by Anna Katmore
When I begin to speak about the werewolf issue, I’m very careful with what I reveal. “For all I know, it was a guy from Scotland. Some nameless dude with a serious death wish. I observed him for a while and then killed him in a short fight.”
“Impressive,” my uncle says. “Where is his body?”
Fuck. My ears get hot. I clear my throat. “There is no body. I…incinerated him. Completely burned to ashes.”
I don’t dare turn my head when I feel his suspicious gaze on me. “Completely burned, huh?”
I nod.
“Where?”
“Deep in the forest. I made sure not to leave any evidence behind.”
As we come to the place where the real attack happened earlier tonight, I swallow. There’s a long pause before he turns his head forward again and quietly says, “Very well.”
The tension doesn’t ease from my shoulders. There’s a fifty-fifty chance he bought that lie. Slowing slightly, Uncle Vlad bends down and picks up something from the grass. As I dare a quick glance at his hands, moonlight glints on the silver blade that is stained with dried wolf blood. Lips pursed, he scrutinizes first the dagger and then me with one eyebrow arched. Odds are probably more like nine to one that he doesn’t believe it.
I cough a little. “It’s almost dawn. We better get back inside.”
His intense gaze almost burns a hole in my head. But then he plants a hand on the back of my neck and steers us toward the castle. “Of course. Your aunt is tired, too. She can never sleep in her coffin. There’s still enough time to talk about everything later.” He leaves his hand there as we walk.
Ellie is relaxing in the wingback chair when we return, and Reginald comes in through the front door again. He’s got one black duffle bag jammed under his arm, and two more suitcases in his hands. One drop of Count Dracula’s blood in his coffee each morning for the past few decades and the old man can easily take on a man in his mid-twenties.
“Shall I bring these upstairs, sir?” he addresses my uncle.
“Yes. To the master bedroom.”
Wait! What? Hey…! “That’s my room,” I protest, pulling a face.
“You forget that this is my castle.” Uncle V laughs and claps me on the back. “Guess who gets to pick bedrooms.” Totally ignoring my claim, he holds out a hand for Ellie and pulls her to her feet. Arm-in-arm, they ascend the stairs and snicker like two teenagers in love.
“And where am I supposed to sleep?” I mutter.
My uncle smirks over his shoulder. “I believe I saw your coffin down in the dungeon.”
Ha. Ha. He’s so funny.
Dumbfounded, I stare after them until they disappear down the corridor, and moments later, Uncle V’s delighted voice drifts down to me. “Just look at that. He cleaned up for us.”
Agh!
All the other rooms are still covered in ancient dust. I’m not going to nap there and let the bedbugs feast on my body. So, that leaves only the wingback chair to curl up in or…
Grinding my molars, I trudge down into the dungeon and haul my casket upstairs in front of the fireplace. The thud when I drop the end I’m holding echoes throughout the castle.
The lid opens with a creak. Just nasty, really. I slump inside and fold my arms behind my head, glaring up at the ceiling. Family! Gah.
But then the hard lines of my mouth soften into a small smile. Gotta love ‘em…
Chapter 29
Symptoms
Abigail
A rhythmic creak of wood drifts into the dreamy meadow where I sit with Quentin. It slowly pulls me away from him to a dark tower. Ascending the winding stairway there, I slowly return to consciousness until I’m able to open my eyes.
I’m in my bed, tucked beneath a cozy blanket. The rhythmic squeak comes from across the room. Nana dozes in a rocking chair, her hands folded in her lap with only her feet gently pushing her back and forth. I don’t remember ever seeing one of those in this house.
Confused about how I got here, and my mind still in a fog, I sit up and wince as a pounding headache sets in. Rubbing my temples, I try to remember what happened after my dance with Quentin last night. Oh wait, we kissed, too, didn’t we? And then we headed into the garden and—
Oh my God!
My eyes snap wide-open as the full onslaught of memories rushes over me, taking my breath away. Am I a werewolf now?
