I could help. I don't know why it took me so long to remember, I blamed my brain being scared witless, but the dead were my domain. My magic sought them like water to the river, or something as equally poetic. I could summon them. I could command them. But those weren't the first tricks I had learned. The first one had been my ability to invigorate them. I could pump a vampire so full of energy that it was like he'd been eating five course meals and preparing for a triathlon.
I opened that connection between Zane and I. My magic traveled down that line until I was so aware of him that I wasn't sure where he started and I began. I could feel his exhaustion. It wasn't like human exhaustion. Vampires didn't breathe or sleep. It was more like a pile of bricks had been laid on his shoulders and he was still trying to move. He shook beneath the weight of it.
I summoned up that energy that made me a necromancer, the magic that felt like ozone and summer nights on my skin. I pushed it down that connection, spilled it into him like he was a cup. He jerked when it hit him, stumbled down on one knee. For a moment, I thought that he was upset. His shoulders became a set, rigid line and his shadowy head bowed. Then I felt his gratitude. The hag slammed her hand down, aiming for a strike to the back of his neck. In a faster move than I could follow he snapped his hand around her wrist and yanked. I heard the snap of a branch and dimly realized that was her arm breaking. She trilled her pain and lashed out with her free hand, catching him across the cheek. He didn't shift to shadow and I felt my own head jerk with the pain that I felt.
Anger suffused us. How dare she strike us. How dare she not know when she had lost. Only a fool did not realize when the fight was over. It was far better to bow to a greater opponent than to hurtle yourself against insurmountable odds.
It was so strange to be in a vampire’s mind, or maybe it was just Zane's. I had touched the minds of vampires before, it was how I knew that Wei loved me. My own brain was liable to run around with thoughts until everything was a great big tangled web. His mind was so organized. I could follow each thought to the inevitable conclusion. She had lost, he had won, and it was idiotic that she hadn't realized it yet. I wondered what it was like to live with that kind of confidence.
He slammed an open palm into her bark like face. There was another crack of branches. It wasn't blood that spurted out of her nose, but something thicker, more like sap. Her head snapped back and she would have crumpled to the ground were it not for the way he still held her broken arm.
“Stop!” she cried. “Stop! I relent. You win.” She held her hands up in submission.
He still held her. We wanted to break her neck. We didn't trust her. I shook my head. Now that things weren't so hectic I could separate his thoughts from my own. I could feel that he didn't believe her, that he thought it was a trap or some kind of trick. He didn't say it out loud. Instead he held her and turned his glimmering eyes on me. What did I want to do, he seemed to ask.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She looked at me. The sap had filled the cracks of her face. “They call me Dora, at least they did years ago. Now I am traitor, and hag.”
I didn't need to ask who “they” was. I assumed that it was other witches. “Because you made a compact?” I asked, curiosity overriding my other worries. I might be a lazy student, but that didn't mean I didn't want to understand.
She laughed. “The Green Man needed a herald, and I was more than willing to give myself to his clutches.”
A Green Man, now that was something I had read about. Every forest, or bastion of wild greenery, had a Green Man who protected it. He was some kind of fae and it was his place to protect where the wilds were still free of man. My grandmother's journal had said that they were extinct, or at least on the way to being extinct.
“There are no Green Men,” Zane said. “They left when the Queen of Fae called her people home.”
Okay, more information. What the heck. What I knew about the Fae could fit on one side of an index card. I knew that they had a Queen, and that she ruled them for a few thousand years or something like that. That was pretty much all I knew.
Her wooden lips curled into a smile. “Not mine. Not mine. He did not wish to leave me, nor the swamp we had tended together. But we couldn't survive, could we? Not alone, not apart. We needed each other. And so we bound ourselves together. Him to me and back again.” She shuddered as if she was remembering a particularly good kiss. “We shared our essence.”
I felt a desire to blush and I wasn't entirely sure I understood why.
“You committed a blasphemy of magic,” Zane spat.
She shrugged her good shoulder. “Is there something you would not do for love, vampire?”
I felt an image of my sister's face flash into Zane's mind. She looked soft in his memories, one arm throw over her head as she slept. Her freckles looked like stars to him. Her lips were pale rose petals. I wasn't surprised to see her. What I was surprised to see was a brief glimpse of myself, curled up with him on the couch. He locked the thoughts down and away from me and I blinked at the sudden lack of contact.
What the heck had that been about? I shook my head, unwilling to think about it. I had enough on my plate without wondering if Zane was beginning to have conflicting feelings.
“I wouldn't corrupt myself for it.” I shook my head. “Not for anything.”
She laughed. “How do you think you will bare a vampire's child? They are dead, you know. They cannot bring life without life being brought to them.”
