Whatever warm and fuzzy feelings Philip had started to feel bubbling up inside of him were immediately snuffed out. He hadn’t turned around yet to see exactly who it was that was talking to them (he knew there were at least two of them and that their names were Ramsey and Brennan, but that meant absolutely nothing to him), but he didn’t need to in order to know that they weren’t friends. There was a nasty, sing-songy quality to the voice that made Philip’s skin crawl. It was solicitous, meant to elicit particular emotions from him and Caroline.
These were not random muggers who had seen a man and a woman out past the time when it was safe to be out and decided to take advantage of the situation. These men, whoever or whatever they really were, had sought them out. They wanted to engage in something, Philip just wasn’t sure what or why.
“Come on now, don’t tell me the two of you are mutes as well? You can’t tell me that you are, not me. I know full well that the two of you are fit as fiddles and right as rain. The boss told me so and the boss is never wrong.”
“The boss? And who would that be?”
“Aha! See? Look it, I was right. You can speak! The boss is never wrong. Didn’t I say that? The boss is never wrong.”
“Yes,” Philip said in a dry, noncommittal voice, “you did say that. Now, do you mind telling me what you want?”
“Aw, well now, are we interrupting something? Were you two lovebirds in the middle of something? No! Ha, trick question, wasn’t it?! You two aren’t lovebirds at all, are ya? Brother and sister, self-proclaimed. Not lovebirds at all.”
Philip let go of Caroline’s hand and his lips curled back to reveal his predator's teeth. Beside him he heard Caroline let out a low hissing sound and knew without looking at her that her incisors were exposed as well. When they turned to look at the intruders, Philip’s sense of danger only increased. These were not normal men.
If anyone had the ability to recognize people who were in a time to which they did not truly belong, it was Philip and his sister. What was that saying? It took one to know one. Philip and Caroline had both lived long enough to see everything that felt familiar to them fade and pass away, giving way to a whole host of new and strange times. These men had done that, too.
Philip could see it in the strangely fuzzy quality of their faces, the lines that seemed to appear and then vanish again, depending on which angle you were looking at them from. Their clothing was the clothing of people who didn’t quite fit. They were the kind of people that your average passerby would look at and, after thinking to himself that he had just seen something sort of odd, promptly forget.
They looked almost right, with clothing that didn’t entirely match and were sometimes worn in the wrong way. A person who didn’t know any better would think that these things were intentional, that they had been done to make a statement.
Somehow this sad effort to be different made the mismatched people easier to forget. People would feel sorry for them, for their sad effort to be unique, and that would make them uncomfortable, which would in turn make them want to forget. It was a different way of blending in than Philip had ever considered (Philip had done a dismal job of blending in when everything was all said and done), but it was an effective one. It would work beautifully on anyone who didn’t understand what it was they were looking at.
Philip and Caroline were not those people. Philip and Caroline had spent more time than they could ever calculate studying the ways in which to get along in the world that they weren’t really part of, and that meant learning to recognize other things that didn’t quite fit.
All of Philip’s internal alarms were going off and he felt certain that these men (if men was in fact what they were) knew that they were seen for at least some of what they were. He thought it was what they wanted, that they were enjoying this. Well, that was good for them but Philip was by no means in the mood to play a game.
“No, not lovebirds. Now, I’ll ask again. What is it that you want? I’ll warn you, I don’t love long, drawn out conversations and I particularly hate being toyed with. If we keep this up, I’ll lose my patience, and that won’t do any of us any good.”
“Boss said you’d react like that. Said you didn’t have much of a sense of humor. And she would know, right? From what I hear the two of you knew each other real well. A little too well for things to work out for you, right? Let yourself get just a little too close to the sun.”
And there it was, the first tacit admission from an outside party that the things Caroline had told him were true. He had expected to feel something when he realized it was all real, but he didn’t feel anything at all, at least not about that. All he wanted was for this to be over. He wanted to put a stop to this for once and for all, to maybe make up for the fact that he had refused his calling for such a long time.
And there was Megan. Megan, who he knew was hanging in the balance of all of this mess. He didn’t know how much she had known about all of this before their meeting, but he suspected that it had been next to nothing. That, almost more than anything, was what had him feeling really scared. He didn’t know what kind of life she had led but he had felt her accumulated pain before he’d even seen her and he did know that she had been the victim of two crimes just in the short amount of time he had known her.
And now?
Now he knew that she was more than he had guessed, more than she knew. Now he knew that if he did not find her soon, she might be seduced into living a life of darkness from which she might never be able to return. He was willing to do just about anything to see that that didn’t happen.
He had already seen one woman he cared for in the clutches of that darkness and he couldn’t stand the idea of it happening all over again. Back then, so many years ago, he hadn’t known enough to realize that there was any kind of intervention required. He was not that same wretchedly uninformed man and he would not allow history to repeat itself. Not if he could help it.
