Death Eater Complete Collection

by Catherine Stovall

  Cool air from the lobby hit Vega full force, causing chill bumps to trail up her arms as she entered the building. Out of place amongst the well-dressed people and soft gray atmosphere, she ignored the strange glances and moved toward the front desk.

  The receptionist looked over her horned-rim glasses with disdain. “Can I help you?” The bored and unpleasant tone implied she’d rather Vega go away.

  “Um…I have a meeting with Mrs. Drehmel.” Vega looked around, hoping the office would be close by. The need to escape the hard, brown eyes of the woman in front of her made her skin crawl.

  The receptionist turned her head toward the computer screen, and held up a finger, displaying one perfectly manicured nail. After a few quick key strokes, she glanced back up, face instantly changing to a more pleasant demeanor.

  “Ms. Schwartz, of course. Please take the elevator and go up to the second floor.” The woman’s false smile spread wider as she added, “Have a great day.”

  Vega shook her head in disgust, flipped up her middle finger up at Ms-I-Work-For-A-Big-Shot-Lawyer, and strode away. Thankfully, the elevator was empty as she stepped inside, and the short trip to the second floor only made her slightly woozy. She hated elevators. In fact, she hated small places all together.

  The chrome doors sprang open, carrying her distorted reflection into the slots at the side, and Vega stared directly into a large office. Behind a curved counter that wrapped around the front, a pretty brunette smiled, patiently awaiting her arrival.

  Vega moved through the waiting area filled with comfortable looking leather chairs already half-full of people, and stood at the counter. In a hushed tone, she informed the woman, “I’m Vega Schwartz. Here to see Ms. Drehmel.”

  “Good Morning, Ms. Schwartz. I’m Elizabeth Lance, we spoke on the phone.” The woman beamed as she stood from her chair and straightened her very businesslike pinstriped dress. “If you will follow me, please.”

  Vega nodded, suspicion cocked like a loaded gun after dealing with the unpleasant secretary in the lobby. Without comment, she followed the woman to the right, and they paused at an opaque glass door with gold lettering that read, ‘LINNA DREHMEL, ATTORNEY AT LAW.’

  With a quick wrap of her knuckles on the glass, Elizabeth, opened the door. “Ms. Drehmel, Ms. Schwartz is here to see you.”

  A cold feminine voice answered, “Thank you, Elizabeth. Please, show her in.”

  The door opened wider, and the lawyer stood up from behind her desk. Unlike the other women she’d spoken to, Ms. Drehmel did not offer Vega a smile. Instead, her schooled features reflected a certain sincerity. Severely blonde capped the woman’s head, pulled back into a neat ponytail at the base of her neck, and her large, dark blue eyes glistened behind wire frame glasses.

  Something about the woman made Vega instantly like and trusted her. A rarity indeed.

  “Thank you for coming, Vega… May I call you Vega? Or would you prefer Ms. Schwartz?”

  Vega nodded as she cautiously approached, sitting in one of the large high-back chairs the lawyer gestured to. “Vega is fine.”

  “Very good, and you can call me Linna.” She slid into her own seat and waved her hand. “I’m not all fussy about titles and nonsense. I share secrets with my clients they’ve never told another living soul, so it seems a bit ridiculous to be so formal.

  “Anyway, I’m glad you could make it down. We’ve been trying to reach you since your aunt passed away earlier this week. My sincere condolences.”

  “Excuse me, but there’s been some kind of mistake. The woman who passed away—” Vega paused, taking a deep breath “—was my mother, not my aunt.”

  For a moment, Linna looked deeply perplexed, lines of concentration forming between her brows. As she skimmed the file on her desk, she tapped her foot as if not being fully prepared made her impatient.

  “You are Ms. Vega Lee Schwartz, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Your mother’s maiden name was Andrea L. Staum and your father, Wayne M. Carrey, correct?” She spoke with self-assurance. “Both were killed in a car accident when you were two, leaving you in the sole custody of your father’s sister, Diana Kay Schwarz, until her death this week?”