The rocking in the corner stops, and Nana looks at me with a soft but worried expression. Beside her on my desk, a thick, red candle has burned down to a waxy stump. I wonder how long she’s been sitting here with me.
“What time is it?” I croak after swallowing a couple of times to wet my throat enough to speak. At the foot of my bed, a mama cat and her four sweet kittens sleep rolled up in one big ball of fur.
“It’s almost ten.”
“Ten p.m.?” That’s weird. It was quite late already when Quentin and I took a stroll through the garden.
“No, ten in the morning.” Nana gets up, crosses to me, and lowers to the edge of the bed, pressing her palm to my forehead. “How do you feel, my dear?”
“Confused.” A nasty smell surrounds me, and I try to figure out where it comes from. Did one of the kittens poop in my room?
She smiles. “I believe that.” From my nightstand, she picks up a mug and holds it out to me.
“Chamomile tea?” I ask, closing my fingers around it.
“Something similar,” she murmurs.
The yellowish brew is warm but not steaming. At the first sip, my face contorts. Boy, this is bitter.
“It’ll help.” Nana reaches into the pocket of her apron and retrieves a sachet of sugar, which she rips open and pours into the beverage. “It’s going to wash out any toxins from your body and ease the symptoms.”
“Toxins? Symptoms?” What the hell is she talking about?
She nudges the mug back to my lips. “Drink.” I do, and the extra sugar works wonders. While she gets up and crosses to the window, she continues, “You got infected with the wolf gene and have a lot of vampire blood in you.”
My chin hits my chest, the mug almost slipping from my fingers. I quickly place it back on the nightstand. “You—know?”
Stopping by the closed curtains, Nana pivots to me with a smile. She clasps one end of the drapes and pulls them aside. A ten-thousand-watt beam is directed straight at me.
Shit! I screech, throwing my arms in front of my face as my eyes shrivel to raisins in their sockets.
Nana drops the curtain, putting us back in cozy semi-darkness. “Side effects of vampire blood. The sooner you get it all out, the better it’ll be for you.”
Good grief! “So, instead of a werewolf, I’m now changing into a vampire?” I whine, lowering my arms again.
Nana comes back to my bed. She takes my hand and pats it gently. “No, my dear, you won’t. From what Rosemarie and Trayan told me last night when they brought you here, you had to drink quite a lot of the…” She pauses, her face turning blank. “The young man’s blood as a cure for the wolf bite. It’ll make you hypersensitive for a while, but you’ll be back to normal soon enough. Still human, my dear,” she assures me, “thanks to a vampire.”
“Yes… Quentin saved me,” I murmur. It’s hard to look into her eyes now, knowing how much I held back from her this past week. On the other hand, she’s speaking about these things as if she’s not the least bit shocked. So, which of us is the real liar?
I inhale a shaky breath and take in more of the foul smell in the room. It makes my stomach churn with nausea, adding to my headache.
“The more you can drink of this”—she puts the strange tea back into my hands—“the sooner the symptoms will go away.”
I empty the mug in one gulp.
After refilling it from a glass jug on the nightstand, Nana returns to the rocking chair. “How is Rosemarie?” I ask her as she settles down.
“She came here with a deep cut from a silver blade. I gave her the same potion as I did you and something to put on
the wound. It won’t help with the pain, but at least it stopped the bleeding.”
“Yeah, the silver dagger. I was the one who did that to her.”
“Because she threatened to kill your friend,” Nana replies with warm sympathy. “Trayan said you and the vampire have an interesting story to tell. I would love to hear it.”
For a long time, we look into each other’s eyes. Then I nod, giving her a promise for one day, just not now. “So, why aren’t you freaking out about all of this? What do you know about vampires and werewolves?” I demand instead as I settle back against the headboard, folding my hands over the blanket on my stomach. “You seem to be taking this in much too calmly.”
Nana resumes rocking in the chair. “The supernatural didn’t come as a surprise to me as it did to you, Abby.”
Yeah, I figured. “I’m all ears.”