And he wouldn’t have to fight that battle on his own, either, thank God. He had his sister beside him and all of the accumulated knowledge of the order as well. He would not fail in this endeavor, couldn’t fail, and that knowledge provided a kind of comfort.
“You shouldn’t get involved with things you don’t fully understand,” Philip growled, all of the muscles in his body priming themselves for an attack, “it’s a good way to get yourself hurt.”
“Is it?” the one called Brennan said as he chuckled, looking back at Ramsey and seeming to be unperturbed by the fact that he didn’t seem to share his levity. “Is it really? And who's going to do the hurting, friend? Is it you? I don’t doubt that you’d like to. I don’t doubt it at all. But you won’t be able to. You’d have to catch me first and I don’t see you being able to pull that off.
“We’re going to get what we traveled halfway across the world for, make no mistake about that. You won’t win this one. It’s best you turn around and go home, unless you want another load of heartache to deal with. Something to brood on for the next hundred years.”
The level headed part of Philip knew that this Brennan was trying to goad him, to get him so riled up that he would make a mistake. Unfortunately, Philip wasn’t always able to listen to that part of himself, had seemed less and less able to over the last couple of days. He lunged forward, reaching out for this Brennan’s throat. His hand closed around the place where it should have been but it closed around air.
“Not as quick as you thought, are you chum? Not used to something you want getting away?
You should be. From what I hear, you’ve been through it before.”
The voice was coming from directly behind him now and he turned, lunged again and again met with nothing but air. Brennan was right, Philip wasn’t going to be able to catch him. Whatever dark powers were driving him were too much for Philip to stop, and knowing that caused him to give mental pause.
He continued the chase so that his foe didn’t realize that the wheels in his head were turning, but his heart wasn’t in it any
more. Because what exactly was the point of it? That was what he couldn’t stop thinking about. What was the reason behind this chase to begin with? Delay. That was all this was about. Brennan was here to delay his and Caroline’s progress and he had the feeling that Ramsey’s role had been to get him there.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see the silent Ramsey digging into his jacket pocket and pulling out a fistful of sand. It was the purple sand looking stuff that he had found in Megan’s empty apartment and Philip realized that Ramsey wasn’t planning on sticking around to see how the game of cat and mouse turned out in the end.
Philip intuited that these men had different black abilities and while Brennan’s was initially the flashier of the two, it was Ramsey’s that he was going to need. He also needed to keep up the pretense of being preoccupied for as long as he could possibly manage and it wasn’t until the moment that Ramsey held his open palm full of sand up to his lips that Philip changed his course.
Brennan wasn’t the only one who could move quickly, and before Ramsey could realize what was happening and change his course of action, Philip had taken a firm grasp of his upper arm. All he had time to see was Brennan’s outraged dismay, Ramsey’s shock, and Caroline’s open, screaming mouth and then there was nothing but the sensation of rushing wind moving rapidly across his face. Nothing but the rushing wind and blackness.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t see how any of it could be possible.”
“Of course you don’t, at least not yet. But don’t let it trouble you, darling. You don’t understand it because you haven’t been enlightened. That’s why you’re here. That’s why I needed you brought to me. It’s imperative that you be made aware of just how special you are.”
Megan felt like her body was going numb. She knew that she was basically just repeating herself over and over again and part of her was embarrassed by that fact but she couldn’t seem to stop. She felt sick and excited and terribly afraid and all she could think was that she was an orphan with zero family to speak of and yet, somehow, she was looking at somebody who looked almost identical to her.
She supposed the rational answer would be that this was some kind of long lost sister or cousin, but somehow she knew that wasn’t the case. There was something far less conventional that served as the solution to this quandary.
For one thing, Gordon, her over-the-top guide up to this point, was practically shaking in his antiquated boots. He was displaying a very genuine kind of fear of this woman despite the fact that she didn’t look all that dangerous, and that alone was enough to worry Megan.
She had seen Gordon walk through a brick wall with her own eyes. If a man who could do something like that (and who knew what else he was capable of?) was this afraid of the woman, what did that say about her? Just what exactly was she able to do?
For another thing, Megan could hear the woman from her dreams, the one who called her little magpie, like a steady hum in the back of her head but she couldn’t make out any of the words. It was like there was a hand clamped firmly over that voice’s mouth and muffling everything it tried to say.
If the magpie voice was her fairy godmother or something along those lines, something was doing a good job of shutting it up and that definitely made Megan feel uneasy. She was disoriented and tired and, at this point, had no idea what she was doing and who she was supposed to trust.
Part of her shouted that she should be able to trust a woman who looked the same as her, but another part of her knew that wasn’t necessarily true. She kept going around and around inside of her head until she felt like she was going to drive herself insane and she put both of her hands to her head, pressing her palms into her forehead and shaking her head.
