by Diana Graves
“Raina!” Mato yelled from down the hall, just this side of the double doors.
“Shit,” I breathed before turning back around.
As a vampire, Mato was by my side in a second. He wore a sturdy grey button up shirt, a dark trench coat lightly dusted with snow at the bottom and cowboy boots. His long black hair was tied back, making his stunning honey colored eyes stand out starkly on his strong Native American face. Looking at him, it was hard for me to accept that I ever shared a bed with such a beautiful man…Then again, I was sleeping with Alistair now. Guess I was just surrounded by men who liked to date down. I’m cruel to me. Bad habit, that.
He was just standing there, staring at me. He seemed unsure of what to do, so I broke the tension by giving him a hardy hug. He hugged me back and I heard him inhale deeply.
“You smell the same,” he said, and he sounded relieved.
“Uh, thank you.”
“Mato,” Melvern said with a hand on his shoulder. “Why are you here?” Mato broke our hug reluctantly, but kept an arm wrapped around my waist as he turned to address his master. “Is there new information from Fillips?”
“Detective Fillips?” I asked.
He looked down at me. “I have been working with EI and other branches of the government since they called me last night. I was the one who asked Ruy to join us, and your mother left the safety of our people because of it. If I had not asked him to leave her alone, she would still be alive. I am so sorry, Raina.”
“No—don’t take blame,” I said. “What’s happening is insane, but why did EI call you for help?”
“As Sherriff of Darkness, Fillips asked me and mine to patrol the forests, watch over the other towns up that way and keep the people safe.” He looked at Melvern. “I do have news, though. The mountains are overrun. I evacuated all I could. Everyone I could convince of it are underground in the caves of Darkness, safe.” His eyes moved to the floor, “But I could not convince all to join us or leave their homes.”
“It really is getting that bad up there?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Whatever this is, it is highly contagious and it makes men into nearly unstoppable killers.” He shook his head. “Those left outside the caves will be torn and eaten.”
“You did everything you could,” I said
“I wish I could believe so,” he said, and he did look truly sad. “With the mountain and surrounding parts swarmed, the government has shut off access to Darkness for everyone, even us. I just so happened to be on this side of the line when they made that call.”
“We can’t go home?” Olathia asked.
“We could. I do not see them trying to stop us as we speed by them, only a blur to their eyes, but it is very dangerous. These zombies, as they call them, are desperately hungry. I have personally witnessed them tear a home apart with their bare hands, cracking their own bones and ripping their own flesh in the process, to massacre an entire family.” He turned to Melvern. “My news is graver still. Killian is gone. We were running a patrol and the horde grabbed him out of my truck. I could not fight them off. They ripped into him until he was unrecognizable as anything but parts. I should not have taken him on patrol. He was a great wizard but still too vulnerable.”
I’d never seen a more serious look on Melvern’s face and it was scary to see it. He put his hand at the back of Mato’s head and brought the other man in for a manly embrace, but Mato never let go of me.
I met Killian only once a long time ago, but even so I said, “I’m sorry.” And my sorry was just as pathetically useless as all the sorries I received earlier. And it was just as annoying to hear it, too. But really, what can you say when someone you love has lost so much and you’re powerless to help? You wish you could, but you can’t, so you’re sorry.
“You’ve done your duty and our people are as safe as they can be,” said Melvern. As he let Mato go he turned to me. “Had I the power to rewrite this night, I’d have stayed home with our people. Lucky for you I don’t possess such power—where is your daughter?”
“In bed.”
“Show me the way.”
INSIDE HER HEAD
OLATHIA JOINED THE party rather than hang back with us serious types. That was fine by me. Melvern, Mato and I were met by Alistair and Damon on our way to Damon’s apartment. The men sat and stood around the apartment while I fetched Isobel from her bed, but in doing so, I woke Thomas and he followed me out to the living room. I laid her gently on the couch and kneeled on the floor by her head.
