Cursed Relic: (Witchling Wars: Vampire Echelon Book 1)

by Shawn Knightley

  ‘Tobias, you sly bastard. You made it sound like you didn’t have any vixra blood left when you asked Arthur. But you clearly had enough for this guy to use elemental magic.’

  “Calm down,” Tobias said as though he could sense right where my thoughts went. “He won’t do a thing unless I tell him to.”

  ‘Especially if I’m right and you’ve been giving him vixra blood. He’ll eat out of the palm of your hand to get more.’

  Christophe sat down in the backseat and extended his arm over it, relaxing as if he had just finished a day of hard work. Then he winked at me with a silly smirk on his face that certainly didn’t give me any reason to feel relaxed.

  We drove down the highway along with the morning commuters who had finally started taking over the streets. I reached for the button to turn on the heater and placed my hands in front of the air vent.

  “What?” Tobias teased. “The flames weren’t enough to get you warm again?”

  5

  We managed to beat the majority of rush hour traffic back to the city. Tobias drove my Jeep through the streets faster than the speed limit permitted and into a parking garage I had never been into before but I clearly recognized. He wasn’t taking me home. He was taking me to his expensive condo. We reached a section toward the bottom with a garage door that required he stop and enter a code into a side box. Once the garage door inside opened, I saw that he had his own private quarters for parking where his vehicles wouldn’t be bothered. There were ten various types of expensive cars. Ones that most men only dreamed of owning yet alone having their own private collection.

  Once my Jeep was parked, he climbed out and slammed the door shut as though he needed to get away from the dirt-encrusted steering wheel.

  “Sorry my tastes don’t meet your standards,” I sassed him.

  “Just because I’ve been enslaved by your kind doesn’t mean I have to give up my standards of living,” he sneered.

  “The vixra are hardly my kind,” I argued as he led the way out of the parking garage toward an elevator. The three of us went inside in complete silence. The tips of my hair were still dripping on the floor when the elevator door opened and I stepped right into Tobias’s living room. The man had bought himself a condo in one of the most expensive buildings in all of Denver.

  “You spent the centuries you’ve lived harnessing your magic,” he said. “I spent mine amassing all that I could. Power. Money. Followers. Elemental magic. Why focus on just one when I can have them all? Just because I lost my coven doesn’t mean I have to give up everything else.”

  Christophe disappeared into a nearby bathroom with a large porcelain tub and brought me a towel. I started squeezing my half dried hair into it and took off my shoes, thrusting them to the side where they bumped into the wall and fell back to the expensive wood floor. I took no issue with showing Tobias just how little reverence I had for his fine tastes.

  “What was all that?” I demanded.

  “You already know what they were,” Tobias said. “Remnants of my coven. Only now they have no leader and they’ve reverted back to their old ways.” He said the last sentence as though he genuinely hated what he saw. The coven he spent so long harnessing and training into submission were left to their own savage impulses once more.

  “Not that,” I spat. “How did the hole fill up with water like that? How did Christophe get me out of there? I’ve never seen a vampire harness that much elemental magic before.”

  He let his gaze fall to Christophe who had made himself comfortable in one of Tobias’s leather recliners. “I taught only the best of my followers how to use elemental magic. Vampires can’t harness the same sort of magic that witchlings can but we can use the elements to our advantage with a touch of vixra blood in our system. A small mercy for a life many of us don’t choose. It’s often forced on us.”

  “So you lied to Arthur!” I hollered. “You asked him for more vixra blood and you already had some to give to Christophe. I wouldn’t be surprised if you amassed a large stash over the years.”

  “I don’t have to explain my reasons for wanting more vixra blood at my disposal. Least of all to you.”

  “But you clearly have a supplier other than Edmund.”

  He was silent for a moment. I think he might have been stunned that I was grilling him for more information. Me. A woman he neither respected nor cared to remember. And clearly a woman he didn’t feel the need to give details on whatever it was he was planning to do with the extra vixra blood he was hoping Arthur would supply him with.

  “Is this your idea of gaining my favor so I’ll give you more vixra blood?” I said when he didn’t respond to my accusation. “You should have been there with me tonight. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even ask because I know you won’t be there.”

  “I’m always there. I’m always watching. But you and I have different goals in mind and very different ways of achieving them.”

  My jaw was nearly on the floor. “The only goal you should have is serving the vixra. If you don’t they will kill you.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” he said, scowling at me. “And I don’t expect your pity. Nor do I want it. You wish to destroy all vampires except those you deem worthy. But only I can tell you which among them are truly worthy of saving and who will help serve the vixra rather than die. The few you’ve managed to kill only died because I permitted it to happen.”

  “Nonsense,” I threw down the towel and got closer to him. Most men were intimidated by Tobias and most women grew weak at the knees in his presence. I wanted him to know that I wasn’t the young woman he knew centuries ago. I wouldn’t tolerate being talked down to. Not by anyone except the vixra. “How do you think Arthur will take it once I tell him that you’re deliberately diverting my efforts to save a bunch of worthless vampires?”

