I blinked. "Wait, what?"
"Zane will be a good father to your child, and a good partner to you. He is strong and he is capable."
I wanted to argue with him, but then he turned into smoke. One moment, he was there, beautiful and haughty and closed off from me. The next, he was a wisp of gray mist fleeing from my grandmother's house.
"Now, wait a minute!" I shouted, just as Jenny walked through the door, a wide-eyed Reikah in her wake.
"What's wrong?" Jenny asked, holding up several grease-laden bags of burgers and fries. "What happened?"
Reikah looked over her shoulder, her nose wrinkling prettily. "Vampire."
Jenny raised her brow and took stock of my appearance. I could only imagine what she saw. My hair was mussed, and not just from sleep. My pajamas weren't quite sitting right on my hips, and there was a clear flush on my cheeks.
"Did you mate the vampire?" Reikah wanted to know.
"Rude," Jenny said over her shoulder, "but did you?"
I slapped my palms over my face and flopped down into the chair that Wei had been sitting in before everything had gotten all handsy. "No... looks like it's blue ovaries again."
Jenny made a sound of sympathy and patted my shoulder. "Would some burgers and milkshakes help?"
I thought it over. While I would definitely prefer sinking my teeth into Wei right this moment, a burger was a close second.
"Alright."
“I do not eat meat,” Reikah said.
Jenny shot her a look. “Why didn't you tell me before now?”
"I did not know that I was going to be invited to dine with you. I believed I was here to teach wizardry. We should practice first," Reikah said. "It is the cusp of the later darkness, a good time to do magic."
Jenny rolled her eyes. "Any time is a good time for magic, but these fries, which aren't meat, will get cold, and weirdos are the only ones who like cold fries."
Reikah lifted her nose into the air. "Simply because you choose to practice magic with no sense of discipline does not mean that any time is a good time for magic. The day is separated into four parts. Dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight. The time between dusk and midnight is when you should begin casting spells for understanding and wisdom. I believe that our mutual friend could benefit from wisdom, do you not agree?"
I thought ‘friend’ was pushing it. I didn't dislike Reikah, and I was very aware that I probably owed her my life, which was a bond all on its own. But friend was someone that you could call whenever you needed to vent about life, and I'd never had the itch to tell Reikah about the deeper inner workings of being me.
"That's bull," Jenny said, plopping the bags onto the small kitchen table. "The whole idea that the time of day and the day of the week influence your magic is a bunch of superstition."
Reikah lifted one black brow. "It amuses me that a mountain witch attempts to lecture me on superstition."
Jenny's eyes took on a fire I had never seen before. "Sweetie, this mountain witch could kick your butt no matter the time of the day or the day of the week."
"Burgers," I said, reaching for the bags. "We are going to have burgers now. Then, you are going to explain what it is I am supposed to be getting wise about. Okay?"
The two women eyed one another for a long moment.
"Buuurgers," I coaxed. I really hoped it worked. "Come on. I can tell you about my new ghost friend while we are at it."
That got their attention. Jenny looked intrigued. Reikah looked suspicious.
"What ghost friend?"
"He's a cat. A gray tabby. The collar around his neck says Maahes."
Jenny's lips, painted a bright rosy bronze, spread into a big smile. "Awww, I had hoped he was around. Where is he?"
I shrugged and plopped down in one of the dining chairs. The other two girls followed suit, and I began to dish out burgers and fries to everyone. "I dunno. He decided to be discrete and disappeared not too long before Wei got to second base with me."
"Who is Maahes?" Reikah asked, offering a large chocolate shake to each of us.
I opened three ketchup packets and made a mountain to dip my fries in. "Well, after a quick look on Google, I can tell you that Maahes is an Egyptian god of war and protection, often depicted as a cat or a lion."
"He was Miz Loretta's cat, Lorena's grandma. He was around for forever, it seemed like. Long-bodied, great markings around the eyes. Good cat."
I felt a little twinge in my chest. "He was my grandmother's?" I had known that, or rather, I had guessed it. But hearing it come out of Jenny's mouth was a shock to my system.
I had never met my grandmother, but everywhere I turned, she had affected my life. When I was born, she had been the one to speak the prophecy, saying that the child that I gave birth to, via the blood of a son of Vlad, would bring magic back into the world. Magic, as I had learned, had slowly been dying away.
There were a lot of theories about why, but the most popular was that the ley lines, invisible highways of magic that wrapped around the world, were broken. How my offspring was supposed to go about fixing that, I hadn't the foggiest idea, but I was pretty cool with the idea of magic being a thing. Apparently, dragons might come back. I like dragons...well, in theory, I like dragons.
