Strange Brew

by P. N. Elrod

  “Are you going to talk the entire way through this?” he asked as his breath caressed the most intimate part of me. I shivered as his mouth hovered there, almost touching but not quite, and everything I was about to say went clean out of my head. “Because I have more interesting things you can do with your mouth, mo ghraidh.”

  I giggled and raised my arms over my head, grasping the headboard, stretching my body across the decadent satin sheets to display my curves and valleys to their best advantage. “Oh, no,” I replied with a wicked grin, “I’m finished. Please continue.”

  He lowered his head, and I heard the wood under my fingers crack as I called his name.

  SOMETIMES I HAVE premonitions. It’s a gift I inherited from my father, as I inherited my magic from my mother. What I feel is never a solid knowledge of what’s to come, but a nebulous feeling of unease that something is wrong, or about to be. It happens sporadically enough that I know that just because I don’t feel that I’m in danger, it doesn’t mean I’m not. On the other hand, whenever I do feel it, I know without a doubt not to ignore it.

  I woke with Michael’s body curled against my back, his right arm slung over me. I blinked several times, wondering what had pulled me from my sleep, and then I felt it. My stomach dropped, as if I’d just fallen from a great height, and chills broke out along my skin. I threw the covers off and jumped from the bed. I checked the lock on the door, then starting tossing clothes at Michael.

  “Michael, get up. Something’s wrong,” I said, and threw his boots at him.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied, “it’s only a feeling, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get caught naked in bed by a bunch of vampire slayers. I have no wish to repeat what happened in Austria last year. Fighting naked is just awkward.”

  I struggled into the leather riding breeches I’d had on last night. Getting into them was not easy, but the only things I’d unpacked thus far were dresses. I would rather not fight in a dress if I had a choice in the matter. Actually, I would rather not be fighting at all. Michael and I, along with our companions Devlin and Justine, spent most of our undead lives hunting and executing rogue vampires but this trip to Venice was supposed to be a holiday. As a human, I had always wanted to see the city and it was one of the places Michael had promised to take me when he’d turned me into a vampire three years ago.

  Pushing down all thoughts of romantic gondola rides, I pulled my boots on. I had just reached for my dagger when the first blow hit the apartment’s door. I winced and hoped that Devlin and Justine had heard the crash from their rooms down the hall. If it came to a fight, I certainly wanted our friends at our backs. Michael grabbed his claymore and stalked from the bedroom, wearing nothing but his pants and boots. I hastily pulled his shirt on over my head, tucked the dagger into the waistband of my breeches, and followed him.

  The third blow cracked the frame, and the door swung drunkenly in on one hinge. Five men and two women swarmed into the room. I choked on the smell of sulfur and blood. Witches, then. Ones who practiced dark magic. Michael glanced at me, and then pulled the great claymore from its scabbard. A tall man, apparently the leader, stepped forward. The wizard wore dark clothes and a black cloak. He might have been handsome, even with his slightly receding hairline and a nose that was too large for his face, if it hadn’t been for the fact that evil and dark dealings radiated from him like heat from the sun. The tip of Michael’s claymore came to rest at the man’s throat.

  “Cosa volete?” Michael asked. “What do you want?”

  Despite this invasion, Michael would be reluctant to run the man through. The Dark Council and the High King himself frowned on vampires killing humans, and the wizard had not offered us violence. Yet.

  The man never spoke. He simply raised his right hand to his mouth, palm up, and blew across his palm. A cloud of pink powder swirled into the air and, before I could shout a warning, Michael’s sword clattered to the floor and he collapsed beside it. I rushed forward, falling to my knees next to him. I turned Michael’s face to me, and brushed his hair away, running my fingers over his lips, across his sculpted cheekbones, over his dark brows. I knew he wasn’t dead. Without whatever magic animated a vampire he would be nothing more than a seventy-year-old corpse, dust and bone in my fingers. He was alive, but he wasn’t breathing. I knew he didn’t have to, but in the three years we’d been together I had never seen him not breathe, even in his sleep. Whatever the wizard had dosed him with had put him so far under that there was no consciousness left.

