Anger swirled with panic in my chest. “If you think you’re going to be the one taking over, Alessandro,” I began, but the look on his face stopped me.
“Don’t call me that hunter name,” he snarled. “I’m Otto Von Dorn. I’ll be your sire if you play your cards right. Lucky girl.”
My heart almost stopped. I knew what that meant.
He sighed and got serious again, as though he recognized it was his last chance to brag a bit. “So as I say, I killed him, took his face, his files, and am going down the list of hunters he had contact with but do not know him by sight. One by one, they’ll be killed or turned. Starting with your thick-witted boy here in town. Shane. Should I kill him, or change him? These are the hard decisions I have to make now,” he said.
Sudden heat flashed against my face, and the torch was just over my head. He was down at my level, leaning, grinning. Only he didn’t look the same. His face had changed into something uglier, with sharp angles and crevices. It was like Alessandro was some heavy theatrical make-up he’d put on, and now it was wiping itself off, folding into his skin and leaving behind Otto Von Dorn.
“And these aren’t decisions I can make on an empty stomach. But first…my dear Bentley… at last, you may bite her. Fill yourself.”
Alessandro whipped away from me. I heard Bentley get to his feet, and shuffle toward me, as though he were a man laboring under a great weight. He made a sound, a grumbling kind of grimace, then he took the place Alessandro had been, inches from my face.
He wasn’t the Bentley I had known. His features were distorted. Not twisted and inhuman like the other vampire, but still, off… Wrong. It wasn’t just the bruising and the swelling and the damage done by whatever had been done to him, probably thanks to his heroic resistance of his elder vampire’s commands. His face had changed, grown a little longer, and his mouth was wider. And filled with long, sharp teeth. And those came closer. Closer.
“Nah, don’t start on the neck. This will take a while, and that would get things started too fast. Bite off a finger, or something.”
I jerked and made an, “erk!” noise at that, and Bentley looked me right in the eye. There was so much conflict in there, a kind of deep sorrow fighting against an animal hardness. And I think the animal was winning.
Then one eye twitched shut… then open.
Wait a minute… had Bentley just winked at me? Quicker than I could see, he moved away, and I could feel him on the other side of my body, hunched over me, his cold breath (cold like Alessandro, I thought with a shudder) touching my bare arms, then my hands.
With a screeching growl, he struck, and bit. I shrieked. I felt the first brush of sharp tooth, like a needle’s point, scape the edge of my hand…
And that’s all it did. Just touched it. He snapped with a ferocious, maybe even exaggerated sound, but he didn’t actually bite me. My hand didn’t feel down a finger. It didn’t even feel as bad as it had a moment before. It was looser, actually.
Then I realized two things at once: Bentley’s bite had gone through part of the rope holding me together, and if I did not act like he’d done more, fake-Alessandro would be onto it in an instant.
So I screamed, and cried, and rolled back, away from Alessandro, pinning my suddenly free hand down under me. Now I had a hand free, but so what? I didn’t have vampire repellent or anything useful… but my hand slipped into my back pocket, and felt paper.
“Oh, the screams!” the fake-Alessandro said. “I love the screams. Scream out a question,” he said, cackling.
“What have I got in my pockets?” I said, in a fake-whimper.
“Huh?” the vampire said.
“That’s a classic,” Bentley said.
And a ruse, because I knew just what I had in my pocket. I had three crumpled, nasty old spells from my Gran Ana, as far as I was concerned until a second ago scrap paper I was just going to throw out.
Then my slow caught up with my quick, and I knew what my brain had figured out a whole 30 seconds ago. It wasn’t until I felt the parchment paper on my skin that I fully knew, or understood.
Glassware, tied up in elaborate knots, hanging from my ceiling.
Somehow, my fingers knew which spell was which, and something in my long recessed past, a past that had been taken from me just as my life had, knew what to do with it. I squeezed that paper, focused on it like I was doing long-division in my head, and said, “Number two!”
