by Harper Allen
Now we did. Quietly I cracked open my bedroom door. The hallway was dark, without the slivers of light I expected to see under Kat’s and Tash’s doors a few feet away. Moving noiselessly along the hall, I reached Kat’s room and tapped lightly before turning the knob.
“Kat?” I began to step across the threshold and then reeled back, overcome with nausea as a powerful stench assailed my nostrils. Gagging, I stumbled backward into the empty hall, only to find it wasn’t empty.
Even as my back slammed against a solid chest, I grabbed the stake I’d jammed into my robe’s belt before I’d left my room and spun to face the vamp, plunging it straight into his heart.
Or so I believed for about half a second.
“At least you didn’t drop it this time, vampyr.” Mikhail sucked in a hissing breath and yanked out the stake that was sticking into his right biceps. “Now we’re going to have to waste time waiting around for this to heal.”
He looked at me as if he expected me to know what he was talking about, but even if I had I wouldn’t have cared. I shoved past him into Kat’s bedroom, but again the sickening odor repelled me. Fear sharpened my voice as I turned on him. “Where is she? What’s that awful smell?”
I didn’t wait for him to answer. Instead I ran down the hall to Tash’s room and burst through the door. “Tash!” I whispered hoarsely. “Tash, is Kat with—”
This time when the stench hit me I recognized it for what it was. I could feel the hives already starting to rise on my face and chest as I staggered to the doorway, retching. My esophagus narrowed to the diameter of a clogged soda straw and my knees began to buckle as I struggled to pull in a breath.
“You still going to tell me you aren’t the triplet who got marked?” Mikhail’s voice seemed to fade in and out. I fell to my knees in front of him—not a position I’d ever thought I’d find myself in with Cujo, believe me—and grabbed blindly at him.
“Allergic…” I rasped. “Garlic…bad reaction…”
“Yeah, like the bad reactions you’re going to start having to sunlight soon, or holy water.” He sounded grimly amused. “You’re resourceful, vamp, but if you really were having an allergic reaction you wouldn’t just be feeling like shit, your air passages would start to close—”
Painfully I tried to draw breath. A gross rattling noise came from my throat as Mikhail kept talking.
“—your eyes would start to bulge—”
I stared in mute agony at him.
“—and just before you lost consciousness you’d begin vomiting uncontrollably. No, what you’re feeling is good old-fashioned vamp revulsion at the wild garlic I hung around your sisters’ rooms to protect them from you and—”
In my ears his voice faded into nothingness as I threw up all over his shoes and passed out.
I came to not knowing where I was or how long I’d been out, but all too aware of my humiliating splash-and-crash episode and wishing I could curl up and die. A moment later my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I realized I was in the right place for doing exactly that.
Bulky stone shapes rose out of the ground around me, the nearest decorated with a basket bouquet of gladioli on the fresh-looking sod in front of it. A few feet away, an angel was frozen in the act of praying and farther on I could see a scrolled and curlicued fence, like iron lace.
I was in Maplesburg Cemetery. Correction: I was in Maplesburg Cemetery at night. Double correction: I was in Maplesburg Cemetery at night all alone. I’d been dumped here by Mikhail, either in retaliation for what I’d done to his shoes or because he figured that as a vamp I belonged here.
“The bastard!” My heart slamming away in my chest, I sat bolt upright and in the process knocked over the basket of glads. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and my heart stopped slamming—or to be more accurate, decided it might be a nifty idea to stop beating altogether. It started up again as I realized that the movement I’d seen belonged to a dog investigating some bushes by the fence. As I watched he cocked a hind leg and annointed them thoroughly.
“Hey, boy!” Normally I don’t feel the need to call strange dogs over to slobber on me, just as I don’t beckon strange men over at parties to grope me. But being in a cemetery, I discovered, uncovered in me a previously untapped kinship with all living creatures that was almost Zenlike. Besides, if a vamp showed up, maybe it would go for the mutt first.
