by Carmen Caine
Taking another step into the room, I casually slid the sketchbook behind my back. I needn’t have bothered. She was so preoccupied with self that she didn’t care one whit what I was up to.
Why was ogling her own likeness her favorite pastime? There was no doubt about it. She was beautiful. She had to be, in order to keep Emilio’s interest for longer than a minute. But didn’t she have any other interest in life besides catering to his every whim? And—eyeing her coordinated robe—didn’t she even have her own identity?
On my third step forward, my mother’s eyes flicked to my reflection appearing in her mirror. Auburn hair, green eyes, and a pouty mouth. Curve-accentuating clothing. Scowling brows. So very different from the remote, ethereal beauty she possessed.
“Redecorated the place?” I asked, noting the new comforter, couch, and chairs, but all the same shade of pink as before. This time, she’d accented them all with cream, fake-fur pillows. “Looks nice.” For a Barbie, maybe, but then, I supposed, that’s what Blair really was—Emilio’s Barbie doll.
“Mother and daughter,” she murmured absently, staring at our twin images in the mirror. With a shake of her head, she traced her exquisitely shaped chin with a long fingernail before dipping her fingers into a large jar of expensive moisturizer and slathering it on her face.
I snorted. “Why bother with all of that?” I asked. “You’re a vampire. You don’t have to worry about growing old.”
“Look at that Terzi vampire, Jacques,” she replied, dabbing under her eyes. “That dreadful scar running down his face.”
“Yeah, but that has to be sorcery of some kind,” I said. It was odd. A scar on a vampire. “But he still looks handsome. Young. And for him, it’s quite the look.” Even scarred, vampires looked sexy—particularly that one. “Nothing you need to worry about.”
But when does Blair listen to me? Never. She just continued rubbing cream onto her skin. I shrugged. Yep. Our typical mother-daughter exchange.
“Need to borrow some clothes,” I said, heading for her closet.
“Clothes?” she repeated, confused. “You’ve never asked to do that before.”
She actually turned to look at me then. Crud. I didn’t want that. With the book still hidden behind me, I searched my mind for a distraction. Ah. As Ricky was always saying: easy-peasy.
“So, Blair, ready to tell me who my father is yet?” I probed, meeting her gaze directly.
Yeah, that did it. Losing interest at once, she turned back to the mirror. “Not this again,” she said, closing her eyes and almost growling in frustration.
Good thing I didn’t really want to know.
As she moaned, I zipped to her closet and snagging a bag, dumped the sketchbook inside, following it up with a handful of clothes. I didn’t even stop to look at what I’d grabbed. I wouldn’t be wearing any of it, anyway. Blair was all chiffon, slinky satin, and lace. I was more leather and drama.
“Emilio’s the only father you need,” my mother was saying. Frowning at her appearance, she used a pair of tweezers to pluck imaginary hairs from her eyebrows.
“Well, guess I’ll head out then,” I said, cutting her off before she could continue that line of thought. “We’ll chat later, huh?”
She just shrugged, obviously as relieved for me to leave as I was to go.
I reached for the door, but it opened under my hand and swung wide.
Great. Psycho-vampire alert.
Emilio strolled into my mother’s room, his hands tucked behind his back and his eyes riveted upon me with such intensity I wondered—unhinged or not—if he could read my thoughts and already knew what I’d done. He’d changed out of his crimson dressing gown and into a tailored suit, one of those dark, pinstriped Italian ones.
“Family,” Emilio intoned. In the pink of my mother’s room, his irises now appeared green. “Famiglia.”
This again? I needed to leave, and quickly, before he started sniffing around the shopping bag. And more importantly, I needed to get back to my primary concern of saving my butt, and that meant getting my hands on those vials.
“Yes, family,” I chimed in, giving my voice more volume than usual. Oddly, the word came out closer to ‘famiglia’ than family. I frowned. Maybe I really was spending too much time around the Italian vampire of late. I hadn’t known they could rub off like that.
Emilio took the time to smile in reply to my Italian-flavored response, breathing deeply through both nostrils before narrowing his eyes into calculating slits.