She chuckles. “Romania has a long track record of vampire and werewolf history. Some know. Some remember. Others don’t.” She smooths her apron over her lap. The next instant, Tinka wakes up on my bed and looks around. When she sees my grandmother, she detaches from the kitten pile, jumps from my bed, and heads over to continue her nap in Nana’s lap. “Even though the last time a vampire has been seen in this area was long before I was born, werewolves never really died out here.”
“Did you know that Rosemarie is one? I mean, before last night?”
Nana nods. “I could already see it when she was very young. And I knew her parents. Her father was a werewolf. Her mother was a human girl from the neighborhood.”
“What do you mean, you could see it?” I scowl, remembering all the rumors I heard about my grandmother when I was a child. “Are you—?” My voice drops to a hoarse whisper. “Are you really a witch?”
“No. Witches don’t exist, do they? Those women do crazy spells and ride on brooms.” She winks at me. She fucking winks at me! I choke. “But I won’t deny that I was born with some gifts,” she reveals then as she absently strokes Tinka’s back. “I could always tell wolves apart from humans. It’s a faint brownish hue in their aura that always looks the same.”
“And you saw that about Rosemarie?”
“Yes. Since she came from two different races, though, it took some time before the wolf gene took over the human part.”
“Does that mean she would have been able to change from the beginning if her parents had both been werewolves?”
“Indeed. Trayan is one such wolf—a purebred. I’m sure he can tell you more about it than I can.”
I swallow. Trayan still creeps me out, even though it seems as if he really was just concerned about my safety last night, and it was all just a huge misunderstanding. Boy…huge is the understatement of the year.
But now I’m getting curious. “Would you be able to tell a vampire apart from wolves and humans?”
“Last night, I saw such a creature for the first time in my life.” Her warm expression fades to absolute blankness. Even her voice sounds dull with her next whispered words. “His aura is entirely black. It’s cold and shut down.”
His aura might be, but his soul is certainly full of vivid color, I protest in my mind. I only have to think of Quentin’s deep blue eyes, and the spot around my heart warms again.
“I believe that’s also why I couldn’t see what things were coming for you where he was concerned.”
Utterly puzzled now, I cock my head. “You— Just what?”
Nana snickers. “Sometimes, I can look a little into your future. Not far, just like an hour or two. And only on good days.”
“Jesus Christ! I knew it!” I blurt, jerking upright. Then I scrunch up my face. “But why only with my future?”
“Because you’re my granddaughter. It only ever works with family.”
Stunned, I fall back onto the pillow. This is some tough information to digest. “You see all kinds of things and you’re telling me you aren’t a witch,” I snort.
That makes her laugh, and Tinka flees from her lap.
*
In the early afternoon, I’m on my twelfth glass of yellow potion. The pitch-black sunglasses help a little with blocking out the merciless sunlight, but I still sit in the shade of the apple tree and wait for the horrible symptoms to lessen. When I stepped out with just a t-shirt on at first, my skin was sunburnt within seconds. The sweater feels a little warm today, but it’s preferable to getting crisped.
I actually would have preferred to spend the day inside, but it turns out that Nana is the source of the foul smell in my room with her garlic-contaminated blood. After a while, I just couldn’t stand to be near her anymore and escaped to the garden. She apologized with a wry grimace and promised not to take the pills for the rest of the summer. The garlic should soon fade out of her body. I made her drink some potion, too, to speed up the process.
Saby naps in my lap. It’s funny how he didn’t leave my side the entire morning. It’s almost as if he’s got a weakness for vampire blood. Crazy kitten. As I stroke his fluffy back, my gaze wanders off to the peak of the castle’s west tower. Quentin is probably asleep now—or pacing the hall, worrying about me. Since his phone is broken, there’s no way to let him know that I’m not a wolf yet. Or a vampire. I would have gone up and told him so already, but I want to talk to Rosemarie first. We texted in the morning—lots of sorrys going back and forth—and she promised to come over after lunch.