  I glared up at the man, fear squeezing my heart. “What have you done, wizard?”

  The man smiled, and it was not a nice smile. I lunged for Michael’s sword and had just wrapped my fingers around the hilt when the wizard’s companions fell on me like a pack of wolves. Fingers dug into me from all directions as I rose to my feet. The four men had taken hold of my arms and one of the women had grabbed me around the waist. The other woman had attached herself to my legs, trying to pull me back down. I threw my weight backward and the women fell to the floor in a tangle of skirts and limbs. Pulling my sword arm in front of me, I forced the two men holding my right arm to stumble forward and I brought my knee up into one man’s groin. He released his grip on me, falling to his knees in a howl of agony. I jerked my arm from the other one’s grasp and slammed my elbow into his nose. Swinging Michael’s claymore in a wide arc toward the other men, I smiled as they released their hold on me.

  “Codardi!” one of the women shrieked as the men stumbled back in fear.

  She stood, with her steel-gray hair disheveled around her face and a maniacal look in her eyes, and raised her hands toward me. My Italian wasn’t good enough to follow what she was saying, but the slow, deliberate cadence of her voice certainly made it sound like a spell. I was not about to give her the opportunity to finish it. I called up my own magic, feeling it build within me, and hoped that just this once it would do as I bid it.

  I held my left hand out in front of me and a surge of power hit the woman with the force of a battering ram, sending her flying across the room. Hearing movement behind me I whirled around, magic in one hand and the great claymore in the other, just in time for the wizard to hit me squarely in the face with a handful of his pink powder.

  The look of satisfaction on his hawkish features was the last thing I saw before the world went black.

  THE DRONING HUM of voices pulled me back into consciousness and I found a stone floor, cold and damp, under my cheek. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and pushed my dark red hair from my face. What had I been doing? What time was it? What day? I blinked, and stared up at the ceiling. There seemed to be a netting of black lace above me. That wasn’t right. I frowned, trying to get my bearings through the fog that clouded my head and dragged at my body.

  And then it all came rushing back.

  I sat up so quickly that the room spun and I had to brace my hands on the floor and close my eyes to keep from blacking out. When I finally opened them again, I found myself in a large rectangular stone chamber. Torches and numerous large candelabra, such as you would find in a church sanctuary, illuminated the windowless room and cast flickering shadows over the wizard’s black-robed coven, gathered at one end of the hall. A quick assessment of my surroundings revealed that the only way out was the heavy wooden door behind me. It was a massive thing studded with iron bolts and flanked by two cloaked and hooded figures. The one to the left of the door raised her head as I struggled to my feet. The witch with the steel-gray hair glared at me, her eyes blazing with hatred, but the monotonous repetition of the spell the two of them were chanting never wavered. I braced myself for the impact of their magic but when nothing happened the tension in my body eased slightly and I allowed myself to turn my back to them and survey the rest of the room more closely. What I saw made my stomach tighten in fear.

  Against the wall to my left was a heavily carved stone altar, perhaps four feet high and ten feet long. Laid out of t
op of it was Devlin, the leader of our group, looking much the same as Michael had back at the palazzo. He looked as though he was asleep, but I could detect no rise and fall of his chest, no movement of any kind from him. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall, and every inch of him was thickly muscled. His massive chest was bare, but he still wore breeches and boots.

  I turned to my right to see Justine, his consort and my dearest friend, laid out on a similar altar against the opposite wall. She was stark naked. Justine was a former courtesan, and a very practical Frenchwoman. Unlike Devlin, she would have gone for her weapons before her clothing. At least our attackers had given her some semblance of dignity by draping her long, silver-blonde hair over her bare breasts. It still made me angry to see her there like that, naked and helpless. She was Justine, the Devil’s Justice, and she deserved better than that.

