Blood Ties

by Skyla Dawn Cameron

  At least I’d somewhat recovered in the vehicle after giving her directions—I still looked like hell but I no longer felt like I was going to vomit.

  And I’d regained enough of my senses to question the wisdom in bringing her along. I knew it was the right decision in the moment to have her drive—I wouldn’t’ve made it otherwise—and she’d acted competently, if not above average, in an emergency situation. I wasn’t so cold as to kick her out of the vehicle now that I had my wits better about me—right now she was my only link to my brother.

  For now, we were allies, even if that tension of unfamiliarity rode in the air.

  “Did Dev tell you much about our dad?” I asked as she parked.

  She peered up at the imposing three-story mansion. “You mean...the vampire thing?”

  “Specifically that he looks the age of you and Dev. Try not to acted surprised.”

  She glanced at me, her fringe of black hair swinging. “Does it bother him?”

  “Not him, but it was always just super embarrassing when we’d bring someone over and have them stare.” I popped open the door and climbed out stiffly, aches and pains flaring to life. I’d done kickboxing through high school but quit a few years ago—nothing like getting my ass handed to me to remind me how out of shape I truly was. Living on coffee likely wasn’t helping matters. Melinoë followed with an easy grace I envied, and I suspected she wasn’t winded the way I was. We moved up the handful of wide shallow stone steps to the door with her slightly behind me.

  I unlocked the front door with my key and we stepped into the brightly lit inner hall. Any doors to the outside operated under the rule of doubles: there had to be two doors between the outside and the inside if there was any risk of sunlight, and one was always locked before another opened. Once we were in and the front door locked behind us, we continued through the next set of doors to the main foyer.

  The windows had multiple layers that required some effort to open them to the outside, and that included opaque steel panels; from the yard it was impossible to tell anyone was awake. But inside it was like stepping into another world, everything lit by a faux sunlight that nearly passed for the real thing—we’d gone from night to day, the brain always taking a bit of time to adjust. Really fucked up a human’s circadian rhythm.

  Steps sounded around the corner, too light and quick to be my father’s, and a moment later a woman stepped into the foyer, dark eyes going wide upon finding me. “El! He didn’t say—what the hell happened!”

  Normally Aunt Roo would barrel over with a bear hug, but she froze there, arm’s length away, and scanned my beat-up face. With a careful touch, she swept my hair back, studying what I assumed was a gash—or bite—on my temple.

  “Last minute visit,” I said with a weak smile. “We kind of ran into trouble.”

  She gently drew me forward for a proper greeting, her long skirt and braided hair fluttering.

  Aunt Roo gave the best hugs. Long enough without being awkward while still being substantial, warm and comforting, wrapping me in the scent of the exotic spices she worked with. I could only manage to pat her back, pain flaring through my shoulder.

  Dad was technically nearing sixty, but he was forever stuck in his late-twenties; the rest of the world aged around him, including any human relatives whether they were witches or not. This included his cousin Veruca who turned sixty-one last May; we’d grown up calling her “Aunt” since his only brother was dead and we had no other actual family, nor did she. So Aunt Roo’s long dark brown hair was threaded with gray—she’d proudly been talking about letting it go natural and having a long gray braid since I was ten—and she was definitely edging toward what Mom had always called “aging hippy”. Mom and Roo always had a lot of tension, but then Mom and anyone had tension.

  Aunt Roo leaned back, her hands firm on my shoulders, and a bright smile lighting her face. It was contagious—I grinned as well, and not the predatory “I’m about to murder you” smile I usually had. “My sweet girl. What happened? Let’s get the first aid—”

  “It’s not that bad—”

  “Liar.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I want to see Dad first.”

  She frowned but said, “He’s in the study upstairs.” She ran a finger along where the pink was just below my dark roots. “Is this leftover blood or dye?”

  “Dye, no headwounds other than what you see.” I hope.

  “It’s pretty.”

