by P. N. Elrod
The man was smart. There was no way he could have thrown that blast in reaction to my movements. I was a vampire and, whatever his unnatural magical talents, he was still human. I could move faster than his eyes could track. No, he’d thrown his magic at me at the same instant he’d passed his hand through the ward. As I slowly picked my battered body off the floor, he set the cup on the ground and then stepped back.
“Drink,” he said.
I walked to the cup slowly, never taking my eyes off him. I picked it up and passed it under my nose. It was human, but I didn’t want to drink it. I knew it was his.
“It’s your blood, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, and it’s filled with my power. Drink it and join me, Cin Craven, and I will let you live.”
I drew back to throw the cup in his face.
“Before you do that,” Gage said, staying my hand, “think of what I can offer you. Think of the power, Miss Craven, what it would feel like to bend all that magic inside you to your will. I can make you the witch you were born to be.”
“A practitioner of the dark arts was not what I was born to be, Gage.”
He laughed. “You are a vampire. You live in darkness. Now let that darkness live in you. I can make you more powerful than any white witch could dream of being. Let me make you what you were meant to be.”
I saw the utter conviction of what he was saying shining in his eyes, and for the smallest moment I was tempted. I glanced at the cup of blood. What would it feel like to have utter control over the magic I possessed? I looked back at Gage, and he smiled. And over his shoulder I could see the lifeless form of my beloved stretched out on an altar dedicated to everything I had sworn to fight against.
I shook my head and threw the cup at the ward, slinging its contents at Gage as I did so. The blood spattered against the black netting and disappeared. The ward was fueled with blood magic, and it had sucked up Gage’s blood like rain on a drought-ridden field. I began to rethink my assumption that Aunt Maggie’s book would have anything in it to break this ward. Macgregor witches did not deal in blood magic.
Gage raised his hand, and the cup stirred from where it had fallen on the floor. It spun three times, and then it flew through the ward and into his outstretched hand. He caught it without ever looking away from my face.
“I will be back, vampire. Perhaps you will have reconsidered my offer by then.”
“Don’t count on it,” I replied.
“It matters little to me if you join me willingly, as the rest of my coven has, or by force.”
“You cannot force me, Gage.”
“Yes, you seem willing enough to sacrifice yourself for your morals. But are you strong enough to sacrifice your companions as well? You will drink what I offer, Miss Craven, because the next time you throw this cup back in my face, I will take it and I will fill it with your lover’s blood. I will drain them all dry before your eyes. Tell me,” he said, almost sweetly, “can you sit there and watch them die when you could save them?”
“You’re going to kill them anyway,” I whispered.
“True, but if you drink from me, I’ll bring them a swift death at the end of a stake. They’ll never know what happened. If you refuse, I’ll wake them just enough so that they know they are dying, slowly, and they’ll know that you could have saved them, but you wouldn’t. I hope that gives you something to think about.”
He strode from the room, and the heavy wooden door slammed behind him, echoing through the chamber like a gunshot.
I sank to the floor and cried, my sobs muffled by the unending chanting that echoed through the chamber.
GAGE WAS TRUE to his word. After what seemed like an eternity, he returned with his entire black-robed coven in tow. They surrounded my warded prison like vultures waiting for the opportunity to fall on me and rend me to pieces. I ignored them and kept my eyes on Gage. He was the key. If he’d bonded the coven to him by blood, then his blood and his death should break the bond. I didn’t know if any of them had enough magic on their own to fight us all, but I was willing to risk it. Gage’s power radiated through the chamber, and I didn’t feel anything that came close to it from any of the others.
Gage came to stand in front of me. I took a calming breath and squared my shoulders. One way or another, this nightmare would end here and now.
“Will you drink?” he demanded.
The gods knew I wanted to. I was weak and hungry, but his blood was tainted with evil and I wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. I gritted my teeth and shook my head.
“You know you want it, vampire,” he said, his tone almost seductive. “You long to taste that coppery liquid on your tongue, don’t you? And the power. Think of it. You have power of your own, Miss Craven. I can feel it, even though you have no idea how to use it. I can teach you.
I realized something in that moment, as I listened to him offer what I had already refused. Despite what he had said the last time he was here, it was important to him that I join him willingly. Whether it was to appease his sense of vengeance or vanity he needed me to come to him of my own free will. I would not give him that satisfaction.
“I am a Macgregor witch, Gage, whether or not I am worthy of the name. Your blood magic is beneath me. You use the dark arts because the Goddess has forsaken you. You have nothing to teach me.”
He jerked his head back as if I’d slapped him, and then narrowed his eyes. “So be it.”
Gage walked to where Michael lay and stood over him.
“Don’t touch him!” I shouted. “If you harm any of them, I swear to you I will make you pay!”
He laughed. “How amusing that you continue to make threats, Miss Craven,” Gage said as he pulled a long, deadly looking dagger from under his robe. “If you had any power to make good on them, you would have done so by now.”
He raised one hand and passed it over my lover’s face. Michael’s eyes flew open, and I could see the muscles in his neck straining with the effort to move.
