“He ran away.”
“Well, I didn’t try to stop him!” Nathan stood and paced, and I eased back a little farther on the bed. Not that I thought he would hurt me, but I’m always uneasy around people in such an agitated state.
“Nathan, this is your problem. You push everything down until you’re forced to deal with it, and when that time comes, you can’t. This guilt is like…it’s like gangrene. If you don’t treat it, it eats you up.”
“That’s a fine example, but the only procedure I know for treating a morbid limb is amputation. I’ll be damned if I’m going to cut off my memories of my son.” He sat again, as if it was too much effort to bear the weight of standing and the weight of his grief at once. “But it’s not just for myself I’m worried.”
He took my hands in his and lifted them to his lips, kissing my palms, then my fingertips. Nathan rarely indulged in such intense physical contact unless it would lead to sex, but through the blood tie I felt only desperation. When he looked at me, I saw the meaning behind his fear before he spoke the words.
“He’s taken everything from me,” he whispered, squeezing my hands almost too tightly. “Marianne. Ziggy. He’ll take you, too.”
I tried to stammer out a generic reassurance, but he would have none of it. “Don’t argue, Carrie. You don’t know him. He wants. That’s all he is, a creature made of want. If you thought Cyrus was bad, he is just a watered down version of his father. He’ll take me back, and you with me. I can’t have that happen to you.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I jerked my hands from his, clenching them to fists. “You really underestimate me, don’t you? I’m not property. I can’t be owned or taken. Not by Cyrus, not by you, and definitely not by the Soul Eater.”
I eased my defensive posture. “You said yourself we have the perfect weapon. That you’re too afraid to use it. That’s him. Don’t you get that? Your fear of him is how he’s controlling you.”
“I know that.” Nathan looked as though I’d slapped him. “I’ve known that for years. Why do you think I was alone for so long? Why do you think I had only Ziggy in my life when I met you? I know my sire controls me. He keeps me isolated. I can shut him out, Carrie, but not permanently, and not forever. Eventually, I’m going to hear him again.”
“So, why not today?” I’d spoken the question without thinking about it, but I’m glad I did. I might not have said it otherwise.
For a moment, he wavered between emotional breakdown and an outburst of righteous indignation. Then his shoulders sagged and he rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes closed in fatigue. “Fine.”
“What?” I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.
He lay back on the bed, staring at—no, through—the ceiling. “You’re right. I should just get it over with. We’re sunk otherwise. We don’t have any other weapons available, and I’m just being cowardly.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I grabbed his wrist, snapping him back to attention. “You’re not going to do it right now, are you?”
“No time like the present.”
I waited, not daring to move, barely breathing, my gaze trained on his face. Would he go all screwy and possessed again? Would I have to run for my life? I mentally calculated the time it would take me to stand after kneeling so long, weighed it against my speed on legs that had fallen asleep, and realized if he did go into mindless-monster mode, I was pretty much a goner.
When his eyes snapped open not a full minute later, I jumped back and gasped.
“Christ, woman, you scared me!” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Were you just staring at me the whole time?”
“No,” I lied. “Kind of. In case. You know.”
He smiled. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“So, it didn’t work?” It couldn’t have, in that short a time, could it?
He blinked, as if clearing his vision. “Oh, it worked. He’s headed to the mansion, to pick up Dahlia. And to move back in.”
“Wait…I thought the mansion belonged to…” I rose and wandered to the living room. Cyrus was in the kitchen still, reading through Dahlia’s notes. I took the chair across from him.
“Cyrus, who owns your mansion?” I watched his face for any flicker of emotion, but none showed.
“My mansion? If I had a mansion, would I be staying here?” He turned a page casually.
I rolled my eyes. “You know what I’m talking about. The house on Plymouth Street. Who owns it?”
“My father.” He touched his tongue to his forefinger and turned another page. “Why do you ask?”
“So Clarence, then, he works for your father?”
Cyrus nodded. “He comes with the house.”
“How long has your father owned that house, Cyrus?” I had the strangest feeling I’d overlooked something important. “Twenty years? Thirty?”
“One hundred and fifty.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “He liked Michigan because it had a lot in common with England, climatewise.
I leaned on the table and scanned the page in front of me. “Is there some connection, then, between this area and the Oracle?”
Cyrus shook his head. “No. He wasn’t interest in her then. I don’t know why he’s interested in her now. He just liked the weather.”
I glanced behind me to where Nathan stood in the doorway, his face grim. I turned back to Cyrus. “So, how can Clarence come with the house, then? He’s old, but not a hundred and fifty years old.”
Cyrus looked at me as if I’d gone out of my mind. “You don’t think he’s alive, do you?” He started to laugh, a chuckle that grew to full-out laughter such as I’d never seen from him, until he pounded his knee with his fist and wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. “Oh, that’s priceless.”
“So, he’s a vampire then?” I snapped, not nearly as amused as Cyrus. “He’s working for your father?”
“He’s a ghost, Carrie.” Cyrus gave one last, soundless hitch of laughter. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”
“That’s not possible,” I scoffed. “There are no such things as ghosts.”
