Queen of the Night Time World

by Kristen Strassel

  Callie sighed and steeled herself against me and whatever secrets she tried to keep. Her façade cracked, and I saw her for what she really was.

  A monster.

  Gray skin, deep purple wells under her eyes, and black lips. Her fangs were a little scarier in this package. A bite from them would do damage. She shook her head, and The Mistress was back, but she still wasn’t perfect. Hair scrambled from sleep, and no amount of pretty could cover the residue of those dark circles. Her hands were lost in the sleeves of her sweatshirt—judging from the size of it, it belonged to Tristan. It hit the tops of her knees.

  The fangs had gone back to cute. “You don’t get to turn this around on me when you barged in here.”

  Okay, good point. “I need to talk to Lennon, like now.”

  Callie turned her head back to where the bedrooms were. “She’s not up yet. What do you need?”

  “It’s something only Lennon can help me with.” I wasn’t about to reveal my plans to The Mistress. It would’ve been more efficient to go back to the lobby and tell Rachel what I was up to, because Callie wouldn’t keep the good gossip to herself. “Can I wait here for her?”

  “Why can’t she come to your room? I wasn’t exactly expecting company.” She kept looking behind her. What’s she got back there?

  “Because it can’t wait.” If I had bigger balls, I’d barge past her and knock on Lennon’s door, but I couldn’t risk getting in a tangle with a hangry vampire. “Where are the rest of the guys in the band?”

  “No clue.” She wasn’t looking at me. “I’ve been busy.”

  A groan came from the direction of the bedrooms. It sounded angry and painful.

  “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath and looked over her shoulder at me before she disappeared. “Go back to your hotel room, Holly. If you have any idea what’s good for you.”

  Like hell I was going anywhere. The cry was more urgent next time, punctuated with a couple of fucks and shits when Callie tried to calm him down. Tristan. Was he hurt or just completely drained? All my bravado from the beginning of the visit faded. Pure fear took over. If Tristan slipped into the darkness, we were pretty much screwed.

  Callie’s voice echoed in the giant, open penthouse, and she sounded younger than usual. Helpless. I settled on the couch, tuned into the argument. The Mistress couldn’t count on security to help her if things took a turn to something she couldn’t handle. I might not be much help either, but at least I was a witness. When things took the form of what I wanted to see, there was comfort in getting stories straight.

  It was Callie’s turn to yelp, but Tristan was making noises that didn’t belong to a human. She pleaded with him, but her voice lost strength.

  I headed toward the bedrooms. Callie needed help. I stopped dead in my tracks when a door slammed shut.

  “Get away from her!” Lennon’s voice was strong and clear. “You’re going to kill her. We need to keep her strong, Tristan.”

  “Fuck you.” Tristan’s declaration was punctuated by shattering glass.

  “Don’t touch me,” Lennon said between clenched teeth. “I’ll be damned if I get infected with whatever virus has turned you into Rachel’s drone.”

  I had bad news for her about Rachel, but I lurched forward, much more interested in the last part of what she said. Rachel’s drone. The Mistress had been overthrown.

  “I can’t frigging wait for this damn show to start again.” Lennon slammed a cup on the island, and startled when she realized she had company. She plastered her best fake smile on her face, like there was a possibility I didn’t hear any of that. “Oh hey, doll.”

  I rushed over to her. “What’s wrong with him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Typical Tristan bullshit.”

  “It doesn’t sound like typical Tristan anything.” I put my hands beside hers on the island and realized hers were covered in blood. I didn’t think it belonged to her, but that was no relief. “What’s this about a virus?”

  I thought I was the one with the bombshell news.

  “He’s...in bad shape. There’s no other way to say it. He’s drank so much Venom I don’t think there’s any blood left in him. And with Rachel hanging around, he’s absorbing her bad vibes. So that was bad on its own. Callie can’t keep giving him blood or he’ll drag her right down with him. I’ve been stingy with mine, ever since what happened with the guys in the band. We share blood all the time when we’re alone. It might be weird if you’re not a vampire, but you guys do things we think are weird.”

