by Alex Owens
“Are you sure this is right place?” Clive said, walking around the front of the car.
I stood and shut the car door behind me. Cassidy didn’t make a move to join us outside of the car—she seemed to be concerned with the sleeping Pete. I waved, telling her not to worry about him and then turned back to Clive.
“Bette seemed so sure...” I said, looking around for any signs of life. “And the gate did open for us, so I’d hazard to guess that someone’s home.”
“Well, what do you want to do?” he asked.
Stiffening my spine, I gritted my teeth and strode forward. “I want to get my daughter,” I called over my shoulder.
As I trotted up the massive stone steps, I heard Cass get out of the car.
“You can’t let her go in alone,” she said to Clive.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” he responded. “Are you coming?”
I heard their footsteps gaining behind me, but I couldn’t slow down to wait for them. For some reason, I had it in my head that hesitating would weaken my resolve. And weakness was my enemy, so I marched on.
Up the steps and through the open doorway I went, into the center of a once-grand entry. It was octagonal in shape, reached up five stories and had floors made of dark, swirled marble. Elaborate frescos adorned each and every wall. Far above me, I made out the distinct sound of wings flapping and the occasional caw. Black shapes zig-zagged far above me.
Crows, I thought, choosing to ignore the dark portent. I already knew that we were stepping into the middle of a serious shit show; I didn’t need the birds to tell me that too.
A pair of mirror-image staircases swept down from the second floor to the first, twisting and bending all the way down, ending feet from where I stood in the center of the room. Beneath me, inlaid flush with the marble floor was a circular mosaic vignette that showed a veiled woman in the center, surrounded by twelve cherubs, complete with halo’s and poufy diapers. The female figure held a thirteenth babe—if you want to call it that—in her arms. The child she held was not like the others. Not innocent or cherubic, it looked rather scary, as far as babies go.
Its face was angular, the eyes laser-focused and tiny white teeth peeked out from under its ruby lips. I shivered and rubbed my arms. I wasn’t sure what to make of the mosaic, but given what I knew of Venna’s history and the pale stranger Oberyn arriving before she’d given birth to the prophesized thirteenth child, I was willing to make the leap, even though doing so scared the bejesus out of me.
Had Venna been turned while pregnant and somehow given birth to a vampire baby? The implications were almost too absurd to consider. Not to mention terrifying. A vampire giving birth—my retired uterus shriveled at the thought.
I sensed Cassidy and Clive slide to a stop behind me, in the doorway. Cass let out a startled gasp and I turned to face them. The look on their faces startled me. Both stood with mouths agape, staring behind me, but up and into the left staircase. I followed their focus and had to bite back my surprise as well.
Quinn stood there, upon the landing, midway to the second floor. Behind her, a middle aged woman stood, with her hands firmly on Quinn’s shoulders.
“Mama,” Quinn said in an eerie tone.
My heart stuttered. “Quinn, it’s okay baby. I’m here.”
The lights flickered and then my baby was standing there alone.
“Welcome to my home, please do come in,” said a voice from off to my right. The woman who had been standing behind Quinn had somehow moved to the opposite staircase. Venna. It had to be.
Without wasting a second, I conjured up two fireballs and threw them directly at the witch. Only, I somehow missed my mark; they disappeared within a few feet of their target with an audible poof.
“Now, is that any way to greet your hostess?” her voice taunted.
I turned in the direction of the voice and now saw the woman standing, alone, where Quinn had been only moments before. A quick glance to the other staircase showed that she’d switch places with Quinn, who now stood in the exact spot I’d tried to obliterate with my fireballs.
“You can thank me for saving your daughter’s life now,” Venna smiled politely enough, but there was a sharpness to her tone and danger within her dark green eyes.
“You want me to thank you? You kidnapped my daughter, you murd...” I glanced at Quinn and stopped myself. “You hurt Morgan. And just now, you tried to trick me into blasting my own daughter. Why in the hell should I thank you?”
Venna glided down the stairs in my direction. Her smile never faltered, but her tone grew more clipped. “Because dear, it is the polite thing to do.”
Although her appearance was rather youthful for someone who’d been around for hundreds of years, her voice betrayed the elaborate ruse. It was full of nooks and crannies, tiny fluctuations in her words that only came from time and age. It was noticeable enough that it messed with me a bit—to hear that voice come out of someone who appeared to be my age, well, it was just jarring.
She came to a stop just before me, obviously not threatened by me or my little parlor tricks in the least. As much as I wanted to rip her throat out, I had to play nice for a little while, or until I figured out exactly what I was dealing with. Coming in palms blazing hadn’t worked out so well for me. In fact, it could have gone so much worse than it had.
I shuddered at the thought and glanced up to Quinn, who was no longer on the staircase. Where did she go? I looked back at the witch.
Venna clapped her hands and laughed. “Realistic wasn’t it? You’re beloved daughter was never in this room. She’s been in her room the whole time.”
Aside from the fact that the witch had added an odd inflection to the word daughter, it did not escape my noticing that Venna had said Quinn’s “room” like she planned on keeping her. Over my dead un-dead body.
