Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  ‘Sensitive, much?’ Blaise said. ‘Come on. It’s bloody freezing and I don’t want to get charged extra for parking my car in a short stay zone.’

  She led us through the maze of taxis, to her rundown silver Range Rover. Emerson hopped into the back with me – much to Blaise’s disappointment and Charlotte’s annoyance.

  Over the course of the drive, it became clear that not all witches were insane like Circe had appeared to be. Besides her obscene flirting with Emerson, she was relatively normal. I didn’t know how much Blaise knew about why we were on the run, but as the Order had okayed her being our personal bodyguard in the lamia version of Witness Protection, I figured it was pretty much all of it.

  Eventually, after rounding another insanely tight road with hedges on either side concealing the fields, the car approached an old cottage. It looked like something from a storybook. Old shingles on the roof with moss covering most tiles that weren’t already piled with snow; black Tudor beams contrasted against the white painted stone; Christmas lights framing the leaded windows and a Christmas tree, lit up, the bay window on the ground floor.

  ‘Looks… cute,’ I said. What I wanted to say was that it looked like a charming version of some Hallmark Christmas set. I wasn’t sure Blaise would appreciate it, though.

  Apparently, Charlotte didn’t give a shit what Blaise appreciated or not. ‘It’s haunted and we’re probably all going to die,’ Charlotte said.

  I couldn’t tell if she was using my version of sarcastic/dark humour. It was impossible because she had such an expressionless face when she was around me and Emerson.

  ‘Is it really?’ I asked. I knew the Death part was inevitable as Emerson had no faith in the Order being able to catch the Mors Exercitus, and I also knew for a fact that if Death didn’t visit me at least once a month, then it wasn’t really life at all.

  Blaise laughed. ‘She believes in ghosts?’

  ‘Said the witch to the vampire,’ I muttered under my breath.

  Blaise parked up on the spot just beside the garage (that, too, had fairy lights bordering the edges). My foot sunk into a couple inches of snow as I exited the car. Emerson grabbed my hand as we made our way to the front door (yes, it had a wreath). I wasn’t sure whether it was to make sure I didn’t slip, or simply because he wanted to hold my hand. I let it happen either way as he’d put on gloves to protect himself from my rings.

  Blaise led us into the house. It was like a Christmas store had exploded – in the cosiest and most English way possible. Tinsel was wrapped around the wooden staircase bannister, Christmas lights were everywhere, warm patchwork blankets were thrown over the arms of ancient looking plush armchairs and a literal log fire took centre stage of the living room. And, yep, there were stockings hung from the mantel.

  ‘You celebrate Christmas?’ I asked, slightly in awe, taking in more decorations. The nutcracker soldiers either side of the fire; felt mice dressed in pantomime outfits; baubles from around the world hanging from the three different trees.

  ‘Why? Because I look foreign?’ Blaise asked. She kicked her boots against the frame of the front door, knocking snow onto the welcome mat. ‘My family haven’t come from Indian since the Victorians and my dad’s white.’

  Okay, so she pulled the racist card quickly. Guessing that was a touchy subject here.

  ‘I, urgh, meant because you’re a witch. I thought you’d celebrate the solstice.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Blaise remained quiet. Emerson pretended to hide his laugh with a cough. Charlotte’s face remained as impassive as ever.

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’ Blaise eventually said, she’d unwrapped her scarf and put her coat on one of the pegs by the door.

  ‘Yeah, what you got?’ I asked. I took off my own coat only when Emerson and Charlotte shed themselves of theirs.

  ‘Stuff,’ Blaise said, disappearing into the kitchen down the hallway. Okay, so this might be a long hideout.

  Emerson and I ended up sharing a bedroom. As he didn’t sleep, I didn’t really class it as “sharing”, but it was where he decided to dump the clothes Blaise had picked out for him. There were only two bedrooms in the house. I had a feeling Charlotte would rather store her clothes in the attic than share with Blaise.

