by Stella Blaze
“Oh yes, to kill me. That’s what you vampires do. I feel so popular!”
He reached out and grabbed her by the shoulders. “I’m here to—”
The inhuman voice from the puddle screeched and interrupted him. “You’ll do nothing but die!”
The vampire roared in outrage. “Can’t either of you let me finish what I’m trying to say?”
With a crack like thunder the puddles under the swing set broke open, and huge spider creatures crawled out and started toward them, chittering menacingly.
Andy screamed and jumped back a heartbeat before one of the spider thingies caught a hold of her. The vampire grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her even further away from the oncoming spiders.
“I’m here to save you,” he said. But one of the spider things jumped on his back, and another three started to chase her across the park.
She started to run, but more spider creatures started crawling out of the puddles in that direction as well.
The vampire growled and roared, and one of the spider creatures made an agonized squeal as he slayed it.
And just like that the vampire stood beside her once more, a sword in his grip as he hacked away at a spider that was just about to jump on Andy’s leg. And that’s when Andy saw that he was carrying her sister’s sword.
“How did you get my sister’s sword?” she gasped.
“Min sent me to get you.”
“Yeah, sure,” Andy pushed him away. “My sister would’ve sent a vampire to save me…a blood sucking, soulless thing. Tell me another one.”
He gritted his teeth and let out a haughty sigh. Then he held out his hand as he simultaneously struck down another spider. In the palm of his hand gleamed Min’s ring. The one their mother had forged. An item of singular power: the ability to allow Min to teleport whoever wore the ring back home: in effect, pulling them to safety.
Originally it had been so that Katarina could teleport Min to safety. But their mother was still asleep, trapped somewhere that wasn’t her body.
Alone…
Funny thing—until that moment it had never occurred to her that her mother had never created a ring for her to wear. Maybe she was just one hundred percent certain that Andy would never get in any trouble. She looked around her at the ever-increasing horde of spider creatures encroaching about her, and then at the vampire standing before her, holding out her sister’s ring, offering her a direct path to safety.
Thoughts flashed and pitched through Andy’s fear and adrenaline-spiked brain, and her next thought just dropped from her lips.
“By the pestilent gods…are you my sister’s boyfriend?”
The vampire’s inhumanly handsome features softened, his eyebrows knitting with a half shrug of his shoulders—body language saying, Well…yeah.
“Get out of here!” Andy whispered in disbelief, not knowing herself if her excitement was from horror or happiness.
The vampire shook his head and pressed the ring into her palm. “We don’t have time for introductions right now. You need to put the ring on. They will pull—”
“Yeah, I know. They can pull me back home using the…did you just say ‘they’?”
This time the vampire lunged to the side, and spun, the portrait of skill and grace, and hacked an airborne spider thing in half. Andy squeaked. The vampire rolled his eyes, reached out and with preternatural swiftness took Brutus from her arms, and the ring from her palm and placed it on her middle finger.
Andy was about to repeat her question: They? and, What are you doing with my dog? But the sudden sensation of having your physical and spiritual self folded in on itself, and then sucked through a teeny-tiny straw, sort of took the breath she was about to speak with right out of her. For a nauseating, dizzying moment she shot through that tight, confined, crazy straw of energy, and in a handful of beats she appeared, whole and ready to throw up, in the living room of her sister’s house. Everything around her was a blur of colors as she fell forward, losing her balance and the starch in her legs. Two pairs of arms caught her and dragged her across the floor and deposited her on the old chintz couch. The upholstery was cool and familiar, and Andy let herself relax into the worn softness of the cushions. She blinked about ten times, and at last her sight began to clear. She looked up to see her sister looking down upon her, her expression filled with worry and concern, and a mirror image of that expression limned the face of her mother.
Andy gasped and felt the surge of shocked surprise jolt through her body. She shot up off the couch and threw herself into her mother’s arms.
“You’re awake…you’re really awake!”