I didn’t know what that reaction meant. It was hard to follow the brain of a madman.
“And the bag?” Emilio asked, suddenly behind me, breathing down my neck.
Crud. Spinning on my heel to face him, I clamped the bag shut and replied in honeysweet tones, “Just borrowing clothes from mama, papa.”
That brought Blair.
Zipping to my side, her face broke into an overt smile of relief. “At last, Cassidy,” she said, her voice holding real emotion. “Papa. Yes. It’s papa.”
Psychos. Both of them.
“Come, sweetheart,” Lucian’s deep voice rumbled from the doorway. “It’s time to go.”
Relief flooded through me at the sound of his voice. I didn’t waste a millisecond in flying to his side. Who’d have thought Lucian could be the cavalry? He snagged me as I arrived, slipping an arm around my waist and pulling me tightly against his chest. I just went with it, sliding my palm up his abs, but this time, carefully avoiding the heart area to prevent any misunderstandings.
Turning back to Emilio, I jiggled my engagement ring to make it sparkle and switched subjects. “Look, the entire family. Together. Isn’t this nice?”
Blair was fooled. Well, honestly, it doesn’t take much talent to fool someone into believing something they so desperately want. Though why she wanted to play family confused the heck out of me. She wasn’t motherly and never had been. Why did she care if I saw Emilio as my father? I didn’t understand the psychology behind it.
And Emilio?
He was back to ignoring me again. He just stood there, fishing a cigarette from a pack in his jacket pocket, but his sharp gaze never left Lucian’s silver-blue one.
“Family never betrays family,” the vampire said, patting a different pocket for a lighter and flicking it on.
Was that barb directed towards me and the bag?
But again, Lucian swooped in. “Don’t mistake this marriage for something it isn’t, Marchesi,” he inserted tersely. “Yes, you may have gained a foothold into the Rowle family, at long last, but you’ll never be ‘family’. The Marchesi matter little to me or the rest of the Charmed world. Never forget that.”
Wow, apparently this Samuel business had really put Lucian in a mood. I expected Emilio to respond in anger, but he simply said nothing. He just stood there, balancing an unlit cigarette on the corner of his lip.
Yeah, I really didn’t understand their relationship.
“If you’ll excuse us,” Lucian growled. “I’ve an investigation to wrap up.”
A dry chuckle escaped Emilio’s lips at that. Lighting his cigarette, he merely commented, “Ah, a mighty Rowle warlock such as yourself shouldn’t find that a problem, eh? It will be finished in a day? At the most, two? Velocemente!”
But Lucian had already moved away, down the hallway, after locking his fingers around my wrist and pulling me after him.
He exited Emilio’s penthouse then, quickening his stride with each long step until I was nearly running by the time we reached the elevators. Neither of us spoke on the short ride down to my apartment, but the moment we stood safely in my kitchen, he let out a prolonged breath.
“Soon,” he murmured. “Soon, this will be over.” He closed his eyes, allowing his broad shoulders to deflate.
“Good,” I said, dropping my shopping bag onto the countertop. My headache and the muddle of my mind seemed to be clearing. Good. I was back on point now. I had to get my hands on those vials. And fast. Rubbing my hands together, I a
sked, “So what time are we heading out in the morning? You gotta give me a few more hints about my role here, you know. What’s up with these nanos and those vials? How does it work?”
“Work?” He queried, opening his long, dark lashes to peer down at me.
Carefully, Cassidy. Tread carefully. “Well, Emilio sure seemed freaked out about them looping back and all,” I replied, striving for a careless, casual tone. “Guess he’s worried about the vials, huh?”
He lifted a brow at that. Shoot, shouldn’t have mentioned the vials twice in a row. Was that suspicion in his eyes?
“There’s nothing to fear,” he replied softly. “Providing it’s not your mana in them.”
Burn. I hadn’t expected a veiled attack. But I was used to thinking on my feet. “Then what’s Emilio afraid of?” I boldly deflected instead. “Why the objection? It’s not like it’s his mana in them, right?”
