by Cat Devon
Alex disabled the security cameras along the way as they exited the hotel. Putting his arms around her, he moved at the vampire freaky-fast speed of his to the Water Tower building on Michigan Avenue, known around the world as the Magnificent Mile.
The Gothic Revival building looked like a mini castle surrounded by towering modern skyscrapers. “The yellow Joliet limestone blocks made me think it was built out of shortbread,” Keira said. “The towers were originally intended to hide the tall standing pipes. The building was built two years before the fire and was meant to pump drinking water from Lake Michigan.”
“Let me guess,” Alex teased her. “You wrote a story about it?”
“Yes, but actually my first visit here was with my Girl Scout troop when I was a kid. I thought it was a magical castle.”
Once they were inside, he looked at the visitors with disapproval. “I wasn’t expecting a crowd.”
“It’s not a crowd. It’s just a few people. Come on.” She took him by the hand. She paused at the display of before-and-after photos from the Chicago Fire before moving on to a deserted far corner of the building.
“It’s this way.” Keira’s evil eye ring felt warm on her finger and glowed in the sunlight streaming through one of the high windows. Putting her hand on the wall, she said, “It should be in a hidden cavity right here.”
And then she was gone.
Chapter Eighteen
Keira looked around in alarm. What the hell had just happened?
She was standing outside the Water Tower, but it looked very different. There was nothing but smoldering ruins around it. No ritzy Water Tower Place shopping center. No skyscrapers. No car traffic on Michigan Avenue.
Someone was holding her hand. “Grandpa?” she whispered. “Is that you?”
He nodded.
“What’s going on?”
“We need to talk.”
She reached out to touch him. He stood before her just as he had in the photo in the newspaper with that white streak in his hair. He didn’t look like he had the last time she’d seem him alive. Then he’d looked to be a spry sixty-year-old who was really seventy. Now he looked to be in his mid-thirties or -forties. And his clothes were period pieces out of a museum. “Are you real?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in Chicago in 1871.”
“How…?” She was too stunned to finish the question.
“The portal. You came through the portal.”
“You yanked me through the portal.”
“I did,” he admitted.
“Why?”
“Like I said, we need to talk.”
“You couldn’t talk to me in current times?”
“No.”
“Why are you hiding out here? Why did you fake your death?”
“I didn’t fake my death.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Where have I heard that before?” she muttered.
“You need to take the journal back with you.”
“That’s what I was trying to do when you grabbed me. Aren’t you worried you’re going to mess up the space–time continuum or something?”
“Not for this short period of time.”
“So it’s like dropping food on the floor? The five-second rule applies?” Keira could tell by the confused look on his face that he didn’t understand what she was saying. No surprise there. She could barely understand what she was saying.
Cupping her face in his big hands, he said, “You have to listen to me.”
“Do you realize that people think you’re still alive in 2015? Are you? Alive in 2015, I mean.”
“Apparently not.”
She hadn’t thought so, but she still felt a pang of regret and loss. More than a pang really. Ever since she’d found his journal in that safe-deposit box she’d been hit with one thing after another, without time to recover from any of the wild discoveries she’d made. “Why did you bring me here?”
“There are things you need to know.”
Her emotions boiled over. “You think? Like the fact that you’re a vampire hunter? How did that happen?”
“I come from a long line of vampire hunters. My father trained me.”
“So you went into the family business? Is that why you brought me here? To initiate me into the business? Because I won’t do it,” she said emphatically.
“Only males in my bloodline are able to be hunters.”
She thought that was totally chauvinistic, but since she didn’t want the job anyway there was no point in going into that. “Did your mother approve of your line of work?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“My kind of question. I’d appreciate it if you answered it.”
“My mother never expressed her opinion of such things. It wouldn’t have been proper.”
“By all means, let’s be proper,” she said.
“I didn’t expect you to be so…”
“Pissed off?”
He gave her a look of deep disapproval that had her squirming before remembering she was twenty-eight years old and had a damn good reason for being pissed off. Just because her time-traveling, vampire hunting grandfather had given her his classic reprimanding frown was no reason to back down. She’d had enough on her plate grieving her mother’s death without all this other shit going on.
Her anger took her by surprise and sent a flaring ember glowing at her feet. Okay, she could not be blasting here or she’d start another Chicago Fire. She had to calm down.
She took a deep breath. “Tell me about my ring. It’s what got me through the portal, right?”
He nodded.
“You said you got it in Turkey.”
“I did. About thirty years ago.”
“Thirty years from when? From the nineteenth century or the twentieth or twenty-first?” she asked.
“The ring is what allowed you to be transported through the portal.”