“You said the same thing about vampires,” Nathan reminded me. “And werewolves.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I watched one of my father’s minions do it,” Cyrus interrupted calmly. “Do you remember when I cut your heart out?”
I glared at him. “That’s a stupid question. Of course I do.”
“Do you remember what it was like to die?” He paused, waiting so I could think it over.
Not that I needed to search my memory. Dying, and what happened after, was never far from my mind. It wasn’t that I was a morbid person, but the memory of leaving my body and floating among a bunch of faceless, vaguely similar ghost people was all the motivation I needed to keep myself from danger.
“But it must be different for humans.” I flinched at the word. I still hated to think of myself as somehow apart from my birth species. “They have souls.”
“Do you think we don’t have souls, Carrie?” Nathan asked softly, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Do you think you don’t have a soul?”
“That’s not what I meant. Not a soul in the philosophical sense. I meant in the Judeo-Christian sense. That there’s something in a person that goes to heaven. Obviously, we don’t go there. We go to the weird blue shadow world.” I shuddered at the thought of it. Drifting with no sense of time or identity, and worse, not caring that you were.
“Well, I won’t argue. But wherever he was expected after death, Clarence didn’t go. Oh, we made a great game of cornering him in the dining room and chasing him around the table. He even did that feint where it seemed he’d go one way, but then turned and went another.” Cyrus smiled, lost in reminiscing, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. He looked first at me, then Nathan, and a guilty expression came over his face. “Well, at any rate, Geoffrey caught him, drained him and left his corpse on the floor. Father was livid. You know how they say it
’s hard to find good help? The same was true then. He was raving, ranting, tearing through his parlor like a man possessed—you remember the parlor in my suite, Carrie?—until he finally calmed down enough to kill Geoffrey as punishment. Imagine his surprise when, just as Geoffrey’s body burned down to ash, Clarence walked in and politely asked if we required him to clean up the mess!”
As neither Nathan nor I were laughing, Cyrus wisely swallowed his amusement.
“What I don’t understand is, if Clarence is tied to the house, and he’s working for the owner, how was he able to help me against you and Dahlia?” I tapped the nail of my index finger on my teeth as I stared at the book.
“Well, Dahlia and I didn’t own the house. My father’s name has always been on the deed, in one form or another.” He turned another page and started reading. “So, my father wanted me dead, and wanted you to find this.”
“But why?” As I pondered the question silently, Cyrus turned back to the spell book, apparently unconcerned with the fact his father had wanted to kill him. It seemed so bizarre, to want to kill your own flesh and blood. And Dahlia…she’d been human once. What would the Soul Eater want with her?
“Oh, God.” I heard Nathan’s quiet exclamation and looked up. Cyrus had pulled his hands back from the book as if it had burned him. I turned to Nathan. He stared, wide-eyed in horror, at the spell book.
I looked down, finally coming to the party, albeit late. Scrawled in Dahlia’s hand was the heading “Vitality Elixir,” and, after a lengthy list of ingredients and incantations, “used on that Movement guy. Didn’t work.”
“What the hell could that mean?” I guessed “that Movement guy” could have been Max, but “Vitality”?
Nathan took the book, his eyes moving so fast as he scanned the words I wasn’t sure he could possibly be processing the information. “This is…What the hell was she trying to do?”
He strode to the living room and grabbed a notebook. On a page he drew three columns. “There are so many different components…. I don’t know them all. I’ll divide up the ingredients list by three. I’m going to have to contact one of my customers versed in Roman magic and curses for the incantations.”
“Don’t bother,” Cyrus said, finding his voice. “Look.”
Nathan glanced up from his notebook and I leaned over the spell book. In the margin, in cramped, tiny handwriting, Dahlia had added: “For forging the ‘sword’(born vampire). Used on Cyrus. No effect. Used on blond vampire. No effect. Needs work.”
“What is it?” Nathan asked, coming to stand in the doorway. Nausea gripped my stomach as I continued to read.
“Perhaps it will work in cross-species breeding, human-to-vampire or vampire-to-werewolf.”
Cyrus’s voice was hoarse. “She used this on me?”
Nathan frowned at the writing, scrubbing a hand over his face. “There are definite fertility elements to the spell. It looks like she was trying to make exactly what it says, a born vampire.”
“She used it on Cyrus. The other vampire…I bet that was Max.” My thoughts spun faster and faster, rushing to a horrible conclusion I knew I didn’t want to reach.
Nathan shook his head, forehead still creased in concentration. “It says here it didn’t work. But…oh.”
Bile rose in my throat. “It didn’t work because she was a vampire, too. But she gave it to Max.”
Max. Bella. Her unexplained fatigue and carsickness.
But it wasn’t carsickness at all.
Bella was pregnant.
Sixteen:
Vitality
T hey arrived in Danvers the night before the full moon.
“You’re not going to go all, you know—” he gave a mocking, horror movie version of a wolf’s howl “—are you?”
“Max, imagine if I behaved that way toward your customs and traditions,” Bella admonished, grabbing her bag from the car.
