by Clare Kauter
“Don’t eat it!” Henry cried.
That broke me out of my trance. I turned towards him slowly, disgusted. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“The heart. Don’t… don’t eat the heart.”
“Why the fuck would I eat it, Henry? What do you think I am?”
“I don’t know! You just had a look on your face…”
“What kind of look?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated with a shrug.
“I haven’t eaten meat in a decade and you thought I was going to start up again with a vampire’s still-beating heart?”
Henry shifted a little under the heat of my glare. “You just seemed…”
“What?”
“Snacky.”
My jaw dropped. “Seriously, Henry? In this moment right now you think I’m contemplating which part of this psychotic vampire I should eat for dinner?”
“You kept complaining about not having anything to eat back at the church,” he said. “I know what you’re like when you’re hungry. I wouldn’t put anything past you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is that something the original king did? Ate his victim’s heart?”
“King,” gurgled Pierre as he drowned in his own blood, his eyes widening in realisation.
“Nessa, please,” Honey pleaded. “Don’t let him die. Please. Give him the gift you gave me.”
“You’re… the… king,” Pierre continued. “So…sorry. Eat… my… heart.”
“Ew, no!” I cried. “I don’t want it! At all!”
Pierre tried again. “It’s my… dying wish.”
“Firstly, you’re already dead, and secondly…”
“Please!” Honey pleaded with me. “Please help him. I can’t…” She was crying again, and my human side resurfaced. OK, I had just ripped her boyfriend’s heart out in front of her. Literally. That would be kind of traumatic. As convenient as it would be to have Pierre out of the way, I would feel a little guilty about what it would do to Honey. More than that, though, she wasn’t someone I particularly wanted to piss off.
I groaned in annoyance, my decision made. “Fine,” I said. “Just give me two seconds.” I tried to slip my finger into the hole in Pierre’s heart, but it had already healed. I couldn’t get in. I turned to Henry. “Do you have a dagger on you?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Sorry.”
Honey shook her head too, and when she checked Pierre’s robes nor did he. I turned to the other vamps. “Anyone got a pocket knife?”
They shook their heads and murmured that they didn’t. I tried cutting it open with the key hanging on the chain around my neck, but to no avail. I shut my eyes and groaned. This was really not my day.
After taking a deep breath, I held my nose with my left hand and raised the heart to my mouth. Warning Henry not to pass comment, I grimaced and bit down. Blood spurted into my mouth, and I had to really work my jaw to get through all that muscle. The fibres were getting stuck in my teeth. I was going to need some serious flossing after this.
“Thank you,” wheezed Pierre. “My dream is coming true.”
“I’m nod eeding id,” I spat around a mouthful of heart. “And you really should think about seeing a therapist. You shouldn’t be dreaming about that kind of thing.”
Finally my teeth hit something hard. The talon! I spat the item into the palm of my hand and started gagging uncontrollably at the sight of it.
Henry leaned over and had a look at it. “Is that… a toenail?”
I started gagging again, trying to fight back the waves of nausea. ‘Talon’ my arse! This was a straight up toenail clipping. Henry was right. If this had something to do with the last king, maybe I didn’t want to know too much about him. What kind of psycho hangs onto an old toenail clipping?
“Nessa, please,” cried Honey. “He’s running out of time.”
I sighed. “Fine,” I said, putting the toenail in my pocket. The necklace hummed happily at the proximity of the toenail. Disgusting. ‘Talon of Truth.’ Talk about false advertising. There was a lie in its very name.
Screwing up my face, I knelt down and used my left hand to lever open Pierre’s jaw. I wasn’t sure that this would heal him, but it seemed like his best option. After plopping his heart back into the hole in his chest, I ran my fingertip along one of his canines. The moment my blood touched his tongue, his eyes rolled back in his head and he began to convulse, purple froth spewing from his mouth. I snatched my hand away and stood, taking a couple of steps back for good measure. I didn’t want to get any vomit on me.
Honey stayed by Pierre’s side to look after him while Henry and I walked away to discuss what to do next.
“The blood will most likely rehabilitate him the way it’s done for Honey,” said Henry. “Of course, we should wait and see, but it doesn’t seem right to arrest him if he wakes up on your side.”
“My side of what?”
“Life,” said Henry. “You know, just things in general.”
I got the feeling that there was more to it, but I suspected that pushing wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It was probably another one of those secrets I wasn’t meant to know.
“And the other vampires?” I asked. “What do we do with them? Is there some sort of cult rehab we could send them to?”
“They killed Ravi,” Henry pointed out. “Tore him apart while he was still alive.”
“You and I both know he’d be happier not knowing that,” I said. “If we arrest them, we’re going to have to tell him.”
“We don’t really have another option,” said Henry. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
I wasn’t sure I liked the tone of his voice. What was he thinking?
“Unless you give them all some of your magical blood as well.”
My mouth fell open. “Seriously? You think I should let an entire cult of vampires snack on me?” I asked in disbelief. “You do realise I need that blood to live, right?”