  ‘Tell me you’re not going to be a creep and watch me sleep?’ I asked as I climbed into bed.

  Emerson laughed. ‘Oh, I sneak into your room every night just to stare at you. It’s my favourite past time.’

  ‘You do not,’ I said, but part of me was a little worried.

  His laughter turned into a full-on belly laugh that had his shoulders moving up and down. ‘No, god no. As much as you give me less grief when you’re unconscious, it’s boring as hell to watch someone sleep for more than five seconds. I’m going to go read or beg Blaise to buy us some video games.’

  ‘I don’t even think this cottage has internet,’ I said – the wiring alone for the bedroom lights was faulty.

  I was pissed off Charlotte had mentioned ghosts because I was starting to wonder, even if Blaise had mocked me, whether this place was haunted.

  ‘Go to sleep, Liv,’ Emerson said, shaking his head. ‘I promise not to creepily watch you.’

  ‘If I wake up and your face is in front of mine, I’m putting silver powder in your shampoo.’

  ‘Duly noted,’ Emerson said. ‘Kiss goodnight?’ he asked cheekily.

  I flipped him off instead. His laughter, as he switched off the light and left the bedroom, was the last thing I heard before I fell asleep.

  I woke up to a pair of doe eyes staring milometers from my face. I automatically punched outwards to protect myself.

  Charlotte’s nose made contact with my closed fist and popped. Blood tickled down and she wiped it away with the back of her hand.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that she’s violent from the second she wakes up,’ Charlotte said.

  Emerson tried to hide a smile. ‘I told you I didn’t want to wake her.’

  ‘I thought you meant that like you didn’t want to, not that it was a bad idea in general.’

  ‘She doesn’t like vampires looming over her as she sleeps.’

  I rubbed my eyes. It was still dark, the only light coming from the open doorway to my bedroom. ‘What are you doing here?’ I looked to the small wooden clock on the dresser opposite my bed. ‘It’s four in the morning.’

  ‘You have slept for a whole day,’ Charlotte said. ‘Try not to sound so put out.’ I’d never realised jetlag was that much of a thing, but clearly I’d been behind on rest.

  Charlotte and Emerson had changed their outfits. Both were in knitted Christmas jumpers, comfortable jeans and brown boots. They looked like models straight out of a magazine. I really hoped Blaise hadn’t picked me out the same cheery jumpers. Wool made me itch.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep,’ Emerson said. ‘You sounded distressed.’

  ‘I told him it was likely a vision. You’re wearing your mom’s ring,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘But he wanted to wake you. What did you see?’

  Like most of the visions I’d had, the faces and facts had begun to fade as soon as I awoke. But it was because I’d already known most of the details of the dream I’d had last night, that the new information easily came to me.

  It began with the man in the little brown house: my dad.

  ‘My dad,’ I began. ‘It was about him this time.’ Seeing his face after all these years – and not mere moments before he met Death – was something I would forever be grateful to magic for.

  ‘When my mom was pregnant with me, my dad started to have dreams about Emerson.’

  ‘Me?’ Emerson asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah, the same ones I got about you before the war with Charlotte’s coven. He thought they were anxiety dreams and started going to therapy because of it.’

  ‘Anxiety dreams?’ Charlotte said, screwing her face up at a human’s attempt to explain the mystic.

  ‘He was about to propose to my
mom, and I was on the way,’ I said, defending my dad. It would have been a stressful time for him.

  Before dad had given mom the ring, he’d worn it around his neck. It was a family heirloom that had been passed down over the last two centuries from the eldest member of our family, to the youngest when they died. My dad had inherited it when his mom had died in the Mayaguez incident.

  Charlotte had said that the next dream I had would be the most interesting because it would include a timeline where I was born, but the strangest thing was that though this was the dream which was most recent to today, it had spanned centuries in knowledge.

  It was harder than I thought trying to explain in speech what I usually was able to scribble half-awake, but I tried. It required making it more into a straight narrative than what I’d experienced in my vision – which had been the flashing between my dad in the therapist’s chair, sleeping next to my mom, and then the distant past when the ring first came into our family.

