A Little Bit Vampy

by A. A. Albright

  Jared grasped my hand, grinning at me. ‘She did. And she was amazing.’

  Melissa wiggled her eyebrows. ‘Was she now? Well, maybe she could use some of that same amazingness to sing at this magic and get us inside.’

  ‘I don’t think I can, unfortunately. Even my grandmother can’t do anything about this magic. Melissa, we think that Vlad’s Boys are using something that belongs to Cassandra to power all of their latest madness. Have you ever heard your granny mention something called the Staff of Wrath?’

  A thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. ‘No, I can’t say that I have. But she’s a little on the secretive side about many things, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she did happen to have something super-powerful. I would be surprised if she were using it to help Vlad’s Boys, though. My granny’s been forced to use her envisioning power to help all sorts of evil organisations in the past, but if anything like that had been going on lately, I’d know about it. Believe me.’

  The determined set of her jaw meant that I did believe her. It didn’t solve the current problem, though. ‘We have to get through this boundary, Melissa. Cassandra might not be willingly helping Vlad’s Boys, but they do have the Staff of Wrath and she’s the only one who can tell us how to fight it. But as to how we get to her, I’m stumped. Like I said, I can’t sing at this particular kind of magic.’

  Melissa paced up and down the overgrown garden, muttering to herself. I heard the words blood magic and vampires quite a few times. Eventually, she turned back to Jared and me.

  ‘Y’know, if it is blood magic – or even a variation of – then it would be difficult for anyone but a vampire to break it, no matter what was powering it. And seeing as this is so much more powerful than your typical blood magic, then it’s a good thing you’ve got two mighty powerful vampires by your side.’

  Jared blinked. ‘I’m not powerful. Not as powerful as my sister, who is never going to help us here. And you’re not a vampire, Melissa. You’re a witch.’

  She tilted her head, looking carefully at Jared. ‘You should be able to sense what I am, if you used even half of the power I know you have in you. I’m a witch-vampire hybrid, Jared. So powerful that the Dark Team tried to recruit me, back before they all wound up in Witchfield. I know they would have loved to recruit you and Pru too, had you not hidden your lights under a bushel.’

  ‘I’m not hiding anything under a bushel,’ Jared protested. ‘I’m the cockiest bugger I know.’

  ‘It’s true, you are pretty cocky,’ I agreed. ‘But only about how good-looking you are. Jared, you acted as a medium for Bella Foyle’s familiar last night. I’ve seen your power, more than once. This whole Mister Modesty act is getting silly, you know.’ I turned to Melissa. ‘So what is it you want to do? You think you and Jared can combine your power and break the boundary?’

  She bit her bottom lip, wincing slightly. ‘Well … yes and no. I know what you are, Aisling. Everyone does now. I know what you did last Winter Solstice – how you freed your parents from years of entrapment. I can’t do anything about this magic. And neither can Jared. But if you channel the vampire sides of our power, then you just might be able to.’ She held her hands up. ‘And I know that channelling is more of a wizarding skill, but I could talk the two of you through it.’

  I glanced at Jared. ‘What do you think? Would that work?’

  ‘I think it might,’ he said. ‘And I promise you, I’ll kill the Mister Modesty act from here on out. I just … I’m used to Pru being the one who takes the front seat.’ He turned to Melissa. ‘And as for talking Ash through channelling, there’s no need. That’s what she did the night she freed her parents. And seeing as I was there, I have a fair idea how it’s done myself.’

  ‘Wow.’ She winked at him. ‘You really are a handy guy to know aren’t you, Jared? Come on then. Let’s talk through what we’re going to do and then let’s give it a go. The worst that can happen is that … well, we fail, and my poor old grandmother dies cold and alone, trapped inside an unbreakable boundary spell. But … no pressure.’

  ‘Funny, but I feel a whole lot of pressure right now,’ I said with a rueful laugh. ‘But let’s do this, anyway. I don’t think a simple joining spell is going to be enough, though. Not considering that this magic is bigger than my grandmother and father combined. We need something that’ll make our joining spell stronger. An incantation other than the usual, maybe?’

