on him. He made his way quickly toward the door and left without another word. Ordinarily, I would have been offended for the lack of a goodbye, but everything was weird around the warehouse, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to waste words when time was so critical. He still had a mission, and I had to assume that’s where he was heading in a hurry.
Carter
As I drove down the highway with the radio off, as much as I didn’t want to, I tried hard to remember the exact moment I had changed into my smoke form in Paimon’s crypt. I needed to know what triggered it, but the situation was a bit distracting and recalling anything besides agony was hard. The excruciating pain of the stake being slowly pushed into my chest was seared into my brain and I could still remember the real fear that I was going to die. I wondered if perhaps it was my nervous system responding to the threat of death that finally triggered it.
I’d tried again in my room a few times since I escaped, but so far I had no luck vaporizing myself. If I was going to be able to get into the palace to save Georgia, I had to be able to control this power whether or not my life was in danger. I wished there had been another way to learn to control it without having to make the trip to see my mother. I honestly didn’t think I’d have to see her again so soon, and I was honestly dreading the interaction. With any luck, she would just give me the information I needed and I’d be on my way to get Georgia out of that hellhole. If Leora had it her way, though, I’d be in for a heavy dose of criticism, maybe an argument, and possibly the withholding of the secret to my power. The classic tricks she had up her sleeve to try to make my life as miserable as possible for her own amusement.
Honestly, though, I’d talk to my mother a hundred times if I thought it’d get Georgia back. Hell, I’d move in with her if I had to. No matter how much shit I’d have to take from Leora, it would be worth it to see Georgia safe again. Besides, the entire mortal realm was relying on us now, and even though I couldn’t relate to mortals like that, I really didn’t want to try and relate to demons, either. So Leora it was.
I just had to cross my fingers and hope for the best.
No matter what club she went to work at, Leora’s club always stood out in its respective area. It was always classy and well-kept among a host of other clubs that weren’t nearly as striking as it. Funnily enough, it never seemed to be that way before she arrived, and after she left it didn’t stay that way for long. It was no doubt thanks to my mother’s famous voice that drew crowds from all over to hear her, shelling out every last dime those poor suckers could afford. Fortunately for me, the local buzz always made it easy to find her. Every man in a ten-mile radius of the club would be so eager to tell you about this little spot they’d heard of where the singer was absolutely out of this world, always hoping they could score with her. If they were lucky, they’d get to hear her sing at the club and go home to their families. If they were less lucky, they’d get the “all access backstage tour” that would include a one-night stand with a few drops of their blood still left in their body afterward. If they were even less lucky than that, they’d be human scraps by morning, dumped to rot on the side of the road somewhere.
My mother was beautiful. There was no doubt that I took after her. I never knew what my father looked like. My mother had some standards, though when it came to meals, she didn’t need to be picky even though she could afford to be. She’d take almost any man to the greenroom with her. The only question would be whether or not he was attractive enough to fuck her before she drained the life out of him and tossed him aside.
Something about seeing her always left a bad taste in my mouth. I was rarely as directly confronted by my complicated feelings about drinking blood as I was when I was around her. She had such a devil-may-care kind of attitude about that whole thing. She’d always told me that humans were created to be our food, but I couldn’t help but think of my father in those times.
Even when I found myself overwhelmed by the thirst, I always tried to do as little damage as I could and cause as little pain as possible. Feeding on other vampires was the easiest way to get my fill without worrying about endangering a human life, but in the dark moments when I didn’t have another vampire and I was crazed by thirst, I knew what I was doing was awful—I just couldn’t control myself, and it always left me wracked with guilt.
I could hear her velvety voice ringing out before I even opened the door to the club, and despite its clear skill, it made me shudder with disgust. Her tone, her pitch, everything about it was perfect. She controlled her voice with supernatural precision, and even though I’d be content to never go near her again, I could understand the allure as far as the men she preyed on were concerned.
The bar was dark when I entered, a majority of the light coming from behind the bar or the spotlight on the stage. My mother stood beneath it, her raven black hair silky and perfectly framing her face. For a moment, she almost reminded me of Georgia. I stood for a moment, watching her sing to a crowd of thirty or so men who were absolutely enraptured by her. I could only shake my head as I wandered ove
r to the bar and ordered a whiskey.