  “He won’t feel any way about it. Because you’re not going to say a word to him. I will have to do a significant amount of reconnaissance in order to find other nests if they exist. Now that this one was exposed by your recklessness they’ll seek a new one. You did damage tonight. Damage that could have been avoided.”

  “I was following the orders of the vixra! Like you are supposed to do alongside me! I don’t enjoy being enslaved by them any more than you do but I know who I can ultimately blame for that!”

  Tobias’s face didn’t move. He didn’t show the slightest sign of remorse. Not for my circumstances or what happened to me as a result of his actions. Or lack thereof. I wanted to wring his neck.

  “Do you two have some sort of history?” Christophe said from the recliner in the corner. Then he chuckled when my cheeks started to turn pink. “I figured. There’s more between the two of you than just anger. A certain…tension.”

  “Stay out of this, Christophe,” Tobias ordered.

  “I’m going to rest,” he said, getting up from the recliner. “If the two of you decide to bury the hatchet by climbing on top of one another, please keep it down.”

  I’m not particularly prone to spontaneity. At least not anymore. When I was young I would do the craziest things that not even I fully understood until it was too late and I was facing the consequences. But at that moment I let go of all reservations. I put my hands up in an L shape to target my magic right for Christophe’s backside.

  He crashed into the brick wall as a room shook then smacked into the ground with a grunt and a groan.

  “Don’t you ever speak to me with such vulgarity again!” I shouted.

  Tobias took my arms and forced them down. It was the second time he touched me. He raised me up after the water sent me out of the hole by the mine. Only this was different. He reached for my hands. His skin touched mine. A wave of electricity shot through my arm and made even the smallest hairs on them stand up straight. Then he withdrew them once he realized my hands were covered in mud from the hole getting wet with me inside it.

  “Best you shower and get changed,” Tobias said. “I’ll have someone bring you a set
of fresh clothes from your apartment.”

  “I trust one of your followers being in my apartment about as much as I trust you,” I hissed.

  “New clothes then. Although, you’ll have to wait. The shops don’t open until ten.”

  I slammed the bathroom door shut before he could get another word in. I knew Arthur wanted us to use whatever means he was willing to give us in order to help with our overall goal but that goal most certainly didn’t include Christophe. Or any other minions Tobias might still have good favor with.

  It was only after I started to undress that I noticed Tobias certainly wasn’t wrong. I was a mess. From the mud on my jacket to a green sort of mold in my hair, I was less than appealing.

  This morning wasn’t the sort of day that I could wash off with a simple shower. It would take a long hot bath to cure this disaster. Once I had the bath water nice and hot I climbed in with the intention of staying as long as I possibly could. Which usually meant until the bath water started getting more cool than lukewarm. And yet, somehow the bath water didn’t give me the same sort of comfort that it usually did. Maybe because an hour prior water surrounded me in a deep tunnel that I started believing I might never escape once the vampires found me. I made myself stay in it and soak anyway just to get rid of the smell. After a few breathing exercises, I started to calm down. Maybe a little too much. Because the bath water went gray. Not just from all the dirt and mud coming out of my hair but from all the color surrounding me in Tobias’s expensive bathroom starting to fade away. A heaviness entered the room, taking hold of my body and forcing my heartbeat to quicken.

  I was having another vision. And two in a single day was never a good thing. It served as a sign of bad things to come. Like one tidal wave after another. I sometimes wondered if they were magnified by water. A natural element. One found in nature. And often manipulated with elemental magic. So being in the bathtub certainly wasn’t helping me to attain the relaxation I was hoping for.

  I went still, allowing the vision to show me whatever I was about to see. To ease into it naturally.

  The sight before my eyes started to change. I was no longer in the bathroom soaking in the tub. Or at least my mind wasn’t. I was standing in the middle of a street. But the cars were gone. The entire city of Denver looked empty. Abandoned. As though something catastrophic had happened and everyone fled in a whirlwind of chaos, leaving food rotting on the ground, random bits of office paper flying in the wind, and the stench of human sweat lingering in the swirling breeze.

  I peered down at my body. I was in my usual clothing, having become accustomed to wearing blue jeans, a simple camisole, and a jacket decades back. But there was something different about me. I felt anxious. Like the inevitable had happened and I was being forced to witness something terrible first hand.

  When I peered up, I saw a television flickering with static inside a bar with the window wide open. No one sat inside drinking. There was only a reporter on the television from a news station. Not one from Denver. It was a larger international channel.

  The screen moved away from her and toward an image I recognized. It was U.S. President McAllaster. And to the bottom of the screen, a news blip printed a sentence in bold white letters that made me blink a few times to make sure I was reading it properly.

  PRESIDENT McALLASTER ASSASSINATED IN DENVER. ASSASSIN REMAINS AT LARGE

  ‘Oh holy lord.’

  The sound of metal clenching against metal and iron striking the street in a battery of mechanical gears invaded my ears. Something was coming. I looked above when I heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter soaring above me. Followed by another. Then another. Then a military jet flew high above the skyscrapers and toward the western mountains in the distance.