Sudden heat burst forth in my hand, like I’d cracked open a chemical heating pad, and all at once the ropes that had me trussed like a hog on a spit went loose, all at once.
“Huh?” the vampire said again, this time not as a question but as an expression of rage. He moved fast as lightning, and in one motion had me pinned to the ground by his knees, and Bentley’s throat in his hand.
Lost in a magical land, trapped in a space between here and there.
“Number three!” I said, though I had no air in my lungs to say it with. This was the spell Oliver had handed me just a short time ago, when I was stuck in that weird place that Gran Ana had built to confuse me. Well, whatever that spell did, it was doing it now. Around us a weird hum had started to build, like when an enormous vehicle passed by and the reverberation of its engines could be felt right in the foundation of your house. Something had happened…
Just what, I wasn’t sure, because Bentley and I weren’t whisked away to safety. Something was missing, something I hadn’t grasped.
With a shrug, the vampire threw Bentley back, and then picked me up off the ground. I was held in mid-air, the untied ropes falling all around me. The face that stared up at me, barely visible in the gloom, looked like nothing human.
“I think you’ve failed, little witch,” the monster said. His expression flattened for an instant, as if he was listening to a sound from far off, and then dismissing it. “You’ve opened a door, but you’ve no way to go through it.”
“Oh, that’s what I did,” I said, in a voice choked off by the monster’s grip on my throat. “Thanks.”
That door was meant for me to go through, to get to someplace else. So…
My hand was still in my backpocket, and even as my vision was getting dim, I could feel that first spell, almost read the words on it by the impression that pen had made on that dense parchment.
A gremlin, stuck in an engine, just waiting for the right word to go.
This spell would have dismissed that gremlin right from my car. It was a magical goodbye. Maybe, in reverse, it could be a magical hello. A summoning, and the door I was supposed to go out from, could let something else in. If only I could gather enough strength to utter the words. I drew in a breath and closed my eyes, using all my might.
But nothing was coming. I needed something—a push, a shove, a shout… I pulled in air as deep as it would go and used it to propel my voice forward.
“Night goblins, I choose you!”
The words came out stronger than I could have believed I was capable of at this point. I lay back, gasping for more air and blinking at the darkness.
And suddenly, it worked… like magic.
As if an invisible curtain had been pulled back, a hole darker than the black of night opened in the air, just behind the vampire monster. Through it, I could see a pair of red glowing eyes, each about the size of my thumbnail… and then another pair. And then a dozen, hovering in mid air with the gentle, weird leathery sound of wings pulsing in the air.
“Little witch…” the monster began ominously, then he heard the wings, too, and turned, frowning.
A nasty little voice came through the rift. “Both have two legs. Means we can’t eat ‘em?”
I felt a laugh trying to surge up my throat, but I was too far gone to let it up. Still, memories! They flooded back. Those little devils! I choked out, with the last bit of breath I had, the words that I’d heard them say when I was caught underground at the wrangler’s.
“Pull one of his off, then you’ll be okay.”
A doz
en slavering, sharp-toothed mouths opened in simultaneous evil little grins. And then, with a whooshing sound, the night goblins attacked.
It was like that old Looney Tunes character, the Tasmanian Devil. Just a whirling mass, wings, teeth, eyes, and suddenly—wonderfully! the evil vampire was covered in winged nightmares. He fought back, half-heartedly at first, as though he couldn’t really believe these tiny creatures were a real threat—but they came at him in a never-ending horde, on and on, and soon he was beginning to look desperate. He swung out, knocking one hard to the ground, then two more attached to the place it had been, clamping down with their tiny teeth. He shrieked, whirled, lost his balance…
And then something happened that I wasn’t prepared for. With the vampire growing weaker, Bentley seemed to find his own strength again. And with a roar of triumph, he launched himself against his vampire master, checking him hard with his shoulder. The vampire fell backwards, through the open gap I’d made in the air, a look of pure astonishment on his ugly face.