Lucian expelled a breath, but when he spoke, it was without the deprecatory tone he usually employed when filling in my missing knowledge gap—which I frankly found a bit puzzling. Where had this patient version of Lucian come from? And why was he popping up more often than the jerk version?
“Vampires’ mana cannot be spelled into a Nether Reach vial, Cassidy. The only mana in their system is that of their victims,” he explained. “Thus, nanoparticles can never track a vampire. Think of spelled nanos as mini-bloodhounds sniffing a trail, only one exclusively composed of mana biomolecules. And when the nanos find their target…” his voice trailed off.
I couldn’t let him stop there. “What do they do?” I prodded.
“They transmit the location, and they’ll carry the sentence out as well,” he replied coolly. “If they’re not stopped, they’ll eat their victim—from the inside.”
Okaaayy. Hadn’t seen that one coming. On second thought, I didn’t want those little suckers hot on my trail at all. “So, what’s keeping them from tracking the mana to the vials and eating the evidence instead? Emilio’s loop back fear?” I understood his concern now. Maybe I could exploit it to my advantage as a contingency plan.
Lucian doused a bucket of cold water on that one. And fast.
“Strix sealed the vials himself. Only a Nether Reach keeper can open them. They’re impervious to even nanoparticles. Emilio knows that.”
Well, I didn’t. But now that I did, I had to account for getting those vials open in my switch-out-the-mana plan. Maybe that Nether Reach training would come in handy, after all.
“Nothing to fear,” Lucian said, his tone returning to the normal scathingly sardonic one. “Although it’s useful to let the nanos take a few bites out of their victims to induce a confession, they’re easy enough to deactivate. They’re the perfect blend of technology and sorcery. I’ve no doubt we’ll find our perpetrator by the end of the week.”
Crud. That meant less than four days. Yeah, Ricky was waking up. Pronto. Whether he wanted to or not.
“Get some sleep,” Lucian said then, taking a step towards the door. “We’ve got a busy morning. We’ve nanos to purchase and mana vials to test.”
Right. I perked up at the purchasing of nanos comment. Meant he didn’t have them already. That could only be good in buying me time. I watched Lucian walk to the door, my thoughts spinning furiously, but the moment his hand grasped the knob, I called out, “Wait.”
That was a little surprising to hear on my lips. Where had that come from?
Lucian paused with his hand on the knob and glanced back at me. “Yes?”
Suddenly, I didn’t want to be alone. Maybe it was the doppelganger. Maybe it was the apartment. Maybe it was the stress from dealing with Emilio and my mother. I didn’t know. All I did know was the fact that I didn’t want him to leave. “Aren’t you going to check the place for spells?” I asked.
“Trust me, Cassidy,” he replied. “No one can enter this apartment if I don’t want them to.”
I just stared at him, wondering why I didn’t want him to go.
As usual, he followed my thoughts. “If I stay, I won’t be sleeping,” he said, half-under his breath.
Did I mind?
He didn’t even give me a chance to respond or even ask my opinion on the matter. Yanking the door open, he strode through, letting it swing shut between us.
I rubbed my temples. The twinges of another headache threatened already. Crud. Why wasn’t my specter healing ability repairing it? If it kept up, I’d have to visit the Night Terrors myself. But right now? I had things to do.
“Focus, Cassidy,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Nanos first.”
I felt drained, but I had to squeeze some much needed knowledge out of Ricky. I tried to wake him. I really did, but he refused to participate. I suppose I couldn’t really blame him. The past few days had been exhausting for the both of us, and doubly so for an imp detoxing from a lifetime of turmeric abuse. I finally gave up and poured him into his blender for the night, a bit jealous. I had a serious sleep deficit to make up, myself.
Yeah, I’d have to grab a couple hours of sleep, and soon, but I had a couple of things to do first.
Like collect Samuel’s mana samples for my vial maneuver.
Grabbing an empty turmeric bottle, I scoured my apartment. Good thing I’d found Samuel’s mana nauseating and hadn’t consumed it. Bits and pieces lay scattered everywhere, shattered remnants from the spells Lucian had broken. I found a particularly large gob of defused Samuel-mana on top of a rice cooker. What kind of a spell had that one been? A rice cooker?
