by Diana Graves
“I don’t know!” I yelled from the ground.
“Kill him.”
“I mean, I don’t know how to kill him!” I screamed. And I wanted to. I wanted to tear that man limb from limb like a wild animal. I wanted to kill him in the worst and most painful way imaginable. I couldn’t even stand looking at him, but I did. I forced myself to glare at him from under my brow and I knew my face was a scary one, full of all my rage. I could see the impact of it on his face. He was scared of me. Good.
“Tell his body to die. Force it to simply stop,” Raphael said.
“No, he will suffer.” And with that thought firm in my mind I got to my feet and walked to my circle. The man cowered at my heels. I didn’t even know his name. I didn’t want to.
“Raina?” Nick asked after me. He placed a hand on my shoulder, but instantly took it back as if I’d shocked him. “You’re hot!”
I smiled an evil sort of grin and stepped on my line, smearing the blood in the grass. The circle was broken and the warlock ran, but he didn’t get far. I wasn’t exactly vampire fast, but I was pretty fucking fast. I tackled him to the ground. He punched me in the face, but I was high on adrenaline. I climbed on top of him and slammed his head against the ground over and over again. With this much blind rage I wanted to beat his skull in with my bare knuckles.
“With your mind, Raina, or no dice,” said Raphael.
I growled at the demon, but I opened up that part of myself that could read emotions and thoughts and sometimes even control minds. I delved into his head. It was a chaotic place, full of fear and anger at that moment. I moved past all that. I delved deeper into his brain. I burrowed in and took the reins. His body was mine to control and I stopped him from breathing. No matter how badly he wanted to take a breath I wouldn’t let him inhale. He was suffocating…but that didn’t please me. He cut up those little boys. He destroyed their insides.
“Raina, you can create fire by manipulating the molecules that surround you, by increasing their friction. Tap into that. Change reality within him,” Raphael said.
My head did an involuntary side tilt as I contemplated what he said, but I didn’t have long. The man in my grasp was going to die soon without oxygen. I released my hold on his mind and he gasped for air, coughing and taking in deep breaths, but his relief was short lived.
When I called my fire it was always the same. It began with a thought and I flexed that thought as one might flex a muscle. I put my will behind it. I focused on his insides. Mentally, I grabbed hold of his insides like I’d grab hold of someone’s mind. It was just another kind of tissue after all. One type of tissue made a brain, while another tissue made a heart or a stomach. I didn’t know much about humanoid anatomy, beyond common knowledge. I knew vaguely where the major organs were, but I didn’t know where to strike to cause the most pain without killing him. I just dived right in. His heart was racing. I slowed it down. I twisted his insides and he screamed.
“Raina!” Nick yelled over the man’s screams.
“This is justice,” said Raphael. He was no longer trapped in my circle. I could feel him standing over us, watching closely.
I played with the warlock’s insides like a child, pulling and prodding. I felt him dying but I didn’t want his suffering to end just yet. I grabbed hold of his mind and heart and kept both alive, even as he bled out from so many internal injuries. I kept his heart pumping what little blood it had. I forced him to experience his organs dying one by one, losing blood, losing oxygen, failing and becoming toxic. It was only when I felt his stomach rupture and blood and bile began oozing out of his ears, nose and mouth that I let him die. I stood up and backed away from the body.
I felt sick. How could I have just done such a thing? I needed some time to regain my composure and the boys gave it to me. Both Raphael and Nick stayed still and very quiet while I closed my eyes and focused on slowing my heart rate. I felt I needed to wipe my hands clean, but I didn’t. I felt dirty. What I’d done to that man was too easy for me. No one should be that powerful. I killed a man with my mind, but I couldn’t dwell on that, not in that moment.
“I want my son,” I said.
“And, you shall have him,” Raphael said, and then he was gone.
“Come on. Let’s take you home,” said Nick.
