House Of Vampires 3 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy)

by Samantha Snow

  He was quiet for a moment. "There are witches past this door."

  I had figured that much out , but I kept that to myself. "Okay, but how do we get past the door without me getting zapped like a fly?"

  "Magic."

  I wanted to tear my hair out.

  "No sh-"

  "Raw magic," he cut me off. "You will need to overpower the runes, spill raw magic into them until they break. Think of it like a balloon filling with water. It may expand, but it will only hold so much."

  There was a certain amount of logic there, but even so I was still unsure. "They'll explode."

  "Probably, but it will be a controlled explosion."

  Well, it was better than my idea, which was throw stuff at the door until the magic broke. "Okay, stand back."

  He shifted down the side of the wall, and waited.

  Magic is weird. I don't say that to sound all crazy or mystical or whatever. I say it because it's true. There are a few basic rules I have learned in the inanely short time I've been practicing, most of which can boil down to don't be a jerk with magic, but I was pretty sure that pouring magic into magic runes in order to make them explode was breaking some rule somewhere. But what could I do? Short answer? Nothing. Long answer? Just do it.

  I took a deep breath and raised my hand so that it hovered just over the inscriptions. My fingers were still tingling from the first shock I had. I was really hoping that I wasn't about to experience the full body version. I closed my eyes and opened up that door that separated me from where my magic lived. The door hadn't really been closed, I still had a tendril of it snaked around Zane, but it wasn't really open either. It was more like a faucet that had been barely left on, and now I had to turn everything up to full power.

  I summed up my magic and the tingle in my arm went away. Zane hissed behind me, but I ignored it. I focused on the shape of the runes and symbols beneath my hand, and pushed the magic into them.

  It hurt. Not as much as getting blasted across the room, but the magic that had been used on the door did not like being messed with and it made me very aware of that. It felt like needles poking back at me, like some sort of invisible porcupine. Not fun. But I persisted. I needed to know what was behind that door and I really hoped that it would help.

  Magic pulsed around me like a wave, it crashed around me, but not against me. I kept shoving my essence against the magic, filling up the symbols into they shivered beneath my palm. Air pressure filled the hallway. My ears popped. And then the explosion happened. Or rather, implosion. Nothing went out, everything seemed to warp towards the circle of the door and then disappear completely. The moment it did I sagged to my knees.

  "Well," I said, breathing hard, "that went better than I expected."

  I tilted my head, and peered into the room beyond.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When you break past a magical circle to get into a room that is spilling acrid mist out into a too long hallway that shouldn't exist, you pretty much prepare yourself to see anything. Okay, I thought, almost anything.

  It was not a room that existed beyond the door, but a swamp. Elegant trees with roots invested in constantly wet soil were heavy with Spanish moss. The moss was long enough to stroke the surface of the nearly green water. The scent of wet dog and moldy things was strong here. A single beam of moonlight illuminated what looked to be a pier. A small motorless boat was attached to it by the length of moldy rope.

  “Okay,” I said. “That's different.”

  I felt Zane move up behind me. My magic reverberated with his nearness. “It's a swamp witch’s ream,” he said, his voice a hushed rumble.

  I bet it was, not that I really knew what a swamp witch was. “Why would there be a magical door to a swamp witch’s dream world inside the house of Marquessa Green? That's...ridiculous. Right?” Not that anything in my life hadn't been ridiculous recently.

  “You misunderstand, I mean it is literally a witch's dream.” He lifted his nose and sniffed at the air. “I can smell it.”

  “Dude, how can you smell anything but wet dog?” I demanded.

  I looked over my shoulder and he shrugged. For a moment, his dark eyes stared into my hazel ones and I felt the urge to ask him about my sister. What was it that he saw in her? Why was he doing this for someone who had hurt him so much?

  “We won’t know unless we go inside,” he said, interrupting my train of thought.

  He was right, but the fact that he was the one who said it had me hesitating. I still didn't trust him. I took one step over the threshold and felt the soggy ground squish beneath my boot.

  “Hey, so before you follow me into the world of swamp dream magic-” God, that sounded absurd even to me- “maybe you ought to find some pants.”

  Zane looked down at himself, as if only just now realizing that he wasn't fully clothed. The Zane I knew liked to be clothed. In fact, on our one and only date he had been dressed from Adam's apple to toe. It had all been very attractive, but if I was being honest, Zane could probably have been wearing a paper bag and be hot.

  “I might have something in the room I was in.” His hands were clasped in front of him to hide his dignity.

  I waited. He didn't move. I waited some more.

  “Well are you going to go get it?” I asked.

  He gave me a sneer. “I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  He looked down at the invisible lines that tethered us together, the magic neither of us could see but we could both feel.

  “You hold the reins.” he snarled.

  I couldn't be mad at him for being pissy about it. Heck, I wouldn't have liked someone to have the magical whammy on me either, but I didn't trust him enough to let him go.

