We start driving fast down the highway as the person on the other end of the call loops others into a conference call. It looks like my hunter is now being hunted. The hunt seems well organized, too. Staying on it sounds like my best option for finding the one I want. I have to take a gamble that Ivy will be well, since my phone is currently in otherspace.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ivy Sparks
“Carl. Get Carl,” I say.
Kate steps out of the room, and comes back a few minutes later with Carl.
“Do you remember how to get to the cabin?” I ask.
“Yes. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” I say.
“Take me there.”
“You’re not well enough to travel, Ivy.”
“I’m not well enough for anything,” I tell him.
“Why?” Carl asks me.
Out in the hallway, I can see Kate on her phone. Probably calling Nathan. I can tell by the way she’s standing. She has always stood that certain way when she talks to him.
“It’s where I last saw Ben,” I say. “It just feels right, if all of this is going to end, for it to end where it started.”
“What are you talking about Ivy?” Carl asks me.
“This baby, our baby, yours and mine and Nathan’s. It’s killing me. I’m not going to make it much past sundown. Get Nathan back, have him meet us there. If I can’t have Ben with me when I die, I want to at least be in the last place he and I were happy.”
“You’re not going to die, Ivy,” Carl says.
“Grandma!” I croak. I want to shout it, but I don’t have the strength to project much beyond the room. Still, she knew I was calling for her, and while Carl is trying to argue with me, she comes into the room.
“What is it, dear?”
“Tell him to take me to Ben’s cabin.”
Grandma looks at Carl then back at me. “Do it,” she says to him.
Carl opens his mouth as if to say something, then shuts it. He rarely argues with her, but her face tells him now is not the time.
“Kate?” I ask, looking toward the doorway.
She shakes her head. “I can’t reach him.”
“Come with us, please,” I say.
With Carl on one side of me and Kate on the other we get out to Grandma’s old lady car. It’s the biggest one at the house, and has the softest ride. Even so, the two hours it takes to get out to the cabin seem to take twenty. The baby inside of me is thrashing around, and I can feel it draining away my blood. I dry heave constantly, sure that one more spasm of my guts is going to bring my own feet and out my mouth. Kate cradles my head in her lap, stroking my hair while Grandma sits, half turned around in the front seat, and constantly works magic to give me strength and dull my pain.
Finally, Carl stops the car. He and Kate get me into his arms and he carries me across the highway. The midday sunlight is bright on my face, and I know that I will never look up at it again. It is burning my eyes, but I can’t look away. When we come under the shade of the trees, I feel an immense sadness settle over me, that the sun is now hidden from my view. It is only when we come through one small clearing and I can see sky above me that the sadness lifts for a moment. But I tell myself that in a little while, we’ll be at the cabin, and there will be a clearing there as well.
I lost the strength to hold my head up, and it lolls backwards. I see one of the trees where a strip of bark was removed, one of Ben’s markers of a place he wanted to route any other vampires coming onto the land. I wonder how the spiders in those corridors are doing. I called spiders to Carl’s house when I moved in, because I missed the sense of those fine ladies out around my home their webs being part of the greater web of protection keeping me safe.
Carl stops walking to readjust how he is holding me, so my head can rest on his shoulder. He kisses the top of my head as he does so, and his beard tickles me.
We hit sunlight again and Carl stops suddenly, so suddenly that he overbalances and almost drops me. The cabin must have taken him by surprise. I turn my head to look at the little home Ben and I were building.
But it is not there. There are a few scraps of blackened and burnt metal, but no cabin. I can see where the field stone fireplace and chimney were, though that had collapsed, and what part of it still stands is also black with soot. “It’s gone…” I say. Carl takes a few steps closer to the burnt ruins. Already, there are green plants sprouting around the metal and stone things that didn’t burn, poking up through the field of ash and bits of charcoal where a small home filled with books and herbs I’d collected had once stood. “It’s gone,” is all I can say. It is so unreal, I find that I can’t even summon tears to cry about it. I am that numbed.
“Put me down,” I tell Carl. He does, but keeps a steadying arm around my waist, standing behind me where I can lean back against him. Kate and Grandma come up to flank me.
“What happened?”
Nobody answers. For a long time we stand there in silence. I can’t take it anymore, looking at the charred space in front of me. I take a tentative step. Grandma and Kate each take a grip on my arm to steady me.