  When I turned around to see what was coming down the street and headed toward the exit to the highway, my jaw nearly dropped to the ground.

  It was a tank.

  No.

  It was several of them. Followed by armored cars with armed soldiers inside. Only these didn’t look like regular armed forces. They were dressed in heavy armor that could stop bullets. It went all the way to their chins with special metal material covering their throats.

  ‘What in the world?’

  The realization struck me. It was protective gear from vampires.

  I scurried through the open window of the nearby bar and hid in the corner as the roaring echo of tank wheels drove down the highway. I could see the reflection of the men in the cars with their specialized armor rolling down the street with each flicker of the television going from white to gray to black when it couldn’t get a signal for the news report.

  ‘How much do they know? Is it just the vampires or witchlings too?’

  As if my vision purposely sought to answer my question, my consciousness left the bar and showed me a face I clearly recognized.

  As the tanks and armored vehicles drove west on I-70 headed toward the mountains, a deathly pale man stood tall in the distance on a crag overlooking the highway. Watching. Waiting.

  Then what looked like over a hundred vampires stood in unison, ready to attack the convoy headed for them.

  I could see the man’s face clearly just before he gave the signal for them to attack. His confident grin was unmistakable.

  ‘Victor.’

  Then the vision changed. I went from watching everything happening around me to feeling as though I was the one being watched.

  Victor turned toward me and looked me dead in the eyes, disrupting my vision and making me nearly jump out of my skin.

  “I see you, kruxa,” he said. His voice was low and threatening. “I will always see you watching me.”

  Before I could gasp from surprise the vision ended and I was back in the bathtub water. I sat up straight and felt for the cord around my neck. It was tightening again.

  ‘No. Not this time!’

  I let my magic weave out of my hand and I wrapped the golden light around my neck, protecting myself from him. Victor started laughing. I could hear it echo inside my head as though the confines of my mind had walls on all sides.

  Only once the room regained its color and the gray stillness disappeared did I allow myself to breathe again and let my magic slowly dissipate back into my skin.

  A tapping noise at the window brought me back to reality and made me realize that I was in fact still alive and the vision was no longer in control of me. And neither was Victor.

  I rubbed the window to clear away the precipitation from the steaming bath water to see a large hawk perched outside the window.

  “Kitty,” I whispered. “I left a window open for you. Go home.”

  “Not until you’re home safe with me,” she spoke in my mind.

  I cocked my head. It still left me dumbfounded sometimes that this copy of my great granddaughter’s mind would treat me as though I was the child sometimes.

  “A little over-protective, are we?” I said to her.

  She didn’t answer. She just stayed there perched on the brick window sill and turned away as I got out of the tub and reached for a towel.

  The dirt, mud, and general grime had been rubbed away but my uneasiness was more potent than ever.

  When I rubbed away the residue from the bathroom mirror, I took a long hard look at my reflection. As I stared in the mirror, my mind went over the vision again and again. Not all my visions came true. Not all of them were premonitions or even a complete certainty. But they were always meant to give me a message. A warning. Was the president really going to be assassinated? Would Victor be behind it?

  My cell phone buzzed from inside my jeans pocket sitting in the corner of the bathroom. I dug it out to see that there was a news bulletin from a local news station. It read:

  PRESIDENT McALLASTER WILL TRAVEL TO DENVER TO SPEAK ABOUT THE RECENT TERRORIST ATTACK

  Any sense of relaxation I might have hoped for from the long hot bath had been destroyed by my vision. Now any hope I had of getting some sleep was disapp
earing as well.

  A knock came at the door. I reached over my towel to make sure it was tucked in tight around me and covered myself before saying anything.

  “What?” I hollered.

  “I have fresh clothes for you,” Tobias said from the other side of the door.

  “I said I didn’t want any of your lot in my apartment.”

  He scoffed and I heard something clink. “They’re on the door handle whenever you’re ready for them,” he said. “You can thank me once you remember your manners. You used to have those if I remember correctly.”

  I waited for the sound of his footsteps to disappear before opening the door and reaching for the clothes on the other side without having to open the door too wide.

  There was a new pair of jeans, a gray tank top, and a leather jacket that had to set him back a few hundred dollars.

  ‘This will do. He can spend as much money as he wants.’

  I finished drying off and pulled on the clothes before leaving the bathroom with my dirty clothes still in a pile on the floor. He could clean those up too.

  When I got out, Tobias was sitting on his living room couch, waiting for me to exit and watching the door with laser-focused eyes.

  “I never thought in a million years that you would be one to lecture me on the merits of good manners seeing as you don’t often have any,” I snarled at him.

  “Your gratitude for saving your life, providing you with new clothes, and a place to rest, is overwhelming.”

  “Don’t act like you did it out of the kindness of your heart. You have to because the vixra are ordering you about.” I saw the sting of my words in his eyes and stood up a little straighter. “And given that it seems to cause you pain to keep bringing it up, I might continue doing so,” I spat. I was on a roll. Maybe not a good one. But for god’s sake. This was Tobias Vallas. The man who shattered my heart and diverted my whole life.