  ‘But it was more about the ring itself than just my dad,’ I started. ‘The stone is spelled with retrocognitive magic. By accident, a witch stumbled upon one of my ancestors and felt the same odd energy I have: Susanna’s spell working on us to suppress the immunity we should be born with.

  ‘The chance encounter led to the witch reading my ancestor’s fate line. If anyone in our line was to die prematurely, from something other than disease or old age, and successfully be brought back, we would complete the conditions of the spell. After that, if that person was then to be bitten by a vampire, they’d be able to turn.’

  ‘You met those conditions,’ Charlotte said. ‘Only were bitten before your death. Perhaps that’s why you began to show signs of turning into a vampire, but couldn’t turn fully, as the venom still within you was weakened from it being so long ago since you were bitten.’

  I wasn’t given any answers as to what was happening with me now in my dream, only what had led to me being in this position in the first place.

  ‘The witch gave my ancestor the spelled ring so that, should one day one of their descendants meet those conditions, they would know what was happening to them and why.’

  ‘Like a Finder, just in heirloom form,’ Emerson said; essentially his job with Gi was what the ring had been intended for me.

  ‘But the ring for our family took on more than just a warning of the original spell once Charlotte’s coven tried to find a way to give you your choice back,’ I told Emerson. ‘Charlotte’s spell went back to the moment your choice was taken from you, and since it was so intrinsically linked to Gabriel and Susanna’s fate, the spells intermingled within Susanna’s bloodline.’

  ‘Intrinsically linked?’ Emerson asked.

  ‘You lost your choice for the same reason that Gabriel and Susanna lost their lives.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The ring not only had to warn us about what might happen should we die and be bit by a vampire, but also then that there was another spell working on us: a way for us to change you back to a witch.’

  ‘How?’ Charlotte demanded.

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘The ring is supposed to warn us about the existence of the spells. It doesn’t say how to complete them. If anything, it tells us how not to complete them: don’t die.’

  ‘Perhaps Grayson was right, then?’ Charlotte said cocking her head. ‘In killing you Emerson might change into a witch.’

  Emerson stepped between the bed and Charlotte, blocking me off entirely. ‘Might. And we have no idea of that for sure. You’re not killing Liv.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was going to kill Liv,’ Charlotte said, tucking her hair behind her ear. ‘It was merely a suggestion of how the spell might be completed.’

  ‘Was there anything more to your dream?’ Emerson asked me.

  I went back to the vision. The rest of my dream had followed the same narrative I’d dreamt of every night for the past twelve years. The little brown house. My parents and me on the inside, and the Mors Exercitus waiting outside. But instead of a horror story as my dreams had always been before, the visions the ring had given me transformed the tale I’d known since I was five into a romance. One of a cursed boy, a girl with a spell on her, the witches who bound them together and the vampires who ensured they met.

  Right before my dad proposed to my mom (his plan was to wait until the moment I was born), he was sent one last vision from the ring. Somewhere on the other side of the world, a coven was casting a spell that would try and complete the one which Charlotte had begun on Emerson before she had turned.

  The coven wanted to ensure that fate intervened and completed the spell within their lifetime, for when the original coven had created the spell, they had summoned Death. Since the conception of the spell, every member and surviving descendent of the coven had been cursed to die a horrific way. Only when the spell’s objective was fulfilled would they be free from the curse.

  So, the coven conjured the threads of fate and pulled them tight together, removing the slack, and forcing the two ends to meet. They did not know how fate would work, only that by doing so they had sped up the timeline for the completion of the spell that was their salvation. This was the spell which bound me to Emerson, the tug on the other end of the line I had felt ever since I came to Seattle.