“C’mon, Rover!” The dog didn’t look my way. I could hear it still whizzing on the bushes. “Buster?” I hazarded. “Rags? Spot?” Judging from the sound, the Niagara-sized stream it was arcing onto the greenery seemed to be coming to an end. I tried another tack. “Wanna Snausage, boy?”
I pretended to fumble in the pocket of my robe—lame, I know, but how tricky do you have to be to fool a dog?—and held it in front of me.
“I’ll pass, thanks.” Mikhail strolled from the direction of the bushes. He gave the fly of his jeans a precautionary tug. “Sorry about that,” he said without a trace of sorrow in his voice. “I thought you’d be out longer. Besides, when I’m in wolf form I observe wolf protocol, not human.”
He propped himself against a headstone and crossed his arms. Swiftly I stood, feeling anger coming off me like heat. “I could fucking end you! You better get me out of this place and back home right this minute or the next time you go into wolf mode I’m collecting a bounty on your mangy pelt! And if that was an example of canine protocol, I’ll take cats any day. What you just did on the bushes was totally gross!”
“And the hairball you hacked up on my shoes wasn’t?” he asked, his arms still dismissively crossed as he looked at me. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re staying here until dawn, and even then I wouldn’t bet good money on us both walking out of this graveyard alive. This is a demonstration, sweetheart.”
“News flash, comrade—I’m not your sweetheart, and since I don’t go for fleas and fur, I never will be.” I exhaled. “I’m leaving. I’d rather take my chances with any vamps or weirdos I might run into on the way home than stay here with you. And if I get there and find anything’s happened to my sisters…” I left my threat unfinished and turned to go.
“Nothing’s happened to them.” Mikhail’s words came from behind me but I didn’t stop walking. He continued, “They’re attending their first training session with your grandfather.”
I whirled to face him. “First training session? First training session for what?”
His gaze met mine. “For acquiring the skills they’ll need as Daughters of Lilith. Or the skills one of them will need,” he amended, “since only one of them is the true inheritor of the title. But learning a few vamp-killing maneuvers might save the non-inheritor’s life one day, so until Anton knows for sure whether this present generation’s Daughter of Lilith is Kat or Natashya, it won’t hurt that they both take instruction.”
“What about me?” I stared at him in disbelief. “What if I run into a vamp? What if Todd and Dean and Lance pop up again like they did this afternoon at the church—do I just expose my neck to them and say, drink up, fellas, this round’s on me?”
“They’d probably react the same way I reacted to your Snausage offer,” Mikhail informed me laconically. “If you’re as far advanced in the change as I think you are, as soon as they got a taste of you it would be thanks but no thanks. Vampyrs don’t drink from other vampyrs. And Lance and Todd and Dean are dead, anyway. What you and your sisters saw this afternoon was an illusion.”
I was so relieved that for the moment I let his Megan-the-Vamp jibe ride. I’d been more terrified than I’d admitted by the possibility that staking might not be a sure thing, I realized, frowning suddenly as the downside occurred to me. “By illusion you mean we’re crazy.”
“No, I mean someone powerful was fucking with your minds,” he said impatiently. “Anton thinks that someone was Zena.”
“The stripper at the Hot Box who specializes in lap dances?” I didn’t bother to hide my scepticism.
“Lap dances that end
with her sinking her fangs into her customers.” Mikhail shoved himself from his tombstone seat. “Think about it: she gets your fiancés in a lather and next thing you know, they’re heading for your house as full-blown vamps. Only an ancient and powerful undead could effect an instant result like that. Add in the interesting tidbits I found out today when I dropped in at the Hot Box and asked a few questions about the owner, like she’s never around in the daytime and she’s got fiery red hair, and I think it’s safe to say Zena the stripper is really the queen vamp who killed your parents.” He paused a beat. “And marked you.”