If I’m gonna be here, I may as well try to make it less miserable.
I took my drink and sat at one of the few empty tables toward the back of the club, far enough that I hoped that she wouldn’t see me. The jazzy piece she was singing was slow and sexy and I could tell that she was really working those front few tables by the way her eyes kept flickering between the entranced men who were currently forgetting about their wives and children and girlfriends.
Her set didn’t last long before she paused to take a break and I could feel the collective men in the room let out their held breath when she walked off the stage. I saw her slip discreetly out to the bar from backstage, sticking to the shadows. She was good at that—even I almost missed her at first.
She didn’t seem to notice me as I approached her, not even bothering to look at me until I was setting my drink down next to her and taking a seat.
“You seem to have a pretty good handle on the dogs in this place,” I commented.
“Well when they beg you to put them on a leash and then keep coming back for more, where’s the surprise in that?” she answered, taking a hefty sip of her drink, her dark eyes darting over to me. “It’s been a long time, Charles.”
Not long enough.
I knew I could correct her on my name, but it seemed better to keep my new name to myself, hopefully to keep her from trying to track me down if she ever decided to try.
“It’s certainly been a while,” I agreed, sipping my own drink.
A shivering man approached the bar with a fistful of dollars, ordering something from the bartender, shifting his weight uncomfortably as he waited. His eyes kept flickering to my mother and I could practically smell the sweat lining his forehead. I rolled my eyes when he predictably approached her and cleared his throat.
My mother shot him a look that was filled with venom but was coated in enough sweetness to make him melt with just a slight upturn of her rouge lips as she looked him up and down. He wasn’t entirely unattractive, but the anxiety radiating off him made me want to slap him and ask if he left his balls at home with his wife or if he just didn’t have any to begin with.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, clasping his hands together nervously. “I just wanted to tell you that you have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard and—”
“If you like my show, sugar, just stick around,” she interrupted, lowering her voice to what I remembered as being her classically sultry hunting voice. “If you come around afterward, I know you’ll enjoy the backstage show.”
She reached out to take his horrible patterned tie between her fingers, running them down the material just enough to make her meaning painfully obvious. The bartender set his drink down for him and he quickly tossed down his money, giving a short nod to Leora before scurrying back to his table like a frightened child. I would have been embarrassed for him if he had had the confidence to be embarrassed for himself, but I suspected that wasn’t the case.
She scoffed as she returned to her glass, angling her body toward me so I could finally get a full look at her up close. She was just as beautiful as I remembered. Her eyes were the only thing that unsettled me about her. Maybe to the humans she preyed on they were alluring, but to me they were cold and predatory. It seemed clear that she had no love for any of these men, and seeing it in action just now made my stomach clench. I could only imagine the suffering she would be subjecting that poor man to in just a few hours.
It almost made me angry to think of whoever my poor father had been. Just some lonely, desperate man seduced by her. Maybe even killed by her. I’d asked about him so many times and never gotten an answer, but it didn’t change the fact that I’d probably never know. Leora probably didn’t even know herself.
“Well come on then, spit it out,” she said, stopping my train of thought. “You didn’t just come to say hello, so what is it?”
Straight to the point for once. That’s new.
“You told me a long time ago that our ancestors escaped persecution by shifting into different forms—smoke, wolves, bats, whatever. How did they control it?”
She pursed her lips, studying me. “Have you ever shifted before?”
“Once. But I don’t know how. I thought I was about to be killed and it just happened.”
She swirled the lowball in her hand, the ice cube softly clinking against the glass. “What were you thinking? When you thought you’d die, that is.”
I rolled my eyes. “Uh, ow, ow, that hurts, ow?”
She scoffed, and for a second, it almost looked like she smiled as she raised her glass to her lips, though she wouldn’t let her tone of voice show it. “Funny, Charles. You had to have been thinking of something. Everyone does before they go. Someone they’ll leave behind, something they’ve left unfinished. A memory or something they were looking forward to, even. Maybe something they left unsaid that should have been said.” She seemed to be waiting for me to react, but I kept my face as neutral as possible. “What was it?”
“A friend,” I said. Something in me hated being honest with Leora, but now wasn’t the time to be scant with information. “A girl. I thought about being reunited with her,” I clarified.