My grandmother, prophetess and witch of the Virginia Appalachians, had wanted to raise me. My father, whose exact reasons for taking me away were still a mystery to me, had decided to get me as far away from my grandmother as he could. Then again, I thought as I dipped one fry into a blob of ketchup, maybe he had just been trying to get me away from my creepy cultist mother. Jeez. I still don't know how those two had hooked up. Then again, does anyone ever really know why their parents are, or were, an item?
"All witches should have a companion," Reikah said, interrupting my thoughts.
"Do you?" I asked.
She pushed her nose into the air, a neat trick since she was already looking down her nose at us. "I am not a witch. I am an adept of the Order of-"
I rolled my eyes. "Yes, yes, I know, sacred hermit or whatever. So, what, adepts don't have animal companions?"
She sniffed as if I had said something bad. "It is...not our way."
"What is your way?" Jenny asked.
"We are practitioners of sorcery, not witchcraft. Ours is a finely-honed talent."
I sighed; I could already see Jenny's eyes flickering with emotion. I did not have it in me to referee a fight about the ins and outs of magic, especially since I really didn't see a huge difference between the two schools of thought here. "Okay, so, why are you here? I mean, I don't mean to sound crabby, but I wasn't expecting you."
Reikah lifted her brow again. "Indeed. Considering the state we found you in, you were not expecting anyone."
Jenny snorted a laugh, and I felt my cheeks go from their natural pink to candy apple red. I attempted several explanations before I gave up and took a bite from my burger. "I don't know if I am in love with the vampire, but I am in serious and deep lust."
Jenny shrugged, doing her best to look unruffled. "There ain't nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned lust."
Reikah responded, saying "Lust will distract. It is better to choose a male whom you trust to protect you."
CHAPTER SIX
As the three of us practiced magic, Reikah's words remained on my mind. I knew by the way that she had said them that she meant them. Maybe she was right, I thought. Maybe it was impossible to choose a guy for love under these circumstances. Love, as far as I was concerned, was supposed to happen naturally, like a flower blooming. I couldn't just go from one thing to the next and hope to be in love.
But, as Alan was fond of telling me, you didn't have to be in love to have a child. People got knocked up every day without feeling anything for the person who helped make that life.
"You are thinking long thoughts," Reikah said. Her eyes were narrowed with disappointment. "You need to concentrate."
I frowned down at the paper in front of me. It was black and lineless. Next to that was a g
reen colored pencil. I had done my best to draw a perfect circle in the very center of the paper, but it looked more like a football, and I was pretty sure it was nowhere near the center.
"I don't understand why I need to learn this," I said, poking at the center of the circle.
"There is no one reason, but if you'd like, I can name several."
Reikah sat back on her heels, managing to make it look graceful. Jenny had gone home to get sleep for the night, since she and a couple of her relatives were running the shop while her grandmother, Marquessa, was off gathering an army. I hadn't realized until Jenny was walking out the door that Reikah had planned on staying the night with me. I quickly learned that it was a more permanent arrangement. After all she had said, I couldn't expect her to live under the roof of vampires without me there.
I had no clue what I had to do with anything, but it was clear that she wasn't comfortable going back to the mansion. Fine. Whatever. She could try to teach me her form of magic if she really wanted to. Spoiler alert, she totally wanted to.
Which is why we were sitting in the very center of my grandmother’s house. Not just from the northern point to the southern point, but from east to west as well. Apparently, when it came to wizardry, which was different from and superior to witchcraft in all ways, according to Reikah, where you were mattered as much as when you were and how you were. Oh, goody.
"Go ahead," I told her.
"The first and most logical reason for you to learn the basics of wizardry is that your main and most common enemy will be The Order itself. It will do you a great deal of good to understand how they operate and what they believe."
Okay, that was fair. "But why can't I just hear it from you? You could, you know, just tell me."
She gave me that look that told me I was being dumb again. I was not fond of that look, and Reikah seemed to perpetually think that I was inferior to her grand magical ways. It was probably true, but she didn't need to rub it in.
"Because it is not really learning. I could lecture you, yes, but the mind does not really understand something until you learn to do it with your own hands."
I sighed and looked down at my pitiful excuse for a circle. "Okay, but my hands don't seem to be learning much."
"Do you expect to be perfect the first time you try? Mine is not as good as it should be, but you do not see me crying about it, do you?"
I glanced at the piece of paper sitting in front of her. If her circle wasn't perfect, I couldn't tell. "Yeah, okay."
She sighed and held up the paper, and proceeded to fold it in half, and then in half again. When she opened it back up, I could see that the circle she had drawn, also in green, wasn't in the exact middle, but just barely.
"That looks pretty damn good," I said.