“According to your theory,” I shot back. “Look, about the garlic thing tonight, I—”
“You’re allergic,” he interrupted. “Yeah, I finally came to believe that while I was washing off my shoes in the ornamental fountain over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bushes. For the first time since I’d met him the previous night I sensed an infinitesimal softening in his attitude toward me. “But that doesn’t change anything. I don’t blame you for not wanting to accept what you are, especially since the change hasn’t come over you yet. I couldn’t accept the curse I carried, either. Right up until my sixteenth birthday I refused to believe that I wouldn’t live a normal life. Of course,” he added off-handedly, “the normal life I envisioned included being the starting pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers one day.”
“Gee, too bad no one tipped you off that they moved to LA back in the sixties,” I said acidly, dredging up what little baseball lore I’d absorbed from Popsie. “That might have softened the blow. Besides, Russians become hockey players, not pitchers.”
“The Bums left Brooklyn in fifty-seven, not in the sixties.” His eyes looked suddenly more golden. “And growing up a trolley-car stop away from Ebbets Field, I never even considered playing hockey.”
“Whatever,” I said irritably. “But my point is that there’s no proof of this mark you insist Zena put on me when I was a baby.” I held up a hand to forestall him. “No proof except for your super-duper vamp-sniffing-out talent—which, if you’ll forgive me for saying, I find just as unbelievable as the rest of your abilities. Unbelievable and creepy,” I muttered.
He looked taken aback. “What’s creepy about shape-shifting?”
I inhaled. “Look, this conversation isn’t about you, but if you must know, I keep wondering what happens with your bones when you undergo a shift, why your clothes seem to appear and disappear with your human form, how you performed that unpleasant mind thing you did with Tash and Kat and me—and don’t think I haven’t noticed that your biceps’s healed where I stabbed you. All creepy, especially the stretching and compressing bones part. But to get back to me and the possibility that you might stake me—if Darkheart was so frikkin’ convinced he had a tiny drooling Dracula on his hands all those years ago, why didn’t he do something about it then?”
“Like kill his own grandchild?” Mikhail stiffened.
I sighed. “God, could you people be more melodramatic? All these curses and hereditary burdens and flying into darkness—no, not kill his own granddaughter! But how about getting her ears pierced or something? I’ve seen baby pictures of us and I know it wasn’t easy to tell us apart, so why didn’t he take some precautions?” I scowled in sudden suspicion. “Wait a minute—if one of us was bitten as Grandfather seems to believe, there’d be a scar, right?” I planted my hands on my hips. “I don’t have one. Neither do Tash or Kat. Guess that means Zena was fucking with Grandfather’s mind all those years ago by making him think she’d gotten to one of us before Mom could stop her, no?”
“No.” His tone was once again hostile.
“And you’re so sure of that, because why, exactly?” I let sarcasm drip into my challenge.
“Because glamyr-wrought illusions are just that: illusions. They don’t show up on film and they don’t translate as reality when someone with my abilities helps a third party relive the scene, as I did with you and your sisters,” he said coldly. “Like I said last night, you should have stayed to watch the end. You would have seen the proof with your own eyes—one of Angelica’s babies with a pinprick of blood running from the puncture wound in her neck. It didn’t have to be large enough to scar, it just had to be enough to infect you. As for why Anton didn’t take precautions, my guess is that after what he’d been through he couldn’t face the truth, just as you can’t now.”
For a moment his battering-ram certainty rocked my defences. A hairline crack seemed to run through the very foundation of who I knew I was and what I could trust about myself…and through that crack, a dark fog began to seep.
I say seep, but that’s not the right word. It snaked, as if it were a living thing, a twisting, changing image of despair and destruction and damnation. A horrific series of pictures flashed in front of my mind’s eye. A man dressed in rich robes tossed the blood-drained body of a woman off a medieval parapet. A young girl who looked to be little more than a child screamed in rage and flew straight into the stone side of a Gothic-styled church, smashing herself to pieces before she turned to dust. A doctor in a Victorian alleyway slashed the throat of a prostitute, a twenties flapper downed a last slug of bootleg gin before stepping out of a window and impaling herself upon the wooden fence below, a couple at an outdoor rock concert that looked like Woodstock led a teenaged girl with drug-dazed eyes away from the rest of the crowd.