“You do! You hate vampires.” He slammed the trunk closed and followed her inside. The place was pretty standard—two beds, a television with bolted-down remote, a sink outside the bathroom for no reason that made sense. But if anything could be said for the East Coast, at least their cheap roadside motels were clean.
Bella began unpacking. He’d only ever seen her remove clean underwear and a toothbrush from her bag, but apparently it held all manner of interesting things. Like a studded collar and wire cable leash.
“Nice,” he said, following it up with a whistle. “So, am I the submissive or…”
“It is not for sex.” She looped the lead through a double ring on the front of the collar. “It is to keep me restrained tomorrow night.”
“I thought you could force yourself not to change. That it was some sort of code of your…people.” Still, he found himself scanning the room for a place to hook the leash.
After a long moment, she answered. “It is our code not to harm humans. But there are other factors. I may not be able to keep from changing. I am under much stress.”
“I get it.” Max cut her off. He didn’t want to hear her tell him again that they were as good as dead. “So, will you recognize me or will you rip me to shreds?”
“I do not know.” She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “If I did attack you, I would not eat you. Vampires taste terrible.”
“That’s a comfort.” If being maimed could be considered a comfort.
She reached into the bag and withdrew a vial. “Just in case I am unmanageable, you can use this.”
He took the bottle, examining the shimmering blue liquid inside. “A sedative?”
“Something like that.” She gripped the radiator and gave it a tug. When it creaked, she shook her head. “Perhaps I should attach this to the leg of the bed. I will probably succeed in moving it, but it will not cause structural damage we would have to pay for.”
“There’s another comfort.” He slipped the vial into his front pocket. “In the event I do need to give you the night-night drug, how do I get it into you? I mean, are you going stop being a crazed werewolf long enough to swallow it?”
She knelt on the floor and slipped the bar of a thick padlock around the leg of the bed. Attaching the looped end of the cable, she snapped the lock shut with an ominous click. “No. You will have to feed it to me in something.”
“Like giving a dog a pill in a piece of cheese.” He smiled, to show he was half joking.
“I do not like cheese. I am fond of orange juice.” She paused for a moment, her palms coming to rest on the front of her jacket, but she forced them down. Her expression grave, she put her hands into his. “Promise you will only use it if I become a danger. I am a very calm wolf, but we all have the potential for fury. Especially under the circumstances. The potion is very powerful, and I do not want to be incapacitated by an overdose.”
“Fair enough.” He eyed the lead in his hand. “You know, since you might be a wolf for, what? Is it three nights with you guys? We should put this to good use.”
With a low, playful growl, she moved closer to him. Then she stopped. Her body tensed.
“Bella?” Oh God. Not again.
Before he could complete the thought, Max flew backward, propelled by an evil wind that seemed to come through the walls. Nothing else moved—the curtains didn’t even stir—but Bella rose slowly from the floor, her head tipping back. Her mouth fell open, blood dribbling from her lips as the Oracle spoke through her. “Bring the weapon to me!”
“You want a weapon? I’ll bring you a weapon, you crazy bitch!” He reached into his back pocket for the stake there, then remembered it was Bella, not the Oracle, he would kill if he used it. How did she get so far into my head? The thought of what he’d been about to do sickened him, but there was no way to retaliate against the power that was destroying Bella.
“Bring the weapon to me!” the voice raged from Bella’s throat. Then, as quickly as it had come over her, the Oracle’s power was gone. Bella dropped in a heap on the floor, lay still for a moment, then snapped up, her eye
s cold with hatred.
Max stepped warily toward her. “Bella, is that you?”
“It is me,” she gasped, choking up more blood. “She is here. She has people here. They know we are coming.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, hating that his hand was trembling. “You rest. I’ll keep watch. And I’ll call Nathan, see if he got any information on reinforcements.”
“No.” She shook her head, drawing herself up slowly. “No. I will not wait for them to come after us. Get back in the car.”
“Bella,” he began, ready for a fight. He walked toward her, and she was on her feet before he reached her, brandishing a stake.
She leveled the point in front of his chest. “Get back in the car.”
Max kept one eye on the road and one on Bella as she leaned out the car window, scenting the air. For the first time, he was tempted to snap at a passenger for not wearing a seat belt. She was hanging way too far out.
When had he become so like Marcus? If this was what love did to someone, no wonder Max had avoided it for so long.
“Are you getting anything?” he asked, gripping the steering wheel tighter, as if that would hold her in. If she fell and broke her neck, he’d kill her.
She slipped into her seat again, thank God, but didn’t buckle up. “Turn at the next available right.”
“The next available right is a dirt two track.” He leaned forward. “Or less.”
“That is where you must go.” She wrinkled her nose. “I smell vampires.”
“How many?” The last thing he needed was to drive into an ambush, though it seemed too late for regrets as he steered the car onto the dirt path. “There are things I need to know before we get there.”
She shrugged. “There were many. Now, there is only one distinct scent. Two, three at most.”
“One is still a possibility?” He downshifted, wincing at the scrape of the rutted road against the undercarriage of the vehicle.
“Of course. Better to be prepared for more, though.” She reached into the back seat and pulled two stakes from Max’s supply. “May I?”
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