“Now,” Venna walked in a full circle, between me and where Clive and Cass stood, still rooted to the ground. “Before we go any further, let me address your unfounded accusations.”
She nodded in a familiar way towards Clive and Cass, and both of them returned her acknowledgement. Wait, did they know her? And if so, why the hell didn’t either of them warn me for fuck’s sake?
Venna turned her attention back to me, getting a little too up close and personal for my tastes. She stood only inches in front of me and I could scent the decay of the decades upon her. She smelled like cut flowers, long forgotten in a vase to rot. Musky, moldy and brittle.
While I was pretending to play the bloodhound, I had another sniff of the air around Venna, carefully that I wasn’t obvious about it. She was definitely vampire, though she lacked the scent of flesh blood. Perhaps over the years she’d learned to survive on something other than platelets? Kind of like how I could go longer without blood if I bottled up excess emotional cast-offs.
“It is rude to ignore your hostess when she is speaking to you,” Venna followed her admonishment with a tsk-tsk.
I did my best to be an amenable little guest. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“I do not appreciate the accusation that it was I who injured your daughter’s perky little friend.” Venna reached out and stroked a lock of my hair.
It was all I could do not to separate her fingers from the rest of her body. Or convulse from the creepiness of the gesture. She clearly had a screw loose.
“We’ve been to my house. We found Morgan’s body. She died, Quinn disappeared, and you left me a stupid glowing note on the wall.” I said slowly, like I was explaining something basic to an idiot. “Now, tell me again how you didn’t kill her?”
Venna chuckled and began walking another slow circle around me. In the background, I could see Clive tensing, preparing for a battle. I held up my hand, telling him to back off. This wasn’t his battle, and it wasn’t one that he could win at any rate.
“Yes, yes. I was there, but to assume that I am the one who hit your friend, Morgan was it? To assume that I stopped her heart with a ball of white light is q
uite the leap. That is not my style, but rather yours. Yes?” Venna motioned to the stairwell where I’d tried to blast her away only moments before.
“But I wasn’t there.... Fireballs?” It took longer than it should have, but my brain finally connected the dots and I swear to Goddess, I almost swooned. “You don’t mean Quinn? Say you don’t mean Quinn.”
Venna grinned, flashing a slip of fang at me. “It was a valiant effort to save her companion, but her aim was untrue. I am still here and your friend is not. It is a great misfortune that someone did not instill the knowledge that would have better controlled her magic.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me and I felt sick to my stomach. My poor baby had magic and I’d been too wrapped up in my own shit to notice. And now she had to live with Morgan’s death for the rest of her life. Something like that can really mess a person up. Trust me, I know, but at least I’m not a kid. Quinn’s an innocent, or at least she was.
I wanted to vomit. Instead, pink tears trailed down my face and I turned my back on her. I didn’t have a decent response. Nothing that I could say would help anything about the seriously screwed up situation. The thought of having to talk to Quinn about what had happened, well, it shattered my heart again.
At once, Venna clapped her hands behind me and I spun, expecting the worst. Instead, she looked almost excited. It was quite the change in mood.
“Now that we have the formalities out of the way, let me show you and our other guests to your chambers.” She took me by the crook of my arm and let me up one of the staircases, motioning for Clive and Cassidy to follow.
As an afterthought, she added, “Bette arrived some time ago and is already settling into her suite. Also, don’t worry about the child’s father, I’ve already taken care of him as well.”
I wondered briefly if Venna meant that she’d settled Pete in a room already or that she’d “taken care of” him in a Sicilian mobster sort of way. Right then, I didn’t really care what which one it was.
Chapter Sixteen
After spending the night alone in my room, like assumed the others had, I was about to go stir-crazy. I’d tried the door several times through the night and earlier in the day, and found it locked. That wasn’t really a surprise, given how we’d all come to be there, but it didn’t exactly set my mind at ease either. I was in limbo. Until Venna showed herself, I had little choice but to pace and remain calm. Letting my bitch-switch get flipped was not a good idea, I knew.
The room itself was adequate, albeit bare. It housed an elaborate wooden poster bed, a vanity and a comfy chair over by the floor to ceiling windows. Everything about the room shouted “antique” and I felt like I’d stepped back in time. Against the vintage backdrop, I’m sure that I looked bizarre in my cropped denim leggings and oversized black “Team Stark” tee. But then again, it’s not like I’d had enough notice to pick a more suitable travel wardrobe.
As for the room itself, there was something else about it, something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’d spent hours trying to describe the mood of the room and the best I could come up with is that it felt heavy, oppressive, like the years had deposited layers-upon-layers of negative energy on every surface and into every nook and cranny. Or maybe I was just projecting my own issues onto a poor innocent bedroom.
See, stir-crazy.
I took two more laps around the room and gave up, flopping onto the down-filled bed. The frescoed ceiling wasn’t something I’d spent time staring at, so I focused on that for, oh, about five minutes. God, I needed a book or something. Maybe ten.
Just as I thought myself about to go mad, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the ethereal glow of dusk began to blanket the world, a knock sounded at my door. I didn’t bother to get up, not trusting my reaction. So instead, I stayed right where I was, staring at the ceiling.