BLUE MOON CAFÉ
THE BLUE MOON Café was a swanky joint near the Tacoma grand train station. I could tell by how the servers and other patrons reacted to our arrival that they didn’t normally serve to our kind. How Mom and Ruy booked the Blue Moon for their rehearsal dinner was beyond me, though I suppose when a dashing sort of man and a beautiful elf came in to book an event they weren’t expecting most of their guests to be filthy witches and vampires. Whatever the case may have been, we were in a private room with Italian décor in dark shades of red, purple and green. The tables were placed in a narrow U shape, where on one side sat my mom’s family and friends, and on the other sat Ruy’s friends. He had no family attending that I could tell. They all appeared to be Native Americans from Darkness: vampires and humans. The wedding party dined at the shorter connecting table—bride, groom, best men and bride’s maids, (Ruy had Mato and Melvern, and Mom had Fauna and Olathia.) I was sitting between Damon and Thomas on the far end of Mom’s side, like the afterthought we were.
I wasn’t reading anyone’s mind. That was definitely a bad idea with this lot: family that didn’t much like me and some townsfolk from Darkness. But from the lack of tension between Seth, Mom and Tristan, I could guess that Seth hadn’t told Tristan that he was his father, and I really couldn’t blame him. As much as I loved my brother—cousin, he was a total snob. I wouldn’t put it past him to be all Luke Skywalker about it. Seth says ‘I am your father,’ and Tristan would shout something like ‘No! That’s impossible!’ What a hypothetical jerk!
Ruy cleaned up like a shiny penny. His long wavy black hair was braided back, face shaved. His usually khaki Indiana Jones rough and tough apparel was replaced with silk fanciness and shiny black shoes. Between the vegan meal we were all enjoying and the spiffed out digs, it was pretty obvious that he was whipped. Mom had him wrapped around her finger. But behind that long stemmed wine glass held so delicately between his thumb and forefinger was a man who hated me. His piercing blue eyes glared at me from over his tomato soup.
I ignored Ruy’s eyes. Almost all of my attention was elsewhere. After last night I couldn’t stop myself from doting on Thomas, watching him so intently. As if I could memorize his every movement, his every facial expression. His beautiful smile left me fighting back tears. He didn’t remember anything about last night, of being taken from his bed, but I couldn’t forget it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d done to that man and what I’d nearly lost. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I also couldn’t bring myself to tell Damon about any of it. To him, I simply woke up beside him exhausted from a night full of fitful nightmares. When we arrived home, I checked on Thomas and Katie and then Damon insisted I get some real sleep. I ended up sleeping the day away.
Nick and I talked for a while after leaving the woods. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to involve anybody else in this mess. Nick insisted that we could deal with this together, without worrying the family or grandstanding Mom’s wedding. Tonight after the dinner, he and I planned to meet at a club named Drake’s. The club was owned and operated by the small vampire collective, Drake’s Bane. It was the collective that our half-brother Michael had finally decided to join as one of their legion vampires. I had another friend that recently joined Drake’s Bane, a flirtatious champion vampire that went by the name Charlie.
I was torn from my thoughts by the clinking of Melvern’s fork on his empty glass. He too may have been giving me sordid looks but I wouldn’t have known. Lazily my eyes drifted from Thomas to the standing vampire; as always he was dressed in his Native garb. He looked great for having been shot less than twenty-four hours ago…though, I suppose I did, too. My chest was no longer bandaged up, but the skin st
ill looked bruised and raw. It’d be like that for a day or so, though the black dress I chose to wear covered it up nicely enough.
“Excuse me!” Melvern boomed. Ruy, Damon and Melvern had the deepest voices of any men I’d ever known, but Melvern was the deepest by far. It was Barry White deep, with such smoothness to it. Ruy’s was unsettling in a creepy way, as though he’d been a heavy smoker for far too many years. Damon’s…well his was a masculine husky that was perfect for pillow talk.
