by K. A. Tucker
Mage suddenly appeared in front of me, her powerful hand clamping over mine, thwarting my plans. Her hand remained on mine as she turned to regard him. “Jonah,” she said, her voice calm.
“Just for a bit . . . promise,” he murmured, continuing forward.
Viggo and Mortimer appeared before the gaping hole in the wall, their tall, lean frames creating a formidable barrier. Luckily we agreed on one thing—we couldn’t have a mutant loose.
“Seriously?” Jonah chuckled arrogantly.
“Now would not be a good time to make your exit.” Mortimer’s French accent made him sound calm and diplomatic but I could see the mixture of rage and panic in his eyes. Viggo, on the other hand, swayed side to side, hands at the ready, sneering. He was eager to pounce, his distaste for mutants evident.
Jonah rolled his hideous white eyes. “I disagree! I’ve waited seven hundred years. Now is the perfect time. You two aren’t strong enough to match me so I suggest you let me pass before I rip you to shreds.”
Great. Another volatile situation. How many more of these would we endure under this roof? How long before one of us died? My attention slid to Evangeline’s friends, who now stood in a far corner under a sizeable fig tree, their shirts speckled with blood. Clearly they’d been at the head of the line for the Foreros.
“No, but with my help they are,” a prissy voice called out, drawing my eyes back to the hole. Rachel stood next to Viggo, offering Jonah a wicked grin. “Thanks for tying me up, freak.” Whatever had transpired on Ratheus, Jonah had made an enemy of her. “If I can’t go out there, neither can anyone else.” She offered Viggo an over-exaggerated grin and a wink. She’s choosing a side. “Besides, you can’t go out there. You’re hideous!” she sneered at the mutant.
Jonah smirked, unperturbed. “So what?”
“So what?” Mortimer shouted, never one to control his anger. “So you’ll only attract the attention of a bunch of fanatics watching us every minute of every day, waiting for a reason to uncover us!”
“You’re being watched?” Mage glanced at my fingertip and, seeing the flame extinguished, released her grip.
I nodded once.
“Humans?”
A second nod. Not just any humans—the People’s Sentinel, a group of zealous humans whose sole mission was to kill vampires. They had been nothing but a thorn in our side for centuries.
“Have they made an alliance with the witches yet?” Mage asked.
Yet? “No . . . ” I began, processing her words and her tone. A few had helped the elusive Ursula—a scorned witch from my past—attack Evangeline in Central Park the day she hoodwinked Leo and the dogs. Max was kind enough to bring one of the victims’ hands home to show me the awkward crucifix on the thumb: the Sentinel’s trademark. I wouldn’t call it an alliance, though. The Sentinel hated witches as much as they did vampires.
“And so it begins,” Mage murmured.
Unease stirred in my stomach. She knew something. She expected something. I opened my mouth to demand she share her knowledge, but she had already turned her back to me, her attention on Jonah.
“I need you to remain within these walls until we decide how to eliminate this threat,” she told him. “We must avoid a repeat of Ratheus. Understand?”
A repeat of Ratheus. She was afraid of a world war ending human life here. She and I shared one thing in common, at least.
“Understand?” Mage repeated more loudly when Jonah’s gaunt face twisted in displeasure. After a pause, the mutant nodded, scowling.
It was as if she had power over them, as if she could control them. There was something so elusive about her, so . . . I seized a magic bud and quietly chanted a few lines of a probing spell as I let my magic drift toward her. The glowing tendrils curled around her skull, preparing to enter and download information buried deep within her core. I would know everything there was to know about our dear Mage in fifteen seconds . . .
Black hair fanned outward as she whirled around to face me, anger flashing in her eyes. “Don’t you dare,” she hissed.
My magical fingers recoiled.
“Don’t ever do that again, or you and I will have a problem,” she warned quietly.
I pursed my lips tightly, torn between feeling like the child caught with her hand in a cookie jar and pure fascination. How did she know what I was doing?