“They won’t need much,” he said. “A couple of drops will do.”
“And once they’ve had a drink?” I asked. “What then?”
He shrugged. “Then you’ll have a few more magical vampires on your side,” he said.
“My side of what?” I repeated.
“Of whatever comes at you,” he replied. “Come on. You said yourself that you don’t want to arrest them. This way they’ll be able to go about life as normal without anyone knowing they’re vampires, and we can pretend that this whole cult thing never happened.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I guess, but –”
“If we arrest them, or even send them to rehab, there’s nothing to stop them from telling everyone what happened here tonight,” he continued. “Whereas if you cure them, they’ll be yours. They’ll say whatever you ask them to, and we can close all the missing persons cases without any further investigation.”
“What do we do about Ravi?”
“Tell him it was a rogue ork,” Henry suggested. “He passed out from the potion and an ork ate him. Who cares? He’s better off not knowing the truth.”
“And I’ll be better off for lying too.”
Henry shrugged. “Yep. That too.”
Half an hour later, I’d fed every vamp a couple of drops of my blood and they were all in various stages of their transformation. It wasn’t pretty. The only cult member who hadn’t drunk my blood was Rainbow, who remained tied to a tree somewhere in the woods since we still weren’t quite sure what to do about her. She wasn’t a vampire, so we weren’t sure how she’d react to the blood. To be honest, we weren’t really sure how the vamps would react. We were mostly just hoping things worked out, otherwise we were going to be spending a lot of time disposing of bodies this evening. Speaking of which…
Finally, Death seemed to have checked his phone. Henry and I were sitting on the grass, kind of wishing the bonfire was still going seeing as it was freezing out here. A portal opened in front of us and out stepped the Reaper, closely followed by Ed.
“Why do you always turn up after all the work is done?” I asked the Reaper. I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “Especially considering you can time-travel.”
Thinking about it for a moment longer, I realised that might be the precise reason he always showed up after the work was done. If I could travel through time, I’d probably show up after all the hard stuff was done too.
Death rolled his eyes. “You know I’m not meant to go back in time and stop people from dying. I’d put myself out of business. Besides, you guys handled it fine on your own,” he said. “Doesn’t look like there’s that much for me to do here. No one’s even dead. Well, not the kind of dead where I pick up their souls.”
“What is this?” Ed asked, hands on hips. “I can’t believe you didn’t call me. I could have helped you with this.” He had the gall to sound wounded. So that’s why he was here – he was jealous that he’d been left out of the loop.
“What are you talking about?” Henry asked. “You hate helping us. You only like helping yourself.”
“Besides, we did OK on our own,” I said, gesturing around at the general carnage surrounding us.
“Yes, we can see that,” said Death, giving me a strange look.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you eat someone’s heart?” Ed asked me.
“What? No! Why would you think that?”
“There’s blood dripping down your chin and I think you have a bit of flesh stuck in your teeth.”
“Ew! Henry, why didn’t you tell me?”
“You seemed kind of sensitive about it,” he replied. “I didn’t want to upset you.”
“This is disgusting. I’m never biting into someone’s heart again.”
“Good,” said the three men in perfect unison.
Chapter 27
The next night, the Black Forest was still filled with the magical beings who’d been there for the full moon: fae, witches, wizards, warlocks, telepaths, psychics, psychos – everyone. Although I’d slept all day, I was exhausted as I lumbered through the forest towards the church for the coven meeting. I hoped I wasn’t going to be hit with a billion questions.
After the vampires woke up, Death had dropped me home before taking Henry to his place. The Reaper had promised to explain what had happened to The Department – that is, he was going to explain a version of events to them. He was also going to let Daisy and Hecate know what had happened. I’d been kind of sleepy when Henry and Death talked through the cover story, and I didn’t know if my answers about what had happened would hold up to much scrutiny.
Death was also going to speak to Ravi. We’d decided to tell him that Rainbow had taken him into the forest and left him there when he passed out. Then an ork had found him and decided to chow down. It was a lie, sure, but it seemed easier on him that way.
When the baby vamps had woken up they were incredibly apologetic about what they’d done. They all apologised to me for their earlier behaviour, and they were being so sweet about everything that it really didn’t seem right to arrest them. Plus, despite their apparent loyalty, if we threw them in jail Henry and I were scared they’d tell everyone about me, so there was that.
Rainbow ended up getting arrested for dealing drugs, and we’d pretended that she hadn’t been involved with killing Ravi. Seeing as we had evidence that she’d been involved in potion brewing and distribution, it was going to be pretty easy to get people to discount anything she said about me having superpowers. Rather than send her to prison, we’d decided to magically shackle her and allow her to keep working at the cafe – under heavy supervision. You might think this seems unnecessarily lenient, but then you haven’t tasted her coffee.
Pierre was still asleep when I’d left the camp. He’d had a little more healing to do than the others, what with his heart being ripped from his chest and, like, a little nibbled. Honey had taken him into one of the cabins at the camp and was staying with him until he woke up. She’d promised to let me know how he was – and how he was feeling about the whole ‘killing me’ thing. Maybe now he knew I was the king and all, he would feel a little more generous towards me. We could only hope.
