by Anna Katmore
“Usually, they do.” Trayan frowns at my hands, but he doesn’t show even an ounce of discomfort upon seeing what I’m playing with.
Rosemarie told him that I have this evil whistle that might bog his mind when I blow it. So if he isn’t scared, chances are he isn’t a werewolf, just an ordinary guy from Scotland coming to the wrong house at the wrong time.
There’s one way to find out, though.
Slowly, I lift the whistle to my mouth. Trayan doesn’t move a muscle, but his gaze follows my hand, stopping at my eyes. The silence between us is oppressive.
My lips part. Wolf or not, we’ll know in a second.
“Oh, dear, you shouldn’t play with this in the house.” And just like that, the instrument is gone from my fingers.
“Nana!” I burst out, my head snapping up to her in shock. She stands beside the table, clad in her usual dark dress with her hair back in a bun. When the hell did she leave the kitchen?
“Luiza Petran’s dog likes to stray to our street. You will make him crazy,” she warns me with a friendly grimace, dropping the life-saving whistle into the pocket of her apron. No! Things don’t just emerge from there, they also tend to disappear into it forever.
I’m set to jump right up, going after the whistle to save it, but Nana spins around and heads back to the kitchen counter.
When I face Trayan again, my heart beating horribly fast, he’s gotten to his feet, his expression unreadable. “Thank you for breakfast, Mrs. Potts, but I should be leaving now.”
“Of course, you should, my dear,” she says and already waits for him by the door to the small hallway.
He grabs his jacket from the backrest but doesn’t slip it on. “Abigail,” he says and then follows my grandmother out.
Transfixed, I remain glued to the chair.
When the front door closes, and Nana comes back one moment later, she cups my chin and makes me look into her happy face. “Now isn’t he a charming young man?”
I’m not so sure he is.
Chapter 21
The power of Grayskull
Quentin
I hate that I had to leave Abby alone on that bench. Hopefully, she realized what was going on and didn’t wake up confused as hell. But I couldn’t stay even a minute longer, or the sun would have caught me out in the open.
A nasty and painful end to my existence.
I slip into the castle just in time to avoid getting fried. Saby punishes me with an annoyed look when I fish him out of my hood and put him on the wingback chair. The run up here joggled him quite a bit. “Sorry, pal. But I doubt you would have liked it any better if your pumpkin carriage went up in flames beneath your ass.”
A cantankerous meow hits me before he jumps off the chair and traipses upstairs, knowing very well where his milk bowl is. I should follow him and take a nap, but the truth is, I feel so pumped with energy, I don’t think I could sleep now. And it has nothing to do with the jetlag.
It’s Abby’s blood making me run on high-octane. She tasted exceptionally good—seriously, I don’t remember if I’ve ever come across such a fine brand in the past two decades—but it must be the amount I took that makes me feel as if I downed an entire box of energy drinks. I’ve never taken that much before. Damn, how long will the effect last? I sure hope for a long time.
Since I’m caught inside the castle with a vitality that makes my mind fly, I decide to make the most of it and hunker down in front of the fireplace. A gentle glow is all that’s left from last night’s fire. Let’s see if I can revive it.
As if trying to make out a 3D effect in the embers, I stare with narrowed eyes. Seconds tick by, but nothing moves in the ashes. Maybe a magical puff does the trick. I lean down and carefully blow on the glowing remnants of some logs and branches. Unfortunately, that only whirls up a cloud of ash, which I breathe in and almost die from.
Coughing, I wave the ashy cloud away. Damn, how does my uncle do this? He can light a thousand candles in a room with only a flick of his hand and a thought. It’s a given that he passed the power on to me when he changed me. But where the hell is it buried?
I sink onto my behind and cross my legs, elbows resting on my knees and fingers laced. Focus, that’s what I need. I need to search inside my mind for the spark that ignites a fire. I’m Dracula’s heir, goddammit. It’s in my blood!