  “I was going to go totally pink but I ran out and haven’t hit the store yet.”

  “It suits you.”

  “Because it’s half-assed?”

  She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh El-baby, I missed you.” Then she glanced past me at Melinoë. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Mel,” Melinoë answered for me and tentatively offered her hand.

  Aunt Roo shook it. “Veruca. Nice to meet you, Mel.” She shifted her attention back to me. “See your dad, let him berate you, then please get the first aid. I’ll prepare some food.”

  I almost always ate when I was home because the food was better than whatever I’d cooked up—or ordered—and there was no arguing with Aunt Roo around. Whenever she visited, she lived in perpetual fear that someone, somewhere in the house, wasn’t getting enough to eat. With another smile at Melinoë, Aunt Roo swept past us for the kitchen.

  “I should’ve asked if you have dietary restrictions,” I said in a low voice. “She is definitely not letting us leave without feeding us.”

  “I’m pretty flexible.” Melinoë’s eyes were wide, taking everything in as I led her to the nearest staircase.

  This was a very different woman from who had approached my office that day. Gone was the badass bravado telling me that I was going to help her; in that place was someone quiet, a little aloof, with a different sort of tension buzzing around her.

  Interesting.

  I strode down the hall, growing more comfortable the longer I was in familiar surroundings, as if it could physically transport me from the world of demons we’d just escaped. Dad’s preferred decor was subdued. Neutral color palate. Less is more. I could all but hear Mom’s voice decrying it boring as fuck. Periodically he’d find her painting a random wall red or a hallway black, and he’d give a long-suffering sigh before picking up a brush to help. Not because he merely indulged her but because, though he’d had the house built and it had been “his” first, he never wanted his family to feel it wasn’t theirs as well. It was something I hadn’t entirely gotten as a kid, as Dev and I were treated the same and got to make our rooms ours, no matter our whims—my hot pink and teal phase was short-lived but painful to my parents. As I got older, I saw the dynamic between my parents more clearly. If the home belonged to everyone, then we all got to make our mark and have that respected—even though group conversations were encouraged.

  The hall to the study was bright purple—I’d helped paint that one. I gave the door a brief knock and then eased it open.

  There were parts of the house that were still being finished as I was growing up, but his study was not one of them—I suspected he’d planned it first and foremost, put most of his focus into it, and built everything else around it. While there was a proper library found via a connected door, he still had a full wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves for books. Then there was the massive marble fireplace, the sitting area, the heavy oak desk where he could sit with his back to the corner and see all the doors to the room.

  He was in an armchair by the fire tonight, reading a heavy grimoire and taking notes on a well-used yellow legal pad. The orderliness of the study was deceptive; he put things carefully away, but the stack of papers and books at his feet belied he was working tonight. For most kids, their parents always kind of look the same, a weird fuzziness around the edges of their memories from childhood. But for me? Dad really didn’t change.

  Dev and I both had his eyes, cool blue and deep set. His dark brown hair was cut a little above his shoulders, long enough to be tied in a sho
rt tail as it was tonight, and wearing a crisp button-down and jeans were about as casual as he got.

  He set the book down and rose with a smile when he saw me.

  A smile that faded. “Jesus, El—”

  “We ran into some trouble.”

  He rushed over, crossing the space to us at the door in just a few long strides. He took my mangled hand, first—I’d managed to stop the bleeding and wipe off some of the blood to better see all the bitemarks. There were about half a dozen—all surface wounds, thankfully, though I didn’t doubt they could bite as deep as bone given enough time.

  I flexed my fingers—all still working!—against his hand. “Some kind of demon—a swarm of them. Like a large rat crossed with a tarantula. There are a few halves of bodies in the car from when I slammed the door on them if you want to see, but ring any bells?”

  “We can look it up but—”

  “I’m fine, I promise—”

  His expression changed, shifting from concern to warning. “You are not fine. Unless whatever did this to you is at my door, you have time to get cleaned up and taken care of. Then we will talk.”