“I know we are not even into the second course of this lovely dinner,” said Melvern. Olathia, his co-master, a beautiful, nearly nude Native American vampire covered in delicate looking tattoos, laughed at the statement. The food meant nothing to the more then twenty-five vampires attending. Mom would not allow blood to be served, so they sat with nothing while we ate. “But I would like to take this moment to say that I am truly honored to be a part of Ruy’s wedding. When he came to our collective so many years ago, he was looking for redemption. He wanted to be a better man, to redeem himself for all the pain he’d caused in his famous but reckless career as a hunter of marked creatures. He became our seeker and our friend, and at last a part of our family. Ruy, I consider you one of my own, and so I take Anna in as family as well, and all who call her family. Alas consequently, we are not a room full of strangers but newfound kin coming together under joyous circumstance!”
“Here, Here!” shouted Uncle Robert with a jolly roar.
The witches clapped happily and the vampires simply nodded in agreement, but the elves gave only a courteous smile in Melvern’s direction. I didn’t know who exactly the elves were to me, besides family. There were four men and two women, but whether they were grandparents, uncles, aunts or cousins was unknown. They were of the Cadell Clan, like my grandmother and namesake, Raina Elizabeth Cadell. It might seem an odd thing to forget where one stands in a family in relation to others of the same lineage, but for old clan elves like the Cadells its commonplace. While mainstream elves are fully integrated into human society, (they get married, have kids, and pay taxes), old clan elves that still live very much apart are shy things that rarely venture outside of their land and almost never marry. They breed among themselves and raise all the children as one unit, so whose is whose particular offspring is often forgotten… My grandmother wanted something different. She met and married my wizarding grandfather, Nicholas Kirkland, of the Kirkland coven of South Carolina, and together they moved away from their families to start their own.
The elves who were there were all dressed well but about thirty years outdated with bright colors, large shoulder pads and draping fabric in all the wrong places. And yet, they still looked gorgeous with their long black and gold hair, big black eyes and tall and narrow frame. They said little and smiled much. The majority of the clan declined Mom’s invitation because she was only half elf and attending meant plane travel from Scotland to the states. Basically, a half breed’s happy event wasn’t reason enough for them to board a metal tube and have themselves flung over an ocean and a continent. The six that came were the bravest, to be sure. Watch out y’all, we have some badasses over here!
Katie hadn’t been formally invited to the dinner, but was there as Everett’s plus one. She was sitting farther up the table, opposite the elves, and she couldn’t stop staring at them. Her eyes would move from them to Mom, to Tristan, sitting beside Aunt Bethany, to Seth who was sitting by Great Aunt Maggie and then back to the elves. I understood her fascination with them. They all looked way too much alike. It was a tad eerie to be honest.
“What sweet irony. The hunter has become the hunted,” said Melvern through my mind. “Do you really think the two of you can stop who hunts you?”
I glared at him with tired eyes. “How can you read my mind so easily?”
“Practice. If in all my hundreds of years on this earth I could not master this one skill perfectly, I would be a pathetic man indeed. No one can keep me out of their mind, no one.”
I looked down at my lap then. “You know everything about me, don’t you?”
“Nearly, probably. I know what you are, I know your brother is here and I know what you did last night. More importantly I know why you did what you did.”
“And?” I asked, ready to be angry and defensive. I wasn’t in the mood to be judged. I really wasn’t. I was doing a pretty great job of judging me all by myself. I didn’t need his or anybody’s help in that regard.
He visibly shook his head and smiled. “You may think that your ability to feel what others feel, to put yourself in their shoes is a heavy burden that only you carry, but I carry it also.” I shot him narrow eyes of doubt. I couldn’t believe Melvern of Darkness was an empath like myself. I’d seen him play deprived games with people for his amusement. “What I mean to say is that empathy comes with the territory of mind reading, Raina. When you know what people are thinking and feeling and why they do what they do and exactly what they have been through, you tend to be more accepting. This is my way of saying that I’m not upset with you for doing what you have done. I understand you.”
I didn’t know how to react to that. I didn’t expect compassion from him. I blinked at him for a moment and then turned back to Thomas, but I couldn’t help putting a hand against my stomach. I had so much to fight for. “Nick and I can do this because we have to.”