Gage leaned down, smiling. “Good evening, vampire.”
“Who are you?” Michael asked, his voice low and hoarse. “Why can’t I move?”
“I am Edmund Gage, and I have just been having a conversation with your lady. Did you know that she has all your lives in her hands, and she refuses to save you?”
“Cin? What have you done to her?”
Gage stepped back and allowed Michael to turn his head. His blue eyes focused on me, and I smiled sadly as his worried gaze raked over me from head to toe. Then, satisfied that I was unharmed, he glanced around the room.
“One simple task could save you and your friends,” Gage said, drawing Michael’s attention back to him, “yet she refuses. She would rather let me bleed you dry. What do you think of her love for you now?”
“Michael, no,” I pleaded. “It’s not—”
“Shh, m’anam,” he said. “I trust you.”
I looked at him, and my stomach clenched. He was my world, this man. I had been raised a sheltered and spoiled aristocrat, meant for nothing more in life than breeding more sheltered and spoiled aristocrats. And then I had found him. I had given up my life to save us all, and I had died in his arms. I looked into his eyes and I remembered that night, and all the others that had followed—dancing with him in the streets of Paris; making love to him with the salt of a Spanish sea still on my skin; lying in his arms under a Highland sky, watching the northern lights shimmer above us. He had taught me how to truly live, and love. I loved this man beyond all reason. I loved his body. I loved his mind. I loved the way he made me laugh and the kindness in his heart. I loved the way that he loved me like I was the other half of his soul.
I reached my hand out to him just as Gage’s blade came down, slicing Michael’s wrist open and spilling his blood across the cold gray stone of the altar.
I slammed my body into the ward and screamed to the gods from the depths of my soul.
And the world stood still.
NOTHING MOVED. GAGE’S hand
was frozen on the downswing, that evil smile I’d come to hate was still plastered across his face. Not a breath or a heartbeat echoed through the chamber. I stared, transfixed, at the drop of Michael’s blood that hung suspended in the air below his wrist.
“Three years,” came a deep, definitely female voice from behind me. I spun around and was completely unprepared for whoever—or whatever—stood behind me.
She was tall, and I couldn’t distinguish any of her features. She wore a cloak made entirely of black feathers. The hood framed where her face should be, but all I could see was shadow. She walked past me, through one side of the ward and out the other as though it weren’t there. As she moved the shadows under that hood seemed to move with her. The feathers that made up the cloak grazed my hand as she passed, and they seemed almost alive. They were huge, black and glossy, with iridescent undertones of dark purple and green, and they brushed the floor with a soft whisper as she moved.
“Three years,” she said again. “A blink of the eye, really, compared to the millennia I’ve witnessed. I thought I would give you time to adjust, to learn on your own.” She turned and faced me again, standing between me and Michael. As she crossed her arms over her chest her feathers seemed to fluff, like an agitated bird, and then settle again. “Obviously that approach has not worked well.”
I shook my head. “Who are you?”
She sighed. “Don’t be obtuse, Cin. You called me. Whoever do you think I am?”
I had called her? My mind raced. Gage had cut Michael and I had screamed . . .
“Morrigan,” I whispered.
The feathers ruffled again. “Precisely.”
Morrigan, the Great Phantom Queen, war goddess, harbinger of death. She often appeared in the guise of a raven. I had invoked her in one of my last successful spells, to summon The Righteous to me. It was how I’d met Michael. She was the goddess I prayed to the most. And she was here, standing in front of me. I fell to my knees.
“Morrigan, please, help me,” I pleaded.
“Oh, for the love of Danu,” she muttered as she once again walked through the ward. I looked up, but could still see nothing but shadow under the hood of her cloak. The hands that wrapped around my upper arms and jerked me to my feet, however, were very real. “Get up, child. You have no need of my help. I gave you all the power you will ever need when I created you.”
“You?”
“Of course. You are all mine. Vampires, werewolves, anything that walks the night is mine. You are my warriors. There are battles to come—”
“What battles?” I asked.
She grew very still, and I cursed myself for a fool. I was probably not wise to question a goddess.
“You will know in my own good time,” she said, and her words were clipped and fierce like the staccato drumbeats at a public hanging.
I dropped to one knee. “Of course. I beg your forgiveness, goddess.”
“As I was saying,” she continued, “I created you to feed on humans so that you would have a vested interest in protecting them, as a shepherd protects his flock.”
As a shepherd protects his flock. I’d heard that analogy before, almost to the word. Devlin had told me that that was how the High King viewed the symbiotic relationship between vampires and humans. Did Morrigan appear to the High King as well? If we were her creation, and he was our king, then I supposed it would be a logical assumption. It would also explain how one man had come out of nowhere, as legend had it, and challenged all comers in hand-to-hand combat until no one stood between him and control of all of our kind. It would be an easy enough thing to accomplish with a war goddess by your side.
