Dante's Awakening

by Devon Marshall

  “So what happens now?” Lois asked.

  What indeed? I had no idea what to do next. I finished my scotch, giving myself precious moments in which to think.

  “I should get back to Holly Bush,” Lois announced.

  “No!”

  The sharpness of my tone alerted her. Her blue eyes narrowed. “Why should I not go home?”

  I had to tell her the truth. “Voshki’s sister is working on the shoot. If she hears that you’re back in Holly Bush Junction, she’ll contact Voshki. Besides, we don’t know whether the Children of Judas are still watching the town or not, or even how they feel about you.”

  Lois blew air hard down her nose. “So what? I’m stuck in some Encino motel? I don’t think that’s going to work for me.”

  There seemed to me only one way out of Lois’s predicament. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t see any other choices. I had to call Ellis.

  I told the sheriff to stay where she was, help herself to another drink, and I retreated to the kitchen with my cell phone. I didn’t want to have the conversation in front of Lois because I suspected it would involve a lot of swearing, mostly by Ellis and directed at me.

  Predictably, then, Ellis was furious when I told her who I had sat in my living room, drinking my scotch. Well, I didn’t tell her that bit. She might’ve fainted from fury. As it was, she ranted and raved and swore at me for a very long time until I remembered vampires don’t need to take a breath.

  I interrupted her. “Ellis, for God’s sake, will you just come over here and tell me whether she really is being truthful or not? We can sort out blame afterwards.”

  “You’re exasperating,” she snapped.

  “I know,” I agreed. “Will you come over? And don’t tell Voshki.”

  Ten minutes later Ellis was at my front door. With Voshki. The betraying bitch. I glared at both of them.

  Ellis shrugged. “Don’t be an idiot, Dante. You must’ve known I wasn’t going to keep this from her.”

  “I had hoped,” I muttered. But I let them both come in. As if I could have stopped them. I warned them to behave.

  Voshki gave me an arch look. I shook my head at her. “Okay, so I couldn’t stop you if you decided not to behave…but, please?”

  “This is the woman who got you hurt,” Voshki reminded me.

  “She’s also a human being. And she was glamoured,” I argued.

  “She might still be…and yet you invited her into your home,” Ellis pointed out, a touch hysterically I thought. I rolled my eyes at her, which made her even more furious at me. It also amused Voshki.

  “You could have been killed,” Ellis insisted. Her dark eyes glittered at me, daring me to mock her angry concern one more time.

  What was I thinking—involving myself with a vampire? With this particular vampire? Ellis was infuriating. I decided I probably needed a good kicking, but that I should also probably wait until later to administer it.

  “Just don’t hurt her,” I sighed. Pretty much all of my earlier anger at Lois Bartlett had dissolved. Forgiving people their trespasses and not being angry at them anymore is part of being human, however, so I didn’t really expect the vampires to understand.

  The vampires traded eyebrow shrugs, and then they preceded me into the living room, where Lois Bartlett had discovered the singularly fascinating joy of staring at your own ghostly reflection in the glass of the French doors leading to my deck. She caught sight of the vampires’ reflections behind her and started. Yes, they do cast a reflection. Hell, most of them are so vain that even if they didn’t cast a reflection they’d find a way to make it so. Lois turned around and regarded them with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

  I rushed in to make introductions, since I knew the vampires wouldn’t bother to do so. “Lois, these are Voshki Kevorkian and Ellis Kovacs. Well, you’ve met Ellis already.”

  Ellis nodded. “I’m pretty sure you weren’t under any glamour when I met you at the station,” she said. Her voice couldn’t have been colder if it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. “But you were suspicious about something—you seemed to feel something was off in your little town. I should have paid more attention to that.”

  “It was off alright,” Lois muttered in agreement.

  “The Children have exceptionally good glamouring skills,” Voshki observed. Not much warmth there either, I noted. She shot Ellis a poisonous look. “And yes, you should have paid more attention to what the sheriff was thinking, instead of paying so much attention to what you were thinking about my human.”

