by K D Grace
I did as she said. It was hard to imagine anyone not doing as Magda Gardener said in that voice of authority that you could feel right where all the blood flows in and out of your heart and right where the hips shelter your center of gravity.
“Magic?” I asked, standing on my tiptoes in an effort to see what she was doing.
“It is.” The smell of molten metal intensified, and the dance and arc of light reminded me again of an acetylene torch. “It’s to help your friend rest and to guard her dreams. I said stay put,” she commanded again as I pressed forward, “unless you want to end up like the animals on the floor.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.
“It means I’m working with powerful magic and unless you want me to make a mistake and lose control, you will shut up and stay still until I’m finished.” The tone of her voice hadn’t altered. There was no anger, no frustration. In fact, she could have been giving me her grocery list, but the light over the worktable flared, and the air was virtually toxic with the smell of burning.
For a second I felt as though my skin was freezing solid on my flesh and my lungs were solidifying in my chest. But before I could choke or gag, certainly before I could make a move for the door, the light dissipated, the air cleared to the point that I could smell nothing but the fresh fell breeze, and the room was suddenly warmer.
I only noticed her dark glasses lying on the end of the workbench because she reached for them. When she turned to face me, she was wearing them again. “Here, put this on.”
She slipped a black cord around my neck on which hung a heart carved from what looked to be the local stone. I drew it up into my hand and ran a thumb over the perfectly detailed feather etched on its surface.
“It’s a protection spell,” she said, not waiting for me to ask. “No one is to touch it but you. Well, your angel can touch it, of course. But only because the two of you have been physically joined anyway, and he’s given you his own protection spell. The heart represents your heart. The quill is a symbol of your craft. A scribe’s magic lives through symbol; therefore it’s you, not I, who will empower it with what’s needed when the time comes. You may not know it yet, but your craft is the most powerful magic you have with which to fight the Guardian.”
I settled the heart between my breasts. “And that’s why you wanted to steal me?” I hadn’t meant to be so abrupt, nor to sound so ungrateful, but I didn’t like having choices taken out of my hands.
If she were upset by my lack of gratitude, she didn’t show it. “You undid my efforts, Susan, and now the Guardian is free once again to wreak havoc. Anyone who can do what you did, I want as an ally.”
“An ally is not a possession,” I said.
“On the contrary, I’ve found that it’s usually best when your allies are your possessions.”
I barely heard her words as my gaze came to rest on the object she’d been working on. When I reached for it, she slapped my hand away. “I told you the magic is for your friend. Don’t touch magic that belongs to someone else.”
I was cold again, cold to the core as I studied the tiny image on the table resting among stone chips and dust. It could have been Annie asleep in miniature, just as I’d left her a few hours ago—the body too thin beneath the duvet, the face racked with exhaustion. Even the details of the bedding and her tiny hand gripping the headboard were identical.
Once again I was certain the piece was carved from local stone, but it was polished, and it shone as though it were somehow lit from within. “Jesus,” I whispered, bending to look closer. “It could be her, living and breathing in miniature.”
“In truth, it does contain a tiny bit of her essence—a strand of hair, a clipping of a fingernail, but it’s only stone, Susan. Taken from that cave, in fact.” She nodded to the cave I’d just come out of. “After your little visit, I was forced to redo the magic,” she said, picking up the piece, which was no bigger than a small chess pawn and turning it over in her hand. “Your unauthorized contact with her raised unconscious longings, made her restless. I’ve had to strengthen the magic to protect her, and to protect all of us.”
I recalled the butcher knife incident with a shudder. “I’m sorry, but she’s my friend, and—”
“And you don’t trust me with her. I understand that. But not trusting me is exactly what the Guardian is counting on. He’ll make you doubt everything you know to be true. Knowing that to be the case, knowing that the moment will come when you’ll want desperately, need with every fiber of your being to believe Him, I will tell you the truth now. Susan, listen to me now, in this place of magic, and know I speak truth. I rescued you, with Michael’s help, when no one else knew you even needed rescuing. I took a ridiculous risk and rescued your friend as well, though I’m still not sure what I can do for her. I am the only one who has ever fought the Guardian and won, and even though your fantasies of him are sweeter than any romance you’ve ever written or read, the truth is that in a few months you’d have ended up just like your friend, and the Guardian would be seeking yet another to devour. This would have been your fate had I not rescued you. You know this to be true. And you must also know that Michael fights the same battle, the same desires, but he is already allied with me. He won’t fight his battle alone, and neither shall you.”
Her gaze locked on me from beneath the glasses, and she slipped the image of the sleeping Annie into a small leather pouch that hung around her neck and tucked it back inside her shift. Then she turned for the door and motioned me to follow her back to the cave.
“Rescue is not the same as stealing,” I said, scrambling to keep up.
“I believe the Guardian would beg to differ.”
“That doesn’t mean I’ll belong to you. If we all live through this,” I added.