  I swung around to face the phalanx of robed figures at the far end of the chamber. There were ten of them, all garbed in black robes with hoods raised to hide their faces. They chanted in low voices, perhaps in Latin, in perfect unison with the other two witches behind me. Some were women and some were men, but the man I was searching for exuded so much evil that I could have easily found him in a crowd of a hundred, let alone ten. The wizard stepped forward and pushed his hood back to reveal his blond hair, graying at the temples, and his cold, dark eyes.

  “Where is Michael?” I demanded in English, hoping he would understand.

  I was frightened and angry, and the smattering of Italian I knew had deserted me. There were undoubtedly other questions I should have asked, but this was the most important one. Michael was my world; without him, nothing else mattered.

  The man looked a bit surprised and then stepped aside, waving a hand to the other robed figures who parted to reveal yet another stone altar. There was blood on this one, but it was old blood, human blood. None of it belonged to the man who was laid out on top of it.

  “Michael,” I whispered, and surged forward.

  Too late I remembered the strange black netting. I hit it with the full force of my body, and it popped and sizzled as it burned me. I staggered back, one singed hand reaching up to touch my face. The wizard laughed. It was a ward, and a particularly nasty one at that. I called up my magic, summoned it from that place where it lives deep inside me, and pushed it out through my hands, visualizing it moving through my body and into the ward. The netting wavered, like cobwebs in a breeze, but held fast. I tried again, hoping that I had weakened it. The steady hum of the coven’s voices grew louder as I gathered all the magic I could call and threw it at the ward. Whatever spell they were chanting strengthened the binding and my magic bounced off the barrier and flew back at me, hit me squarely in the chest and knocked me to the floor.

  “They said you were a powerful witch, and yet you cannot break a simple ward,” the wizard observed, and I was surprised to realize that he was English. Then again, Venice was lousy with Englishmen these days. I rose unsteadily to my feet as he stalked around the ward, which surrounded me in a ten-foot circle and arched above my head as though someone had hung a net woven of darkness over me. “I thought perhaps you would make a useful addition to my coven, vampire, but even the most inexperienced of my followers knows the spells to break a ward. I must say, you are a disappointment.”

  I glared at him. It was close enough to the truth, but I wouldn’t let him see that he’d hurt my pride, even a little bit.

  “I’ll kill you for this, wizard,” I spat.

  He leaned in close to the ward, his dark eyes mocking me with cool disdain. “You can threaten me all you want, vampire, but nothing on this earthly plane frightens me, especially not an inept witch caught in my web.”

  I smiled. “Oh, you’ll fear me before this is over. I promise you, you’ll die screaming for my mercy.”

  Sometimes bravado is all you have.

  His arrogance faltered just a bit, and then he recovered and inclined his head, returning my smile. “We shall see, vampire. We shall see.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Edmund Gage, and what I want is vengeance.”

  As I watched him circle the ward, I tried to recall ever having seen the man before, let alone having done anything to him that would require this level of retribution.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever wronged you, Mr. Gage,” I stated.

  “Oh, not you, vampire, not you. It’s that bastard Marco I’ll have my vengeance on.”

  Marco was the Regent of Venice, the local master vampire. I’d met him when we’d arrived in town, since it was proper protocol to present ourselves at the local court whenever we entered a new city.

  “If you seek to harm Marco through us, then you’ve chosen the wrong vampires, wizard. We do not belong to him.”

  He shrugged. “You will do for my purposes all the same.”

  “Do you have any idea who we are?” I asked.

  He inclined his head again. “You are The Righteous—judge, jury, and executioner in the world of the vampires.”

  He was correct. We constantly traveled throughout Western Europe, and it was our duty to deal with anything the local Wardens couldn’t handle. We had no allegiance to Marco, though, or to any Regent. Unfortunately that also meant that with all four of us trapped here, it was unlikely anyone would notice we were missing for quite some time.

  “If you know so much about us, Gage, then you should know that we do not belong to Marco. We are the High King’s subjects alone, and if you kill any of us, you will bring down his wrath upon you. Trust me when I tell you that you really do not want that.”

  I’d never met the High King, but we were his, and I hoped that I was right about him avenging our deaths.