  Ellis flushed. I groaned. “Guys, this is so not the time. And I’m not your human, Vosh. I thought we established that already?”

  Voshki huffed. Then she moved toward the sheriff, in that lightning-quick way of vampires. I was used to it, but it startled the hell out of Lois. Finding herself suddenly face-to-face with the vampire, Lois instinctively stepped back, and bumped up against my French doors. The glass shuddered gently. “Jesus,” the sheriff breathed. “Would it be pointless of me to ask how you do that?”

  Voshki flicked a hand to indicate that yes, it would indeed be pointless. She reached out with the same hand and grabbed the sheriff’s chin, forcing Lois to look into her eyes. Like that was a chore to do.

  “What are you doing?” Lois asked. She tried to jerk her head away but Voshki held on easily.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  As I watched, Voshki’s eyes began to glow a soft pinkish red, and Lois Bartlett fell under the vampire’s spell. I had never seen this intense mind reading before either. It was both fascinating and a little scary. Normally a vampire can read a human’s mind or glamour them without there being any outward sign of it—well, except maybe the human’s expression will start to look a little dreamy, but this was different. Voshki was delving into the subconscious of someone who’d already been glamoured and couldn’t recall what she might have done whilst glamoured. That took a lot of concentration on the vampire’s part. A lot of energy, too.

  “Did you know you were leading Dante into a trap?” Voshki asked. Her voice was soft too, silky and seductive. It made me shiver, something which did not escape Ellis’s notice. I aimed a shrug in her direction. She pouted. Oh, fuck, really? I looked away and continued to watch Voshki probe the sheriff’s mind.

  Lois answered her in a dreamy voice. “No.”

  “What’s your connection to Robin Shepherd?”

  Lois’s brow creased. “Robin,” she muttered.

  “Yes. Robin. What’s your connection to her?”

  “She…I…I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s in your mind, Lois. You’ve blanked it out, is all. Just let me in and I’ll find it for you.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear whatever Lois had blanked out. I turned to leave the room, only to bump into Ellis. She kept her gaze on Voshki and the sheriff as she took my arm in a tight grip.

  “Let me go,” I said. “I need to…”

  “…You need to hear this.” She cut her gaze at me, dark eyes steady and expressionless.

  I swallowed. But I stayed where I was and listened.

  “Robin,” Lois murmured. She swayed once on her feet. “Robin and I…we were…I remember.”

  “Yes, you do.” Voshki took one of those needless breaths and stepped back. But she held onto Lois’s chin as she looked over her shoulder in my direction. I thought I caught a flash of sympathy in her eyes. “She is…or she was Robin’s human.”

  I thought I misheard. No, I hoped I misheard. I stared at Voshki. She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Sorry, Dante. It’s true though. Robin had sex with her and took blood from her, fed her blood. She made your sheriff her bitch.”

  “She’s not my sheriff,” I said reflexively.

  Voshki looked at me for a moment, made a suspicious hmm noise and turned back to the woman she held captive by the chin. “I’m not going to kill you, Sheriff Bartlett, but only because you weren’t acting under your own volition when you tried to harm my fr
iend. Consider this a bullet you have dodged.”

  “I’d kill her anyway,” Ellis muttered. I shot her a glare but she just returned it with a shrug.

  Voshki let go of Lois’s chin. The glow died from her eyes. Lois jerked, blinked several times. She looked like a woman coming out of trance, or a very long sleep. She frowned in befuddlement at Voshki. “You said I…I had sex with this Robin person?”

  Voshki nodded. “You shared blood with her too. That’s how she formed a connection with you.”

  “Blood,” Lois groaned. She had turned quite pale. I worried she might throw up on my carpet. It wouldn’t be the first time it’d been thrown up upon, but I still didn’t want it to happen another time.

  “But how can I not know I had sex with someone?” Lois demanded.

  “And shared blood with them. Don’t forget that,” Ellis added sweetly.