“I wish you would have left her in her bed. If you wake her out here she may have a meltdown,” Damon spoke softly. “It can take a long time to calm her down once she gets going.”
“We don’t need her to be awake to do this,” said Melvern as he rose from his seat at the dining table and joined me in kneeling by Isobel. “In fact, it’s easier this way.”
“Are you going to hurt my sister?” Thomas asked Melvern.
“No, my boy, with any luck we’ll save her,” Melvern answered with a wink. “Are you ready?” he asked me.
I looked around the room. Alistair stood close by with his hands behind his back. Damon stood closer still, looking down on Isobel, one hand on Thomas’ shoulder. Mato stood farthest away, leaning up against the kitchen sink. I realized just then that I’d experienced sex with every man in this room. Well, with Melvern it was only in my head; a false memory of sorts that he’d concocted to mess with me.
“Awkward, huh?” Raphael asked.
“Where have you been all night?”
“I don’t like drama,” he joked.
“Raina,” Melvern said to get my attention.
“Yes?”
“Are you ready?”
“No, but let’s do this.” I looked down at my daughter and combed her hair back with my fingers, but my eyes pinched shut when a wave of nausea hit me hard. I recognized the feeling. Melvern had sent me inside Isobel’s head. I looked up and everyone was still there, exactly where they were in the waking world. They were looking down on me.
“Is she okay?” asked Alistair.
“Mom?” asked Thomas. “She’s passed out! What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” Melvern assured them. “Raina is just fine. She and Isobel are sharing one mind.” He looked down at Isobel, petting her hair just before he stood up and walked away. “We should all wait somewhere else. Our presence is distracting her. We’re keeping her mind routed in the here and now, the real and tangible. She needs to be a bit more flexible than that.”
“We can wait in my classroom down the hall,” Damon suggested.
“I don’t want to leave her,” spoke up Thomas, but Damon put his arm around our boy and guided him out the door just the same. He was a good father, I had to give him that much credit. Damon took care of our children by himself after I died, and that took strength. I watched him walk away with kinder thoughts of him in my mind. Maybe Raphael was right. Maybe I had a problem holding onto hate.
As the men left the room I noticed a figure standing still in the background, blurry at first, but unmistakably Adia. Her head full of bouncy golden curls was a dead giveaway. Had she been there the entire time? She was a statue of a figure by the bookcase. I heard the door close, but I didn’t look away from Adia.
“M,m,ma,” came a little girl’s voice, and I did look away then. I looked down at Isobel. Her eyes were closed but her lips were moving. “Ma,ma,ma.”
“It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s here,” I said, and I held her, rubbing my head against her’s.
“Mom,” she said, and I my eyes shot wide.
“I’m here.”
“Monster,” she said. Curious…
I looked back at Adia, but she was in my face when I turned my head. Shit! She screamed loud and high pitched, a mouth too large to be human and filled with an almost touchable blackness. I pushed her back, but she was unmoving. She only continued screaming. I grabbed Isobel off the couch. She was like a ragdoll in my arms. I ran down th
e hall toward Damon’s room.
The hall grew longer than I remembered it to be. I looked back and Adia was behind me, her mouth stuck inhumanly wide, screaming still. I ran harder and finally made it to Damon’s room and slammed the door behind us. I held Isobel to my chest and stared at the door, trying to not let panic get the better of me.
The door shook as something pounded against it from the other side, over and over again.
“Monster,” Isobel squealed. “Monster, monster, monster!” she cried over and over again, just like the loud pounding; unrelenting and unnerving.
“Stop it,” I said calmly.
“Monster, monster, monster!” Pound! Pound! Pound!
“Stop!” I screamed at the door.
“Monster, monster, monster!” Pound! Pound! Pound!
I put Isobel down on Damon’s bed and went to the door. “Stop it, you fucking cunt! Leave my daughter alone!”
The pounding stopped, and Isobel fell quiet, though through it all her body was still limp and lifeless, her eyes were still shut tight.