  I stifled a whiny teenage groan. “Fine.”

  He smirked. “Smart ass.”

  With the adrenaline truly abated now that I was safe and the familiar magic saturating the house warming me, at last I felt the crashing relief to be here. I leaned forward and gave him a hug, not caring that I might get blood on him because he wouldn’t care either. He stood half a foot over me, and though I normally thought of myself as “average” in terms of build, he always made me feel small. Not in a bad way, just...like when I was a little girl and he seemed like this giant of a man who kept me safe. It was a good feeling.

  Melinoë lingered behind me, and Dad peered over my shoulder at her. “Who’s your friend?”

  Right. Introductions. I’m bad at humanning sometimes. “Mel, this is my dad. Dad, Mel.”

  He shifted to face her, keeping me locked under one arm still. “I’d prefer Nate over anyone other than my children calling me ‘Dad’, of course.” And a careful look at me to remind me of my rudeness.

  “Sorry. Mel, Nate O’Connor. Don’t call him ‘Dad’.”

  Dad chuckled. “You’re welcome to anything you need, Mel, though Elis looks like she got the brunt of it.”

  “She saved my life,” Melinoë replied solemnly, still pretty glued to the doorway.

  He gave me a wryly amused look. “She does that on occasion.”

  Eight

  Home Is Where the Demonology Library Is

  I stood under the shower in my bathroom until the water ran clear.

  The water pressure was intense, hammering like needles against my skull. It hurt to lift my right arm still—might’ve been my rotator cuff—and deep blue bruises ran up my right thigh. There was no sense of the little bites becoming infected, though goddess knows what kind of demonic diseases the things carried. Wasn’t like there were tetanus shots for things that go bump in the night.

  The tattoo on my left thigh was unblemished. I idly wondered what would happen if it was accidentally sliced just so—did intention matter? But I thrust the thoughts aside, because it hadn’t happened and there was no point in thinking about it.

  I hadn’t the patience to stay in the shower for long, and shut off the water to step into the steaming bathroom and wrap myself in a towel. Another for my hair and I padded into my bedroom, the temperature comfortable enough that the water dried from my bare legs and arms but didn’t make me feel cold.

  Dad never changed our rooms or repurposed them—I would always have a place here, even though I hadn’t lived at home for almost four years now. The walls were painted—three black, one magenta against which the canopy bed was centered. A window seat was flanked by two bookshelves and my old desk rested against another wall. As a child I’d had room for a huge dollhouse, my parents indulged me so I never wanted for anything, and I suspected all of those items were packed away somewhere in the manor if I wanted to go looking.

  Melinoë was perched on the foot of my bed, just waiting there without reaching for a book or pulling out her phone to occupy herself. Her body language spoke of discomfort—shoulders tense, expression guarded. Why, I could only speculate, but then depending on her circumstances the house and everything might be a little intimidating. At the very least, there was a cognitive dissidence going from Dev’s place in Magic Alley and the demon swarm to a polite vampire in a quiet mansion.

  “You want the shower or anything to clean up?” I asked as I went for the door to my walk-in closet.

  She waved a bandaged hand at me. “I cleaned up the blood and your dad brought a first aid kit. I really didn’t get bit that badly.”

  I didn’t have a lot of clothes at home, but enough to do me in an emergency. Fresh cotton panties and a bra, socks, another pair of skinny jeans. My combat boots were fine, so I grabbed a fitted black tee, gray hoodie, and called it done. The closet was angled away from the bed so I couldn’t see Melinoë, but I wasn’t particularly shy anyway and dropped my towel in favor of the underwear.

  “Odds of that swarm having something to do with Dev’s disappearance?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she returned. “It seems a little too coincidental, but at the same time, if anything weird like that was going to happen, it would be at Magic Alley. We might’ve been caught in someone else’s crossfire.”