She stopped in the middle of the cave, deep enough that the natural light had dissipated to dusk, and still she wore the glasses. As she held me in her gaze, no—it was more than that, for a moment I was certain she held me in her thrall—but as she held me there, I was suddenly, irrationally, very glad for the barrier the glasses provided. “No one belongs to anyone, my darling girl, but what you will come to understand if, as you say, we survive this little adventure, is that some debts can never be repaid. Therefore the loyalty we feel, the sense of gratitude, goes much deeper than simply belonging to someone. I have stolen you from the Guardian, but at the end of the day, it will be you who will steal yourself for my purposes and give yourself over willingly.”
“Your purposes? What the hell are your purposes?” I asked.
“Why, to write, of course. You are a scribe, after all. Come now.” She found a Maglite at the entrance to the tunnel and nodded me to follow. “The others will be waiting. It’s time we return to Alonso’s drawing room to finish your little story.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Back in Alonso’s basement drawing room, Cook had delivered still more coffee and tea, along with little finger sandwiches that reminded me of high tea at the Ritz, rather than a quick snack in a vampire’s lair before I exposed myself again. I took nothing. I didn’t think I could force anything past the tightness in my throat, but Alonso handed me a cup of Kenyan tea and a plate laden with treats.
“You need to eat,” he said softly.
Michael sat me down and, before I could protest further, offered me up a miniature chicken salad wrap as though I were a child not capable of feeding myself. He’d stolen me! He’d fucking stolen me, I reminded myself and resisted the urge to, quite literally, bite the hand that fed me. With the first mouthful, however, I realized just how hungry I was. As I opened my mouth for another bite, I decided we’d table the Chapel House robbery discussion until after I’d eaten. With the second bite I remembered poor Annie wasting away in the bed upstairs. The next sandwich I fed myself, then gulped the tea and braced for impact as Magda, once again, began to read the words I didn’t remember writing.
“Come to me, my darling. I need you to release me
so that we can be together. You, my beautiful scribe, are the only one who can set me free.” That’s what He kept saying to me, and I swear it felt as though He were whispering it in my ear.
Annie had gone to bed hours ago, and I should have. I should have been fast asleep, but I couldn’t settle, couldn’t calm myself, couldn’t focus on anything but what I’d experienced in the crypt at Chapel House and the sweet whisper of His longing against my ear. I wanted desperately to go back. I could sneak out of the flat and drive over there easily enough, but the garden was a jungle, and it was huge. After all, it had been a graveyard once. I would never find my way back to the crypt, not without Annie’s help, and I most definitely didn’t want her help. I didn’t want her to know my secret.
But the constant nag and niggle, the need to go to Him gnawed at my insides like a hungry beast. And His voice, I could hear His voice calling to me again and again, inviting me to come to Him.
“Release me, my love. Release me and we can be together. I’ve waited for you for an eternity, and now I can scarce breathe in my longing for you, in my need for you. Please, set me free so we can be together at last.”
Each time I heard His voice, it was as clearly as if He had been standing in the room next to me. And my response, well, I’m not sure if my response was out loud, in my head, or in the open document on which I had poured the details of my earlier encounter in the crypt. “I can’t release you. I don’t know how to get back to the crypt and I don’t know where the key is,” I said, bracing myself, half fearing that He might say that He could guide me back to that dark, overgrown place, and half fearing that He would change his mind and get someone else—maybe Annie—to help Him. I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else being with Him. I was just about to tell Him I’d do anything, anything He asked, when He told me a secret.
“You need not return to Chapel House, my darling,” came the reply I hadn’t expected. “There is no key, and the door to my prison, it means nothing. It’s only a symbol. One could tear it out from the very rock and rip open the earth above and I would still be a prisoner. You! You are the key, my darling. You’ve already begun the process of setting me free. Only a little more remains for you to do, and then we’ll be together. I’ll give you what you want, what we both so desperately need.”
“Tell me! Please, tell me!” I did speak out loud then, feeling a longing for Him that I feared would tear me apart if He didn’t tell me what to do.
And then He was so close that I could almost feel the physicality of Him, so close that for a moment, I believed He had somehow managed His own escape. I swear, He kissed my nape and spoke against my ear in a whisper that was barely more than a breath. “All you need do, my lovely, is use your magic. I have read what you’ve written of our first encounter—each word of it like a caress driving me to lust and longing I can scarcely contain, and my heart races with anticipation. Each word is so carefully chosen, each nuance so evocative of our coming together. Your magic, my love, is our story set down for us to share later in our long nights together, when we are sated and reveling in the pleasure of each other. All you need do, my darling scribe, is write my release, and I shall be free, indeed.”
There have, so often, been times when the worlds I create as I write bleed through to the real world and both become equally real to me. I think nothing of it. It’s a part of what I do, a part of what I love about my craft. But this! This was different. The words I wrote returned me instantly to the crypt.
I could almost touch the thick darkness as I entered. I don’t know how I could see, and yet I could. I could smell the dust on the ancient stone; I could feel the rusted bars as I curled my fingers around them. And then I felt His warm breath on my face from just beyond the bars. He cupped large hands over mine and His voice was that of a man just awakened from a deep, dream-laced sleep and into the arms of His lover. “You’ve come for me, my darling, just as I knew you would. Now set me free. All you need do is open the door.”