One mana-filled bottle later, I held it up to the light, straightening my aching back.
Hmmmmm. Small problem.
Tabitha’s vials had glowed a vibrant purple-pink. My turmeric bottle looked like I’d filled it with gray snot. Yeah, I’d have to deal with that one in the morning. I was gonna need Ricky’s help. And anyway, right now, my eyes burned from lack of sleep.
One more thing, and then maybe I could catch a few much-needed Z’s.
Sliding the turmeric bottle into an inner jacket pocket, I grabbed the shopping bag hiding Emilio’s sketchbook and headed up the stairs to my bedroom for a pair of sweats. I stopped halfway up. It was a peculiarly peaceful moment. The many lights of New York City streamed in through the plate glass windows, making me feel like I wasn’t alone while keeping my privacy at the same time. I liked it, even as I wondered where the newfound feelings of melancholy and isolation had suddenly sprung from. I’d always cherished my solitude before.
Once in my room, I fished the sketchbook out from under Blair’s clothing and couldn’t resist giving it a quick once over. Images of Gloria filled the pages, along with sketches of the Ring. Nothing special about either, no obvious hints concerning the Mindbreaker that I could see. Most of the pictures depicted Gloria lounging in various positions, a couple with the Ring as a backdrop. There were about three drawings of the Ring itself. But I learned nothing from the different angles of a circle other than the fact that Emilio had a strange mind. Smothering a yawn, I hid the book under my mattress and tossed Blair’s shopping bag into the closet. As soon as the Nano-Vial crisis was over, I’d be back to pour over the sketchbook pages in detail and plot my revenge.
Exhaustion overwhelmed me then. Skipping the sweats, I returned to the living room and dove headfirst onto the couch. It was funny. For the first time in my life, I had a fancy bedroom, but where was I sleeping? The couch—boots on and all.
With a loud sigh, I twisted onto my back and closed my eyes.
It had to be only five minutes before a familiar voice echoed in my mind, “Talk to me, lass.”
Crud. Dorian. I groaned and tiredly lifted my lashes.
“We must speak, lass!” His voice came again. Stronger. Demanding. “‘Tis a matter of great import.”
I sat up. Even though I knew he spoke only in my mind, I looked around for him anyway. To my relief, he really wasn’t there. Sinking back onto the couch, I tried to ignore him.
It didn’t work.
“Cassidy, lass, I must see you. This very night,” he insisted.
“No,” I thought in reply, concentrating as hard as I could.
“Cassidy, ‘tis not seemly to ignore me,” he continued, a clear note of exasperation running rampant in his tone. “Speak to me! I command it!”
Yeah, that pretty much confirmed it. I could only receive. I couldn’t reply—with words, anyway. I had sent Dorian a mental image before in Venice, but I wasn’t really sure pictures were worth more than a thousand words. Art is so subjective. It means something at least a little different to each person viewing it.
As he continued to harangue me, I went the picture route, anyway, conjuring an image-response designed to shut him up. I even growled a few mental words along with it, just in case they made it through as subtitles along with the mental pictures.
“I’m not your minion, Dorian,” I retorted in my head, imagining myself as a yellow, banana-shaped cartoon character covered with a big red ‘X’.
Dorian’s response? Silence. Good. Exactly what I was aiming for. Let him stew over that for a while. I could just see the confusion flooding his ruddy, handsome features.
Satisfied, I collapsed back onto the couch and appreciatively rubbed my cheek against the soft leather. About three seconds after I found the most comfortable position ever, Dorian’s Scottish burr fired back up.
“Aye, nothing about your character is yellow, lass,” he informed me. “We’ve words that must be said now. Speak!”
Apparently, someone connected to the Terzi group mind-link had filled him in pretty quickly.
I groaned.
How could I outwit a hive-mind like the Borg?
I tried ignoring him, but one thing I’ll say for Dorian: he’s persistent. I spent a good hour mind-shouting, hoping to sever the connection, but it didn’t work. I must have sent him hundreds of images. I learned then that we might have a faulty connection because he acknowledged my messages only half the time. I could only assume he never got them.