She nodded knowingly, and that’s when I did see her eyes soften a bit, her apple red mouth turning to a smirk that stopped just short of a smile. It wasn’t much, but it was the most affection she’d looked at me with for as long as I can remember. It seemed like such an odd expression on her face.
“I should’ve known this was about love,” she mused.
I scoffed. “Yeah, it is. And she’s in danger right now, so I don’t have time to sit here and tell you about it. I need to know how to shift into my smoke form so I can save her from literal Hell.”
Now that she did smile at. “I should’ve known you were a smoke shifter. Just like your mother.”
The idea of being like her made me shudder, but I didn’t have time for a snappy retort, instead watching her pull her small clutch purse from her lap, fishing through it to pull out a small palm stone wrapped in hemp cord that seemed to be hanging like a necklace. The stone was black as night with a small symbol carved into it that resembled a wisp. She rubbed her thumb affectionately over the surface of it a few times before offering it to me.
“This stone belonged to one of your ancestors. The villagers in his town had finally discovered the way to kill vampires and went on a rampage, tearing through the streets to get to him. They backed him into a corner and he only narrowly escaped being staked by evaporating into smoke and fleeing. The stone has been passed down since. If you have it with you and say its secret word, you’ll be able to transform on command.”
“Secret word?”
“Füst,” she said, nodding. “Remember it well. It’s the Magyar word for smoke.”
Füst. I imprinted it in my mind, shoving the stone in my pocket.
“Just like that? You’re giving me your magic rock just like that?” I questioned.
“It’s no precious gift, think nothing of it. I haven’t worn it in years.” She just shrugged. “Don’t need to. When you’ve been shifting as long as I have, you don’t need a magic rock to help hone the ability anymore, you just do it. You’re a little half vampire—your control over your power is far weaker and less stable than mine, I’m sure. That’s also probably why you’re such a late bloomer.” She took a sip of her drink. “You’ll probably never be able to shift on command without it. It’s a cute accessory, though a little bohemian for my taste. I’m not losing out on anything by giving it away.”
“Well thanks for the generous donation,” I said sarcastically as I stood to go, throwing back the rest of my drink. I had already turned away, but she stopped me.
“You’re getting stronger, Charles,” she said.
“I can turn into smoke, that’s not much.”
“You couldn’t do that before, though, could you?” She raised her eyebrows, as if to answer her question. “Stronger.”
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The thought gave me pause. I’d already been alive for decades, why was I only just getting stronger now?
“It must be that girl of yours,” she said, as if she could tell exactly what I was thinking. “In fact, I’m certain it is. I can tell.”
I crossed my arms. I really didn’t have time for this, but she was digging just like she always did, and something in me needed to know why.
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
She huffed a laugh. “The fact that you’re even here is a testament to it. You haven’t sought me out in nearly forty years, yet now your love is in danger and here you are, trying to figure out how to save her with my help.”
She was right, but I hated how easy it was for her to read me like that. I turned from her again, my jaw tightly clenched.
“Thanks for the rock,” I said.
She sighed. “Sometimes you remind me of him.”
I froze. I thought I must have been mistaken. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said, finishing off her drink. “Go save your girl.”
As I walked out of the bar without looking back, I wondered if maybe someday, if we survived this whole mess with Paimon, I’d find out exactly what she meant.
12
Carter
I drove slowly and silently down the street, the factory grounds looming menacingly just up the road. I flicked off my headlights and pulled over behind a few closely-placed trees that would hopefully keep it hidden from view of anyone at the factory. The console clock was radiating a neon green 2:43 at me. I shut my lights off and pulled my keys from the ignition, stepping out into the cool night air that felt a bit too brisk for the time of year.
My hand was stuck in my pocket, fingering the stone my mother had given me, feeling the etched wisp in its front. I wished that I had a bit longer to practice with it and learn to control it, but time was up and I couldn’t leave Georgia in there for one minute longer than she needed to be. I fished it out to hold it in my palm, feeling an energy radiating off of it that I hadn’t noticed before. I squeezed it tightly in my palm, feeling its secret word looming in my brain. My throat felt dry, nervousness stirring in my chest as I urged myself to say it. Now wasn’t the time to hesitate. I thumbed at the twin stakes Eli had given me which were tucked securely inside my jacket, reminding myself that I was prepared for this.