by Harper Allen
“What just happened?” I demanded. “And don’t tell me nothing, because I know something did. What did you say in that weird language? Why did you point at me and Mikhail, and what about him going back to Russia? That’s still the plan, right?”
“Is not necessary now.” Darkheart’s tone was almost airy, for him. “I will let Mikhail explain to you. Other granddaughters and I must discuss tonight’s training.”
He turned to Tash and immediately began telling her why her throw had gone so wild. Kat lifted her eyebrows at me questioningly. “Go ahead with the play-by-play,” I told her. “I’ll handle this.” I turned to Mikhail. “Well?” I demanded.
He was putting his shirt back on. At my one-word query, he looked up. “Well, what?” he said curtly.
Frustration overwhelmed me. I took two strides toward him—not as much of a power move as it sounds, since I was still wearing my fluffy pink scuffs—and confronted him. “Look,” I snapped, pointing the knife for emphasis, “you owe me. A few minutes ago I saved your sorry ass from a really messy death. Even a jerk like you has to be grateful for that, so help me out here. What the hell was that incantation-sounding thing Darkheart was spouting?”
“An incantation.” Mikhail finished tucking in his shirt and made a move as if to follow Darkheart and my sisters toward the graveyard gates. He took two steps and then stopped, as if he found it physically impossible to take another.
I pressed my lips together. “Smart move. Because if you’d walked away from me, you’d have felt this knife slipping between your shoulder blades.”
He shook his head. “That’s not why I stopped. You can put the knife down. I can’t take off on you, and I can’t harm you. Your grandfather took care of that.”
“Darkheart,” I corrected him. “I’ve decided I’m perfectly content with having Popsie as my only grandfather. What do you mean, he took care of it?”
“He bound me to you,” Mikhail said in a leaden voice. “I’m your creature now, not his. I go where you go, take my orders from you, lay down my life for you if necessary.”
I stared at him. “You’re joking, right?” I took in the set expression on his face. “You’re not joking. Well, we’ll just have to make him reverse the incantation!”
Mikhail gave me a sour smile. “It doesn’t work that way. Even if I was at his throat trying to kill him because you’d ordered me to, he couldn’t undo the transfer. I’m your oboroten, your werewolf. You’re my mistress. Until one of us dies, we’re stuck in this relationship.”
“But that’s worse than marriage!” I saw a straw and grasped at it. “If Darkheart broke the bond, why can’t I?”
Relief passed over his face. “Of course, I didn’t even think of that solution. All you have to do is say the Aramaic incantation out loud and we’re free of each other. Okay, shoot.”
My heart sank further. “I don’t know the Aramaic incantation. And Darkheart’s not going to write it down for me, is he? Are you telling me we’re totally screwed?”
Mikhail met my bleak gaze with a bleaker one of his own. “Screwed, blued and tattooed. In other words,” he said bitterly, “the two of us are fucked.”
Chapter 8
“Watch your back, Meg!”
At Kat’s shouted warning I whirled around. The vamp flew through the air toward me, her fangs dripping blood and her clawlike fingers outstretched. I began to raise my stake, realized I was holding it too far down the shaft and propelled myself into a backwards flip that would take me out of harm’s way.
I’d forgotten the wall three feet behind me. I remembered it when I was looking at it upside-down halfway through my flip. “Shit,” I said just before I smashed into it.
“Vamps four, Meg zero,” Tash said in a bored voice from the sidelines as she reeled in the cardboard cutout of a vampire strung on one of the wires crisscrossing the living room. “And I’m not counting the one you staked in the butt, sis.”
“Is getting better,” Darkheart said as he helped me up. “No, truly,” he insisted at my incredulous look. “Did not knock yourself out this time, da? So in three days is big progress.”
“In three days is big joke,” I said, wincing as I picked up my fallen stake. “Kat, are you sure Detective Van Ryder meant it when he told you on the phone yesterday that we weren’t prime suspects anymore? ’Cause right now I wouldn’t mind taking a nice relaxing vacation in a cell.”