Satisfied that I would not continue my magical assault, Mage looked to Viggo and Mortimer. “We know everything. We know about your venom issue. We know about Sofie’s sister in that tomb over there.” She pointed to the statue behind Mortimer. Viggo’s eyes bulged with panic, that the secrets he guarded so closely were thrown out into the open. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that we consider a truce. No more killing—anyone. No more of Sofie’s magic.” She looked at me to confirm that I heard her. “In return, Jonah stays inside and this group will behave as appreciative guests, accepting your asylum.”
Viggo and Mortimer exchanged the briefest look. “Though I am trustworthy,” Viggo began, earning an eye roll from me, “how do we know we can we trust this group?”
Mage offered Viggo a honey-sweet smile but when she spoke, her words were laced with deadly warning. “No one defies me. No one.”
“No one?” I mimicked, eyeing Rachel, whose vengeful snake eyes hadn’t left Caden and his friends.
Understanding my concern, Mage turned to Rachel. “No retaliation, right, Rachel?”
After a pause, a sneering Rachel nodded reluctantly.
“And,” Viggo added, his index finger swinging back and forth between Caden and me, “we have a truce as long as they stay away from each other.” Of course. He was afraid I’d form allegiances.
Caden chuckled in response. “No worries there. I want less to do with that witch than with psycho.” He gestured toward Rachel.
“You had better not be lying to me,” Viggo warned in a low tone, his blue eyes icy. Caden snorted.
If this is an act, you had better ease off. Though Viggo played the easygoing vampire, getting caught lying to him had disastrous consequences.
“Fine. We’re in agreement,” Mage said, assuming she had my agreement. “So now what?”
Viggo clapped his hands together, his typical false charm in full swing again. “How about a beverage?”
“Stand back!” Viggo sang out as Mortimer pushed a refrigerated cart along the cobblestone path, its metal frame rattling noisily over the uneven ground. They had insisted on bringing a batch of blood up from the cellar, afraid that exposing the Ratheus vamps to all that blood at once would send them into a crazed tailspin.
Now, though, asking a group of vampires who had waited seven hundred years for a drop of blood to stand back was too much. All forty vampires—I had rescued the ones from within the Merth-affected perimeter in an effort to gain favor—flocked toward the cart like starving, red-eyed peasants begging for the king’s rations. Arms outstretched, they groped eagerly at the metal box.
“You’ll all get some!” Viggo chirped as he tossed bags of blood out, adding for my benefit, “It would be faster if we had servants, of course.”
The vamps tore through the thick medical plastic with their teeth, desperate to get to the contents. Blood spilled over their hands and splashed onto the ground. Evangeline’s friends pushed forward to fill their fists with bags, then scurried to a far corner to feed quietly, whatever promises they’d made about refusing human blood clearly nonexistent. I felt another sharp pang of despair, my hope that they might be deceiving Viggo and Mortimer all but gone.
That much spilled blood proved difficult even for me; I felt the spidery web of veins creep into my eyes and knew I needed to get away. Turning from the crowd, I fled to the only place that offered some semblance of comfort in this asylum of blood-crazed vampires.
2. Exile
“Am I stupid?”
Leo jerked in his chair as if startled from sleep. My voice had likely done just that. He was past exhaustion, the heavy circles under his e
yes so dark they could be mistaken for bruising. But the stubborn old man refused to go to bed. Instead, he slouched in the checkered-print wing chair beside the wood stove in my room, his hand resting lazily on Remington’s head. I think he was waiting for me to drift off.
That was the problem. I couldn’t drift off. Caden’s bloodthirsty red eyes met me every time I tried. Murderous eyes. And no matter how hard I concentrated, no matter how long I stared at the four by six photo of him that I held in my hand, I couldn’t call his beautiful jade eyes from my memory.
It had been a little after midnight when Leo escorted me to my second floor bedroom—a simple but cozy cedar-paneled nook with slanted ceilings and two tiny windows overlooking the mountains. A pair of pink flannel pajamas waited for me on a double bed. Just as Sofie had instructed, Leo informed me.
Now, two hours later, I lay under the plush white down duvet with my personal guard dog, Max, stretched out beside me, gazing out at a night sky speckled with brilliant stars, thinking about Caden and the others. Wondering if their previous morals and convictions still held. Wondering if Caden was mad at me for believing everything would be fine. Wondering if I was an idiot for believing in the first place.
