Not Just Voodoo

by Rebecca Hamilton

  I grab a torch and charge at the first vamp I see, swiping the flames across his skin. He catches fire, and when I give him a hard kick to his chest, he tumbles back into a female vamp nearby, spreading the fire.

  Who knew vampire skin acts like some kind of fire accelerant? I’d say ‘lucky me’ except that the flames seem to be trying to ignite my skin as well. I guess being half-vampire has its pitfalls, even if I haven’t gotten any of the perks.

  The floor is covered with dead flaming vampires that I have to leap over as I run to attack more. They seem to keep the fire going and spreading, doing half of my job for me as other vampires trying to escape catch fire as well.

  The near-deafening roar of the fire is almost peaceful. Right up until I hear Finn scream.

  12

  As I run toward the sound of Finn shrieking, I’m overwhelmed by the number of dead vampire bodies that litter the ground. Finn has taken out more vampires than I knew were even down here.

  But then I see the open door that leads to the exit, and it makes sense. They must have piled in from other halls inside the nest. Finn took them out…except for one.

  Alessandro stands with his back to me, his hand around Finn’s neck and pinning him against the stone wall. Through the smoke, I can barely make out Finn’s face. He’s shifted back to human form too, and now a deep gash runs from his temple to his chin.

  Something tells me the wound isn’t the cause for his screams, though. His gaze is directed downward, I believe locked with Alessandro’s, but I can’t see anything from this angle.

  Alessandro doesn’t even acknowledge my presence, which is strange. Surely he can hear me behind him, walking over the steaming pile of vampires beneath my feet?

  Now that there’s no vampire-skin accelerant to fuel things along, the flames are starting to simmer down to embers in some places, the stone helping to stop the spread of the fire. I lift a torch and take a careful step forward, preparing myself to set Alessandro alight next. But Finn’s voice presses into his head.

  Hadley. Don’t!

  I pause, turning my questioning gaze toward him. But he’s still not looking at me. His gaze is still locked with Alessandro’s.

  Finn?

  The next time Finn’s thoughts enter my mind, he’s not thinking anything. It’s just a painful noise. One that drops me to my knees and makes me scream the same way Finn had moments ago.

  The torch rolls out of my grasp, and I try to cover my ears against the noise, but it’s no use. It’s inside my head.

  Alessandro laughs. “So you two are connected.”

  When he speaks, it’s as though the painful noise makes way for his voice. But as soon as he’s finished his last word, it rushes back with the same crippling pain. It feels as though my brain is bleeding, the pain so great that my vision fills with bursts of blinding light.

  Somehow, he’s infiltrated our minds. Or perhaps he’s just infiltrated Finn’s thoughts which are now echoing into my own.

  I force myself through my pain to reach for the torch I’d dropped, but Finn’s voice pulses into my mind again. Don’t. We need him.

  It doesn’t seem that Alessandro can hear the thoughts we send to another, because his expression doesn’t change and he gives no indication of understanding. That means somehow he can send thoughts and sounds into our minds…even though he can’t hear what we’re sending out.

  It takes every bit of fight I have left in me to send a message back to Finn, who’s still physically restrained by Alessandro. What do I do?

  Trust me, he mind-speaks back to me.

  It’s a tall order. I barely know him. How can I trust someone I barely know? And yet…I do. Or perhaps I’m simply in too much pain to do anything else.

  Get the screw, Finn tells me. Plunge it into his neck.

  I fumble through my pockets to find the screw from when I’d dismantled the chair earlier. I know I need to commit to what I’m about to do before I do it, because the pain is too intense to allow room for pause. So once the screw is in my fingertips, I lunge for Alessandro and drive the screw into his neck.

  It sinks into his vampire flesh with surprising ease, and Alessandro’s grip on Finn loosens as the painful noise lifts from my mind. Finn falls toward the ground, but catches himself on his feet and stumbled forward. He knocks right into Alessandro, who thumps back into me. I have to twist out of the way to stop the men from falling on top of me.

  I catch myself on my hands on top of a pile of dead vampire. I bite back the bile rising in my throat at the feel of the tarry vampire blood on my hands. They’re decomposing slower than I imagined a vampire would, but still much faster than any human. My stomach gurgles again as the charred vampire skin squishes beneath my hands and I push back to my feet.

  Finn has Alessandro pinned, immobilizing the vampire’s hands so he can’t claw the screw out from the back of his neck. He looks up at me, his face dripping with blood, a sigh of relief escaping his lips.

  “You saved my life,” Finn says. “Now I need to save yours.”