  Rachel hadn’t been involved in the blood exchange between Blade and the guys, but she probably shared blood with Blade a lot. My own blood boiled thinking about it. Sinking her fangs into his skin. Taking what was mine. What else was new? But if she’d weakened him, knowing it would spread through the clan like a virus, things were making sense.

  “Is the virus the same thing that happened to the rest of the band?”

  “Not sure.” Lennon sighed and jerked her head back in the direction of the bedrooms when Tristan groaned. She lowered her voice. “Callie can’t donate much more to Tristan. He drains her way down, and without the show, there’s never enough energy to get her back to where she needs to be. Rachel volunteered to give him blood, and he’s been a mess ever since. I won’t let him touch me. That crash you heard was me breaking a lamp over his head to get him off me. But Callie can’t say no to him.”

  “So they’re both wasting away.”

  “I’m scared for them, doll.” She took my hands in her own bloody ones and squeezed. “I don’t know what to do to stop it. I refuse to stand by and watch Rachel take over the clan. She’ll treat Callie like roadkill if it means she gets what she wants.”

  If Callie survived. She was collateral damage in Rachel’s war.

  “There is something you can do.” It occurred to me my plan wasn’t foolproof, either. “Can you fight Rachel, since she created you?”

  Lennon frowned. “She can read my mind, so no sneak attacks.”

  “We don’t need any. I saw her downstairs. She stole Gabriel’s powers. It’s her intention to take her team into the other Realm and leave the rest of us here to rot. She’s draining the vampires so she can fill them with her powers.”

  Lennon pointed toward the bedroom. “That’s what a drained vampire that’s been ‘filled’ with her power acts like. I’d bring you in there, but I can’t be responsible for what happens next. At this point, you’re the only hope I’ve got that things might turn out okay. That we’re not all going to rot in Hell.”

  It was humbling and frightening that Lennon had that kind of faith in me, especially when my plan relied on her to pull us through. “Can you leave Callie alone with him?”

  “There isn’t much hope for either of them.” A red-tinged tear rolled down Lennon’s cheek.

  We were in survival mode. This wasn’t about getting Rainey back. It was saving our own asses.

  “Blade’s missing, too.” I still held out hope that he’d be waiting for me when I went back to my room. But he hadn’t messaged me. Night had fallen, and he was scaring the shit out of me. “We’ve got to stop her.”

  Lennon bit her lip, shaking her head at something I didn’t see. “I’ll do whatever I can, but I don’t have the powers you think I do. You’re the one with the power, Holly. You’re the only one who can stop this.”

  I motioned for her to follow me, not letting her see my face. If she knew how much her faith in me frightened me, she’d stop believing. “I’m not. Rainey is. She decides who lives and who dies.”

  PUTTING ALL OUR FAITH in a book seemed foolish, but this was no ordinary book. Older than possibly anything else on the continent, the grimoire held the actual secrets of the universe, as recorded by Rainey. A chill racked my skin as we settled into the chairs around the desk in my hotel room. My Blade-free hotel room.

  “All of Cash’s worst traits lived on in Rachel when he was destroyed. That’s what happens when you play with magic you don’t unde
rstand.” I looked down at the grimoire with trepidation. Rachel was making decisions like she was The Dominia about who would perish in this Realm. We planned to repeat Rachel’s mistakes with reckless abandon. “But I don’t see any other way out of this.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Lennon asked.

  “We need to cast a spell to protect you from what we find in Gabriel’s Realm and to keep you strong. Rachel says she’s preparing the vampires to handle sunlight.” I racked my brain, trying to figure out what kind of spell to cast that would check as many boxes as possible. Rainey didn’t know that vampires existed before we came to Vegas, or so she claimed. The possibility that my entire life with Rainey had been a lie, too, couldn’t waylay me. Some lies were worth risking everything for.