  Lois swallowed, closed her eyes. She shook her head. “This is too much. I need to get out of here.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Voshki asked her, frowning. Voshki is incredibly sexy when she frowns. I shook that thought off quick. I’d never thought that before I shared her damned blood, had I? Had I? “Having sex with someone and not remembering it is a standard Saturday night for some people.”

  “And sharing blood with them, is that standard too?” Lois demanded.

  Even Voshki had to concede that point.

  “Standard,” Lois seethed. “It isn’t even anywhere near fucking normal, never mind standard!”

  I experienced a moment of discomfort as I recalled that drinking blood and having my blood drunk was sort of becoming normal for me. At least I didn’t find the idea of Lois and Robin together quite so hot as I did the idea of Voshki and Ellis together.

  “You find that hot?” Voshki asked.

  I jumped. I’d forgotten about Voshki and I having our own residual connection. “No,” I said too quickly. Voshki smirked.

  Lois went and sat down on my couch, and there she dropped her head into her hands and started to cry. The rest of us stood around and looked at each other, none of us quite sure what we ought to do, or even if there was anything we ought to do. I confess I am uncomfortable with crying women. Crying children and puppies also make me uneasy.

  “I’m gonna kill that fucking vampire,” Lois muttered from inside her hands.

  Voshki laughed.

  “That was funny?”

  “You can’t kill a vampire with whom you have shared blood,” Voshki informed her.

  Well. This was turning into yet another one of those days for learning a whole mess of new and interesting things. I glanced at Ellis. “So I can’t kill you?”

  She smirked. “Nope.”

  Apparently it didn’t stop you from having the desire to kill your vampire.

  Lois raised a tear-stained face and scowled at Voshki. “So someone else will just have to the killing for me,” she said. Her clenched jaw moved from side to side as though she were chewing on her own anger. “It’s not like I couldn’t find someone willing to carry out a hit. I am a fucking sheriff after all.”

  “A hit on a vampire?” Ellis asked dubiously.

  “Nobody will be killing Robin Shepherd except me!” Voshki snapped. “And I have a plan as to how we can do just that.”

  Lois sniffed, wiped the back of one hand across her eyes and nose. “Yeah? Well, I’m listening then.”

  Voshki decided we would use Lois as bait to draw Robin to us. A vampire who took a human as their own incurred an obligation to that human. If said human were in trouble, their vampire had to come and help them. If we let it be known that we were holding Lois prisoner, Robin should be compelled to come rescue her.

  “Does that work the same way with the Children of Judas?” I asked.

  Voshki shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot, right?”

  “Yes it is,” Lois agreed.

  I frowned at her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She gave me a sad little smile and a nod. “It’s okay for you, Dante—you like the vampire you’re with. In fact, I think you might even be in love with Ellis.” That got her surprised looks from all three of us. Lois shrugged. “It was hardly like that for me, was it? I wasn’t given any choice. So, yes, I’m sure I want to do this.”

  Fair enough. I put the in-love-with-Ellis thing on a back burner that was becoming kind of crowded. “How do we let Robin Shepherd know that Lois is here when we don’t even know where to find Robin?”

  “Leave that to me,” Voshki assured us.

  “You can stay here until…whenever,” I offered Lois. I’m sure I felt Ellis tense, but I didn’t care. For no good reason, I was mad at her and I wanted to stay mad. Probably because Lois was right and being mad at Ellis made it easier for me to deny I was in love with her.

  Shit. Why does my life have to be so complicated? Oh yes. It’s because of the fucking vampires that have gotten into it.

  “You can’t let her stay here. She tried to kill you,” Ellis objected. So predictable. I stifled a sigh and instead silently appealed to Voshki for help.

  “Ellis, let it be. No one will be killing anyone,” Voshki told her. “Besides, I’ll be leaving Samson outside. All night.”

  I walked with the vampires to the door. Voshki told me not to worry, she would take care of everything, nothing bad would happen to me, and I nodded like I actually believed that. Ellis put a hand on each of my shoulders and searched my face with those beguiling dark eyes of hers. “Be careful,” she said.