Almost meditating myself into a coma, I keep my hard gaze on one particular spot and imagine time and again how a small flame comes out of there. But the longer I stare into the fireplace, the more my mind drifts off to the day when Abby helped me make it warm in here. The memory curves my lips. Who needs superpowers when you have a girl with two flint stones, right?
Abby has filled my lonely days in a strange way since my arrival here. She brought me apple strudel. I chuckle at the memory. And when she understood that her grandmother’s dessert wouldn’t keep me alive, she brought me a goat. And then she offered me her blood.
And when she did, it was so much more than just a feeding. It was so very intimate. The tenderness of her embrace still haunts me, and I remember how much I needed to hold her at that moment. How important she was to me.
An explosive flame licks up the stone fireplace and sends me careening backward. “What—” the fucking hell!?
Lying sprawled on the floor, braced on my elbows, I pant and gape at the hearth. Whoa! That thing has suddenly turned into a crematorium. And it was me. I did it. With only one— Yeah, what exactly was it? On hands and knees, I crawl closer to the fire, then kneel in front of it. The flames still creep up every inch of the stone inside the hearth.
The thought I had when the explosion occurred was about Abigail, so maybe she is the trigger. I think of her and try to connect with the flames again, to calm them down, but nothing I do is enough. No bond forms with the fire as it rages on. If Abby’s not the catalyst, it must be something else about that particular memory of us in that intimate embrace. I inhale slowly and let myself live through the entire scene again.
The moment was loaded with emotion. A longing to be close to her. Deep passion.
The blaze reduces.
Suddenly, I feel something deep inside of me. A kindling flame at the very core of myself. I concentrate on that instead of the fire in the hearth but still keep my focus on what’s in front of me. With passion, I dig from the memory about Abigail and rise and lower the flame in my mind. As if the outside were merely a reflection of what’s inside of me, the fire mirrors my thoughts and obeys my will.
Holy bat shit!
Tearing at my hair, I jump to my feet and stumble backward a couple of steps with a disbelieving laugh. This is amazing! I—I— “Fuck!” I have the power of Grayskull!
I need to call Abby and tell her this. Right now! Reaching into my pocket for my phone, however, I whine. Nah… That thing is still in the rain grate.
Starting another test run to make sure it wasn’t just a one-hit wonder, I grab one of the torches from the wall and command the tip to burst into flames. Like a match stroked on the box, the torch sparks to life with fire. “Yesssss!”
With the light in hand, I descend to the dungeon and then look around the torture chamber. There are so many items in here, there has to be something I can use to help me retrieve my phone from the chute.
I stick the torch into a claw on the wall and start tinkering with something that looks like oversized nippers and the hilts of two axes that I broke for my needs. It’s a bit of a challenge when I kneel down by the chute and fumble inside with my makeshift grip tongs. Back in my childhood, I used to love the machines that had stuffed animals inside where you could only get them out with a mechanical claw. I fished one out for my mom at every fair she took me to.
I straighten and sit on my heels, swamped by that memory of old times. Some of those critters still sit in my room back in Uncle Vlad’s villa. I couldn’t let them go after my parents died—and I was allowed to live. With a smile, I glance up at the ceiling and wonder if they would be proud of me tod
ay.
Uncle Vladimir and Ellie would be for sure if they were here and could see me now—finally able to summon fire. My heart warms strangely.
After the car crash turned me into an orphan, I found there was no need to impress anyone. I’d lost my family, my home, my life. Everything. In the first few months after my rebirth, I condemned Vladimir for not letting me die with my parents. Anything would have been better than the grief eating me from inside. Later on, I found that not giving a shit about the world was the best way to deal with the pain. And it stuck.
In fact, Abigail is the first person in many years I really care about. There are at least seventy people back in Los Angeles that I shallowly call my friends. The truth is, I hardly know them. And I never let people close. I haven’t missed any of them since coming to this place.