“I sure hope it allows me to be transported back to my own time.”
“It does.”
“What else does the ring do? Is it the reason I blasted a hole in that tunnel?”
“What tunnel?”
“Never mind. What else does the ring do?”
“It provides you with some protection.”
“Some protection against what?”
“Evil,” he said.
“By evil do you mean vampires? Because all vampires are not evil.”
“You are wrong.”
“No, you are wrong. But there’s no changing the past.”
“It’s your future I’m worried about. It’s in jeopardy.”
“In what way?”
“From vampires.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know.”
“Did you read the journal?”
He nodded.
“Then you know what your own future holds,” she said. “Isn’t that against some rule of the universe?”
“Perhaps.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The vampires want this journal.”
“What does that have to do with you knowing your own future? By the way, I’m assuming that if you change the future, then I won’t have been born.” She paused as a flare of panic hit her. “Is that why I’m here? Because I wasn’t born? I don’t exist in my own time anymore?”
“Stay calm. I’m not going to change anything.” Having said that, he opened the journal and tore out half a dozen pages.
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting you.” Without future ado, he lit a match and set the pages on fire.
“Stop!” she cried out.
But it was too late. The pages went up in flames. The air was already still thick with the smell of smoky ruins surrounding them.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded.
“I told you.”
“What w
as on those pages?”
“I did what I had to.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’ll get from me on this matter,” he said.
“Was it the pages in some sort of old language?” She could tell by the look on his face that her hunch was accurate. “I’m right.”
“I’m not discussing it any further.”
“Maybe you already have changed the future by burning those pages.”
“I just made sure they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
“Meaning vampire hands. Why did you leave the journal to me in the first place?”
“So you would know the truth.”
“Why did you send me to see Alex when he was next on your vampire hit list? I didn’t see anything about your reasons for that in the journal.”
“It was written in the old language.”
“In the pages you just burned?” She looked at the charred remains at her feet in dismay. “You destroyed information about Alex and me? I don’t understand any of this!”
“I’m not explaining it very well, I fear.”
“You’ve got that right,” she muttered.
“Those pages contained ancient legends.”
“About Alex?” She frowned. “But he didn’t become a vampire until the Second World War.”
“The legends foretold someone to come.”
“You mean that Alex was destined from ancient times to be a vampire?”
Her grandfather nodded.
“How ancient are we talking about here?” she asked,
“The Crusades.”
“Whoa.” She tried to wrap her mind around that. “What about me? Why do I feel this strong connection to Alex? And don’t tell me it’s just sex.”
Her grandfather looked like he’d just swallowed a frog.
“Sorry,” she said. “I forgot who I was talking to for a moment there. You looked older when I knew you.”
“There is a legendary connection referred to as The Longing in your case and The One in his.”
“By connection do you mean we’re meant to be together?”
Her grandfather nodded.
Keira had sensed as much. “Is that why you wanted to kill him?”
“That decision was made by future me. I can only assume I was concerned for your safety.”
“Yet you sent me to him.”
“Something must have happened to change things.”
“The blood thefts?”
“I don’t know the answers.”
“Did you die of natural causes or did a vampire kill you?”
“Again, that’s the future. I have no knowledge of that.”
“What about your past? Can you tell me about that?”
“You are a tenacious one, aren’t you? You must have gotten that from me. I was never going to marry or have children. I didn’t want to pass this burden on to another.”
“Burden?”
“Being a vampire hunter.”
“Can you teach me how to blast?” she said.
“Blast?”
“You know what I mean. You used blasting to hunt vampires.”
“You want to become a hunter?” he said.
“No. I want to be able to protect myself.”
“There isn’t time. You have to go back or the portal will close.”
“Then why did you pull me back here?”
“I confess I wanted to see you to talk to you, my own flesh and blood.” His voice was gruff. “I never thought that day would come again. I never thought that I’d have a family. Not when I was doing what I was doing.”
“I heard you were married before.”
He nodded. “Before I became a hunter. Everything changed after that.”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“It was my mission in life.”
“Why couldn’t Mom and I have been your mission in life?” she asked unsteadily.
“You were.” He brushed his hand across her cheek as he had many times over the years.
“But hunting vampires was more important.”
“More urgent. When Almina, my first wife, died from a vampire attack, I knew I had to follow the path of a hunter and do it better than it had ever been done before. I never planned to marry again … but I did.”
“What about these blood thefts? Did you plan those?”
“No. I did not.”
“How can I believe you? Why should I believe you?”
“I’ve never lied to you.”
“Your whole life was a lie.”
“No. What I did was not share certain information with you for your own good.”