  “N-no, ma’am,” Vega stuttered. Though something in the words felt right, she couldn’t lie. “Those names mean nothing to me, other than Diana. She was my mother.”

  “Vega. Oh, I’m so sorry. I hate that you must find out this way.” The woman slid a birth certificate from the file and handed it across the desk.

  Vega took the paper with trembling fingers and read the information in black and white. The names were there, the date was correct, and even the hospital where she had been born was listed.

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  Next, Linna handed over a will. Though the legal wording jumbled in her mind, unreadable because the confusion crowded everything out, Vega struggled to make sense. By the time she finished scanning the pages, she realized that Andrea and Wayne had left the document, decreeing Vega should be adopted by her Aunt Diana should both parents pass away.

  Tears dripped down her cheeks as she laid the will aside and turned her gaze to the lawyer quietly watching her from the other side of the desk.

  “I-I… This can’t be true,” Vega mumbled.

  Without speaking, Linna handed her the final blow that would send Vega’s world crumbling into ashes. The newspaper article felt fragile in her shaking hands, and the grainy black-and-white photo blurred as she tried to decode it through a flood of tears.

  Minutes passed before Vega could understand she was looking at the twisted metal remnants of the car her parents had been driving the night they died.

  ****

  “I had a mother and father who loved me, a nice house in the suburbs, and a life.” Vega spoke the truth aloud to an empty house, but they didn’t make her feel any better.

  The box lay open on the wooden coffee table, the contents of a secret life staring up at her. Pictures of her as a baby showed her beautiful raven-haired mother and fair-haired father holding a baby in their arms.

  “That’s me,” she whispered as her fingers hovered above the strange faces. Smiles and happiness seemed abundant in every old snapshot.

  “They loved me, they wanted me, but they died. All these years, I never knew.”

  Her anger spiked. Diana could have told her. Someone could have said something. She could’ve known all this time about the family who had loved their child. That nugget of information may have made dealing with her horrible life so different.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have killed them in the end had they told her she’d had a mother and father who hadn’t been monsters.

  Vega couldn’t bring herself to touch more of the photos, papers, and trinkets. Her hands felt dirty with the blood of her victims. Diana’s face drifted through her mind as she held a few snapshots that had fallen from the box.

  “Strange to think of that woman as my aunt, not my mother. Not at all.”

  Memories of how Diana had treated her so poorly lifted some of Vega’s guilt.

  “Not my mother lying dead on the carpet. Not my mother’s boyfriend dead at my feet. Related, yes, but not my mother. My mother had loved me. My mother had not deserved to die.”

  To learn her entire life had been a horrible lie came as no surprise. She’d always suspected something between her and Diana had not been right. However, she had never guessed it would be something so drastic.

  With gentle fingers, Vega sorted the pictures to one of Andrea and Diana. The two women stood next to a Christmas tree with big smiles on their faces as they held up matching pajamas. Though, Andrea’s pregnant belly looked enormous, it was easy to tell the woman had been small framed. Little resemblance could be seen between her and Diana, but Vega felt as if she were looking at a picture of herself as she stared at her biological mother’s face.

  And, even though she hated to admit it, Vega could see how pretty Diana had been before drugs,
booze, and bad living had stripped her youth away. At some time, the woman must have been different than the monster Vega had known. Why else would have Andrea and Wayne given her their child.

  What happened then didn’t really matter though. Even knowing she’d been right all those years about how her aunt hadn’t treated her as a mother should treat a child didn’t amount to anything now. So, Vega wasn’t Diana’s daughter, there still wasn’t some fairytale home for her to go back to.

  “Money? Yes, there is plenty of that.” Vega’s parents had left her a substantial sum, one her aunt hadn’t been unable to touch once she’d blown the monthly allowances stipulated in the will.