I didn’t realize I had made another gesture until it was already complete, moving my hand from the right to the left like I was pulling a curtain rod. As I moved, the black gap in space closed, taking with it the goblins and the screaming vampire.
The sudden silence was like the crashing of ocean waves. I cringed against it, and nearly fell. Bentley caught me, and guided me to the cot. I sat, staring at nothing for a while, not sure I could believe we were safe. Surely something else was still to come, something else to tear at us and finally defeat us.
But no. We sat and waited, and it was quiet. So beautifully quiet. I was wrung out, just barely able to move even a finger, but still alive. And so was Bentley.
I looked up at him. He looked down at me, and he almost managed a smile.
“Other than that,” he said, his voice hoarse, and tired-sounding, but still so clearly his, “how was your day?”
Chapter 14
The impulse to laugh was strong but the strength just wasn’t there. So I sat very still and smiled at Bentley, and he took a deep breath before going on.
“Haley,” he said quite seriously. “I can’t tell you how touched I am that you risked life and limb to help me. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more loyal friend.”
And all I could do was smile. But life was coming back into my veins, little by little. “Tell me this,” I rasped out at last. “Did Alessandro engineer your jail break? Or what?”
He nodded. “I was afraid it was my death knell when I saw him coming down into the cell area with that ring of keys. I knew he didn’t mean to do me any favors.”
“What did he want?”
“Want? World domination of course. His type always does want that. And it usually ends badly. Actually, I think so far, it always does.”
“Let’s hope that trend holds true.”
He nodded, then reached out and took my hand in his. “He spoke of ruling Moonhaven, wanting my agreement. I refused to give that to him and so he began my torture. And soon after, yours.”
“This has been a crazy night,” I muttered. “So Alessandro killed the Inspector?”
“Yes. Only I know him as Otto Von Dorn.”
“Then why was Joe Pelligrini searching your house?”
“Ah, poor Joe. I’m sure he was nervous. I’d been helping him with some transactions he was involved in, regarding the custody of his beautiful little girl. He was probably trying to find the paperwork he needed for the court case.”
“Oh. Well that answers that question.”
I looked around, beginning to get nervous. Could Alessandro really be defeated that easily? “How do we know he won’t come back?” I ventured. “Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
He shook his head. “No. He can’t come back here. This is my cave and now that I’ve got control of it again, I can keep him out. If I weren’t so bone tired, I’d bring back my chandelier and all my other furnishings. But that will have to wait for another day.”
“At least you haven’t cast me out,” I said, remembering what he’d said the day before about not knowing what side I was on, and whether he could let me into his enchanted space.
He laughed softly. “Never,” he said, his voice low and husky. “You belong here. You’ve proved that.”
Had I? I wasn’t so sure. I’d fought off Alessandro, but did that prove anything?
“Bentley,” I said, squeezing his hand and looking into his eyes earnestly. “Did he do it? Did he turn you?”
“No. I told you that I went to sea as a lad, didn’t I? Well, I spent a lot of time in Europe, and eventually I landed in Transylvania. That was where it happened. And believe it or not, it was done for love.” He smiled at me. “Someday I’ll tell you all about it. But right now, I think I hear the hunters arriving outside. Shall we go to greet them?”
I wasn’t sure I could walk that far but I surprised myself. I was regaining my control and my power. And as we came out of the cave into the open, I looked into the glaring lights they carried, shaded my eyes and spotted Shane.
And then he had me and held me and I looked up into his beautiful face.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice hoarse. “Oh Haley, why didn’t you wait for me?”
But he didn’t expect an answer to that, and I wasn’t going to give one. Tears were running down my cheeks. I didn’t seem to have words. But he held me, and I knew everything was going to be alright. At least tonight.
Of course, there were hurdles to cross. Making our report and trying to fit things into an official explanation should have been a contortionist’s dance if there ever was one.