So I wrote me in the darkness of the crypt, me with hands so anxious, but so certain in their task, me exerting all the force I could manage in my effort to pull the gate open on hinges frozen with age. I wrote the sound of rusty metal giving way. I wrote the smell of age and decay yielding. I wrote the anticipation of lovers who have waited an eternity. I wrote the scent of His desire, of His longing, mingling with mine; dark, fecund, primordial. And then the door was wrenched from me with astounding strength, and He shoved it aside and pulled me to Him and for a moment it was as though I had suddenly been reunited with the other half of me. I knew Him and I knew His heart, and I knew the depth of His desire. And I was overwhelmed with longing.
But before that... just before that… only for a moment, the moment He burst from the earth, the moment He shoved the gate from between us, I felt something else. I felt my body turning to ash on my bones in the heat of fire I knew I would not survive and, in the depths of the inferno I willingly plunged myself into, there was neither escape nor relief. My doom was sealed and I went to meet it rejoicing. But that was all forgotten in His embrace. He was free and it was me that He wanted. Nothing else mattered.
If there were words, I don’t remember them. If I could have found the words, the right words to express what it was like to be touched by Him, to be embraced by Him, to be loved by Him, they aren’t words that human ears could hear or understand, nor that human voices could utter; and if I had written them down, they were somehow lost between the moment of my desire and the moment of His sating me, for honestly, how could it have been more than a moment?
In the next second I was back in Annie’s flat, lying on the floor in a beam of moonlight, curled around myself as though I could hold on to the moment just a little longer, the fast fading memory of Him taking me. And He did take me. He made love to me. Surely He did. Or at least I think He did.
And then He stood over me, all silver and translucent like the moonlight. I couldn’t see Him, but He filled the whole room with His presence, as He coaxed me to my feet and back to the open document, glowing pale in the dark study.
“And now, my beloved,” He said. “Write me as your secret, a secret that even you won’t remember until the time comes for us to be together. Write me a place of safety, a place where I may sustain myself, a way in which I may control my longing until the two of us can be together again.”
Then He saw the story I had told Annie, and His laugh was like the purr of a large cat. “Why, my darling little scribe, you have already written my place of safety, and you have given me this friend of yours to sustain me until you return to me. It won’t be long, my darling. I promise you it won’t be.”
For a long moment, the room was silent. All eyes were on me, and not all of them were without accusation. I couldn’t blame them. If I could look at myself, my eyes would be full of accusation. And contempt. I swallowed the rawness in my throat and spoke. “It was then that I heard Annie in the bathroom and I realized that I had to keep the memory stick safe. The next morning I didn’t remember any of it. Like I said.”
“Did he fuck you?” Of course it was Talia who asked.
“I honestly don’t remember. Surely I would have. Don’t you think?” I looked from Magda to Michael and back again.
“Oh, you would have if the choice had been yours to make. I’m certain of it,” Michael said. “But I doubt that He took you. If He had, you’d have never been able to stay away from Him. And for whatever reason, He wanted you to stay away until he had Annie call you back.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because you, He wants to savor. In His mind’s eye, He’ll not use you up, but He’ll keep you. You’re the one he’s waited for,” Magda said. “You’re the one who could release Him. You’re the one who could write Him and His story. You’re the one He wants as His consort.”
There was a murmur of surprise around the room and an uncomfortable shifting about. But that all receded to background noise at the thought of being Hi
s consort. I was right. I had been right all along. I was special. It was me He wanted above all others. It was me He had waited for, me He loved.
It was the tingle of Michael’s mark that brought me, grudgingly, back to myself, back to the reality of the situation. I gulped down the last of my tea, now cold, in an effort to clear my head. “But you said, you both said, He’d use me up as He has the others before,” I finally managed.
“No doubt He will,” Magda replied. “You are human, after all. But using you up won’t be His intention. It seldom is.”
Still, she was wrong, a little voice in the back of my mind told me. I was different. Me, He would never hurt. Michael’s mark stung and burned and I bit my lip until I tasted blood, knowing that my logic was flawed, knowing the danger I was in and the danger I’d put everyone else in. Focusing, even with the burn of the mark, was an effort I could just barely manage. “If I set Him free by writing His freedom, then why can’t I write His recapture too?” I asked.
It was Michael who answered. “Because you really, desperately wanted Him free. But no one,” he laid his hand against my breast, next to the mark and the pain eased. “No one who has been with Him could ever want to put Him back in his prison with that same intense longing.”
Once again we all sat in silence. I knew Michael was right. I might have freed the Guardian, but I could never put Him back in His prison because there was just too much of me that didn’t want Him there.
As though Michael understood what I felt and, no doubt he did, he slipped an arm around me and pulled me close. An act which made the buzz of the bite above my breast once again pleasurable rather than painful.
“So then, Magda, what do we do?” Alonso asked.
Before she could answer, Cook shoved his way through the door, bleeding heavily over one eye. “Ms. Annie—she’s gone.”
Chapter Twenty-five