“I created you to be virtually immortal, so you would have the power to fight what I need you to fight, and when I need you to fight it. I made you physically stronger and faster, so you would have the skills to wage the battles to come.” She walked over to Michael and reached out with one pale, slender hand, running a long, shiny black fingernail down the edge of his cheek. “I created you with the capacity to love the same person for centuries, so that your long lives would not be lonely, and so that you would have something worth fighting for.”
The words came softly, almost like a caress. She turned to me.
“He is beautiful. I put him in Devlin’s way, you know, all those years ago. I chose him for you. He is my gift, to make up for the life you had to leave behind.”
How was it that she had chosen him for me when he had been made a vampire half a century before I was even born?
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t,” she said, and nothing more.
I waited for an explanation, but apparently that was all I was going to get. I knew better than to question her further. Instead, I begged for her mercy.
“Please, Morrigan, save my friends. I will give my life for theirs.”
She walked over to where I knelt and reached out a hand, cupping my chin and turning my face to the dark emptiness that was her own.
“You really don’t understand. As I told you before, you don’t need me to save them. You are special, Cin.” She leaned close. “You are my greatest weapon.”
“Me? I can’t even break the ward to get to Gage. I’m worthless as a witch.”
She laughed and brushed past me. I watched her weave in and out of the ward, walking in circles around me.
“Tell me, Cin, do you eat as a human does?”
She already knew the answer to that, but she was a goddess and so I played along. “I can eat. I still enjoy the taste of human food and drink, though it gives me no sustenance.”
“And can you walk in the sun? Take a morning stroll or an afternoon carriage ride through the park?”
Only if I wanted to burst into flames, I thought. “You know I cannot,” I answered.
“Oh good, so you do realize that you are no longer human?” she said with more than a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
“Of course.”
“Then why do you insist on believing that your magic must be practiced as humans practice their magic?”
“What other way is there? I practice my craft as my aunt has been teaching me, and my mother before her.”
“Fine witches, the both of them, but they are not you. No vampire ever created has had the magic you have, Cin. I have given you a great deal of power, not only your own magic but the accumulated magic of all those Macgregor women who came before you. I chose you because you understand the responsibility that comes with power, it’s been bred into your family for centuries, and you have the strength of character to shoulder such a burden. You are my chosen one, and it’s time you ceased weeping like a child and used your power.”
I opened my mouth and the closed it again, unsure of what to say to that. Before I could come up with a suitable reply, she simply vanished. A heartbeat later I felt her behind me.
“If I cannot make you understand with words,” she said, and grasped my head in her hands, “then I’ll try different means.”
There was a nearly blinding flash of light, and then it was as if I was floating above the room, watching myself below. Gage turned and smiled at the me that was still down there, locked behind the ward. I saw myself walk through that ward, and I knew before I touched it that it wouldn’t stop me. I watched my hand raise, and the knife fly from Gage’s hand to mine. I felt a rush of power, as though I were in my body and yet out of it at the same time. The power wasn’t Gage’s or Morrigan’s. It was mine. I felt it. I felt everything and, finally, I understood.
I knew why my magic had been so wild in those early days, and why it was so difficult for me to harness now. It wasn’t that I had no control of it; it was that I didn’t understand how to control it. I was raised to think of magic as a tool, something that could only be performed with the proper rituals and spells. Perhaps that’s the way it worked for my human relatives, but this magic, my magic, was different. I had thought of it as something that lived inside me. I now realized that the magic was me. It didn�
��t answer to herbs and potions and spells. It answered only to the force of my will. My magic had been fettered and chained all these years—by tradition, by my teachers, by my aunt Maggie—but it was free now.
I was free. I finally saw exactly who and what I was meant to be.
“There’s my girl,” Morrigan whispered. She took her hands from my head, and I was back in my own body again. “Now, end this,” she said, and snapped her fingers. I felt her disappear an instant before time began to move again.
Gage turned to me, that arrogant smile still on his face. I called my magic and felt it rise up, filling and completing me, and for the first time it wasn’t something I was trying to harness or fight.
I smiled back at Gage. I was the Devil’s Witch. I was blessed by a goddess and no human wizard, no matter how powerful, could ever hope to stand against me.
I WALKED THROUGH the ward just as I had done in Morrigan’s vision. There was no burning this time, no pain. The ward fell before me like a thin veil of cobwebs, not because of any spell or incantation, but because I willed it so. I put my hand up, and the knife flew from Gage’s grasp. I caught it and felt a stirring of victory when I saw the first flicker of fear in his eyes.
“How—?”
“I warned you what would happen if you laid a hand on him, Gage,” I said. “One drop of his blood is more important to me than your wretched life.”
The coven stirred behind me and finally that infernal chanting stopped.
I ignored them and kept walking toward Gage.
“Keep the spells going!” Gage yelled. “She’s sworn to protect humans. She won’t kill me.”
I cocked a brow at him. “Want to wager your life on that?”
The chanting resumed, but somewhat raggedly. When I was about five feet from Gage he conjured a ball of magic in his hand. I expected him to throw it at me, but instead he held it over Michael.