  I swallowed my free-floating anger and nodded.

  “And don’t sleep with the sheriff,” she added.

  I let my anger boil up. “Fuck off,” I snarled. “For that I just might!”

  “Jesus, you two, enough with the drama,” Voshki sighed. I glared at her and she shrugged before stalking off down my driveway. I saw her car parked there, a silver Mercedes coupe. She was slumming tonight.

  Maybe it was Voshki’s sarcasm, or maybe I just felt bad for what I’d said when I saw the wounded expression in Ellis’s puppy-dog eyes, but I held her back before she could follow Voshki out of the door. “I’m not going to sleep with the sheriff,” I told her.

  Ellis gave me a smile that made my bones melt and my insides explode. I wished she could have stayed…But that would only have rubbed Lois’s face in it, and I didn’t want to do that. “Thank you,” Ellis said.

  “And you know, you do irritate the hell out me, I could strangle you a lot of the time, and I think you…and Voshki too…keep shit from me all the time, which bugs me…but I think she was right…” I motioned with my chin to indicate the living room and Lois Bartlett… “I think I am in love with you.” There. I’d said it. I had declared myself in love with a vampire. The nice men in the white coats could come along anytime now and haul me off to join the rest of the loonies in their rubber bedrooms.

  Then Ellis kissed me, just for a moment, and even though she kept her hands to herself when she did it (well, mostly), I swear there were sparks that came shooting out the top of my head.

  “I think I might love you too,” she told me.

  Okay, so it wasn’t Shakespeare, but at least she said she loved me back. It made me feel a bit less awkward about the whole thing. Ellis kissed me once more, then she stepped out of the door. She paused, winked at me. “Besides,” she added, “you couldn’t sleep with the sheriff. Once you’ve gone vampire, you never go back to plain old human.”

  I hoped the door didn’t hit her in the ass when I slammed it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I showed Lois where the guest bedroom and the bathroom were, told her to help herself to anything from the kitchen and then I took myself to bed. I was exhausted, but it took me a considerable while to fall asleep because my mind kept trudging back and forth over the matter of Ellis and me.

  Was I really in love with a vampire? With a vampire as annoying and possessive as Ellis? Yes, she was gorgeous. Yes, she knew how to make love to you in a way m
ade you feel all my-God shivery good. But there was no escaping the fact that she was possessive and jealous, like all vampires, and I don’t do well in smothering relationships. I don’t do well in closeted ones either, but given the choice I’d take that over smothering. Aggravating as all of that was, however, far more worrying was Ellis’s temper. I’d seen it once firsthand, directed at me, and I didn’t want to experience it in such close proximity ever again. But could I even expect any such restraint from a vampire? Of course, I knew before I got involved with Ellis that a relationship with a vampire was nearly always going to be a disturbing, aggravating pattern of two steps forward and eighteen steps upside-down and sideways.

  And there was still the niggling issue of Voshki. In theory I should stop having thoughts about her once her blood left my system, but I had to admit to myself that the blood was only part of the problem. I’d always been somewhat attracted to her. Drinking her blood just brought my attraction into sharper focus.

  And she was Ellis’s sire. Ellis had Voshki’s blood running in her own veins. Did that mean I had fed more on Voshki’s blood than Ellis’s? It was too confusing. And those two had been lovers. So what if it was over two hundred years ago? You try not thinking about that. I frowned at the ceiling. This was getting complicated. I fought an urge to call Lydia and ask her advice. Lydia hates being woken up in the middle of the night, unless it is by George Clooney. Or Matt Damon. Not that it has happened yet. But she lives in hope.

  At some point amidst these mental meanderings I must have dozed off, because the next I knew I was waking from a dream in which George Clooney sat by my lap pool, drinking a glass of warm blood, wearing a jacket that looked suspiciously like one I had given Lydia as a Christmas present two years ago and dispensing advice to me on what to do about my little vampire love-triangle problem. I protested to George that I didn’t have a “love-triangle,” protested a little too much, frankly. Then I woke, certain something was wrong.