But I miss Abby…even though I saw her only a few hours ago. Strangely enough, I miss Ellie and Vlad, too. They’ve never given up on me all these years, and it doesn’t seem to matter to them that I never really let them in. Only parents love you in that way, don’t they? Unconditionally. And just for that, they deserve to be loved back…a little.
Pressing my lips together with a determined breath, I decide that no matter how long I have to fend for myself here, I won’t disappoint them this time. I want to be the man that Uncle V always thought I could be.
I reach into the chute once more and finally manage to fumble out my phone. Pride swamps me like it did back in those years of my childhood. Tossing the nippers into the corner, I sit down on the casket and wipe the device clean on my jeans. As I turn it over, however, my excitement shrinks to a frustrated groan. Like rifts in the Arctic ice, the display is shattered and totally destroyed. No matter which number from the contacts I try, it keeps telling me that it’s only good for emergency calls. Goddammit! My shoulders slump. What are the odds that 9-1-1 will answer my emergency then find Abby and send her up to the castle for me?
Two steps forward, one step back. Okay, I won’t let this ruin my mood. I leave the dungeon. Fire over phone, right? In the hall, I put the burning torch back into its former place, and stand before it and smirk. “Out,” I command, and the fire dies. “Hell, yeah!” Cheering, I pump my fist in the air and then run up the stairs to the master bedroom.
Saby sleeps on the bed again and gets tossed in the air when I belly flop onto the mattress next to him. “Come here, little tiger!” Grabbing him, I roll onto my back and hold him up above my face so he can look down at me with those big, confused eyes. I lower him to plant an excited kiss on his forehead then hold him up again. “You’ll never guess what I learned today!”
Because he squeezes his eyes shut as if he couldn’t care less, I let him settle on the pillow again and then fold my arms behind my head, grinning at the ceiling. Some nights and days are just amazing…
A little while later, a gentle knock on the doorframe rips me from of my revelry. I brace up on my elbows and find a mop of black and blue hair poking in. “Abby!” My face splits with a smile.
Her skin is pale, her eyes cautious. “May I come in?”
What a question. I jump from the bed and haul the door open for her. My gaze travels up and down her body, and suddenly, I have the strangest desire to pull her in for a warm hug—which I don’t do. But she looks like she could use one, and that has me worried. Grabbing her hands, I tug her inside. “Is everything okay?”
Her focus drops to her fingers in mine. The sight seems to pull her into a vortex of thoughts for a moment, but then she glances up at my face and sighs. “You look good. Feeling better?”
“Just awesome.” I nod and can’t wait to show her the thing with the fire, but she didn’t answer my question, and I want to know what’s troubling her. Hopefully not the blood loss. Her hands slip weakly from mine. She came up here—quite soon after she let me bite her—so I doubt it’s fear that has her in such a state.
I lay an arm around her shoulders and steer her to the bed where I make her sit on the edge. I squat in front of her. “Tell me what’s up, Abigail.”
“I—” She sucks in another deep breath and glances at the ceiling. “Something happened this morning, and I think—” Suddenly, she jerks up and starts pacing the room. I take her vacated seat and give her the time to come out with whatever is on her mind. My heart stutters a little from fear that I did something wrong.
In front of the door, Abby stops and whips around. Her frightened gaze meets mine. “I think I know who the werewolf is.”
Oh.
I frown, hands folded in my lap. “Who?”
“Someone who’s living in my friend’s house for the summer. His name is Trayan MacCorbin.”
“And what makes you think he’s a wolf?”
She starts pacing again. Her words come out in a rush, and I have trouble even understanding her cheeping. “From the first day I met him, I have this strange feeling whenever he’s near. This morning, after you left me on the bench outside my house, he came and woke me.” Stopping dead, she rakes her hands through her hair, casting me a panicky look. “He asked me some really odd questions.”
“What questions?”