  Melissa bit her bottom lip. ‘I know a good one. One that will direct everything from Jared and I into you. I know you’re not a witch, Jared, but you’ll need to say the words, and you’ll need to one hundred percent give yourself over to Aisling. Can you do that?’

  He smiled at me. ‘Without hesitation.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Well, good. That’s … good. So let’s get on with learning Melissa’s incantation.’

  They were simple enough words, so Jared soon had them memorized. A few moments later, the three of us joined hands, said ‘Ceangail!’ and then Jared and Melissa went on to chant her spell:

  ‘My power I give to this here fae,

  To use as she will, to direct as she may.’

  Jared spoke the words so intently, looking right at me all the while. Even though Melissa was doing much the same, there was something deeper in Jared’s offering. Something that made me glad Dylan wasn’t here to watch.

  As soon as the incantation was finished, I felt as though bolts of power were hitting me in the chest from either side. Within seconds, that energy was travelling all the way through my veins, making my limbs shiver.

  I blinked. ‘I can feel your power,’ I told Melissa. I really could. This was one powerful lady. ‘And you.’ I turned to Jared, swallowing. The energy coming from him was astounding. But it wasn’t just his power I was feeling. It was his essence, too. I could feel everything about him. How good he was. How warm. How full of love and longing. At Winter Solstice, though Jared had been helping, it had been Grace’s magical lightning storm, combined with the power of the hawthorn tree, which I’d been channelling. Now, I felt so closely connected to him that it was a little overwhelming. ‘It’s em … it’s quite intoxicating.’

  He blushed, staring at me, his eyes locked to mine. More and more of his power surged into me, and I began to feel a strange hunger. No … a thirst. It was something I’d never felt before. Something I knew was unique to vampires. I knew that this connection would only last as long as our hands were joined, but even so I was afraid that I might be – temporarily – just a little bit vampy.

  But if I were, then it wasn’t all that bad a feeling. Jared gave me a crooked smile, one brow lifting, his stare intensifying, making me wonder of he wasn’t sensing every single thing I was experiencing right now.

  ‘Well then,’ said Melissa. ‘How about you stop giving Aisling the googly eyes, Jared, and we let her get on with breaking the boundary spell?’

  With embarrassment coursing through me, I turned to face the magic once more. But this time … this time it was different. Not in how it looked, but in how it felt. Because I really could feel it, in a visceral way. A way that made my own heart beat faster. I could understand it now, understand that, at its heart, this really was vampire magic.

  But I also had a whole lot of vampire magic running through my veins. And so, with Jared and Melissa on either side, I opened my mouth, and sang.

  The boundary held fast for a few seconds, but soon the individual cells began to wobble. As more time passed, the whole structure started to shift. Finally, I could see the waves of magic that held these cells together. It moved differently to any magic I’d seen until now. It didn’t have the beauty of witch and wizard magic, and it didn’t have the haphazardness of Púca magic, either.

  This magic moved in tight, quick beats, stringent and barely yielding. But I could make it yield. I could make it break. I sang louder and louder, directing my voice right into the centre of each and every cell, watching as the magic tried to cluster tighter together. But the tighter i
t moved, the more damage it did to itself. Finally, just as I thought my own voice was about to fail, the magic began to shatter apart, disappearing into the air like tiny droplets of the darkest blood.

  Exhausted, I wanted nothing more than to slump to the ground. Instead I croaked out, ‘It’s done,’ before hobbling towards the door of the shack.

  It really was bigger on the inside, and a whole lot nicer too. It had large rooms with high ceilings, and although some of them were a little on the gothic side, they weren’t quite as cheesy as Greg’s revamped flat.

  We had only entered the second room (a living room with a rerun of Be My Witch playing on the TV) when we found Cassandra.

  She looked a lot like Melissa, albeit with piercing blue eyes instead of green, and tattooed symbols all over her bare arms. She turned in the couch and smiled softly at her great, great, great … let’s just say her granddaughter.