“What’s that?” Leo murmured, his thick Irish accent as staggering now as it had been the first time I heard it only hours ago, when I learned he wasn’t merely a proper British butler, but Sofie’s warlock spy, planted in Viggo’s household fifteen years ago to keep tabs on his employer.
“Am I stupid? For believing them?”
He chuckled softly. “No, my dear Evangeline. You are far from stupid. Naïve, absolutely. But it’s born out of an enormous heart and an enduring need to believe the best of people. Not stupidity.”
“But why? After everything that’s happened, I still lap up what people give me like a dog!”
Hey, now, Max grumbled.
I patted his massive paw in apology. “You’re no ordinary dog, Max.” That was an understatement. Max and his brothers were werebeasts, created by Mortimer before Sofie’s magic fried all vampire venom in her struggle to do the impossible—turn from witch to vampire. Besides their giant muscular bodies, they had the regenerative abilities and super senses of a human vampire, as well as telepathic links with their maker. Except Max. He was special. When Max switched his allegiance to me after the attack in Central Park, I began hearing him inside my head. It was only one way, unfortunately, but he understood every word that came out of my mouth.
Leo shifted in his chair to face me. “Honestly, I don’t know what keeps your spirits so high. With all that has happened to you, we expected one jaded young woman. And yet you keep surprising us with this unworldly resilience.” He smiled gently. “That’s a good thing, by the way.”
“I guess so,” I murmured after a moment.
“It is!” he insisted. “It’s what makes you so damn lovable.”
I leaned into Max’s shoulder, hiding the blush I felt creeping into my cheeks at the compliment, such attention unfamiliar to me. I’d spent the last five years utterly invisible. Of course now I knew that was all Sofie’s doing, her compelling everyone to keep their distance for fear of Viggo murdering those close to me.
Leo turned back toward the stove, chuckling to himself. “And don’t forget, you weren’t the only one tricked. I’ll bet Viggo and Mortimer are feeling quite foolish right about now.”
I propped myself up on my elbows. “Why’d you do it?”
The light from the fire burning in the wood stove coupled with a candle on the side table provided enough light to observe the old man’s profile, brows puckered as he frowned, deep in thought. “I was in Sofie’s debt.”
Shock widened my eyes. “She forced you?”
Leo’s head whipped back toward me. “Oh no!” he said, his voice suddenly passionate. “Not in the least. I wanted to help her.” With a sigh, he bent forward to ease another log into the fire. “Sofie gave me back my wife.”
A small gasp escaped my sagging jaw.
“Oh, don’t be so shocked! Did you think I was born in a three-piece suit?” he exclaimed, straightening the red and orange argyle sweater vest he had donned, a contrast from the formal clothing he’d worn in Manhattan as Viggo’s butler.
Leo . . . in another life? Married? It was reasonable, yet I couldn’t picture it. Swallowing my shock, I asked, “How did Sofie . . . give you back your wife?”
He smiled. “One winter, my wife—Maeve—started having difficulty breathing. To this day, I don’t know what caused it. A weak heart, perhaps. Being what I am, I tried healing her, but I couldn’t. I tried every spell in the book. I begged every sorcerer I knew, who tried every spell in their repertoire. Nothing. No one could fix her. Not with normal magic, anyway.” He leaned back in his chair. “A friend of mine suggested I ask the Fates.”
The Fates. I remembered Sofie mentioning these Fates. “Isn’t that what Sofie did for my spell?”
Leo’s head bobbed up and down, his brow furrowing. “Dangerous and powerful stuff, that type of magic. It can be deadly. Few sorcerers will even attempt a Causal Enchantment. Most don’t have enough magic in them to call on them, even if they’re brave enough. I don’t, that’s for certain.” A wrinkled index finger rose to wag in the air. “But there was one, it seemed, a powerful and fearless French sorceress who had turned herself eighty years earlier using a Causal Enchantment for the love of a vampire, only to accidentally kill him. I had heard about her; she was a fable by that point, really. No one knew if she still lived. Most thought she had met her demise by fire, or something equally poetic. If she did exist, she had dropped off the grid completely.
