“Because it’s hers. Not matter how many times I spin this, it always comes back to that. It’s a relic, and something tells me it’s got power in it—even if it’s power only she can manipulate, they go together. Objects of power don’t belong in the hands of those who don’t understand that power.” I knew that all too well. I’d ended up with a few of those objects of power and they still creeped me out. Crouching in front of the trunk, I opened it and studied the contents inside. There was a strap holding a pair of fingerless gloves in place. I grabbed them and pulled them on. They were black and heavy as hell, thanks to a webbing of silver and iron mesh between sturdy layers of cotton and leather. If I got into a knock-down-drag-out, I’d do more damage with those than with my bare fists. “Even if the vase only responds to her, if it has power, then it needs to be with the person best suited to care for it, not just some thieves who made off with it.”
“What if she’s not meant to have it—maybe that is why it was stolen.”
“Already thought of that.” I rose and looked back at him. “And if I get a bad vibe at any time, I’ll reevaluate. Right now, we focus on finding it. Then we cross the next bridge when we come to it.” I didn’t want to ask, but I better do it now. “That is, assuming you’re still with me on this.”
The scowl on his face almost made me smile. “Like I’m going to let you do it alone.”
Chapter Sixteen
The following morning, I was supposed to meet with Es. She’d emailed me back late yesterday—her reply had consisted of four simple words.
Come see me, Kitasa.
That was it.
Well, I’d wanted short and simple. Be careful what you wish for.
Seems like I’d spent most of yesterday spinning my wheels—technically, I could call it research although I hadn’t learned anything. Justin had gone off to do his witchy shit, although he hadn’t unearthed anything, either. If he had, he would have called me.
Now I had to drive across half of Florida. Wasting my time. I felt like there was a clock ticking away in my ear. I was getting ready to go when Justin called.
“I’ve got a consult.”
“Yeah?” I checked the mirror and had to fight the urge to reach for a pair of scissors. I needed to get my bangs out of my face and most of my hair was just about down to my collar. “I’ve got one, too.”
“Who and where?”
“Es. Her place.” I put the phone on the counter. “Go to speaker.”
His voice filled the bathroom around me as I reached for a comb and combed my hair into sections. “Who are you meeting with?”
“A couple of witch historians. I want more info on Pandora, or whoever she claims to be. They won’t meet me at your place. I won’t meet them at their place. We found some neutral ground a few miles from the Lair, of all places. Meet’s at ten.”
“Historians?”
“Yeah.” I heard him sigh, heard the frustration in his voice as he said, “We got to start somewhere, right? Why the meeting with Es?”
“Something she said once. I think she might know something about the vase. Or I could be off on a wild goose chase.”
“It’s a start, especially seeing as how the bitch didn’t give us any idea where to start.” He paused and then asked, “You think it’s true? That shit she said?”
My gut twisted a little. “I don’t know. I need to go. Don’t want to keep Es waiting. Let me know how your meet goes.”
“Will do.”
The line went dead and I finished braiding my hair. Two short braids framed my face, baring the tattoos. If it wasn’t for those, and the look in my eyes, I probably would have looked about twelve years old. As it was, I might have passed for twenty.
No help for it. I needed a haircut. I needed to get on the road.
I needed to find a better line of work.
* * * *
“You smell of old magic. It’s not pleasant.” The look on Es’s face was one of complete distaste. And unless I’d really lost my touch, I thought I saw something in her eyes that looked like fear. Resigned fear, as though something she had dreaded for a long time was finally coming to pass.
It wasn’t reassuring.
But instead of saying anything about that, I just forced myself to smile at her. “Wow, Es. Yes, it has been a long time. Good to see you, though. Please...don’t hover. It drives me nuts.”
A low chuckle escaped her. “I’m sorry, Kit. That was rude of me.” She rose from her perch on the stoop and came to stand in front of me, her pale, colorless eyes resting on my face. “You look rather well.”
“And you’re a better liar than I thought,” I said sourly. “I look like a horrid, broken waste.”
“That is your grandmother talking.” Es gave me a disapproving look. “You look like a woman who is pulling herself out of hell. Again. You did it once.” She reached up to touch my cheek and I didn’t let myself flinch away. “I hate the fact that you have to do it again. But you will. You will be stronger, wiser, sadder for it. But never doubt you’ll do it.”
As she spoke, she watched me with an intensity that left me uncomfortable. It was like she was trying to tell me something but I didn’t know what.
Licking my lips, I decided to focus on the matter on hand. “I need to know about Pandora, Es. You know, the stinky, old magic smell. Just what does old magic smell like anyway?”
She smiled at me and it was a familiar one, full of humor, wisdom and patience. “That just depends on the magic, dear Kitasa. This smell...it’s old blood, malice and cruelty.”
That didn’t make me feel better. And I hadn’t exactly felt warm and cuddly to begin with. Out of habit, I flexed my hand. Es lowered her gaze and watched.
Something in the back of my mind burned. “Please stay out of my head, Es.”
“Even magical injuries can be healed...if you’ll allow it,” she said gently.