  She loved me, that wasn’t fake. Love was real and pure and true no matter what someone’s intentions were. There was no spell to disguise that.

  I flipped through the pages, relishing the vibration that prickled my fingertips. Rainey had left a part of herself in this book. I let go of it, concentrating hard on what I wanted. Lennon gasped when the pages turned on their own. Whatever it settled on, we were doing.

  To Disguise the Physical Body and Let True Intentions Come Through. I chuckled as I read the spell. It was the same one Rainey had used to get Blade out of jail, and to sneak me into Sin City Vampire Club before it belonged to me. “I’m familiar with this one. This was what Rainey used to mimic my age the whole time she was with me.”

  There was no way to prepare for the emotion that racked through my body. I covered my face with my hands to catch the sobs. The negative energy, the utter hopelessness, could not spill onto the grimoire. It was the only chance we had at survival.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Who should we disguise me as?” Lennon asked. It was a good question. Everyone we knew with power was a vampire. But every vampire would have the same weakness as Lennon. Daylight.

  Except the one who was siphoning the sunshine from this Realm and polluting the other with her intentions.

  “Rachel.” I swallowed hard as I made a list of the crystals and potions we needed to pull this off. Rainey had been resourceful, since some of this stuff was super obscure and we went two hundred years without access to online ordering. “They know her there, and it seems like she’s already struck a deal with Gabriel. He’ll play ball with her.”

  “Doll.” Lennon’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “She can read my mind. She’ll know what we’re up to.”

  The spell got us into trouble before, when Rainey disguised herself as Callie. But in the end, we got what we wanted. “I’ll handle it. Rainey will believe me over that bitch, and she’ll deal with Gabriel. They’re both fluent in riddle.”

  There was a possibility that Rachel wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms in the other Realm. They didn’t have a weak leader like we did, if Callie was still The Mistress. No matter what, I’d never answer to Rachel. But it was possible that she filled the good people in Gabriel’s Realm with as much rage as she did to me.

  “I don’t think anyone will hurt you there.” It was a big leap of faith. “I joke that it’s Orgyville. It’s everything good on steroids, without the bad stuff. I think the two Realms overlap. The good stuff there, the bad stuff here, and reality is somewhere in between.”

  “If you say so,” Lennon said with a groan.

  “The spell won’t work if you don’t believe in it.” That wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the grimoire, but it didn’t have to be. Faith was the most important ingredient. “You have the power inside you. My light and my fire come from you. And when you get scared, think of what’s at stake. It’s way scarier than pissing off a bunch of sex-starved Gabriel disciples. Although I have to warn you, you’ll see some things there you can’t unsee.”

  She chuckled. “It’s Orgyville. And I worked in a strip club back in the day. And Embrace. I’m scarred for life. I could probably teach them a trick or two.”

  “So you’re in?” I actually crossed my fingers.

  “I was never not in.” She leaned over the ancient book and kissed my forehead while I did a little victory dance. “I don’t want to let you down.”

  “You never do.”

  I’d never seen Lennon completely unraveled before. It wasn’t the jammies—it was the naked fear on her face that no makeup could ever disguise. She looked young, but not innocent. She trusted too easily and regretted it every time. But her hope never died.

  Now that I had a signed permission slip from Lennon to change her into the enemy, we had some serious work to do. Rainey hadn’t bothered to mark her spells with a degree of difficulty. She was an expert caster. I could be jumping into the deep end with Lennon and her insecurities. I read the spell one more time. We had some of the ingredients with us at the hotel, but we had to go back to my apartment to get the rest.

  “We should cast the spell when we get to the apartment. Rachel is in the Alta Vista. It might be harder for her to read your mind if you’re further away.” I drove. Lennon was too nervous. I hated seeing her like this. She was a completely different woman when she worked at Embrace. She’d been the queen of that little universe until she was overthrown. No wonder she didn’t have high hopes for our mission. None of her stories had happily ever afters.