“I was desperate. I had to find her, had to see what she could do that no one else could. And so I searched. I researched every French sorcery guild tree; I picked the brains of every elderly witch still alive. And I finally found a name: Sofie Girard.”
“Girard,” I repeated softly. Of course Sofie had a last name!
He nodded. “Once I had her name, I used a type of spell called a ‘broadcast spell’ to seek her out. I’ll explain that another time.” He waved away my perplexed look. “Maeve was so weak by this point, her breathing ragged. I didn’t expect her to last another week.” Leo paused and swallowed heavily.
“The morning after I sent the broadcast out, I walked into our little kitchen in Dublin to find this stunning red-haired woman perched on the counter.” He chuckled. “At first I thought she was going to strike me dead for seeking her out—those pale green eyes seemed to dissect me.” Leo leaned forward until he perched on the edge of his chair, suddenly animated as he relived the memory. “But she pushed past me without a word and walked over to the couch where my wife lay, wheezing terribly and barely conscious by now. Sofie leaned forward, close to my wife’s face. I didn’t know what to expect. I was afraid she would do what I couldn’t—end my wife’s suffering. Or worse, turn her! Of course, I didn’t know about the venom problem, that her venom couldn’t turn a human.” A wistful smile touched Leo’s lips.
“But she did no such thing. For two days straight, Sofie sat beside Maeve, holding her hand. I could feel her magic in the house. Such awesome, unparalleled strength that woman has. She is a true rarity in the sorcery world. I sat in the chair next to them, watching. I didn’t utter a single word. For two days straight, I sat there, until I finally passed out from exhaustion.” Leo leaned back into his chair. “When I awoke, Maeve was sitting next to me with rosy cheeks and vibrant eyes. Sofie was gone.”
My heart swelled with relief. “So Maeve’s okay? Where is she now?”
Leo smiled sadly. “She’s been gone twenty years now, Evangeline. That’s the downside of marrying an older woman.” He chuckled. “Maeve was nineteen years my senior. When I was a spry fifty-five-year-older, she was in her mid-seventies. Old age took her. But thanks to Sofie, I had thirty wonderful years with her.”
“So then what happened?” I felt my eye brow quirk with doubt. “How’d you end up as Viggo’s Britis
h butler?”
“Well . . . ” Leo slowly eased out of his chair. He walked over to gaze out a window, his arms crossed over his chest. “When Maeve died, I was lost. Figured I’d just let myself waste away until I could join her. And then one day about fifteen years ago, Sofie contacted me using a communication spell. It seems the sly woman had kept tabs on me and knew I was widowed.” He laughed, shaking his head. “She asked about my British acting skills and my ability to mask my powers. Intrigued and willing to repay her in any way I could, I followed her instructions. I moved to England under an assumed name and fraudulent credentials. I published an advertisement for a job in New York City, and I learned a disguising spell to hide my Irish accent, to create the illusion of a perfect gentleman’s man. It didn’t take long for Viggo to find me. His last butler met an untimely death.” Leo grimaced. “Or timely, for Sofie’s sake.”
I shuddered, hoping Sofie had nothing to do with it but not feeling overly confident.
“I entered their home just after Viggo killed your mother.”
That stabbed at my heart. Since learning the truth of my mother’s death—that Viggo had murdered her—I could not think about my mother without seeing the haunting image Max had shown me of Viggo leaning over her broken body. It was etched in my mind, just as Caden’s bloody eyes now were. A giant wet nose nuzzled against my ear. Max, comforting me. I gave his head an affectionate scratch.
Leo continued. “At first I knew nothing about you, about the spell, or the venom issue. But slowly, as Sofie learned to trust me, as I began feeding her bits of information and described strange happenings that I heard of with my ear to the ground, she confided in me.” He gave me a gentle smile that pulled at the wrinkled skin around his mouth. “By the time you stepped out of Viggo’s private jet, I knew you quite well.” Returning his gaze to the window, he paused, his mind drifting. “Maeve and I were never able to have children. She was in her forties when we married. We tried, but it never took.” Just as quickly, he drifted back into our conversation. “Planting me in there was brilliant on Sofie’s part. Unfortunately I knew nothing about Ursula. Viggo kept that one close to his unbeating heart.”