“Adia?” I asked into the silence.
“MINE!!!” she screamed loud and long. “MINE!!!”
“Monster!” Isobel cried from the bed, and then the pounding started again.
“Fuck!” I shouted and blew out a heavy breath of frustration. “Let’s talk, Adia! Please, act like a fucking person for a Goddess damned second!”
The door flew open, and I fell back. I got to my feet and found Adia standing before me; petite and gorgeous, wearing a charming smile and a white gown, no longer the blurry statue.
“Of course, love,” she said with a heavy British accent. She smiled, flashing some serious fang.
I exhaled. “You know why I’m here?”
“You want me out of your daughter,” she said, letting anger show in her face, while her voice remained pleasant. An unsettling image.
I gave her a shallow nod of my head, but I never took my eyes off of her. I didn’t trust her. “What can I say that will make you leave Isobel’s body?”
“Say? Nothing,” she giggled. “Do?” she shrugged her dainty shoulders. “Something.”
“What can I do?”
“Offer yourself to me,” she said.
“You’d use my body to hurt others, like you used Alistair’s.”
She laughed out loud and Isobel twitched on the bed, turning herself over and hiding her face in the bedding. Adia was nothing like I remembered her to be. The woman I knew was patient, charming and loving. This woman was scary creepy. How could they be the same soul?
“Oh, I think I could do a lot more with your benefit package than I could with my brother. He had power and fire and a dick. I got bored fast. But you. You have untapped fame, unrefined beauty, and un-mastered talents that not even you could begin to understand, demigod.”
“You’re making a strong case against me letting you inside of me,” I warned. She laughed again. Why do crazy people always laugh so damn much?
“You’re such a bloody waste, Raina! The things you could do with everything you’ve been given.” She shook her head.
“Let her in,” Raphael whispered in my ear, from inside my head.
“What’s that?” Adia asked, as though she’d heard his voice as well, but she waved away the question with a graceful hand.
She smiled wide, too wide, showing too many teeth. Spine-chilling. Her bright blue eyes darted to Isobel on the bed, and mine followed, but when I looked back at her she wasn’t there and everything had changed. I was looking out over a dense forest with thin moonbeams of light shining sparsely through tree branches. It all felt so familiar.
“Adia!” I called out.
When I saw movement in the distance I instantly remembered where I was. I was in a dream that I had years ago, the very night I was first infected with Adia’s blood.
“Raina!” she spoke softly. The figure I had seen was far in the distance, but the voice sounded inches from my ear. I turned and she was there. The shock of it toppled me. I fell to the leafy hard underbelly of the forest. A large log lay to my right, covered in mint colored moss. I moved to stand, but Adia was on me, pushing me back down before I could get my footing.
“I came to you before, just like this. Do you remember?” she asked. “You were beside yourself, stunned by my beauty. You writhed in my arms like a whore. You craved me, my touch, my bite, my love.”
And, now I found her repugnant. I moved away from her, inching my body out from under her weight. “A naivety death has thankfully remedied,” I said as I freed myself and stood tall. She looked up at me with sad eyes and a pouted lip.
Again I heard Raphael whisper in my ear, “Agree to her terms.”
“Even then,” Adia began, still lying on the ground. “You wouldn’t let me inside your mind, not completely. I don’t think it was on purpose, but you kept me at arm’s length. I could only ever talk to you through your dreams.” She stood then and dusted herself off. “I think you have trust issues,” she said with an air of judgment about her.
“You think I have issues?”
She nodded with her head held high and walked around me. She stepped on the log, walking down it with her hands held out for balance, like a tight rope walker. The whole image was very whimsical and childlike.
“You did love me once. For a long time, you loved me most, more than anybody else in the whole wide world!”
“And then I found out everything you ever told me was a lie, and you only wanted me for my body.”
She shrugged, “Guess I was inside my brother too long, I started acting like a man, am I right?” she laughed. I rolled my eyes with a sigh. “Anyway, not everything I said was a lie.”