Katarina’s arms enveloped Andy and she whispered comforting words, more instinctive sounds a mother would emit at any point in the last million or so years, to calm and soothe a child. She stroked Andy’s hair as she gently pulled her back onto the couch with her.
“It’s really you? You’re really awake?” Andy laughed and cried out, but then stiffened against the feel of her mother’s familiar arms. She pulled away and looked up to her sister. “This isn’t some trick? Not just some glamour or spell?”
Min shook her head and tried to bring a smile to her lips. “No, no. This is real…I swear to you.”
Andy’s hands shook as she reached out to her mother, hesitating for a moment, and then taking the older woman’s hands into her own. “But how?” her voice betrayed how enormous her joy was.
And why the hell isn’t Min overjoyed to have our mother back with us?
Katarina spoke, and her lightly accented voice was music to her daughter’s ears.
“It was all your sister’s vampire’s doing.” She looked up and rolled her eyes and sighed, then continued, “He figured out what was keeping me from reentering my body. That a thing’s magick was only as strong as its greatest weakness. He broke the Winter Queen’s spell using cold iron.” She looked to Min with troubled eyes. “Rather clever, that young man of yours…for a centuries-old, soulless vampire.” Her tone turned cool and harsh as her words played out.
Andy shot her mother a hard look. “Yeah, I just met the guy—and wow, what a looker—and since he just helped save my life, and apparently just gave my mother back her life, I’m going to cut the man some slack when it comes to the whole soulless thing.” She lifted her eyebrows, “I think we all should, don’t you, mother?”
Katarina looked nonplussed, but she nodded. Andy threw herself at her mother again, grasping the woman to her for dear life. Her voice choked with tears, “I never thought we’d get you back. Everything Min tried failed. And now…” she cried out with such joy. Words just failed to form anymore in her head.
“It’s alright now,” her mother cooed, stroking her fingers through Andy’s wild tangle of hair. “We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re not stumbling around blindly anymore.”
What did that mean?
“Mother,” Min’s voice was harsh and disapproving.
“Now Min…”
“No,” Min demanded. “We have to tell her. You have to tell her. We won’t have time enough soon, and she deserves to know.”
Andy pulled away from her mother’s embrace, looking at her face. It slowly changed expression, from one of cool detachment to worry. When she met Andy’s gaze, her eyes were beseeching.
“Know about what?”
Katarina took a deep breath, her lips parting as if she were about to speak, but she hesitated. “I’m so sorry for lying to you all this time.” She took her daughter’s face in her hands and then let go. “I’m not really your mother.”
There was such silence in the room. Andy shook her head. “Wow. Your bedside manner needs some work. Ever hear of tact?”
Katarina looked completely confused. Andy sighed and it was her turn to roll her eyes. It was a family trait…or so she’d thought until about thirty seconds ago.
“So you’re telling me I’m adopted?”
Katarina looked to Min, and Andy saw tears welling up in her sister’s eyes. Oh, this is going well.
“No,” Katarina finally said. “What I mean is…you were not born to me. You were not born to any woman.”
A question tried to form in Andy’s head, but her mother began to speak again before she could pin it down.
“Arianna, the Summer Queen of the Sidhe came to me. Her blood has run through the veins of our family from time in memoriam, so she used that link to…to call me to help her.
“She had a thing of power waiting on the other side of the Ethereal Mists. I didn’t understand what it was, precisely, but she needed my help in hiding it.” She took Andy’s hands in hers and peered deep into her eyes. “And the best way to hide something is to place it in plain sight.”
Andy wasn’t following her mother one bit. Why was she talking about the fae? Katarina had always told her daughters that the faerie people were just folk tales. Creatures of lore. And now she was talking about them like…well, like she knew them.
“Using my blood and my magicks, I helped the Queen mold that…the power…into a human being.”
Andy looked up to her sister, her mind jumbled and confused. She had thought they were talking about her. That Katarina was explaining how she—and then it hit her. Her mother was talking about her.