She sighed and laid it down again. "It would barely work, but it will have to do."
"If you say so. Okay, we both have our circles, now what?"
"A circle...if you want to call what you drew a circle...is the beginning of all magic. Magic, you have to understand, is not unlike water; it wishes to move, to flow, to fill an available space. That circle creates a space for it to go."
I nodded; that made sense. "And magic cares that the circle is perfect?"
"Magic is not alive, not like you or I. It is an energy, and while it will fill any offered circle, provided that it is properly called, a lopsided circle will cause the magic to fill in unevenly, and that can, in many situations, cause problems."
I held up my excellent attempt at a football doodle. "So, I should try again, shouldn't I?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I assumed that you wished to go about magic with the same flippant attitude of your friend."
That got my hackles up. "Watch how you talk about Jenny. She's a good person."
Reikah kept her eyes on her paper. "She may have the best of intentions, but her actions do absolutely nothing to help heal the wounds of the world."
Now there was a term that I hadn't heard. "Wait, what wounds? What are you talking about?"
She narrowed her eyes at me. "You don't know?"
"Would I ask if I knew? I mean, do I strike you as that kind of girl?"
She seemed to take the question far more seriously than I meant it. "I don't know," she finally answered. "I know you only as a woman who wishes to fulfill destiny."
"Well," I said, reaching for another piece of construction paper from a massive pile that I had found in my grandmother's closet, "I am not the kind of girl who would waste time asking dumb questions. There are far better ways to waste my time."
"I do not know why anyone would like to waste time at all."
I had to chuckle at that. "Remind me to introduce you to my PlayStation when we are done here. But that being said, what the heck are the wounds of the world?"
"The places where magic no longer flows," she told me.
"Okay, I know something about that. There are ley lines that don't have magic going where it ought to, like broken highways."
She gave me a long look. "And? Why do you think they are that way?"
It was my turn to raise my brow at her. "I think the better question here is why you think that they are that way. You are, after all, supposed to be teaching me how the Order thinks."
She folded her hands in her lap in a prim fashion and settled down to the ground. "Because, many years ago, magic was a wild thing. It did whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, at the hands of a person who knew even the most basic understanding of the craft. It was like a string pulled too tight between too many hands over and over again. It has frayed, and in many places snapped."
"I see," I said. I had heard a version of this before, similar enough that I was willing to believe most of it. "So, you think that by putting magic back into the world, we are going to go through the same thing again?"
She shook her head. "I don't. It is impossible to say what may happen again. Just because it happened before does not mean that it will happen that way again. Human beings, and society at large, while prone to certain patterns, are, in essence, chaotic."
I frowned. "You talk like a Jane Austen novel sometimes, you know that?"
She smiled. It was a good smile. "I am fond of her novels."
"What?" I asked, legitimately shocked. "Miss precise lady likes romance novels?"
She shrugged. "Romance novels in a setting where there are rules and structure, yes."
Okay, that made more sense. I thought of Jenny now, and the way that she had looked when she talked about Reikah. It didn't quite match up to the way she looked when she was talking to Reikah, but that didn't mean that there wasn't any hope. If Austen taught me anything, it was that two stubborn people with a difference in opinion could fall in love. "Is that all you want in a relationship? Rules and structure?"
"I do not know what that has to do with anything."
I shrugged, doing my best to appear nonchalant. "We are friends, right?"
She gave me a look. "We...are."
"Jeez, you don't need to say that as if I were pulling out your teeth."
"You are not pulling out my teeth, but you are treading into uncomfortable conversation." Her eyes stayed fixed firmly on the black paper in front of her. I hadn't known Reikah for very long at all, just a couple of days really; I was in no way an expert, but I was pretty sure that she was very uncomfortable.
I frowned. "I'm sorry." I meant it.
She sighed. "It is not your fault. People are naturally curious." She used her long fingers to flatten out her recently folded paper. "I have never been in a relationship; I have never had any desire to be. I do not know how I would handle it, or if it is even something that I want."
I had heard of people who were asexual or aromantic before, but I had to admit that it wasn't something I really understood. As far as I could tell, they were just people who didn't experience attraction. I, personally, couldn't picture that, but just because I didn't know what it would be like didn't mean that it wasn't a real thing.
She gave me another one of those Jon Snow looks, the one where I felt like I knew nothing. "How can you possibly believe that?"
I shrugged again, picking up the green colored pencil. Then, I set it down and folded my paper into quarters and opened it up again. I wished I had some kind of protractor or something, but my grandmother did not seem to be the kind of woman who would have had one around.
"Why shouldn't I?"
"I just told you I enjoy Austen's books."
House Of Vampires 2 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy) Page 7