  My dad had dismissed everything he saw as mere fantasy. But I could see what he, and the coven, could not. By tightening the lines of fate, they brought the Mors Exercitus back into the Morgan bloodline. After Susanna, our family had never been able to see through a vampire’s glamour, and any spell cast would work on us like any ordinary human. As we were not immune, we had not become a target. But fate required me to be able to recognise the boy I would help live once more, and so gave me the gift of sight back.

  Fate continued to spin its shortened thread, and put my family in the path of the Mors Exercitus. It took all of one look for them to see me and go into a rage, for I looked identical to Susanna: the immune vermin who had poisoned Gabriel’s mind. How had this branch of hunters escaped when they had been sure they had wiped every last one from that town? What hidden bastard had continued the line?

  And so, the Mors did what they were created to do. They killed the man, woman and their child. Brutally, without pause or planning as they would do for any other immune case. They could not risk this family slipping through their fingers once more and endangering other innocent lamia.

  But the girl did not die; fate was not yet finished with her. When the Mors left, the girl awoke. The venom in their bite had not changed her (she was still immune from transformation until her second death), but kept her alive. Alive enough to walk away from the bodies of her parents in search of the other end to the string tied around her heart by fate, and the meddling of three covens.

  For Emerson, his love story, if indeed he ever did love me, began the moment he met me that day in the science classroom. For me, it had begun that night, with the flashing of red lights, a double homicide and a healing bite wound on my neck.

  As I looked at him now, waiting for my answer, there was no doubt in my mind. Recalling the dream and the moment which started me down the path that led to him, confirmed it for me. I knew for certain that I loved Emerson Lark. That same feeling I had been searching for the night I’d lost my parents, I had been searching for my whole life. Every house I moved to, every district and high school I changed, I was always looking for something more, never quite knowing where my future would lead, but always knowing I wasn’t where I needed to be.

  I wasn’t scared anymore to admit how I felt. I didn’t need to deny the crush I had on him – or that it had been much more than a crush for a long time now – because for once, my love didn’t mean the end to someone. For Emerson, I was fated to find him to save him. To protect him. A purpose that didn’t mean Death, but life. I didn’t have to hold back how I felt out of anxiety over what awful thing might befall him because I cared for him. I didn’t need to fear commitment or labels or run away to prote
ct him. I couldn’t run from him because he was my future. He had been my future before I had ever been born. And I didn’t want to run. For once, my selfish wants didn’t have to be denied because it wasn’t selfish to want him, to stay with him and enjoy his company.

  ‘Liv?’ Emerson asked me.

  The revelation of how I felt flitted all other remnants of the dream from my mind.

  ‘I, urm, can’t remember,’ I said.

  My eyes roamed over each facet of his beautiful face. The bond sang like it always did when it told me to go to him, to move closer. But it wasn’t the glamour or the spell that made me want him. I knew my own mind. Despite every effort I’d made to ensure I wouldn’t, Emerson had managed to get me to fall for him. Just like I could see when a glamour was working against me, attempting to change my mind, I knew there was nothing in this spell that influenced my feelings. That was all me. I loved Emerson wholly for who he was.

  He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter, love,’ he said. ‘We can get you a notebook if you want to keep trying to understand them. At least now you know what the visions mean and how the spells are connected to you,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He chuckled, thinking my dazed responses were due to lack of sleep rather than the internal admission of my feelings.

  ‘We’ll let you get back to sleep, come on,’ he said, grabbing Charlotte’s hand and tugging her away from the room.

  ‘Wait-’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Urm, why’d you want to wake me?’ I said, chickening out of admitting how I felt.

  ‘You sounded… upset,’ Emerson said, sheepishly. ‘I didn’t want you to have to go through- I just didn’t like hearing you suffering.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Good night/morning, love,’ Emerson said with a wink, shutting the door on me.

  I slammed my head against the pillows, muffling a sigh I’d know he’d hear if I didn’t.

  I loved a vampire I was fated to find – right when we were on the run together from a threat that would no doubt end our lives. I had so much to worry about and yet I’d turned into that typical teenage girl cliché from YA books I’d always mocked.