She saw it in her sister’s eyes. She knew too.
So it was true.
Andy pulled her gaze back to her mother and said, “So I’m not real?”
“Of course you’re real,” Katarina said, holding all the tighter to her daughter’s hands. “No matter where you came from, or how you came to be, you are as real as I am.”
Andy felt her entire body turn cold as her stomach bottomed out. She pulled her hands from her mother’s grasp and stood on wobbly legs.
“Real?” She staggered past her sister to the fireplace, wishing the flames of its fire would warm away the ice that was flowing in her veins. “Real…like one of your spells?”
“Well, yes, but much more. Since—”
“Since a faerie Queen pitched in, is that it? You made me into a real little girl, like some stupid Disney cartoon?”
“It wasn’t like that!” Katarina shot off the couch and tried to get nearer to her daughter, but Andy would have none of it, skirting around her and putting the couch they’d been seated on between them.
“I don’t know you,” she looked at her mother, her eyes burning, her breath coming in rapid, hoarse pulls. “How could you do this…how could you keep this from me? You’ve been lying to me my entire life!”
At that Min turned away and Andy watched her sob into her hands. Min was crying like…oh god, she hadn’t seen Min cry like that since the day they’d found Katarina, cold and lifeless on the floor of the magic shop. What could be worse than—dear goddess.
“When did you and this faerie Queen make me?” She could hear the sharpness in her voice, and didn’t care. Her mother was still hiding something from her, and she was going to hear the whole damned thing, and now. “How long ago did this happen?”
Now tears were filling her mother’s eyes. Katarina Boccherini never cried. She was a kind and loving mother, but she was also cast from freaking steel. But now she was crying…for the love of god!
“A little over a year ago.”
What? Just a year ago…
That wasn’t possible. She was twenty-four years old. She’d gone to college for business before going to work at the family magic shop. And before that there had been high school and junior high school, and…and…
But almost anything was possible when it came to magick, now wasn’t it? She may not have any real talent or knowledge of the craft, but her mother did. Who knew for certain what all her mother could do? Or her sister—
Andy wheeled around and shot Min a razor sharp glare. “Did you know?”
Katarina walked between the two, shaking her head. “I had to place the spell on her as well.”
So it was spells all around.
“But Min was too strong to permanently change her memories. Once I released the spell, her memory returned.”
Min came up beside her mother, her eyes swollen and red, “So now I have both: all my original memories and those with you.”
“But that’s just magick!” Andy turned her back on them both. “It’s just tricks. Not real. Just like I’m not real!”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Katarina said, the sound of her voice coming closer. “Whatever you were before the Summer Queen and I…before we molded you, you were real. Not a thing of magick, but a naturally occurring power that came from this world, this universe. That makes you real. That, and…we used my blood to cast you with.”
Andy spun around to face the two women, hot tears running down her cheeks, making the room blur and pitch. “So I’m some experiment? You cooked me up like a batch of mystical cookies, and now what?” her breathing heaved and then stopped. “Why?”
“Because…” Katarina blinked, and then very slowly she shook her head. “The fae are not much for sharing their reasoning. I know she said she needed to hide you away from her nemesis: Sliva, the Winter Queen, the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
“Sliva…” Andy repeated the name. It even tasted cold on her tongue. She was about to say it again, but her mother raised a hand and hushed her.
“Never say a thing’s name more than twice, or you’ll call that thing to you.”
Andy’s mind whirled and turned in her skull, a rather dizzying experience. But suddenly it all came to a halt, and she felt her shoulders loosen. “So that’s who I saw in the frozen puddles in the park. Who sent those horrifying spider things after me, and…and who put you in a coma.”
Katarina nodded.
“So why hide me from her? I mean, she knows who I am now, what’s the point of trying to hide me? We might as well invite her in for some coffee; just let her have me.”