  ‘I should have known you’d come for me,’ she said, switching off the TV and standing up. ‘Although I have to say, considering what that lot took with them when they left, I have no idea how you managed it.’

  18. The Staff of Wrath

  A few minutes later, we had returned to my grandmother’s home. She brought us to her dining room, where her table had been enlarged to fit all of us around. Along with Casandra, Melissa and my friends and family, Queen Úna had her own father there, as well as some of her most trusted advisors.

  There were chocolate brownies, tea, and lemonade laid out, but no one touched a thing. We were all far too rapt on Cassandra, and the story she was telling.

  ‘They took me unawares,’ Cassandra told us all. ‘At first it was just she. Darina Berry. The others were outside, cloaked and waiting. I could sense them, and I very quickly sensed what they were there for too. Unfortunately, it was too late. I tried to sink my teeth into Darina, I tried to shoot her, I tried to break her neck …’

  ‘But she was wearing this, wasn’t she?’ I held up my Impervium locket. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Vlad’s Boys already had the Staff of Wrath when they attacked Nollaig’s wedding, and Darina had my locket at the time, which meant she also had it when she broke into Cassandra’s home.

  Cassandra nodded. ‘As long as she had it on, I couldn’t do a thing to hurt her. Those lockets are so rare. It caused quite the stir when Dylan Quinn entered the Protection Trials last year and won one for you.’ She gave me a suggestive wink. ‘He must really think you’re something.’

  Dylan rolled his eyes. ‘I am sitting here, you know. And yes, she is something. I’d do it all over again if I had to.’

  ‘Aren’t you romantic?’ Cassandra zoomed in on him. ‘You remind me of my third husband. Although you have a much better physique.’

  ‘Granny!’ Melissa shook her head in exasperation. ‘Can you just stop flirting with everyone and tell us what happened next?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with a bit of flirting, you know,’ she retorted. ‘Helps you feel alive. But you’re right. I’ll tell you the rest. So, while I was trying and failing to kill Darina, another witch walked in. She looked like that mild-mannered teacher from Riddler’s Edge. But it was clear that she was someone very different, and very powerful.’

  ‘Bella Foyle,’ Melissa supplied. ‘She came back from the dead and possessed Catriona Eager. She’s one of the psychos who came up with Vlad’s Boys in the first place.’

  ‘Well, psycho or not, she’s certainly powerful,’ said Cassandra. ‘I couldn’t manipulate her mind and her body, no matter how hard I tried. She froze me instantly. They did undo the freezing spell when they left, but only once they’d already sealed me into my home with an Insitu spell. I couldn’t get out. They left me with no way of contacting the outside world. Even my psychic skills were dulled by their boundary spell.’

  She paused to take a nervous breath. ‘They took the Staff of Wrath with them, of course.’

  ‘What is it, though?’ Grace asked impatiently. ‘How can it be more powerful than the fae? And more importantly than that, how in Hecate’s name do we fight it?’

  Ignoring Grace, Cassandra moved closer to me and touched my temples. An image of a wizened old staff entered my mind. ‘It doesn’t look like much,’ I remarked.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But when it’s in use, it would look very different.’ She implanted another image into my mind – and judging by the shocked faces of all around the table, she had just given them that very same image.

  Their shock was perfectly understandable. In Cassandra’s second psychic image, the staff had grown in length, and was aflame with a deep red fire. The flames looked like blood – the same blood that had been at the centre of the boundary spell I’d just broken apart. Those roaring flames were huge and devastating, and just looking at them seemed to fill my mind with screams of pain and horror.

  ‘That’s … that’s sacrificial magic, isn’t it?’ Jared said hoarsely. ‘Old, powerful, sacrificial blood magic.’

  Cassandra’s jaw jutted out. ‘It is. And I won’t apologise for it. It was what was needed in order to fight your father.’ She looked around the room. ‘You are all well aware by now that Ron Montague and Ronaldo the Righteous are one and the same, and that I am the idiot who sired him.’

  Nollaig gritted her teeth. ‘Yes, well, I don’t like to call another woman an idiot. But you are a seer, Cassandra. How was it that you couldn’t see what my husband would become before you sired him?’