  “Right,” I took a deep breath and concentrated on the line. “Go get your clothes from the room you were being held in.”

  He turned and walked away. The line would let him do just what I asked and no more. I wish I could say I didn't watch him go, but the view was too good not to give an appreciative look. When he returned with clothes in his hand, but not dressed I realized I should have worded my command better.

  He must have seen my thoughts on my face. “This would be a great deal easier if you relinquished the hold.”

  “I don't trust you,” I said.

  “You will need your magic for other things,” he reminded me. “And I will be accompanying you anyway.”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, that whole thing sounds good and logical right up until you realize the easiest way to keep your creepy girlfriend from getting hurt is to push me off a cliff or something. Just get dressed and let’s go. I'm a little freaked out that I can't smell wet dog anymore.” I was pretty sure that my nose had just grown accustomed to the smell, but that didn't make me feel any better.

  I turned around to give Zane a bit of privacy as he pulled his clothes on. The brief pause had my brain going a million miles an hour. Did Wei feel for me the way Zane felt for Connie? Was he being punished for feeling what he did? Was everything that was going on my fault? Ugh. I didn't like these thoughts. I wanted them to go away. I wanted things to be simple and easy. I wanted to sit on a couch with my vampire boyfriend and play video games and remake the world in magic.

  A hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped. When I whirled around, absolutely sure that Zane was about to push me into the swamp or something equally villainous I was struck by the sadness in his eyes.

  “You are worried for him.” He didn't ask it, he said it. He was dressed now, and I was sure the clothes were his, a dark gray button-down shirt and a pair of deep brown slacks. While the other vampires liked to dress in stereotypes, Zane dressed like casual Friday at the CEO's lounge. It was always khakis or other slacks, and button-down shirts or expensive turtlenecks. Of all the vampires, his clothes seemed to be the most modern. I wondered why that was, considering I had been told he was the eldest of the brothers.

  I shrugged. “What was your first clue?”

  He reached a hand out and d
abbed the wetness of my cheek. Great. I had gotten so used to crying that I didn't even realize when I did it now. Fan-friggen-tastic. He gave me a gentle look and I resisted the urge to cry some more. What was it about people being nice when I felt like crap that made me want to cry? Not cool.

  I swiped angrily at my cheeks and took a step away from him. “Come on.”

  Maahes sprang in front of me, his tail curling as he started to walk along the edge of the swamp water. His ghostly feet didn't make a single dip in the ground as he moved. I started to follow.

  “Are we going to follow the cat?” he asked dubiously.

  I shrugged. “That cat has a name, and yes. So far Maahes hasn't led me wrong.” We lapsed into silence as the swamp stretched out in front of us. When I couldn't take the sound of my feel on soggy ground anymore I asked, “how can this be a dream? I've been involved in dream magic before and you have to be asleep for it.”

  “You do when it's somniamancy. But it is not the only magic that can produce a dream world.”

  Great. More stuff about magic that everyone else seemed to know but me. “What else does it?”

  He didn't answer at first. I looked over my shoulder at him, but he wasn't giving me that insufferable look that I was expecting. Instead he was looking over my shoulder, past me to something that lay beyond. I had a sudden urge to stay completely still. It was as if my body was telling me that if I didn't look at whatever had Zane's eyes glittering, I wouldn't see what had the vampire preparing himself for battle.

  “Don't...move,” he whispered.

  I didn't. I didn't even want to breathe. Maahes had hunkered down by my legs, his ears pinned back and the tip of his tail flicking like an anxious bird. It matched the beating of my heart. A fierce rumble reverberated out of his throat, sounding even more eerie because of the mist.

  “What's going on?” I asked, so quietly that it would take a vampire's acute senses to hear me.

  “Swamp hag.” He breathed the word, barely giving it any sound. If I had not been looking right at his mouth, watching the movement of his lips, I would not have been able to figure out what he was saying at all.

  I flipped through the files of my memory until I came across the one about Hags. I had read about them in my grandmother's book. Okay, okay. I had skimmed about them. I was not the best student in the world. There is a chance I'm lazy. I'm working on it...you know...after I recreate the world with magic.

  Hags were corrupted witches. Witches who, through some action usually involving blood sacrifices or forbidden magics, had bound themselves to other entities or creatures who gave them more power. It sounded like a great deal until you realize that the hag now corrupted the very land she walked on because she had done something terrible, something the very world couldn't abide.

  I probably should have paid better attention, because I was pretty sure that a hag was a witch's greatest enemy or something. Yeah, I definitely should have researched that more.

  “What do I do?”

  “Have you ever dueled a hag?” he asked.

  “What? You mean like pistols at dawn? Ten paces? All that crap?” I hissed between my teeth.

  He gave me a look that told me that I had the complete wrong idea. Yeah, I wasn't surprised. I was one hundred percent sure that I had the wrong idea.

  “Get behind me.”