  Yet here she was, helping me rescue Rainey and checking for texts that weren’t coming from Blade on my phone. She still believed it was possible for dreams to come true. Once we brought the apocalypse to a screeching halt, maybe we could sign her up for a dating site. Or ask around to see if our friends knew any sexy, single vampires.

  For now, it was a silly little diversion to keep reality from making me crazy. Lennon may have been lost in one of her own, because she didn’t answer me right away. I glanced over at her when we stopped at a red light and she jumped, like she forgot she had company.

  “Distance isn’t an issue,” she finally said. “She can still get in my mind.”

  “Rachel doesn’t know where my house is. By the time she finds it, we’ll be in the other Realm.”

  Lennon nodded and looked out the window. The light turned.

  “Don’t be afraid of failing the spell,” I said. “I’ve done more stupid things than I can possibly count. Everything always works out.”

  “Energy can’t be created or destroyed,” she said. “It’s the second law of physics. Yeah, I know, big surprise but I loved science when I was in school. So we’re not losing energy. The problem is it has less quality every time it’s changed into another form. We’ve ruined the energy we have. And if we go by the laws of the universe, there’s no way to fix it.”

  So maybe Lennon didn’t believe that everything could be fixed with hard work and good intentions. “Okay. I can’t argue with science, but what do we have control over? We can restore the balance between the Realms. We can attract people who have the same goals we do. When Tristan is healthy enough to play again, the fans will come. Guaranteed. Now I understand why he and Callie didn’t care about perfection. It’s like the fans love him more when he fucks up.”

  “He pushes limits and makes mistakes. He’s their fantasy. That’s what the fans want—for the band and even you to go as far as you can into the darkness and come out okay, so they know that they’ll be all right when they go back to their lives. I worry we’ve gone too far this time, doll. That the humans will give up on us and see us for what we really are.”

  Monsters. You see what you want to see. I never thought of it as true in our Realm, too. “But you’re still here.”

  “I’m still here.” She sighed. “Prepare yourself for the possibility we can’t fix this, doll. What will you do then?”

  Easy. “Keep fighting.”

  “And I’ll be right there with you,” she said softly.

  Only darkness greeted us in the apartment. As depressing as it was, I was glad that Lennon forced me to think about Plan B. There were so many variables—I’d never cast a major spell before and neither had she. We
may not be able to get into Gabriel’s Realm. And I couldn’t bear to think that something had happened to Rainey. That she was being punished or had been reduced to slave labor to teach the good people of the Realm a lesson.

  We might not be able to create more good energy, but this Realm would benefit greatly by having her back.

  I opened the closet and gasped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s a mess in here.” I looked back at Lennon and then to the closet. “You wouldn’t have left it like this, would you?”

  “Hell no. I left everything as I found it.” She came up behind me, and groaned when she saw the condition of the closet. Jars knocked over, contents spilled, labels ripped off. She stormed away and went over to the slider. “Here’s the culprit. There’s broken glass all over the carpet.”

  “That wasn’t easy.” It was a double-paned glass. And they had to climb a stucco balcony to get in.

  Lennon shrugged and pushed a loose shard of glass to the floor. “Not a challenge for someone with supernatural strength.”

  I opened the list up on my phone, not deterred by the fact that someone was one step ahead of us. Or that Blade still hadn’t answered me.

  I couldn’t find anything. Everything we needed was missing, or there was only a trace left in the jar. It pissed me off that someone dumped the jars out. I didn’t expect them to have any respect for me or even Rainey, but they should’ve had some reverence for things that were bigger than them. For the things that science couldn’t explain.

  The grimoire Rainey wrote was still at the hotel. In retrospect, a stupid move. The information inside was too valuable to fall into the wrong hands, or worse, be used against me. I’d be a fool to think that the person who destroyed Rainey’s stash wouldn’t look for more books. I had no idea if any were missing. She had that many.