“No,” I say. “Stay here.” I feel Carl’s solid presence behind me suddenly move. A few seconds later, he is putting a stout branch in my hand. I lean on that and start to walk up the hill. I remember that when I turned one of the kitchen knives, I took off my agate pendant I’d worn for years, and I buried it up on one of the escape runs Ben had showed me. With the cabin gone and Ben nowhere to be found, I feel my tie to this land is now lost, so I want to bring that stone with me. I no longer want my life to end out here. I want to go to my circle now to breathe my last.
For each step I take up the hill, I have to rest. I look up and see that I have at least three dozen steps to take. As long as I am remaining upright, my family and my friends behind me are willing to let me do what I will.
Intent has power. I realize this when I find a little bit of strength to cover half the distance to where the stone is buried before I need to rest again, and then I make the other half. So as not to worry anybody, I take a rest before I lower myself down to the ground. There’s an irregular patch of moss on a spur of rock that breaks free from the forest floor that reminds me of a bird. I follow where its beak is looking, five hand-widths from the edge of the stone, and I use the end of my walking stick to scrape at the soil. I feel the pendant, the little impact of something beneath the surface. I set the walking stick, and use my fingers to dig away the rest of the dirt, until I find the stone with its silver mounting, tarnished nearly black now from being buried. As I bring the stone up into the light again, I feel everything about the little plot of land change. A wave of confused emotion washes up to me from Carl, Grandma, and Kate. A powerful sense of hesitation rolls down from above, of curiosity and searching, then of fear, terror, regret, all backlit by a blast of bright joy and a soft glow of relief. The weight of all those emotions drains a huge amount of what little energy I have left.
I hear footsteps coming down the slope toward me, but it takes me until I am in their shadow before I can move. I see a pair of very familiar shoes first. I roll onto my back and look up into the face of Ben Wake.
“I need you to turn me, Ben…”
Epilogue: Ivy Sparks
We are celebrating our son’s second birthday after sunset. He wanted a backyard party, and I am much more comfortable outside at night than during the day.
The little boy’s name is Benarl, after Ben, Nathan, and Carl, his three fathers.
Nathan cuts the birthday cake, a slice each for everybody but Ben and me. Benarl makes short work of his slice, having inherited Carl’s appetite. Grandma sits beside Benarl, wiping frosting and crumbs from his mouth while trying to keep him from stealing her cake.
He starts fussing. Kate puts a hand on my shoulder, to signal me to remain seated, and walks over to him, taking the napkin from Grandma. He calms down, and lets her distract him with a glass of milk. Kate able to cal
m Benarl almost as well as I can.
Around her neck, Kate wears my old agate pendant on a red silk cord. She has chosen to never polish off the tarnish from its time buried by the cabin on it, but just by wearing it daily, the black patina has worn off on its own, and the fitting glows softly in light of the oil lanterns around the table.
The pendant is the only thanks Kate would take for her part in saving my and Benarl’s lives. When Ben turned me at the cabin, the transformation was tremendously violent and almost instantaneous. Carl said he could barely change form as fast as I became a vampire. As soon as the excruciating pain let up enough for me to think, I knew I needed to feed immediately. Kate was right there, offering her wrist. Carl and Ben held my arms down and Grandma sprawled across my legs so I couldn’t grab Kate and attack her. They let me take only enough to sustain me and little Benarl for a few hours before they bundled me up from the sun under whatever cloth they had and drove me home. What I got from Kate was just enough and just in time to keep Benarl and me alive.
In addition to the necklace, Kate wears a matching agate bracelet. Grandma has taken her as a second student. After the damage done to my body by Benarl, I am unable to carry another child, so I am the last of the Esseriya witches. Thirty eight generations of only daughters, was a long run, one of the longest ever for a strictly hereditary line, and the longest for a line that takes only one student per generation. We do not know what the new line, starting with Kate, will be called. The teaching will change, because Kate will need to find her own power and her own sense of what works for her. Whether this new line will be a hereditary or gathering, and what it will be called are all things that will be known as they come to pass.
Since Kate is managing to keep Benarl calm, I move a few seats down the table to sit next to Ben. He and Carl are enjoying glasses of very good tequila, Carl taking small sips and Ben small sniffs, while Nathan drinks water with just a squeeze of lemon in it. Carl and Ben are still different enough that there will never be true friendship between them, but they work very well together. Nathan is somewhat remote, but also manages to bond very well with both Ben and Carl. While the latter two will occasionally get into arguments with each other, they always get along with Nathan very well. Once Benarl was born, my three men quickly figured out their individual strengths and weaknesses where it comes to fathering our son and maintaining our strange and decentralized household. It is best for the four of us adults to not share a house. I don’t know how they would handle the tensions of knowing I’m bedded down with one of them on any night, so we do a lot of bedroom shuffling. Generally, I will primarily live with one of the men for three days, take a day of rest for myself, and then take the next as my main partner. I still see each of them every day as long as they are near home, but there is only one I am ever sleeping with at a time.