  Cassandra folded her arms. ‘I shall tell you why. It’s because I was awestruck by a vision. A vision that overshadowed everything else. I couldn’t see what Ronaldo would become, because I was far too focused on what he and I could create together.’

  She stared at Jared. ‘I couldn’t have cared less about your father. He was a means to an end. And the end was you. You and your twin, Pru.’

  I gawped. ‘You’re twins?’ That seemed like the sort of thing they ought to have mentioned before now.

  ‘I’m older,’ replied Jared with a shrug. ‘But I don’t get it, Cassandra. Are you saying you turned Dad so he could make me and Pru vampires?’

  ‘That’s precisely what I’m saying. Nollaig.’ Cassandra turned her head in Nollaig’s direction. ‘Ronaldo turned you when you were already pregnant. He hoped that it would save you and your unborn children from the plague. And it did. Pru and Jared were born as vampires. But I still had some more of my vision to follow. There was one more thing I needed to do in order to make your children as powerful as they were destined to be.’

  She took Jared’s hand, and he didn’t flinch. ‘Your mother doesn’t know this. Nobody knows this, but you and Pru were turned twice. Once you were born as vampires, I sired you once again. It was as I had seen in my vision. Twins, double-turned, would have double my power and more. I did it in secret, as I dreamt I must. While you were sleeping, I snuck into your room for two nights running to complete the process. It was an unheard-of method, but it worked just as I’d known it would. The process was not without its flaws, however.’

  There was a long moment of silence, until finally she spoke again. ‘Ronaldo. He was the flaw in the plan. When he saw how powerful the two of you were, and indeed how powerful he and Nollaig were, he decided that the vampires were the master race. And you all know what happened once he got that silly idea into his head.’

  As Nollaig clenched her fists, Cassandra kept on talking. ‘I’d created a monster, and it was my responsibility to put him down. Ronaldo was as powerful as me, so I couldn’t simply kill him. If I tried that, it was just as likely that I’d be the one who ended up dead. I had to be clever about it. So, I had a wizard lover of mine help me to create a spell. Every time Ronaldo murdered someone, the energy created by that death would be drawn into the staff. We named it the Staff of Wrath, because that was what it was created of. Ronaldo’s madness fuelled it. Each death at his hands added more power to the staff, and it was with all of his own rage and evil that we would wreak revenge on Ronaldo.’

 
She let go of Jared’s hand and folded her arms once again, hugging them close to her body and shivering slightly. ‘Once the staff built up enough energy, my wizard would channel that energy and use it to kill Ron. Obviously I didn’t kill him, in the end. There was no need. When you left him, Nollaig, and took the children with you, Ron finally saw the error of his ways. He forgot about the Knights of Darkness, the cult he led back then, and he tracked you down and begged you to take him back. After that, he settled into a loving, doting family life.’

  ‘Doting!’ Nollaig spat. ‘Sure, he was doting, in between affairs. And he didn’t just end his madness with the Knights of Darkness, did he? He and Bella Foyle conceived Vlad’s Boys back in the Year of the Walrus.’

  Cassandra shrugged. ‘Well, I knew nothing about that at the time. Had I known, I would have killed him without hesitation. I kept the staff on the off-chance, but I never told anyone about it, except of course the wizard who helped me create it.’

  She chewed on her lower lip. ‘Darina is a Berry, though. It’s now known that the Berry coven keep a careful record of any objects of awesome power. Someone in her coven might have found out – the wizard did go on to have a relationship with Alice Berry at one point. She and Darina are known allies. Darina often visits her at Witchfield.’

  That was true. I’d seen Darina visit Alice Berry when I was at the prison last Christmas. Right now, though, I was far more focused on something else Cassandra said.

  ‘A wizard?’ I squinted at the vampire. ‘Lately there’ve been quite a few unexplained wizard deaths. They’ve been set up to look like the wizards were electrified by their own contraptions, but it looks like they died slowly, almost like they were fried from the inside out by some gargantuan level of power. Like a Staff of Wrath, maybe?’