  “Ah, but it must be you, my dear. A witch for a witch—that is what I require. Marco took something precious from me, and it will shame him that I took you in his city.”

  “A witch for a witch,” I repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  Gage came within an inch of the ward. If I could have breached it, I could have snapped his neck before he had time to draw a breath.

  “He took my daughter from me,” he said, each word filled with pain and barely contained rage. “She would have been the greatest of us all, and he bespelled her, defiled her, and turned her into a bloodsucking leech.”

  Marco’s consort . . . Sara? Now that I thought about it, she did look a bit like Gage, the same blonde hair, the same dark eyes. She must have inherited her mother’s nose. She was a pretty little thing, not at all someone I would take for a practitioner of the dark arts, and she was completely in love with Marco and he with her. And there was not a bit of magic left in her. It seemed I truly was the only witch whose powers had survived the turning.

  “Sara is your daughter?” I asked.

  “Do not!” he yelled, and then his voice dropped to nothing more than a sibilant hiss. “You are not fit to say her name.”

  I shook my head. “Marco may have bespelled her, Gage, she may have even been bespelled when he turned her, but once she was turned, he lost all power over her. Vampire tricks do not work on other vampires. She has complete free will. I saw her not a fortnight ago, and she was happy. If she’s under any spell, it’s only that of a woman in love.”

  “You speak in twisted lies,” he spat.

  “It’s no lie. They are in love, and she is his consort. Her magic is gone though, Gage,” I said softly. “Let her go. Let us go. Vengeance will not bring your daughter, or her power, back to you.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Marco will pay for what he did. He will pay, Cin Craven. He took from me, and I will take The Righteous from under his nose. It is not enough, not nearly enough, but it will do for a start. Your friends are merely here for my amusement. There are some devious spells I can spin with the blood of a vampire, you know. You, however, you will be mine.”

  “Not in your wildest dreams,” I assured him.

  “Oh, no, dear—in rea
lity. You will get hungry eventually, and then you will drink of my blood and I will bind you to me, as I have bound my other followers.”

  I laughed. “I’ll die before your tainted blood ever passes my lips, Gage.”

  He smiled. “That’s fine with me, too.”

  I TRIED, TRULY I did. Long after Gage had gone, I looked for holes in the warding, any spot where there might be a weakness in the magic that held it together. I tested it until my hands were raw and bloody with burns. The thing that frustrated me the most was that I knew Aunt Maggie had a book specifically on spells to break wards. When I closed my eyes, I could see the damned thing on the shelf in her rented flat in Inverness, its brown leather-bound spine mocking me. If I’d been a better student, then maybe I’d have remembered something about what was in the book but, as Maggie had often said of me, I concentrate about as well as a puppy. And now that one, tiny character flaw was going to get us all killed.

  Two of Gage’s followers were in the chamber with me at all times. Apparently the chanting had to be continued for the spells to hold, because they rotated in turns every few hours. I tried talking to them. I tried begging, pleading, bribery. The only response I received from any of them was when one spat at me and hissed, “I hope the master kills you slowly, you bloodsucking whore.”

  I stopped trying after that. There’s no reasoning with zealots.

  The sound of the door opening brought me unsteadily to my feet. Gage stalked in with an ornate golden cup in his hands. I could smell fresh blood from across the room, and my stomach churned. I had no idea how long we’d been his prisoners, but I hadn’t fed since the night before we were taken—and I was hungry.

  “I have something for you, vampire,” he said. “Something I think you want badly by now.”

  He walked up to the ward. Here was my chance. If he wanted me to drink, he would have to break the warding. I watched in fascination as the warding melted for him, and his hand and the cup passed through the small hole. It wasn’t as much as I’d hoped for, but it would do. If I couldn’t get out, then I would pull him through the ward to me. I lunged for him and nearly made it, too. I had been so intent on what the one hand was doing that I didn’t notice that he’d conjured a ball of pure magic in the other. The magic hit me when I was a bare inch away from him. The force of it slammed me into the far side of the ward, searing the skin on my back through the fabric of Michael’s shirt.