  The papers explained the trust fund she now controlled and all it entailed, but Vega could only think of the past. Of the long, cold nights spent with her belly aching from hunger.

  Drugs. That’s what those allowances went to. Diana smoked them all up. At least the bitch bought the Volkswagen, and now, it’s mine.

  Tears stung Vega’s eyes as she stared at her real parents’ beautiful faces as they stood together on their wedding day.

  “I lost them both in the same breath I discovered them. Cruel and twisted fate.”

  Hours passed, and day turned to night. Vega didn’t move. Silent and numb, she examined the remnants of her secret past. Hunger or thirst did not plague her because she desired nothing. Instead, her thoughts turned jagged and sharp—a box full of broken glass inside her skull. Each new wonderful revelation brought about another horror. Each problem solved by her large inheritance and the discovery of her true heritage was countered by guilt and fear.

  Finally, Vega sat forward, her tongue snaking across dry lips. With nothing left to do but go through their belongings, she took a deep breath to steel herself against what she might find. She couldn’t put off facing her past any more than she could have put off facing her future. She had to know these things about herself. Things the simple and seemingly innocent box held.

  Piece by piece, she pulled out and studied the accumulation of her parents’ short lives. She looked over stacks of photos from Andrea and Wayne’s time as high-school sweethearts until the time of their deaths, a pile of love letters tied together with a ribbon, marriage, birth, and death certificates, her adoption records, trinkets, and tidbits. It might all seem mundane to someone else, but every tiny scrap of paper meant the world to Vega.

  With her birth certificate in her hand, she read the dates again and again. After the fifth time, the horror of what she saw sunk in. Her birthday was the next day. She’d spent nineteen years watching the world fall apart around her—kept in the dark and wishing for something more. How quickly it had all changed. She had wanted a family, and now, all she had was corpses.

  At last, she came to the bottom of the small chest. There, in a black ring box, were her parents’ wedding rings. Carefully examining the smaller of the two, she sighed.

  “How could two people’s lives be reduced to such a small amount of things?” she wondered aloud as she held the ring up between thumb and forefinger.

  The simple band of silver with rose buds engraved around it glinted in the light, despite the slight hint of tarnish on its surface. At first, Vega almost closed the box and put it away. Though it had been her mother’s, she didn’t care for roses. In fact, they made her uneasy for some reason.

  However, she decided without deciding at all, to slip the ring onto her finger as a reminder she had been loved after all.

  ****

  The ring. Zane fought to conceal his excitement. The ring had found its way to her, and the final piece to the puzzle fell into place.

  He’d found it a lifetime ago while wandering the streets of the city where she’d died. Like a beacon, the simple band had called out to him. At first, he hadn’t understood how it could be the one thing that could save them, especially since Vega hated roses.

  Few things stayed the same as she moved from one life to the next. But, somehow, her distaste for the flower had always remained. Even she didn’t understand it, he knew the reason why.

  In their first lifetime together, after the battle and Eurynome’s curse, Vega had been buried in a garden of roses. She and Zane had been laid to rest in a mausoleum surrounded by a thousand different blooms in the summer. The sweetness of their smell in the unwavering heat often grew so strong that it became a stench poisoning the air.

  She would hate the ring without knowing that reasoning, but to Zane, the simple rosebuds etched into the silver had symbolized everything she was. Vega had become an undying blossom caught in a circle of eternity and bound to repeat her tragic destiny.

  When he’d first touched its cool surface with his fingers, he had felt something shift. The monster inside of him had gone silent, its pleas to taste the dying breath of every living thing no more than a whisper in the void.

  In place of the death eater’s constant demands, another voice had risen. One Zane had not heard in so long, he’d nearly forgotten the sound.

  On that long-ago day, a man had appeared before Zane. Dressed in a priest’s robes from a time long since passed, he’d offered hope.

  “Zane, my son, this is the only gift I can give you. It will be your penance and your reward. When next your beloved falters and you meet again, place this ring on her finger before she fades and you return to Eurynome’s hell.