“About you.” When I lift my eyebrows, she explains. “He wanted to know why I came to your castle and what you did to me last night. It seems like he knows you’re a vampire.”
A slight tremor racks her body, so I stand up and gently lay my hands on her shoulders, gazing down into her gingerbread eyes. “Fair enough. This doesn’t sound good, but I wouldn’t count this as evidence of him being a werewolf.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She pulls free and heads to the door again, leaning with her back against it. “He said things as if he really knew. And then he left very abruptly when he saw the whistle I got from Nana, the one that’s supposed to scare wolves away.”
“Whistle?” It sounded like a codename when she said it. “Is that something like the air horn you almost deafened me with?”
“I think. Nana said it would drive dogs and wolves mad. She gave it to me for protection, but when I went to use it this morning to test Trayan, she took it away.” Whining, Abby claps her hands over her face. “Oh my God, and she let him in. She actually invited him into our house. Now he can come back anytime and eat us all.”
I know I shouldn’t, but her panic is so cute, I just can’t stop myself from chuckling. “Abby…” I move toward her and peel her hands off her face so she has to look at me. My smile is gone by that time. “If you’re right and this guy really is a werewolf, it wouldn’t matter if anyone invited him in. That’s just a vampire thing. Wolves can enter houses whenever they want.”
Shell-shocked, her skin loses the rest of its color. Fuck, my attempt to soothe her was a total bust. I don’t want to scare her even more than she already is, so to make up for it, I dare a step forward and pull her carefully into my arms. It’s a good feeling when she lets me and digs her fingers into my shirt at my back. I rest my chin on top of her head.
With her cheek pressed against my chest, she murmurs, “He scared the hell out of me. I thought he was going to have me and Nana for breakfast.”
I guess there’s a lot more explaining necessary. Slowly, I stroke up and down her spine. “Werewolves, just like vampires, don’t run around randomly eating people. We’ve got rules that protect the night creatures and humans alike. Think of it like this, you wouldn’t head into a pasture and haphazardly start eating the cows there, would you?”
Abby tilts up her head and sends me a frown for my comparison. I smile. “And what’s more, werewolves usually eat in human form. Human food—not humans for food. I believe they enjoy a pepperoni pizza a lot more than raw grandmother.” Abby’s body relaxes a little in my arms, and the terrified expression eases from her face. It’s nice to see the tiny twitch of her lips at my kidding.
A moment later, concern pulls at her features once more. “But you said you came here to find a crazed wolf. You said they’re dangerous when they give in to bloodlust.”
&nb
sp; “Right. And that’s also the reason I don’t think this guy is the one on our radar. It’s almost impossible for a werewolf to change back to human form once their animal part takes control.”
“So, he would stay a wolf forever?”
I nod, though forever is a term used loosely. Berserk wolves draw too much attention with all the brutal killing. They are recognized by the Elders in our world quite quickly. And then eliminated. The death of one for the good of many.
Abby detaches from my embrace and heads to the window. She pulls one end of the curtain away, very carefully, and peeks out. Even though I know she does it with great caution, I keep by the wall, my heart beating a bit faster until she steps away again. “But why would Trayan be out at night spying on you and me then? Why would he lie to me?”
“I don’t know.” Heading back to the bed, I settle against the headboard and fold my arms over my chest. “Tell me what happened when he came to you this morning.”
Abby comes over and sits on the mattress, facing me with one leg angled beneath her, the other foot on the ground. “I was asleep on the bench and then felt someone touching my neck and wrists. That woke me up, and he was there in front of me.”
My brows tip into a thoughtful V. “If he really suspects that I’m a vampire, he might have checked you for bite marks.”
“But why would he even suspect if he isn’t a werewolf? Humans don’t know about vampires, right?”
“Well, they might not know that we’re real, but if we’re too careless, they could cotton on to us. I guess my staying in here during the day coupled with the nightly strolls to your house could have made him suspicious if he paid attention.”