“Come in,” I sighed.
The door opened and Venna stepped inside cautiously. She glanced around like a nervous Nellie, and what I took initially as apprehension about the state she’d find me in, started to look like something else. Like maybe she didn’t want to be in this room any more than I did. That was interesting enough to make me sit up. Slowly, of course.
“Hello,” she said with a smile. “I take it you slept well?”
I don’t sleep, not much anyway, and she of all people should know that. So I assumed that she was talking out of her ass, just trying to be the gracious hostess.
“I’m rested.” I answered as truthfully as I could.
She took a tentative step forward. Then another and another, until she stood in the shadow of the window dressings. She peered around the heavy damask curtain and relaxed at the sight of the inky night sky.
“I thought perhaps we could take a walk in the gardens. I think you will find them very agreeable.” She spoke like a proper lady would have, say a few hundred years ago.
It was fucking weird.
“Sure, that sounds quite lovely.” I stood and put on the most amenable expression that I could muster, while slipping on my ballet flats. I stopped short of a curtsey. I wasn’t that flipping polite. Still, no one could accuse me of being a shitty house guest. At least not yet. I’d be willing to bet that time would come though.
“Fabulous! Shall we?” she motioned to the doorway.
“After you,” I replied, not wanting to turn my back on her for one moment. I’d have to be an idiot to put myself in that position.
After a slight pause, she obliged and led the way out of my room, down the hall and out through the kitchen entrance to the garden areas. I wondered if this was the same place she’d spent hours being tutored by the herbalist, M. Rue. I couldn’t very well ask her without letting on that I was in possession of the journal. I might end up needing that Ace up my sleeve, I thought, so there’s no sense in tipping my hand too early.
Because Venna’s demeanor was vastly different that evening, I decided to see if I could use that to my advantage. Maybe I’d be able to fill in the missing pieces of her historical puzzle. There was no time like the present—she was subdued, quiet even, and far more docile then when I’d last seen her. Could Vampire Witches be bi-polar, I wondered?
“Do you—did you have any children?” I pried, trying to get around to the topic of the demonic looking baby in the mosaic floor that I noticed when we arrived yesterday.
Venna picked the seed pod from a strange looking plant and pocketed it within the folds of her apron. “Yes, once upon a time. I gave birth to thir... uh, twelve daughters. But I wasn’t allowed to raise them. I don’t know their names or what became of them.”
“That’s awful! I’m sure that must have been so very hard to go through.” God, Stepford-Me was creeping Real-Me out. “So you spent a very long time pregnant. Twelve daughters, wow. One hundred and eight months... that’s nine years. That’s crazy to think of.”
I needed to find a way to make her open up further, I needed more details, especially about that last one she’d avoided speaking of: the creepy little fanged baby.
“At the time, it felt like an eternity. But now, looking back, it only lasted mere seconds in the grand scheme of things.” Venna passed me and went down another row of the garden, averting her eyes.
Of course, I followed her.
Venna wasn’t getting away that easily, even if she looked miserable, as if no time had passed and the wounds were still fresh. Maybe it was because of the long passage of time—it’s not like she had a shot in hell of finding them alive almost three hundred years later. That boat had long since sailed.
On some level, I began to feel sorry for her all over again. I could not let myself do that. In this, we were on opposite sides of the trench and one of us would have to lose eventually. I’d rather it not be me. I decided to try one more time to get Venna to open up.
“So twelve children, huh?” I prodded, stopping beside the night-blooming jasmine plant. I bent at the waist, inhaled and smiled—at least the gardens were well tended, even if the rest of
the place wasn’t.
“Thirteen,” Venna corrected me sharply. Realizing her gaffe, she tried to back step. “I mean, well... what are you doing to that plant, eating it?”
I smiled calmly and stood up, “Just taking in the scent of it. I prefer my meals a little livelier these days.”
Walking further down the path at a leisurely pace, her words finally hit me and I stopped abruptly and turned back to face her. “Wait, thirteen? I thought you said you had twelve daughters? Was the thirteenth child a boy?”
Venna shook her head, “No, it was a girl too. But I was... unwell during that last pregnancy and the baby I delivered was not... normal. My... well, I tried everything under the moon and stars,” she gestured to the vast stores of medicinal plants surrounding us, serving as her own pharmacopeia.
“It was all of no use. That baby did not survive the fortnight, though it should not have even lived that long.” Venna stooped over and yanked a few weeds from the base of the planting bed.
“Oh, that’s too bad. I can’t imagine how that must have felt.” I stepped into the row she was foraging down. She saw me blocking her path and slowed, wariness showing in her expression.
“I mean, as mother’s we’d do anything for our children. Failure is not an option.” I smiled, though my tone said otherwise. “Even when there’s nothing left for us to do, we still can’t give up, can we?”
Venna shook her head slowly, “No, I suppose not.”
“As much as we’d like to think we’d never fail our children, it happens to the best of us.” I said, stepping closer to where she stood. I reached my hand out to touch her arm, giving it a little squeeze.