“No, I know you were telling the truth when you said Mort Villa was attacked, and your people tried to escape only to be run down. I researched it. However, I don’t think you were among them, as you claimed to be.” Her only response was a glare. “Where were you for all those years and how did you die? How did you end up possessing Alistair?”
She just stared at me with a blank sort of expression on her face.
“She won’t fess up to any of it,” huffed a raspy feminine voice from behind me. I turned abruptly and found another Adia standing just a few feet away. This Adia had blond curls braided over her shoulder; she wore a long red skirt and a white blouse with a high collar, tight sleeves and puffy shoulders, 1890’s garb.
I felt sick. This woman was mental! “And you will?” I asked tentatively.
She lifted her skirt with both hands and stepped closer to me. “I’ll tell you. My people were destined for an earth bath and my god needed me alive. Since they were going to die anyway, why not use them as a diversion. Let the bizzies chase them around. I took a secret passage to a safe place.” She said the last part with a devious look in her eyes. “Anyway,” she waved her hand in the air. “I was safe for a good long while, until that bastard got greedy.” She paused, maybe that was my cue to say something, but I didn’t. I stared at her, waiting for her to continue and eventually she did.
“Admetus, Anex or whatever the hell he chose to be called.” Her face grew aggressive, as if just talking about him got her all riled up. She tore at her clothes, ripping the fabric away until she was wearing black pants and a blue blouse. Her hair fell loosely around her shoulders again. “He killed me, but he didn’t just kill me. He drained every last fucking drop of my blood from my body. We always knew my blood was the key to the perfect solution, but he wanted it all, right then and there. A few grey hairs and he loses what was left of his fucking mind!” she growled.
“So, Admetus starts aging and he kills you for your blood?” I asked.
“Yes, Apollo’s instructions were that I was to give a pint a week for testing, not a drop more or less,” she said, looking down and talking more to herself than me. “He came in, as he came in every week to take my blood, and he straps me in and takes it all! I could feel myself slipping away. I could literally feel my life leaving
me, like I was being sucked through a vacuum tube. That’s when I reached out to Ally. I knew he was close by. I knew he’d started up my old vampire collective under a different name. He was my twin. We’d always had a connection, but we had more than that. He had my blood, my disease in his veins. He was so much my play thing.” She laughed loud and long. “After I took over, you should have heard him whining. ‘They’re children, sissy! Leave them be!’” she mocked Alistair. “I had to show him how to be a man. Can you believe that? More than a thousand years on this Earth and I had to show him how to take what he wanted. But he never seemed to grasp what power meant, what being a man meant. I never gave up, though. Lessons and lessons. Your brother didn’t want to learn either.”
“Say yes and I will tell you how to end her,” Raphael whispered.
“I can’t trust you. If she has my body, she’ll make me into a worse monster than she made Alistair,” I thought at him.
“If you keep her in your daughter, she’ll destroy her. Trust me, Raina, I can show you how to put an end to Adia, but you have to take her into yourself first. Do it. Accept her offer.”
“I had to bend him over and show him myself!” she shouted in anger. She punched her fist into her hand over and over again. “This is how you do it!” She laughed then. “Good times.”
“You can have me. Take me,” I said, but the look on her face made me instantly regret it. Was I really trusting Raphael again?
“Better times to come,” she said with an eerie smirk.
“Yes,” I said, fully unsure of myself. “Only, I don’t know how.”
She walked closer still and put her hand on my cheek. I didn’t move away, even though I wanted to. But I stiffened under her touch.
“Just relax. The connection has already been made. All I need to do is get in there,” she said, putting her second hand on my head and pressing down so hard it hurt. She pressed harder still, and I closed my eyes and screamed, but I didn’t try to get away from her. She was crushing my skull, but I kept telling myself that it wasn’t real, this was not real!
The pain left in an instant and I opened my eyes. I was in Damon’s apartment. Isobel was asleep on the couch, and I was kneeling in front of her.