  “As you travel the winds of time, so will this ring. It will find its way back to Vega, and she will find her way back to you. Then, when the time of death nears in her next life and breathes its coldness into her lungs, you must place the band over her heart. Not on her finger. Remember, it must be laid over her heart.

  “Once it is in position, you must speak this vow. Eternity bound, and eternity released. A soul for a soul in the eyes of the Almighty.

  “If you do as I say, the power of the ring will draw the curse outward, but not without a price. Though it will undo what Vega did to save you from death, it will solidify the demon inside you. What once was a parasite will become a part of the man.”

  Zane had understood the old village priest was not some vision produced by Eurynome. He’d witnessed a saintly man’s attempt to interject and stop the curse. How the old man had come to learn of their true demise or how he had breached the void decades later, Zane didn’t know. None of it mattered anymore.

  He’d given Vega the ring in his last lifetime and had told her to find it once again. As the priest had promised, it had found a way back to her in this new lifetime, riding on the ebb and flow of fate’s tide. Now she had it in her possession, Vega would soon succumb to death’s call, and Zane had to be there to save her when she did.

  Chapter Five

  Vega ran away, but the mob followed close behind. Her bare feet smacked against the mud and bled from the sharp stones as she fled toward the forest. Panic filled her as strange voices called out in a language she did not know but could clearly understand.

  “Witch!” The word echoed through the night, so much like the eerie light of the torches.

  “Get her!” the people demanded of one and another, egging the mob onward.

  “Burn the witch!” Even the women she had once been friends with took up the cry.

  Vega stumbled and fell, briars tearing at the tender flesh of her face and tangling in her long red hair. Rough hands mauled her, tearing her dampened dress and bruising her arms. Hauled upright, she cried and pleaded her innocence.

  “No mortal can make the hogs speak or cause her neighbors to dance in their sleep. I’ve done none of these things. I am innocent,” she pleaded.

  The crowd only jeered and threw stones that cut her face and arms as strong men held her limbs immobile. Only when he approached did the madness calm.

  From deep within the fold of crazed and dirty faces, he appeared. The black habit and wide brimmed hat he wore made him resemble a servant of the devil instead of a man of God. White hair billowed in the breeze and fell to run long down his back, collecting the rays of the full moon
in its pale strands.

  Though a black cloth to prevent the spread of disease covered his face, Vega knew it was him. The man from her nightmares had returned. She had no doubt.

  “Vega Elleroy, you are hereby charged with the act of witchcraft.”

  Vega couldn’t protest or even attempt to save herself. The woman she had become in the dream was innocent, but a deep melancholy silenced her voice.

  Even in that, the people found proof of their claims. Whispers fell from their liar’s lips as she passed, declaring the devil was giving her the strength to hold her tongue in the face of sure damnation.

  The men dragged Vega to a dirty cell beneath the church—a place no accused person had ever left alive unless it was to be dragged to the gallows. Many days passed until she finally broke her silence.

  The man and his cohorts stripped away her clothes to check for the mark of Satan, shaved off her curling auburn locks, put hot irons to her feet until the skin melted and burned crisp, stretched her body on the wheel, and beat her without restraint or mercy.

  Vega screamed in agony, sounding like a wild beast caught in the hunter’s steel trap, and the Inquisitor laughed as he read the words of the bible over her broken body.

  At last, after days and nights of such tortures, Vega’s dream self broke. She confessed to the dozens of false charges brought against her. And though she begged for forgiveness and for compassion, none was given.

  On the next dawn, the men led her to a pyre built at the center of town. With a heavy candle of penance clutched in her broken hands, she shuffled up the long dirt path on damaged feet. Pain enveloped her body, but Vega held her green eyes open wide and forced herself not to cry. She would not give the blood hungry crowds what they wanted. They could watch her flesh and blood sizzle, but they would never see her tears.