“You said you were an accountant.”
“I was an accountant. An accountant who also hunts and kills vampires. I left that part out.”
“Lies by omission are still lies.”
“If only life were that simple,” he said.
* * *
It took Alex five minutes to evacuate the Water Tower building. It was the longest five minutes of his afterlife.
Even moving at vamp speed, it was difficult to reach all the visitors. There weren’t a lot, but they were all over. Too bad he didn’t have the ability to do a mass compulsion. He could have sent them all out of the building in seconds.
The worst was the Girl Scout troop that had just entered. Seeing them reminded him of Keira telling him about her first visit here as a Girl Scout. “I thought it was a magical castle,” she’d said.
He compelled the troop leader first. “The girls are in danger. Get them all out of here immediately. Head out in an orderly way.”
The woman obeyed without causing a stampede.
“Are we going over to Water Tower Place to shop now?” one scout eagerly asked.
“Your eyes are glowing,” one astute scout with her hair in braids told him before he compelled her to forget.
Of course there were security cameras, but he disabled them with a mass surge of energy. Security would merely see images from earlier in the day.
All the while he told himself that Keira was okay. The connection between them was so powerful that he’d know if she was dead. So she must be okay. It had to be her grandfather who grabbed her. The bastard.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if someone else had grabbed her? What if Lynch had taken her somehow? How would the Gold Coast leader know their location? Alex had taken great pains to make sure they weren’t followed.
No, it had to be her grandfather. He was the one who had told her to stash the journal here. Was it possible that he was still alive and had somehow grabbed her in some sort of hidden passageway?
If that was the case, her claustrophobia would make her panic as she had in the Vamptown tunnels. Alex hated to think of her that way. He also prayed that she wouldn’t try to blast her way out, because the Water Tower wasn’t as sturdy as the Vamptown tunnels and any secret passageway could collapse. Yeah, the place had survived the Chicago Fire, but it might not be able to survive a supernatural blast from the granddaughter of a legendary vampire hunter.
Alex frantically ran his hands over the wall looking for some device that would trigger the passageway or the portal. He had to use caution that his strength didn’t knock the wall down or he’d never get her back. No matter how carefully he looked, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There was no hint of anything magical.
“Come back to me, Keira!” Alex shouted before whispering raggedly, “You have to come back to me.”
* * *
“I have to go back,” Keira told her grandfather. For a second there, she could have sworn that she heard Alex’s voice calling to her.
“I know.”
She couldn’t resist asking, “What do you know about my future?”
“More than I can tell you,” her grandfather said.
“That’s not real helpful. You know something about my future yet you can’t tell me about your future, about how you died. Why is that?”
/> “I don’t make the rules,” he said. “I just have to abide by them.” He paused a moment before adding, “I will say this … you’ll do well in the end.”
“In the end?” she repeated. “What does that mean? The end, as in right before I die?”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“It’s hard not to.” She took a deep breath. “Will I see you again?”
He shook his head regretfully.
Two tears rolled down her cheeks. Damn, she’d been doing so well up until then. “I didn’t get to say good-bye to you before you died. I wanted you…” Her breath caught. “I wanted you to know how much I love you.”
“I love you, too. Remember that and think of me when you look at your ring.”
“What about my tattoo? It’s changing.”
“That’s as it should be. It’s a sign of your future.”
“A future you can’t tell me about.”
“That’s right.”
“No, it’s not right. None of this is right. You dying. Mom dying. Me being alone.”
“You have Alex.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“It’s out of my hands.”
“Whose hands is it in, then? No, wait. You can’t tell me, right?”
“Right.”
She’d been holding on to his left hand all this time. He held his journal in his right hand. When he opened it, she realized what he was doing. “Stop!”
* * *
Alex knew time was running out. Sooner or later the security crew would notice something off with their footage. And while he’d barred the entrance door, newcomers he hadn’t compelled were bound to think that something was wrong. If he flashed his badge, he might gain some time, but that would mean leaving his post at the wall where Keira had left him. He wasn’t willing to do that.
Leaving was too much like giving up, and that was not an option. He’d tried everything he could think of, from pressing his mirroring tattoo against the wall to compulsion. Nothing worked. Logically he knew he couldn’t compel inanimate objects, but he was desperate.
Checking his watch, he realized she’d only been gone fifteen minutes. It seemed like forever. His gut told him that her ability to return if there was a portal would be limited.
He had no experience with time-travel issues. What if she was stuck in some other time forever? What if she couldn’t come back?
His blood froze. The thought of never seeing Keira again left him bereft. He refused to accept such a possibility. No way.