“That’s what the man said,” she replied, sinking into a forward lunge to warm up her leg muscles. “Now that Lance and Todd and Dean aren’t the only men who’ve gone missing in Maplesburg, we’re in the clear. His call was only a formality, anyway. Van Ryder admitted the same thing to Popsie the day after your nonwedding, when that men’s choir bus was found abandoned on the outskirts of town.” She held the lunge. “Since that was the clincher that persuaded Popsie it would be all right for him and Grammie to go on their cruise as long as Darkheart was here to watch over us, I’m afraid I’m not with you on that vacation-in-a-cell idea, sweetie.”
“You should be glad your grandparents are out of harm’s way,” Mikhail said. He was standing a few feet away, his arms folded across his chest and his eyes shooting daggers at me, but since he’d been wearing the same expression for the past three days, the menace factor was wearing off, although the irritation factor was growing by leaps and bounds. I’d asked, threatened and even begged Darkheart to teach me the words that would sever the bond that kept Mikhail by my side all day and outside my bedroom door at night, but he’d refused. This morning I’d finally come up with a plan to win my life back and I intended to put it into practice this afternoon.
For now all I could do was try to ignore Mikhail as he went on, “But all that matters to you is you, right? It wouldn’t occur to you that if your grandparents had stayed, Zena could kill the two of them just as easily as anyone else would run down a couple of rabbits and rip them to—” The flush that appeared on his cheekbones robbed his dark and brooding pose of some of its Wuthering Heights quality. “As easily as anyone else would swat a fly,” he finished unconvincingly.
I gave him a withering look. “Please. You’re salivating over running down bunnies and you’ve got the nerve to criticize me? For your information, I was completely down with the plan to get Grammie and Popsie out of Maplesburg while Zena’s gunning for us, although I have to say I’m not too impressed with her efforts. If she wants us so badly, why not come after us herself instead of sending our fiancés to do her dirty work for her?”
Darkheart nodded. “Is understandable you wonder this,” he said, slapping his palm on the balance beam beside him. I spared a thought for Grammie’s reaction if she could see the living room at this moment—all her precious antiques shoved into corners and shrouded with sheets to make room for the gymnastic equipment that had been delivered the day after she and Popsie had departed. Tash hoisted herself up onto the balance beam and went into a cautious handstand. Slowly she began to walk on her hands along the beam as Darkheart continued talking. “Would have been more simple to carry out attack herself. Instead she buys Warm Package—”
“Hot Box,” I corrected.
“Hot Box,” he went on, unperturbed, “sets herself up in town of Maplesburg, USA, and then arranges for foolish young men who are to marry granddaughters to come to her.”
“That part’s pretty far-fetched,” I disagreed. “Having Dean’s stag at the Hot Box was only a coincidence.”
“One thing you better learn fast is not to use coincidence and Zena in the same sentence,” Mikhail growled. “Trust me, somehow Zena arranged for your fiancés to be there that night.”
I flicked a glance at him. “Trust you? If I trusted you, I might wonder why my oboroten let me slam into a wall a moment ago instead of saving my ass like he’s supposed to.”
“I’m only compelled to save you from death or serious injury,” he answered. “Even that rule ceases to apply if—”
“Misha is right, is part of plan that fiancés meet
Zena,” Darkheart broke in. “Now turn around to face starting place again,” he said to Tashya, who’d reached the end of the beam and had been about to resume an upright position. She wobbled slightly and her upside-down face looked briefly mutinous, but she began her turn. He kept his eyes on her as he spoke. “But your question is why does Zena make big plan at all? Why not arrive in America from old country, go straight to granddaughters and kill them, and then return home with deed done?”
“I wasn’t dwelling on the kill-granddaughters part, but that’s the gist of it, yes,” I admitted.
“Talismans I send for you to wear around necks—talismans you discard,” he emphasized with heavy disapproval, “had power to keep her away for—nyet, Natashya! If must fall, throw weight forward as I have taught you!”
It was Tash’s turn to lie in a crumpled heap on the floor, I saw with sisterly callousness. She’d landed on the protective pads that had been strewn around for just such a contingency, so all that had been damaged was her ego. I waited for her to flounce off in a huff, but to my surprise she got to her feet.