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Get. Behind. Me.” He punctuated every word, as if I couldn't understand them as a sentence, but might as individual sounds. I was not amused.

  “Dude-”

  “Lorena, now.”

  I was just about to tell him that I was the necromancer here and he couldn't order me to do anything when Maahes gave an almighty hiss. I whirled around and saw her, at least I was assuming it was a her, she barely looked human. She had two arms and two legs and one head, but that was about where the similarity stopped. Her back was curled over so much that her body looked more like a question mark with a lump growing out of the top. Her arms were too thin, and had the gnarled look of branches. They swayed like willow limbs as she walked. Her dress, barely more than a belted sack, hung on a lumpy body, and all of it was held up on two legs that would have looked more at home on a chicken.

  She peered at us through a curtain of moldy hair. Her lips, thin and green, formed into a knife sharp smile. Fear froze my blood in my veins before she threw her head back and let out a wild shriek of laughter. I wasn't frozen anymore.

  My legs were moving before I even thought. The ground was too wet and soggy beneath my frantic steps. I went knees first into the swamp ground and my pants became soaked in moss covered earth. It was not as pretty as it sounded. Truth? It hurt. Shocks of pain radiated up into my hip and then my back. I crawled like a crab behind Zane as another laughing shriek surged up behind me.

  Zane had changed. I had seen vampires shift before. Dmitri and Yasmina had become more beast that human when they prepared for battle. Alan and his sister had been quick as lashes when given the opportunity. I had even seen Zane fight before, and I had heard from all of his brothers that he was the most powerful of them, as first born he was the closest to Vlad in strength. Even with all that I still didn't expect the guy I saw before me.

  His muscles stood out beneath skin the color of a shadow. Not brown, but black. A rich dark black that you got on a moonless night. His eyes were like red suns glimmering out of his angular face. His teeth were elongated and sharp, making twin pearl points over his full lips. He was beautiful and terrifying.

  A few weeks ago, he had saved me. Dmitri had gone a little bonkers, as the more primal vampires tend to, and I had been pretty sure I was done for. Then Zane had come out of nowhere and rescued me. He had called himself the Shadow, and now I could see why.

  “Little witch, little witch, come out to play.” The hag's voice was like wet bark, grating against one another. She spoke with the sing-song tone of a nursery rhyme as she peered at me around the dark line of Zane's body. “Come out and play.”

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “Nooo. Hard pass. Not gonna happen. I'm totally grounded.”

  She frowned at me. “You decline?”

  She said decline like it should be capitalized. I blinked. “Yes?”

  Her already ugly face twisted until it would have done Picasso proud. A shrill scream reverberated through the swamp. The mist swirled around us forming a hurricane of smoky air. The scent of old dog surged up around me. My head went light. It thickened until I could barely see. All I saw was a swirl around me before the mist engulfed me completely. This was not where I wanted to be. All I could see was the shadow of Zane's body in front of me. Maahes was completely invisible.

  My eyes fluttered closed and for just a moment I forgot what I was doing here. Fear leeched out of me. My body felt like rubber. I wanted to lay down. God, I was tired. I was so tired. And why wouldn't I be? Everything was wrong and nothing I did ever seemed to help. I didn't belong here. I belonged back at the burger joint, listening to people yell at me for not having the ice cream machine up at eleven thirty at night. I was just a gamer. I couldn't even make it in college. I took a deep breath and slithered to the ground. I didn't care that the wet, soggy ground was ruining my jeans. I didn't deserve to have them.

  I heard the slap of flesh against flesh. I looked up and saw a dark shadow grabbing a green one. A clawed fist slammed down, and the hunched figure went to her knees. But then her hands shot out and Zane went flying. His dark body slammed against a tree.

  “The dead are foolish to walk in my domain.”

  Hey. That wasn't cool. Zane was alright. Yeah, he was a lying vampire but he was my lying vampire and if anyone was going to send him halfway across a swamp clearing it was going to be me. Another wave of mist washed over me and I was overwhelmed with the same self-loathing ennui I had been a moment ago. I shook my head. Crap. It was the mist. It was messing with my head.

  Zane lunged at the hag again and managed another strike, but this time it barely seemed to hurt
her. When the moonlight hanging between the Spanish moss caught her face I could see that her skin had changed. It was more like bark than flesh. When Zane's usually lethal claws hit her skin, he scraped off wood. She laughed, a high shrill sound and returned the strike. Zane didn't move, but her hand, tipped with twig like claws, hit nothing but smoke.

  It was like watching two titans fight. One made of wood and stone, the other made of smoke and mist. Each hit did so little damage it was as if nothing was happening at all. It should have made me feel better, it didn't. Zane was a vampire, and that gave him more stamina than most, but he'd been locked up in a room for who knew how long and his weakness showed. No, I thought. It didn't show. The shadow of his movements masked everything, but I could feel it in the connection that we shared. He was weakening and it was happening quick.