Honestly? I hadn't thought of that. I had just kind of assumed that there was some spell or something that would let that whole thing happen. Was she right? Was I going to have to bind myself to a vampire to make this whole prophecy thing happen? Oh crap. I shook my head. No. She couldn't be right, she couldn't possibly be right.
She smiled that knife-like smile and gave a cackle that sounded like branches caught in a hurricane wind. Her nose had stopped bleeding but the lines of her lower face were still filled with that strange ichor.
“Oh, you foolish little witch. Did your teacher not tell you?” The look on my face must have given me away. “You don't have a teacher, do you?”
“I did.” I snapped. “I had two of them. You took them. They are here somewhere. Where are they? Where are we?” All the questions that had been building up came out of my mouth in a tumble. I wasn't going to be distracted by her tidbits of knowledge.
She tsked and shook her head sadly. “If your teachers had been worthy of your loyalty, they would have told you all about pocket dimensions and witches’ travel.”
Pocket dimensions sounded like something I should be hunting for through a temporarily popular phone app.
“I don't understand.”
She tugged on her broken arm and Zane gave me another look. I gave him the barest of nods and he dropped her to the ground. She crumpled into a pile of spindly limbs, but righted herself quickly enough.
“It used to be when a witch got strong enough she could use her magic to create a place just for her. It wasn't very large, but it was necessary. After all, once upon a time, people would come to us for all manner of things -- charms, rituals, knowledge; both humans and otherwise. We were the crux between the world of magic and the mundane. We needed a place to be ours, to get away from it all.
What it was depended on the witch. Yours might be a cemetery under a full moon, or a little house in the middle of nowhere where it was perpetually autumn. It would be entirely up to you. You could take all the time you needed.
We could bring whomever we wanted there, make what we needed. All the time in all the world was ours to be had in these places. But when magic started to fail, so too did our dimensions.” She spat the word, and a hunk of that drying ichor to the ground. “But when I bound myself to my Green Man...” she spread her fingers wide and swept them in a semi-circle.
“If this is yours, how are we here?”
She laughed. “Well, that's Marquessa's fault, isn't it? She tried to bring us all together.�
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My heart did a little leap. “Marquessa did this?”
“No, but she found the witch who could. One who could summon us all at once. It didn't go well.” She rubbed her wounded arm.
“What do you mean?” I demanded, feeling more confused than ever.
“Witches are solitary creatures by nature, little witch. We enjoy our solitude and we do not much enjoy it being interrupted. Ornery women were disrupted.” She shrugged and waved a hand towards the broken door that I could still see behind me. “And all of this ensued.”
“I still don't understand. Are you saying that Marquessa found a witch that could summon you all, that this witch did, and all of those doors are pockets to dimensions?”
Dora nodded, her willow-like hair moving around her face. “Is that not what I said?”
I wanted to tell her no, that most of this I was piecing together through bits and pieces of what she had said and my own knowledge, but I didn't. “And that some of them took offense to being uprooted and a bitch fest went down and that ended....how?”
She sighed. “We fought, and magics combined, as they are inclined to do, and some are stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“Mmm.” She plucked at her scrap of a dress. “Stuck.”
I blew out a breath. “Great. Something else to add to my to-do list.”
This was like one of those open world video games were the quests just kept piling up and I wasn't sure how I was going to get everything done before I got to the main quest. I jerked my hand through my hair and growled. “Okay. So, do you know where Marquessa and Jenny Green are?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Not here.”
That had me pausing. “Who is here?”
She gave me a wicked smile, but didn't answer me. I didn't even need to give Zane a look for him to swipe Dora up. She gave a protesting squeak. “Only the Frenchman!” She said Frenchman like it was a title. Then her lips shifted so the creepy smile became an even creepier grin. “He could help you.”
I snorted. “uh-huh.”
“He has the same affinity for the dead that you carry. He could teach you many things.”
I have to admit it. I paused. I knew so little about my own magic, and the lore about necromancy was very, very low. Most of the books I had thumbed through had little more than a paragraph about what I could do and it usually boiled down to “can raise the dead”. Everything that I was doing came from instinct, not knowledge, and instinct was only going to get me so far.
“What do you want?” I asked, knowing that it wouldn't come without some kind of strings.
“Let me go,” she shrugged. “That's all I ask. I have never hurt anyone. I wish only to be returned to my Green Man and my home.”
“She should die,” Zane said. “She will only be more difficult in the future.”
She gave Zane a look. “I have never been difficult to anyone who did not tread on my own lands. And, given the right education, I could never stand up to a necromancer of prophecy. Have you any clue how powerful you could be, witchling?”
Temptation beat around me like a storm. I was really tired of not knowing what my magic could do, and I was really tired of being the weakest witch.