“And what if this Orestes is too much? What if he does something unexpected? You have no idea what he is capable of, what his game plan is. You should consult with those you trust.”
I knew he was right. As adamant as Nick was that we keep this between us, I knew I needed to bring Alistair and Damon into the fold, but somehow that felt like the selfish thing to do.
“You don’t know if Orestes is hunting only you, or your entire family. What is selfish would be keeping this to yourself and letting them die without a chance to fight. What you are really afraid of is admitting to them and yourself that they may be in danger because of you.”
I looked down to hide the beginnings of tears. “That, and—I don’t want them to know that the people who died in those cages did so because of me. I’m so ashamed.”
Seven waiters with arms full of round trays came through the double doors one by one. They set the trays down on mobile tray holders while they cleared away the soup bowls. What they placed in front of us next was the main dish, a small freshly baked loaf of bread, hollowed out and filled with crumbled tofu, pesto, colorful olives and bell peppers, all on a thick bed of crisp romaine lettuce and lemon zest with a drizzle of honey-sweetened balsamic vinegar.
“Nick is probably talking with the Nascosto as we speak. He’ll have some answers and I’ll know better what to do after I meet with him tonight,” I thought.
“I hope so,” was all he said before he turned back to Ruy with a smile, engaging him in a lively conversation about a bachelor party in the works. The wedding was the next night, so his party had to be planned for after dinner. I wondered only for a moment if mom was having a bachelorette party. If she was I was obviously not invited and even if I were invited I couldn’t go. I had to put Thomas to bed, wait for Damon to retire to his office for the night and then meet Nick at Drake’s.
“What’s wrong, Raina?” Damon asked.
I knew I couldn’t hide my mood from him. Earlier I blamed it on the nightmares, which wasn’t a complete lie. The nightmare of what Luke did to me was disturbing, but that’s not what kept the frown on my face and tension in my shoulders. I couldn’t tell him the big reason, but I could tell him a reason for my sadness that was just as believable because it was also a part-truth.
“I’m at my mother’s rehearsal dinner, sitting at the end of the table like some distant cousin. Ruy hates me; the elves won’t even look in my direction and—I don’t know why I’m even here.”
He put his hand on my hand, which was still on my stomach. “Your mom wants you here, Raina, but if you’re uncomfortable we can go home.”
I smiled at him and leaned in against him
. Breathing deeply his scent, I felt like the luckiest woman when I was near him. “I’m fine. I don’t always understand my mom. I’m not even completely sure she does want me here. But I know she loves Thomas and he loves her. Putting my feelings aside, she is his grandmother and he deserves to be here.”
Damon took my hand from my stomach and laid a gentle kiss across my knuckles. “You’re an amazing woman.”
Shit! For some reason that set me off. I felt I was going to puke and my eyes pinched with the effort to cope. Where did this come from? It was too late in the pregnancy to have morning sickness, right? I couldn’t pretend to know anything about that. Maybe it was just nerves, but I stood abruptly without thinking about what I was doing.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said as my thighs bumped the table, toppling glasses of wine and water as I tried to make a quick exit.
“What’s wrong?” Damon asked and he wasn’t alone. Suddenly I was the center of everyone’s attention. Sweat was beading on my upper lip; I could feel it. I swallowed hard. Everyone that was staring at me could be in danger because of me and they didn’t even know it. They were happy, unaware of their probable demise. My adoring Damon was, well, still adoring and I was keeping secrets from him. I felt like shit.
“Raina?” Mom asked.
I backed away from the table. “I’m fine; I just need to go to the restroom. Where is it? No, never mind. I’ll find it. I’ll be fine,” I rambled. I was walking backward toward the double doors.
“Honey,” Aunt Marge said. “You look like you’re going to be sick. Are you sure you’re fine?”
“I’m fine, really.”
“You sure? You look a mite ill.”
“I am, I’m fine,” I said breathlessly, turning to find the doors a few feet to the left and not right behind me at all. I awkwardly corrected myself.
“Tristan, help your sister,” said Mom.
“No, I can manage,” I said, pushing the door open.