In other news, the toenail had now joined the other items on my necklace. This one I’d put inside a locket. I didn’t care what fancy name you gave it, it was still a toenail clipping and I didn’t want to display that on my jewellery. As gross as it was, though, I could instantly feel it giving me extra power. And making my temper worse. Yeesh. I was really going to have to work on keeping calm.
At the thought of the companions, my mind wandered to what Henry had done the night before – turning into a ghost. How was that even possible? Did it have something to do with visiting Ed in Hell? That might have given him the idea of how to get Honey out of the cage, but that still didn’t explain how he’d managed to shift in the first place.
I had no idea how it had happened, but it was related to my powers, I was sure of it. Like the clouding spells cracking, or the portal to Hell appearing near my house, this had to be related to my energy force field. There was no other explanation.
When I reached the church, I turned left, relieved to find the snack table filled again. Rainbow was standing behind it, magically shackled to the floor. She glared at me, picking up a teacup.
“Tea?” she said through clenched teeth, looking beyond ready to kill me.
“I’m OK, thanks,” I said, picking up an Anzac biscuit in one hand and a cucumber sandwich triangle in the other. I gave her a sweet smile. “Although I’ll be popping into the cafe tomorrow morning to pick up a lavender latte.”
She snarled. “Of course you will.”
I simply smiled and walked further into the church, heading toward the cauldron at the front where Daisy and Hecate were talking to Henry, who was in gorilla form. I sighed with relief at the sight. Henry would have already answered their questions and I wouldn’t have to try to remember what story we were telling. I was too tired to lie convincingly.
“Congratulations!” said Daisy when I joined the group. Immediately she put up her hand and added, “I know you’re not pregnant. I was talking about finding all those missing magicals, and figuring out what happened to Ravi.”
I nodded, looking blank. “Yes. We did that.”
Henry frowned at me, his face telling me that I needed to work on being more convincing.
“We were just discussing our theories for what caused all of those creatures to be attracted to that particular place in the woods.” That’s right – I remembered Death saying something about that the night before. He’d decided to tell everyone there had been some sort of spell that pulled the magicals into the forest, where they got lost and couldn’t escape. Like a mass hallucination or something. “Hecate thinks there must have been some sort of cursed object hidden in the forest and when they strayed too close they were pulled towards it. Of course, it’s hard to know. What’s your theory?”
“Uh, yeah, something like that,” I said. “Like a mini Bermuda triangle.”
Daisy nodded. “We’ll do some more investigating, but I don’t know if we’re going to find out who’s responsible,” she said. “At least the spell’s worn off now.”
“So everything’s wrapped up,” I said.
“Yep,” said Henry with a nod.
“How very convenient,” said Hecate, eyeing me suspiciously.
* * *
Once the main covenly duties were done, Henry and I headed outside to chat. Mostly we were trying to avoid Hecate’s probing questions. She wasn’t entirely buying our cover story, and I didn’t have the energy to deal with her interrogation right now. She knew something was up, but we’d deal with that another day.
“So,” I said, once Henry and I were alone. We were standing on the grass a short distance from the church, near the edge of the Black Forest.
Henry shifted into his human form. “So.”
“Are we heading to the library after this?” I asked. “To get started on classes?”
Henry smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “I’ve spent all day preparing lessons,” he said. “We’re going to cover everything: ether diving, using your powers without the items to focus them, using Ed’s clouding cones on things to practise breaking clouding spells, meditation and yoga and anger management. I’ve scheduled it all. I’m so excited!”
I grinned. “I’m mostly just excited that you can pull me through Ed’s door now and I don’t have to talk to him so much.”
“That’s a definite bonus of my new powers,” Henry agreed.
Then we fell into an awkward silence. I swallowed, hoping Henry would say something. He didn’t. Oh no. I could feel something building in the quiet night air. It was coming. We made eye contact and then looked away too quickly. Argh. This was going to happen. Abort! Abort!
“We need to talk,” said Henry.
“Damn it,” I muttered. “I should have burnt to death on the stake when I had the chance.”
He frowned at me. “Really?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t like talking about feelings.”
“Why?” asked Henry. “Because you don’t have any?”
“I have one or two,” I said.
“No one likes talking about feelings,” said Henry. “Especially with someone like you.”
My mouth fell open. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seem like the kind of person who’d tear a man’s heart out of his chest and bite it in half. Metaphorically speaking.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I didn’t have a choice about that.”
“Um, I don’t think that’s entirely true. There were probably other ways to go about it.”
Crossing my arms, I said, “Well, I did my best in the moment. I’m sorry if that’s not good enough for you, but –”
“It was terrifying,” he said. “I’ve never been more scared of anyone than I am of you.”
“You’re so charming. Please stop. I can barely handle it.”
Henry ignored me and continued. “But maybe I’m wired wrong, because despite that, despite everything, I actually quite like you.”