  I got my bra and t-shirt on next. “Until we know what kind of demon they were and precisely what Dev was doing when he disappeared, that might remain in the ‘unknown’ column.” I zipped up my jeans, slipped on socks, and grabbed my hoodie and boots as I left the closet. “If anyone around here will know anything, it’s Dad. Ready?”

  She nodded mutely and followed, her leather coat creaking as she walked. She’d smoothed out her hair in addition to bandaging her hand and freshened up the kohl lining her eyes—no purse, so she must’ve had things stowed in her pockets...along with the gun holstered somewhere under there. Not a lot of people around here carried, so that was also a little weird.

  I grabbed my old school messenger bag from the back of my bedroom door and stuffed everything from the pockets of my torn up jeans and hoodie—wallet, phone, pack of gum, keys—and there’d be plenty of room in case Dad had any supplies to send with us when he identified the swarm. We then retraced our steps back down to the second floor. Dad was still in the study but now he had books freshly stacked on the coffee table in the sitting area and was pulling another from the shelves as we entered the room.

  Notably absent were the books and notes he was working on. More experiments, probably, and apparently I wouldn’t be sneaking a peak.

  “A swarm, you said?” he asked, crouching to peer at the lower shelf.

  “Thousands of them, easily.” I led Melinoë to sit; we took either end of the plush navy sofa. While she sat quietly, scanning the room, I reached for the top book.

  None of the tomes were remotely dusty—quite a feat considering he had hundreds of them and some were centuries old. I honestly wasn’t sure whether he employed someone to dust them or did it himself—given their importance, he might not have trusted others to dust in here.

  The lighting was low and comfortable, glinting on the glass of framed photos atop Dad’s desk across the room—I could picture them all without even looking, each carved in my memory. Me, Dev, and Mom—a frame of each. I didn’t have anything like that in my apartment. Did that make me weird? Well, beyond as weird as I already was. Maybe it was another sign that something was seriously wrong with me, but...

  When I was with Dad, here at home, it was fine. I saw Mom everywhere, found it comforting behind home. But when I was alone, the reminders hurt. Hurt in a way I didn’t want to be confronted by every day. I got by better without thinking about it all the time, and that meant no sentimental photos.

  Dad withdrew another book and brought them to the coffee table. He took the heavy armchair kitty-corner with
the couch. “Off hand, there are half a dozen possibilities.” He flipped through the book. “Where were you when you encountered them?”

  I knew I’d have to say it but was hoping I could’ve avoided it. “Dev’s place.”

  Dad looked sharply up at me. “I didn’t know you and your brother were speaking.”

  “We’re not,” I replied. “But he’s kind of missing.”

  “Missing.” His gaze moved pointedly from me to Melinoë—who was giving me some kind of look I couldn’t decipher, like she hadn’t expected me to say that—and then back to me again. “This swarm has something to do with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should I be concerned about your brother?”

  “Not yet.”

  He passed me the book open to a black and white drawing, a copy of something from the Middle Ages. “Was it this?”

  I took the book and leaned over for Melinoë to see. It looked more like a tarantula than a rat and didn’t have the razor down the back. “Similar but not quite. They also had red eyes.”

  He immediately cast aside two more books. “Not those ones, then. What sound did they make?”

  “Um...like a chittering? High-pitched?”

  “And they had a scent,” Melinoë added. “Or maybe whatever magic summoned them did, but I could smell sulfur.”

  Another two books discarded. Dad settled on a thick green leather-bound number and thumbed through the yellowed pages. “There’s a passage...here. No picture. In the midst of the Black Death, there were villages wiped out in Norway by what some said was a demon, but it was passed off as superstition. Rats with glowing red eyes and too many legs, traveling in swarms. No taxonomy, no further sightings. There are thousands of stories like this, brief mentions of demons no one has been able to confirm the existence of. Sometimes they pop up once and never again. Other times they eventually get studied and understood.”