In nearly any other town in America, the next part would have been the hardest. I mean, there I’d been in a magically constructed cave, created from the mental desires of a vampire lawyer who had been accused of murdering a government inspector, who had left behind a string of damning evidence and had escaped from prison.
What was our story? One of the hunters in pursuit of him was actually an old vampire in a mask who had some form of mental control over the good vampire, so he couldn’t tell anyone what was really going on. And no, I don’t have a witness to back me up, because I sent the bad guy through a magic portal into a nest of night goblins who may or may not have eaten him up, yum.
Like I said, anywhere else in America, in the world, when I told them exactly that, their reply would not have been what Deputy Tommy Decker’s was, when I fed him the above line:
“Oh, thank God. Well, that explains that.”
I may have blinked at him a time or two. I’d practically had my hands out, waiting to be cuffed and taken away for aiding and abetting a fugitive. I didn’t expect the law to be patting me on the back and immediately sending for people to tend to a vampire’s wounds.
“People really like Bentley here in our town,” Tommy explained to me later. “To learn that somebody you trusted was a bad guy, that’s a hurtful thing. It’s just nice when it ain’t true, whatever the reason.”
“But he’s a vampire,” I said.
Tommy shrugged. “Well, I suppose there’s vampires, and then there’s vampires.”
True enough. I didn’t try to reason my way through that, or anything. I needed to get home, to hug my dog, and to get some sleep. I gave Shane one last longing look, but he was fully occupied in dealing with the mop up and report making so much a part of the peace officer’s job these days. I let Tommy take me home.
I slept, dog on the bed (I didn’t have the heart, or the strength to kick him out that night) and dreamed. It was the same dream I’d had before - locked in the car, water bubbling up around us… us…
Who was us? I could see in the rear-view mirror, faces, almost becoming clear, as the music pulsed. What the heck was it? The James Bond theme? Peter Gunn? Something like that with a guitar piece running over and over and over while the water poured in through the vents…
And then it covered my face. Warm water, sloppy and wet and… delivered via dog tongue.
&
nbsp; I woke up just before I’d finally figured it out, before the tune became clear, and there was Toto, looking me in the face with a sense of doggy seriousness in his expression.
“You silly pooch,” I said. He blinked at me, took the minor reproach with his sense of dignity intact, and licked me again.
I started to get up, then stopped very firmly. It was less accurate to say I ached than I was a living ache, one big old knotted, angry muscle that didn’t want to do anything today, or for the rest of this week, thank you very much. Except maybe sleep. Or die, just for a little while.
So I was not at all welcoming the sound of fluttering wings accompanied, a second later by a knock on my bedroom door.
“Go away,” I said. “And never come back. And I’m not doing any tests or anything at all ever again.” I don’t know if my weak voice made it all the way to the door, but it didn’t make much of an impression.
The knocker knocked again, accompanied by a friendly (but no more welcome) “Miss Greco, your grandmother humbly requests your presence—”
“Gran Ana never does anything humbly,” I said, surprised by both the volume I was able to get in my voice, and the fact that I was jumping out of bed, pulling on jeans. I didn’t remember showering last night when I got home, but a look in the mirror proved I was not covered in the muck and yuckiness of the night before, so I must have sleep-bathed. I was clean when I stepped out the door to face an expectant Oliver in human form, who had that wry expression I couldn’t read. It was a smile, like we were sharing a secret joke, but for all I knew the joke was on me.
“Lead the way, wings,” I said. “Gran Ana has a lot to answer for.”
“Wings?” he said, that smile turning into a quite disapproving frown.
“Better than Bird Brain,” I said, and we went.
A half-hour later, we were in Gran Ana’s beautiful home that hung, cantilever-style, over the waves that hit the rocks beneath. It was a magical house to live in—just right for a sorceress like my grandmother. I had to admit I loved the place.
That Old Witch Magic (Wicked in Moonhaven~A Paranormal Cozy Book 2) Page 16