“Show me the necromancer first.”
“Lorena!” Zane snapped. “She is a hag! She is lying.” His brilliantly gold eyes were filled with disbelief.
“I never lie,” she hissed. “Not once has a lie passed my lips. The truth is terrifying enough.”
He shook her and her wounded arm snapped back and forth like a branch caught in a breeze. She heaved out a whimper of pain.
“Zane, stop!” I cried out. “This is my decision to make.”
He stopped as if I had hit pause. The look he gave me was filled with anger. “I forgot,” he snarled, and I didn't need the tether between us to feel the anger radiating off of him. “I am your thrall.” I could tell by the way he said it that “thrall” was not the first word he had wanted to say. A sick feeling slithered through my belly. It was true enough, my magic kept him tethered to me, took away his choices. I felt bad for it, but I was also too afraid of what he would do without it there. He was my undead slave, and it was wrong.
He dropped her to the ground with more force than was necessary. She managed to look both amused and offended.
“Come along,” she said, beckoning with a hand that looked a little less like a branch and a little more like flesh. “I will show you where he slumbers.”
I followed. I knew Zane didn't want to go, but after a moment he fell into step beside me. Dora was humming as she walked over soggy ground and raised roots. I stumbled in her wake. On a particularly bad one, Zane caught me.
“Thanks,” I said as he helped me over the roots. He didn't answer so I continued. “I'm sorry for the...enthrallment.”
He snorted. “Are you?”
“I am,” I answered. “I wish it didn't need to be there. I wish I weren't afraid of you. I wish we were friends.”
“You fear me?” he asked, sounding annoyed. “You could command me with a wave of your hand and you claim to be afraid of me.”
I stepped over a fallen branch that seemed to squirm out of my path. “You are stronger than me, faster than me. You've got that mist thing going for you. Not to mention that whole immortal thing. And at the end of the day you are in love with my sister...who wants me dead. I think I'd be stupid not to be afraid of you.”
He was quiet again, but there wasn't the same weight. “She is not so terrible as you believe.”
I couldn't help but roll my eyes. “Are you serious? I mean, really? The girl spent the first few weeks I knew her pretending to be my friend. And when my mom decided to use her mental magics to kidnap me Connie helped set it up. I'm not an idiot. There is only one way my mom could have found us at the club. My sister betrayed us. And then there was the fact that she was willing to drain you of your life to change the prophecy? I mean, I don't know how you are the one who is still pining after her.”
“She's dedicated,” he insisted. “She believes in her cause. I cannot hold that against her.”
I sighed and shook my head. “I dunno. Seems to me if the person I love is willing to drain me of everything that keeps me alive for their cause...”
“I know she does not love me as I love her,” he interrupted. I stumbled again and this time his hands weren't half so gentle when he righted me. Instead he whirled me around and I found myself looking into his eyes. I expected them to be red, but they were his normal gold flecked with copper and yellow. So far as I could tell all vampires had beautiful eyes. Maybe it was a prerequisite. His hands gripped my upper arms. “I know that she doesn't. She loves her cause, and her family more than she will ever love me. But love does not need to be returned to be real, Lorena. And pretending like the love between two people must be equal to matter is foolishness. You should know that.”
I blinked. “What the heck does that mean?”
He gave me a sour look. “Do not act so blind.”
I frowned harder. “Don't be so vague then. What are you talking about?”
His eyes bored into mine as if they were looking for something. Then his sour look rearranged and he was smiling at me. Then he laughed. “How old are you, Lorena?”
I wasn't even a little sure about why that mattered but I answered him anyway. “I'm nineteen.”
He shook his head slowly. “So very young.”
I gave his chest a shove. He moved back, but I knew better than to think it was because of my strength. He moved because he wanted to.
“I'm nineteen, dude, not ten. I'm not that young.”
“Age and youth are not the same thing. A person can be fifty and still be young, or twelve and know too much of the world. But it takes someone very young to mistake lust for love so easily as you have.”
The words were like a punch to my gut. I watched in shocked silence as he wandered away following the now barely visible trail of Dora the swamp hag. If it weren't f
or Maahes blinking at me halfway between her and us I might not have seen the trail at all. Zane's broad back was a shadow in the mist.
“Hey!” I called, charging after him, clamoring between roots and branches to do it. “Don't you walk away after saying something like that. This isn't some stupid TV show where we can cut to black after some zinger has been delivered. What do you mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders, but his lips were twisted into an amused grin. “I mean exactly what I said Lorena. Lust and love are not the same thing. I had assumed you knew that.”
“I love Wei.”
“Do you?” His words were light, twisting them into mock sympathy.
House Of Vampires 3 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy) Page 12