I have moved back into my old room at Grandma’s house. Carl has kept his place where he can have other werewolves come to stay. With the pressure of the Great War over, they are reclaiming their old practice of forming larger, looser packs, which means there is a lot of movement as individuals travel around to meet each other and start recreating the kinds of bonds that were lost.
Ben bought a patch of land above Grandma’s house, off an old dirt trail. Heather, the hunter that was tracking him used to come up sometimes to watch the house. Now she lives up in his place with him. The day that Ben had turned me, the vampires that Nathan was with caught up with Heather. The fight was short and furious, and ended with Heather bringing four heads from the Rouxille clan to Romania, including the one of their best hunters, who had claimed at least eighteen Negre heads over 900 years. This put her close enough to the Negre leadership that she was able to take three of their lieutenants one hot and sunny day. The whole affair has created an amazing amount of disruption among the clans as all of the alliances have reshuffled and nobody seems to be consolidating their strength. What is most interesting is the change in Heather. While she and Ben were minding Benarl one day, he fell and cut himself. Heather did the thing all women do instinctively to a hurt child, she licked her finger and wiped at the wound. The second time she did this, she got some of his blood into her mouth, and he effectively turned her a second time. She became something very different. Still clearly a vampire, but changed. She takes no sustenance from warm food, but it does not harm her either. She is not always cold. She has less power over mortals, but she can also tolerate sunlight as well as any person of northern ancestry. Her more extreme emotions and her contempt for mortals has also lessened greatly, and she’s become a lot more empathetic than she ever was. The hunter Ben remembers training is not the same vampire that lives with him now.
This caused Ben to reconsider Sonia Vătafu’s words. Everybody assumed she was warning them of the sun, but she wasn’t: “Someday, young Benjamin, one of us Negre is going to bed a witch, and every one of us will feel the son. Not a one of us will escape the son, not a single Negre, not a single drinker of any other clan. Only the one who raises the son will escape the son.”
When we saw the effects on Heather, Ben and I each took a drop of Benarl’s blood, but nothing changed for us. After a lot of discussion and thought with Grandma and Nathan, we think it is because Benarl is our child that he is unable to turn us. The child cannot also be the parent is how Nathan put it. Heather and Ben have resumed hunting, but looking for clan renegades that have been in hiding. Twice they have brought a single drop of Benarl’s blood out to a neutral location and given it, and the effect was the same as on Heather.
Then there is Nathan. He has also bought land near the house, just down the hill. He and Kate live there together for now. Kate is taking three more years to study with Grandma, and then will go off to study with other lines for several years. Nathan stays always within the loose kite on the map, drawn by Carl’s house farthest out, and then the cluster of his and Kate’s home, Grandma’s and mine, and Ben and Heather’s. He has taken responsibility for the safety of everybody within that domain, and he keeps a small phalanx of friendly minor demons and other invocates around it. The sum of all of the demonic energy effectively renders the domain invisible to vampires, which is why Benarl and I never leave it ourselves. I worry terribly every time Ben sets foot outside of the domain, but with Heather at his side, he has yet to suffer any harm on his forays.
Sitting in my dark yard at night, with this strange assembly of people gathered around me, I feel both free from the fated events that brought us all together, and still tightly bound by them. I am loved in abundance by three of the most fascinating men in the world. I have a beautiful son, my grandmother is still healthy and strong, I have Kate always by my side.
But I also have to maintain a fiction about a previously unknown disease, maybe tick-borne, that has given me a severe sun allergy for the rest of my friends… And I will not leave this area of just a couple dozen square miles where I now live for many, many years, until things with the vampires are settled. Those most ruthless and heartless ones that exist only for destruction will destroy themselves in war, while Ben and Heather spread the new blood to the willing, drop by precious drop from our son.
And so, like a proper witch, I accept this fate that is mine. On my feet, eyes open, middle finger up and out, loud and proud when necessary.
###The End###
About Cheri Winters
USA Today Bestselling Author, Cheri Winters got hooked on Urban Fantasy through Kim Harrison, Patricia Briggs, and Laurel K. Hamilton. Now Cheri writes her stories with kick-ass heroines battling their way through adventure and mayhem.
When not writing, Cheri practices Muay Thai and Karate or catches up reading her favorite authors.
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