One other side effect of vampire blood is exceptional hearing. Though this one has lessened a lot during the past couple of hours, I can still hear Rosemarie and Trayan chatting on the street long before they actually come into sight. Trayan seems worried about the pain in her arm.
Putting Saby aside, I lift from the ground but keep standing in the shade of the tree. They come through the front gate, and then Rosemarie slows to a complete stop when she sees me. Automatically, Trayan halts beside her. His gaze moves back and forth between us, his brows tilting up. Out of the three of us, he’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have problems with any of this. He’s also coming toward me first.
“Hey, Abigail, it’s good to see you on your feet again,” he says and lays a gentle hand on the crook of my shoulder. “Sorry for the bad start we had.”
I nod and dare a small smile. “You’ve made my summer quite exciting so far.”
A sigh behind him draws my gaze back to Rosemarie. “I really don’t know what to say,” she murmurs, her hands clasped in front of her, and her head lowered.
Trayan steps aside to let her come closer.
“How about you start with why you suddenly howl at the moon?” I carefully suggest. And then I pull her into a tight hug that’s long been overdue. Her arms, coming up around me, take away a lot of the tension that’s built up inside me the past week.
As the three of us lower to the grass, and Sabretooth climbs back into my lap, she explains how she slowly figured out what weird change was going on inside her a bit after her nineteenth birthday. I heard most of the story from Nana already this morning, though the details coming from Rosemarie are quite shocking. I feel so sorry for her when she tells me how she gobbled up her favorite goose without even knowing what she was doing.
Trayan sits quietly beside us, watching her with a soft but intrigued expression the entire time. I believe it’s the first time he’s actually heard the emotional ride Rosemarie has been on, even if he was there with her for most of it.
“I couldn’t drag you into all of this,” Rosemarie finally finishes her story. “I really wanted to tell you, but you see what bullshit I have to deal with now. No one should be concerned with such a mess if they don’t have to be.”
“That’s exactly why I couldn’t speak with you about Quentin,” I confess. “He said people die if they find out.” I glance at Trayan. “And then I thought you were a vampire hunter or something.”
“After you tested the wolf whistle on me.” He laughs.
Right. I completely forgot about that. “So, you heard it?”
“Oh God, Abby!” R
osemarie’s eyes open wide. She claps a hand to her heart. “Promise me that you’ll bury that thing in the woods. Or better yet, throw it out into the middle of the lake.”
I scrunch up my face. “That bad, huh?”
“Worse!” A visible shudder runs through her that, in hindsight, totally makes me regret my wolf research. “I wanted to cringe on the ground and rip both my ears off.”
“Ugh. I’m so sorry. But I couldn’t even tell if it worked that day because of the damn honking of the camper van.”
“Thank God, you didn’t blow that thing again.”
My focus zeroes in on the bandage on her forearm. “I’ve tortured you quite a bit these days, haven’t I?”
She lays her hand on the wound, looking at it herself. “I deserved that one.”
No, she didn’t. But I know why she said it. It brings on another thought, and I twist to Trayan. “Nana said Quentin came down here with you yesterday. Did you two bury the hatchet?”
“I guess you could say we’re sort of honoring a cease-fire.” He winks at me. “For a bearer of the name Dracula, your vampire actually isn’t that bad.”
My vampire… The term has a lovely ring to it. I smile. “What convinced you that he didn’t command me, after all?”
Trayan scrutinizes me for a long moment. Then his gaze briefly skates to Rosemarie and back to me. “When you tried to save each other from the attack, I suspected the truth. The proof, however, was that he had to actually beg you to let him into your mind when you didn’t want to drink his blood. Vampires can control humans quite easily, but you shut down completely from your panic. He really had to work it out.”
I nod slowly. The whole situation must have looked very peculiar from their side. Being in it was crazy. Blood with cherry flavor. Nobody would ever believe that. Not that I can actually tell anyone…
After some silent seconds, I ask Rosemarie in a low voice, “What are you going to do now? Do you think you’ll adjust to this new life of yours?”