“We can’t!” Min and Katarina said in unison. Min continued, “We could never do that.”
Katarina patted Min’s hand as she walked closer to Andy. “If she gets her hands on you, she will devour you…” And that’s when Andy stopped hearing what her sister and mother were saying.
Andy had her back to them both, facing the mantel of the fireplace. She wanted to be anywhere on the face of the earth, anywhere but there. Her breath started to catch, and she couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs.
Oh god, oh god, oh god…
It was all just crazy. It couldn’t be real. She had to have snapped, and this was some sort of psychotic nightmare. What did the shrinks on television call it: a dissociative break from reality? Maybe her entire life was just a hallucination? But then, that’s what they had been telling her, hadn’t they? A spell.
And then she finally really looked at what was right in front of her on the mantel. There between a blue and pink carnival glass vase from the 1940’s and a six-inch tall green marble geisha statue that predated the Ming Dynasty, sat a small, white and silver stone, worn smooth, longer than it was wide or high, and nearly cylindrical.
Andy hadn’t gone around to all those conventions and out of the way estate sales for nothing. She may not have the practical magical knowledge her sister and mother had, but she did now her magical artifacts. Shamlus stones were naturally occurring marbleized limestone quarried in the highlands of Scotland, and they had a singularly innate enchantment to them.
And that white and silver stone was a Shamlus stone.
Andy reached out and took it in her hand. Cold, smooth and hard in her hand, she held it tight and closed her eyes, pushing all her will into the stone. She felt it warm in her hand, and then she thought a word three times: Shamlus. Shamlus. Shamlus.
A tingling sensation spread over her flesh, covering her completely in the space of only a few heartbeats.
Her mother and sister gasped at the same moment, and her mother called out her name. But Andy didn’t even look back at them. She needed to get away from them—from all of it. So she ran for the door, clawing at the door locks and racing outside and th
rough the darkened street. She just couldn’t stay there and hear another word. She needed to get away, to get out…to get anywhere they weren’t.
She had a vague feeling that things waited in the shadows, watching the house—watching for her. But the Shamlus stone must have done its job thoroughly, for nothing so much as stirred in the surrounding night.
A cold numbness settled in around her heart as she ran down the street. They had betrayed her. Her own kin…but then again, if the insane things they had told her were true, they weren’t even that to her. They were just…just…
No, they weren’t just anything—she was what wasn’t real. She was the no one.
Andy made very good time, for before she knew it the streets turned unfamiliar, and she knew without a doubt she was well away from her family—the word brought a jolt of intense anguish with it, as if a shard of ice were clogging one of the chambers of her heart. She had to wake up. She had to get out of this nightmare. It had to be a dream, it couldn’t be real…because nothing in her entire life had hurt an ounce as much as this did.
Her legs started to give out on her, and she slowed to a terrified, though weak, jog. Her body wanted to slow down desperately, but her mind was still racing, and she could no more stop and catch her breath than she could keep running.
She slowed down enough that she started looking around her and behind, seeing if anyone or anything was following her. She didn’t want to see them…to see Min nor Katarina, but a new riff of paranoia was starting to speak up. What if this wasn’t a dream? What if what they had said was indeed the truth?
But that was impossible.
But so was magick…and vampires and werewolves and…well, a million other things that she knew damned well were absolutely, unalterably real.
She ran into something while she was looking back over her shoulder. She jumped and cried out, pushing against and trying to push through whoever or whatever it was. She felt something cold and sharp cut into the palm of her hand, and reflexively she wrenched herself away from it, staggering across the sidewalk and backing up into a parked car.
The car’s alarm went off, wailing at a deafening pitch. It made her jump again as she swung around to find the black, high-end sedan blinking its lights at her, filling the night with lights and sounds galore. She whirled back to what she had run into, and found a wrought iron gate swinging in the night breeze, topped by sharp looking fleur-de-lis. She looked to her aching palm and found the flesh there torn and smudged with her blood.