  13

  Turns out, the screw is silver, and silver incapacitates vampires. Especially if you shove it right in between two vertebrae in the back of the neck.

  I didn’t know any of those things when I pocketed it back in my cell, but I’m definitely filing the information away in case I need it later. Finn says he didn’t know for sure, either. He just had a gut feeling. I’m not sure I believe him—not entirely, anyway.

  I don’t know how such a weapon found its way into a vampire nest, but Finn thinks it wasn’t on accident. That maybe someone left it there for me. I admire his sense of some greater plan in the universe, and for the time being, it gives me a little peace.

  Just the same, there’s nothing I want more than to go back home to my normal life, but the longest day of my life isn’t over yet. Instead of collapsing in my warm bed, I’m waiting by the side of the road for Esme to show up in a car. Worse, I’m standing over the immobilized body of Alessandro, which Finn and I had to half-carry, half-drag from the building.

  Thank God it’s dark outside.

  “You know,” I say conversationally, nudging the prone body with the toe of one tennis shoe, “that would’ve been a lot easier if you could shift into a horse or something.”

  Finn’s bark of laughter echoes louder than I expect it to. “Or maybe you could.”

  “What’s taking Esme so long?” I wrap my arms around myself, even though it’s not cold out here.

  “She had to contact a lot of people. It takes time.” Finn sounds calm, but I can’t help but notice how carefully he’s watching our disabled vampire.

  When Esme arrives, Iris jumps out of the passenger seat of the car and throws her arms around me.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she whispers, and that’s all she says, as if she’s too emotional to say much aloud. I’m a little teary-eyed myself, though I’d rather no one notice.

  “Me, too,” I say gruffly—but Iris knows exactly what I mean. With a brisk nod, she pulls me toward the car, where Finn’s wrestling the vampire body into the trunk. Before he slams the lid, he checks the screw to make sure it’s still in place.

  Note to self: stock up on silver hardware. Screws, nails, maybe a bolt or two.

  “Come on,” he says, holding the door open for me to slide into the back seat. “We have a vampire council meeting to get to.”

  14

  The meeting isn’t really a full council meeting, according to Esme, who apparently knows a lot more about vampires than she told me before.

  It’s more like a meeting of the council’s representatives—the real power brokers in the vampire world.

  Standing in the center of another room full of vampires makes my skin crawl, but I’m working hard not to show it as Esme presents our proposal to the representatives. Usually, my mentor looks … well, normal. Kind of like a magical soccer mom—one who wears jeans and t-shirts and keeps her dark, slightly graying hair pulled back in a low pon
ytail. Tonight, though, she’s gone all out: red power-suit, full makeup, careful hairdo. And I can just barely sense the presence of some kind of revealing spell designed to let the vampires get a sense of just how much preternatural power she has.

  Hint: it’s a lot. More even than I expected.

  But I’m beginning to think it’s not even close to as much as I might someday have access to.

  Still, we chose Esme to be the spokesperson for us because she looks the part.

  I tune back in right as she’s wrapping up her request. “Therefore, we propose that the Council grant the Princess Hadley, along with all her immediate connections including family and friends, immunity from all vampire politics in exchange for the vampire traitor Alessandro, to be turned over to the Order immediately for whatever punishment the Council deems necessary.”

  I flinch when she says Princess, but otherwise manage to keep a straight face. The Order is apparently some creepy vampire super-religious knights thing. On the drive over, Esme’d given us a rundown on some of their more…creative punishments. Let’s just say that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing on these guys.

  The main Council spokesperson is a tall female vampire with long red hair. In other contexts, I might think she was a model. But every time she pins me with her gaze, it’s all I can do to keep from throwing my arms around her and telling her I love her—and that scares me more than anything else I’ve ever experienced. She practically oozes power.

  Now, she gives Esme an assessing stare, then leans to the side to listen to a low comment from one of the other vampires seated at the conference-style table with her. The set-up might be even more intimidating if we weren’t in a standard industrial-park office building. It’s bad enough, though, and the longer we wait for an answer, the twitchier I get. On either side of me, I can feel Finn and Iris getting anxious, too.

  Then Finn’s fingers brush against mine where I’m clutching the armrest of my chair—just the lightest of touches, disguised by Finn’s movement as he shifts in his chair—and he says into my mind, It’ll be okay.

  I start to reply, but the redhead vampire stands up to speak, and the whole room goes as completely silent and still as only a room of the undead can be.

  “We accept the proposal, with a few addendums,” she says. Her voice is deeper and smoother than I expected. She has the same indefinite accent Alessandro had, and I find myself wondering if they’re related somehow.