“I’m okay.” She scrambled onto the beam again. “I can’t believe I blew it! I’m so going to whip this puppy this time.”
Kat had changed. Tash obviously had, too. I suddenly felt as if I were on the Titanic watching the last lifeboats pull away with everyone I cared about on them waving goodbye to me as I stood on the sinking deck.
“The brat’s determined, I’ll give her that.” Kat gave me a sideways glance as Tashya began hand-walking along the beam once more. “Remember when she was on the cheerleading squad and vowed she’d be better than the rest of the girls? And when she threw herself into salsa dancing a few years ago? Our little sister’s found a new obsession in this vamp-staking thing, no?”
I kept my eyes on Tash’s maneuvers and Darkheart’s approving expression as she made the tricky reverse. “I know what you’re trying to do, Kat,” I said evenly. “Quit it. I know I’m the odd woman out here, so don’t try to pretend nothing’s different between the three of us.”
“Feeling sorry for ourself, are we, sweetie?” she said in the honeyed drawl she hadn’t used for a few days. My angry gaze jerked toward her, but before I could speak she continued, her tone losing its sweetness and taking on a peppery sharpness. “Since you’re so hot on hearing the truth, here it is. You’re a klutz at this and I seriously doubt you could stake a tent-peg, let alone a vampire. But what really worries me is that one day soon we’re going to need your particular strength, and you’ll be so sunk in self-pity that you won’t be there for us.”
“My particular strength?” I gave a short laugh. “And what’s that?”
“Doing what you’ve always done—being the glue that holds the three of us together,” she replied. “Think about it, Megan. Who never lets the squabbling get too far out of hand? Who cuts Tash down to size when she’s being particularly Tash-ish, and who else would toss a perfectly good mickey of vodka out the window because she knew another drink was the last thing I needed? You’ve been holding us together for so long that I can’t remember a time I didn’t count on you for that. Without you we’d just be triplets—with you we’re sisters.”
She didn’t let my feigned inattention deter her. “We need to be sisters now more than ever, Meg,” she said with low vehemence. “Remember what I said that first night about the circle being closed? I still don’t know where those words came from, but I know we don’t have a chance in hell to get out of this situation alive if the three of us aren’t united. You asked why Zena didn’t just kill us herself. I asked Grandfather Darkheart that same question the day you drove Grammie and Popsie into the city to board their cruise ship, and you know what he told me?”
It was the first time in days that she and I had really talked. Emotion filled me, but perversely I kept it out of my voice. “Apparently I’m about to.”
Kat looked like she wanted to shake me. “The bitch is afraid of us,” she said flatly.
I was jolted out of my pose of indifference. “Oh, please! She’s the big evil and until a few days ago, all we’d ever gotten lethal with was a credit card. Why would Zena be afraid of us?”
“Because we’re Darkhearts. And Grandfather says Darkhearts have fought against her and her kind for centuries,” she said simply. “Some of us have been Daughters of Lilith, some have been trainers and keepers of knowledge, like he is, but we’ve always been the enemy.” Her expression shadowed. “Zena thought she’d won when she infected Angelica—she’d turned a Darkheart away from the light and made her one of hers. She never thought Grandfather would be able to kill his own daughter.”
“But he did,” I said slowly. “If I were an evil bitch like Zena, I think I might just take that as a personal defeat.”
“Believe it, sweetie.” Kat’s smile was more of a grimace. “In the normal course of things, once we’d been spirited out of the old country she would have left us alone. We were an ocean away, after all, and as babies we weren’t any threat. But Grandfather learned through his network of contacts that she’d sworn to wipe out every last Darkheart and put an end to us once and for all. That’s when he went into hiding…but the last thing he did before he let the world think he was dead was to have those necklaces made and sent to us.”
I couldn’t help thinking that Darkheart had certainly been a busy little hive of information with one of his granddaughters, at least. I raised my eyebrows. “Megan-denial-mode here, but how could some silver crosses on chains keep us safe for all those years? Who made them, Merlin?”