No. No. It was too much for her and all she wanted was to be allowed to go back to her shitty studio apartment, pack her few belongings, and go somewhere where nobody knew her and nobody would bother her again.
She shut her eyes tightly and almost convinced herself that if she waited for long enough that way, when she opened her eyes again she would be home, just like Dorothy after clicking her heels three times.
“Megan, dear, please. Open your eyes. I’m not going to hurt you. Believe me, I never would. How could I hurt my own relation? It would be unnatural, wouldn’t you say?”
“My relation? What the hell does that mean? I’m an orphan. My mom was some kind of a drug addict or something and my dad split. I don’t have any relations.”
“No? You don’t think so? Do you not see a rather striking resemblance between the two of us?”
“Of course I do.”
“And what alternate explanation do you have for something like that? Do you consider it to be some kind of an unexplainable phenomena?”
“No,” she whispered, feeling very close to crying.
She couldn’t seem to get a grip on things, to plant her feet on solid ground. Every time she felt like she was starting to get hold of herself something else happened, something else was said, and then she was right back to the beginning.
As if concerned by her obvious distress, the woman who looked like her glided towards her, her beautiful but antique Victorian silk skirts moving around her with a soft whispering sound.
Megan wanted to shrink away from her but she was transfixed, rooted to the spot where she stood and almost completely incapable of any sort of movement. When the woman reached out to smooth the damp hair out of Megan’s face, she winced.
The woman’s skin was the opposite of Philip’s, almost unbearably hot. It was also almost completely devoid of lines, even the lines expected on a young person. It was an almost chalky and vaguely sickly looking white, like she hadn’t stepped outside in many years.
In her beautiful eyes there was a clear madness but also a fierce competence that Megan couldn’t help but admire. It was mesmerizing, completely impossible to tear her eyes away from.
She was too tired to keep trying. This woman was powerful and if she wanted to have her say, she was going to do so. Never mind that Megan had her own power, arguably the greatest that the world had ever seen. She didn’t know that yet. She had not been made aware of what she was and what she could do and as far as she was concerned she was entirely out of her depth.
She looked at this strange woman’s face, a woman who didn’t look like a stranger at all, and saw her eyes flash something like fire. She could sense how defeated and pliable Megan felt. It was exactly what she wanted her to feel.
Then, as if entirely on impulse, she leaned forward and kissed Megan’s cheek, her lips feeling every bit as full of fire as the rest of her had. She took her by the hand and tugged, the way a kid tugged on her older brother’s hand when she wanted to show him something really spectacular.
“Come on, love, come sit with me. We have so much to talk about, you and me. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time and you haven’t been the easiest to track down.”
“Is that so?” Megan said with a voice that sounded far away in her own ears.
It was ridiculous, of course. Nobody had been looking for her, not for any portion of her life. She had never had anyone in her life that really gave a damn about where she was or what she was up to. Only, when this stranger said that she had been waiting to meet her, it was very difficult not to believe that it was true.
Something in her voice was raw and needy and gave Megan the impression of being a missing puzzle piece. This woman really did believe that the two of them were supposed to meet, and who was Megan to say that they weren’t? What did she really know about the world, after all?
Not long ago she had honestly believed herself to be a world-weary kind of a person. She had believed that she had seen enough in her rather short life to be immune from surprises and yet she had so recently been proven to be dead wrong. Nothing was cut and dry, nothing was black and white, and the world she was actually living in was one where things like vampires were real.
&nb
sp; She had to keep reminding herself of that and once she did, once she got it through her thick skull, she had to admit to herself that all bets were off. This woman looked like she knew something and as far as Megan knew, maybe she did.
Not that it mattered all that much. She was dragging her towards a little sitting area beside the blanket of windows whether she knew anything or not. Once the two of them were settled, she gave Gordon a sharp look, who then turned and walked through the nearest wall. Megan was a little surprised to find that the shock of that ability had already worn off.
She had to hand it to herself, she was pretty good at rolling with the punches. Gordon returned almost immediately, a tray with two beautiful cocktails sitting on top of it.
“French 75s,” Megan said dully, somehow not surprised to see that, either.
“Yes! They’ve always been my favorite. So delicate, so lovely. Now, a toast. To finally meeting after so much effort.”
When Megan didn’t move her glass, her unusual companion had done the work of clinking their glasses together herself before taking a dainty little sip. When Megan didn’t follow suit, she sighed in exasperation and Megan got her first glimpse of the fact that this woman’s temper was probably relatively short and she was probably pretty damn used to getting her own way without any fuss. But she took a little breath and a moment to compose herself, then poked out her bottom lip in a perfect little pout.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 14