Then I saw myself moving determinedly through an unfamiliar darkened building with murder in my heart…and knew I was hunting for Kat and Tashya.
“No,” I whispered. “No!”
Chapter 6
Gasping, I severed the connections between my brain and the dark images. Had I experienced another episode of Mikhail’s unpleasant mind-control abilities? One look at his suspiciously narrowed expression told me he didn’t know what had just happened to me, which meant the pictures in my mind hadn’t come from him. Desperately needing to replace the lingering sensation of horror with something—anything—else, my mind snatched at fragments that had passed me by earlier.
“Ebbets Field? Trolley cars? 1957?” I barely cared what I was saying. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.” His gaze on me was too steady.
“In human years, not dog years!” My nerves, already frayed from the horrors I’d imagined—of course I’d imagined them, I told myself—couldn’t take much more. “How old?”
“Twenty-eight,” he repeated. For a second a shadow passed behind the molten gold of his gaze. “I’ve been twenty-eight for a while. I’ll be twenty-nine for a long time, too. It’s one of the…gifts that came with the shape-shifting.”
“Gifts?” I grimaced. “I could say more, but I think I’ll just let my earlier comment on creepiness stand. And you’re not Russian?”
“My parents were. I grew up here, but after I turned I went back to the old country to learn how to harness my abilities.” Again his gaze looked distant. “When your grandfather told me we had business here I thought I was coming home. I didn’t realize how much had changed. The world I knew doesn’t exist anymore.” Abruptly he shrugged. “But I was telling you how Anton couldn’t face the truth when you were marked. He still can’t. He hopes that somehow the infection didn’t take and you’ll make it to twenty-two without changing from human to vampyr.”
“Besides being able to legally drink in this state, what’s the big whoop about being twenty-one?” I demanded, feeling a little more in control of myself than I had a few minutes earlier.
“This is the year you’ll turn. Think of it as a long incubation period between being marked and having the infection rage through you. Some discredited legends imply that there’ve been a few vampire-marked victims who have escaped their fate, but even if the stories had any basis in fact, they don’t apply in your case. Like I said last night, as soon as I laid eyes on you my hackles rose. It’s just a matter of time before you—”
He stopped and I cut in. “It’s just a matter of time before I wonder why the hell
you hauled me out here to bore me with the old rising-hackles speech.” I gestured toward my shortie robe and the baby-doll pj’s beneath it. “I’m not dressed for graveyard-hopping, and even if I were it isn’t my favorite pastime—not that any of my past escorts have ever suggested it as a fun date. So if you don’t mind, I don’t think I’ll wait until dawn for your little demonstration, whatever it is.”
“You won’t have to.” While I’d been speaking he’d lifted his head. Now he took a deep inhalation of the night air.
I sighed. “So five minutes ago, Mike. You turn into a wolf, do some wolfey stuff, I freak out. Or at least, I would if we hadn’t already gone through—”
“They’re coming back earlier than I expected. Arm yourself!” Without warning, Mikhail strode to the deeper shadows by the row of plantings by the fountain. Even as I stared after him I saw his shape begin to change.
Does that sound as heart-stopping as it was? Probably not. I could spend hours trying to describe what I half saw in the moonlight—the way his broad shoulders began to melt into his body, the way his waist and hips suddenly narrowed, the frightening abruptness with which he fell to all fours and his gait changed from that of a man’s stride to an animal’s lope. No description could capture the absolute wrongness of what I was seeing. I knew he was a shape-shifter. I’d seen him before and after his changes. But actually witnessing Mikhail Vostoroff shifting from human to wolf that first time made me feel as if my insides had been scooped out like a pumpkin’s.
He was all wolf now, right down to his midnight-black, silver-tipped tail. Still loping away, he glanced over his shoulder, and his eyes, looking like two suns going super-nova at the same time, met mine.