“They were made by a silversmith Grandfather knew,” she answered, her eyes on mine. “But their power came from what they were made of, according to Grandfather. You’re the brain, Meg. Don’t tell me you’ve never read about the Lost Grail.”
“The chalice used at the Last Supper,” I said impatiently. “It’s what the knights of the Round Table were supposed to be searching for, the silver cup that had been used by—” I stopped. “Shut up,” I said in weak defiance. “That’s where the silver in our crosses is supposed to have come from?”
“The man whose son Grandfather saved from vampires years ago swore that’s what it was when he gave him part of a broken silver handle that had been in his family for generations.” Kat raised her shoulders in a helpless gesture. “I honestly don’t know what to believe, but it’s no more far-fetched than having our fiancés turn into vampires, right?”
I was too stunned to respond for a minute. “So for over twenty years we were safe from Zena. Then the crosses’ power began to wane.”
“More like ours began to stir.” Again she shrugged. “Maybe you’ll understand Grandfather’s explanation better than Tash and I did. All I know is Zena no longer found it impossible to come after us, but she had no way of knowing whether she was up against three normal American girls who still knew nothing about their heritage, or—”
“Or two normal girls and one vamp-killing Daughter of Lilith. So she sent Lance and Todd and Dean, just in case.” I looked at her. “You know you’re the one, don’t you, Kat? You’re the Daughter in this generation.”
She shook her head. “I think it’s Tash. I said she had determination, but more importantly, she’s got heart.”
I followed her glance. Both Mikhail and Darkheart were spotting Tash, but it was obvious she didn’t need them. During the minutes we’d been talking, she’d not only mastered the move she’d been practising but had added a few individual flourishes of her own. I winced in anticipation as she ran along the beam on her hands and propelled herself upwards. With the insouciance of a top-gun fighter pilot throwing his jet into a daredevil maneuver, she tucked her head to her chest and clasped her knees to her body as she spun through the air. As she started to descend, she snapped out of her curled-up position and landed on her feet in a crouch, facing the way she’d come.
“She’s got heart,” I agreed as Tash took a quick breath and immediately began the move all over again. “But my money’s still o
n you.” The phrase was an unpleasant echo of Mikhail’s earlier words to me, and from the flash of anger in my sister’s eyes, I knew she recognized where I’d unconsciously borrowed it from.
“Merde, sweetie, I hope you’re not still hung up on what our unfriendly local shape-shifter predicted.” Mikhail’s back was toward us but as if his senses had alerted him, he swung his gaze suddenly around to meet ours. Kat smiled sweetly at him, raised the middle finger of her right hand, and turned back to me. “Think he got the message?” she said with a wicked smile.
“Five by five.” My amusement faded. “But you watched the flashback right to the end, so you saw what I missed—the part where one of Angelica’s babies got bitten. I’m finding it hard not to get hung up on that detail, especially when said unfriendly local shape-shifter seems so certain I was that baby.”
She looked exasperated. “As Grandfather’s explained, the old stories say that one mark isn’t enough to infect. Anyway, for all we know, Tash or I was the one who got bitten. What you and Grandfather haven’t figured out is that Mikhail’s reaction to you hasn’t got a thing to do with his anti-vamp radar, it’s got to do with him having the hots for my big sister.” Without looking away from me she added, “This is a private conversation, Cujo, so turn off your canine hearing.”
Startled, I glanced at Mikhail. He was still in position by the balance beam, but his seething glance at Kat and me was a dead giveaway—he had heard everything we’d said. For about the seventieth time in as many hours I mentally cursed Darkheart for his misguided efforts to protect me. “Don’t even go there,” I told Kat shortly. “He hates me because he thinks I could turn vamp any day now. I hate him because he’s an asshole. Our relationship may be totally dysfunctional, but at least we both know where we stand.”
She gave me the exact look she’d given me fifteen years ago when I’d told her how much I despised Alan Arksey for putting a frog in my book bag, but she didn’t argue. “Whatever you say, Meg, so long as you accept the rest of our heart-to-heart.”