  Esme opens her mouth as if to answer, but without even meaning to, I launch myself to my feet and start talking before I know what I’m going to say.

  “What else do you want from me?” I ask.

  The Councilwoman turns her full attention on me, and I fight to maintain my composure. Then I feel Finn sending…not words, this time, but strength.

  I hadn’t known that was possible.

  “We will leave you and yours entirely alone, provided you agree that, upon the current Vampire Queen’s death, you will ascend to her throne, as originally ordained.”

  I got in trouble earlier for agreeing too quickly to Alessandro’s proposal. Narrowing my eyes, I ask, “How long am I likely to have before that happens?”

  A slight smile flashes across her face and is gone again in an instant. “Several hundred years, barring any unexpectedly successful assassination attempts.”

  Don’t do it, Hadley.

  I ignore Finn’s urgent voice intruding into my thoughts.

  “And if I agree, you swear that all vampires will leave me and everyone I care about entirely alone for as long as she’s alive?”

  “We do.”

  Some tiny voice in the back of my mind is screaming that this is a bad idea, but as my gaze flickers across the faces of my friends—all three of them, now—I know that I’m going to say yes.

  Besides, I’m sick to death of vampires and their stupid politics and games.

  I’m ready to go home.

  15

  Two weeks later, the four of us are in Esme’s place at the warehouse. At home, my life is back to normal. Here, Iris and Esme are brewing tea—not to read the leaves, but just to drink. They’ve already finished their divination practice for the day, and they haven’t yet figured out Iris’s best medium. We’re just sure it’s not tea leaves—when she tried that, she was absolutely certain the leaves said that Esme would give birth to a duck. Esme wasn’t amused, but Finn and I can still crack each other up with a single mental Quack.

  In fact, Iris doesn’t have a particularly strong gift at all, but when we asked the vampires to remove the decoy spell from her, they told us they couldn’t. Instead, they did something that allowed her to block it herself. So now she’s learning everything she can about enhancing her natural abilities.

  A few feet away from the other two, Finn and I circle each other on a thin, blue mat taking up a large portion of the floor.

  I push my hair back out of my eyes, using my forearm to wipe sweat away before it can drip down and interfere with my vision. Finn uses the momentary inattention to slide in under my guard and hit my side with the flat of the wooden practice sword in his hand.

  “Oof. God, Finn,” I complain. “I’m going to have another bruise to hide from my parents.”

  “Then pay better attention. If you’re fighting for your life, you’ll get worse than a bruise.”

  We’ve had this argument several times already. I don’t plan to ever fight for my life. But the other three all agree that I should be prepared to defend myself—or even the Vampire Queen, if the occasion arises and I need to keep her alive in order to protect the treaty and keep the life I love. The one where I’m not on the vampire throne.

  Secretly, I agree with them.

  But I’m not about to admit that out loud.

  I have way too much other stuff to worry about. Like the fact that I’m apparently immortal—and everyone in the vampire world seems to agree that immortality is a curse, not a blessing.

  But at least I have a good long while—like eternity, apparently—to figure that one out. Less time, however, to find a way to break the news to my parents. I’m still not sure how I’m gonna handle that one.

  More immediately pressing is the fact that the shifting spell’s long-term effects seem to be … well, that it’s not wearing off. Not only can I still shift, I have to. Kind of a lot.

  And so does Finn.

  I’m not sure why he was so willing to take on consequences like that just to help me, but I’m determined to figure it out.

  Starting now.

  “Anyway,” I say, “if I’m fighting with a sword against people who’ve practiced sword-fighting literally forever, then I’ve already lost. I should use my own weapons. The ones I’m good at.”

  “Like what?” Finn asks, once again circling around me.

  I turn with him, this time keeping my guard up.

  “Like this.” In one motion, I drop my sword and shift, ignoring the pain and leaping immediately into flight.

  Finn is only a couple of seconds behind me, but by the time he’s done shifting, I’m already headed toward the open door and into the bright blue sunlight outside, sending a mental message back behind me.

  Catch me if you can!

  The End

  About Rebecca

  NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL bestselling author Rebecca Hamilton lives in Georgia with her husband and four kids, all of whom inspire her writing. Somewhere in between using magic to disappear booboos and sorcery to heal emotional wounds, she takes to her fictional worlds to see what perilous situations her characters will find themselves in next.

  Represented by Rossano Trentin of TZLA, Rebecca has been published internationally, in three languages. You can follow her on twitter @InkMuse

  Get two free books when you subscribe to Rebecca’s newsletter! http://www.rebeccahamiltonbooks.com/free-books

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