“It’s not an injury.” Nobody understood the bond with my blade. I knew how it felt and it was like somebody had cut an arm off. Once a person lost a limb, no amount of healing would regrow it.
She sighed. “So very stubborn.”
Like she was anybody to talk. But I didn’t point that out to her. Judging by the smile in her eyes, she knew exactly what I was thinking, though. Drove me nuts, the way witches could do that.
“Would you feel better if I told you that you are just as frustrating to me?” Es stroked a hand down my arm and squeezed. “Just as frustrating…just as endearing.”
I swallowed and looked away.
“Now I’ve made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry. I just…well, I wanted you to know. I’ve missed seeing you. Speaking with you.”
I looked back at her, forcing myself to speak past the discomfort. Affection always left me…out of place. I just didn’t know how to handle it. “I missed you, too,” I said, and it was like I had to drag each word out. But I said it. “I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t visit. It’s hard enough even now.”
“I understand.”
Coming from her, I could accept that. It didn’t sound like a trite platitude. Es didn’t use those. If she said she understood, you simply believed that. Gazing into her pale eyes was too hard, though. If she understood how hard it was…I blinked, my eyes burning.
Clearing my throat, I focused on the job.
“Can you help me with this Pandora thing or not?”
“Can I help?” she murmured, echoing my words. She walked away, the white garments she wore fluttering around her. She took the mug of tea she’d left on the stoop and lifted it to her lips. “When it comes to that one, the wisest thing anybody could do is stay away. Very far away.”
Her pale eyes met mine. “But that’s not an option, is it?”
“Doesn’t seem to be.” Turning away, I stared off into the brilliant blue sky. Clouds dotted the horizon and the sun played hide-and-seek, turning the edges of one fat puff to silver. I stared at it until my eyes stared to burn. “My gut tells me that walking away from this o
nly makes it worse.”
“Worse for whom?”
The question was soft, and under the gentle tone of Es’s voice, I heard a world of worry.
Turning, I studied her. To my light-dazzled eyes, she looked strange. Bright lights didn’t affect me the way they would had I been fully human. I didn’t have trouble focusing on her, but light seemed to cling to her. It was an…odd sight. Odd, and unnerving.
Finally, I shrugged. “I can’t answer that. I just don’t know. The only thing I do know is that it doesn’t feel right to have something called Pandora’s Box in somebody else’s hands. Especially unknown hands. It would be like...” I faltered for the words. “Hell, putting my sword in the hands of my enemy.”
“So it’s the lesser of two evils in your mind.” Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she sipped from her mug. “Were I in your shoes, I might agree.”
“I get the feeling you disagree. What do you think I should do with the damn thing?”
She smiled, a faint curve of her lips. “Find the deepest, dark hole in the ocean and cast it down into it. Is that viable?”
The idea had merit. Then I shrugged. “I’d have to find the damn thing first. And I need more info to do that. Do you know anything about it? She…” I swallowed the nasty, coppery taste of fear crowding my throat and forced myself to ask the question. “She told me…” I paused. My throat was dry. Even thinking this was almost impossible. “She told me something that’s almost impossible to believe. I have no way to confirm it.”
“Don’t you?”
“Es.” I spun around, ready to hit something. I didn’t have time for this enigmatic shit. “Look, can you help me or not? I need more than what she told me. I don’t even know enough to know what I should do with the damn thing when I find it. I’m operating blind and I hate it.”
“Yes. I imagine you do.” She turned away and crossed back to the stoop, settling there with her arms wrapped around her knees. “What I know may or may not be of any use. In the end, you need to trust your gut on this.”
“I can’t just go by what she says. And research is pointless. There’s next to nothing about Pandora in the mortal world.”
“Please.” Es closed her eyes. “Stop saying her name.” Then she sighed. “There was never much known outside of those legends…only a handful of scholars, only a select few ever knew more.”
I narrowed my eyes. “A select few?”
She rubbed a finger down the hem of her sleeve. It held silver and green embroidery. Very pretty...upon closer inspection, I realized it was the pattern used in the crest for Green Road, the house Es belonged to. There were four houses in the order of witches. Green Road was the largest, the oldest, the most powerful. “Do you know the written history of Green Road is almost as old as the written history of the aneira?”
“I don’t much care about aneira history,” I said. The aneira might have bred me, raised me, trained me, but they had also tortured me, beaten me, starved me. They hadn’t bothered to share their history with me. Why should they? I was a useless, mongrel half-breed, not fit to even breathe their air, according to my grandmother.
“You should care. It’s more important than you realize.” She stared at me and yet again, I had that odd, uneasy feeling that she was trying to tell me something. “Sometime soon there will be things about them that you need to know. And your resources are…limited.”
I bit back the taste of bile and fear. “My grandmother won’t give up. I know that. I’ll deal with it.” Somehow…
“Oh, she’s not what I was talking about. Not all things related to your people are bad, Kit. After all…” She reached up and touched my hair. “You’re not. But you’re right. She’ll continue to seek you. Prepare for it. However…it’s not the history I was referring to. It’s the age. We are old. Very old. All of us are—aneira, witch, were, vampire. The offshoot races…some of them came later…our scholars think they happened when our kind interbred with mortals and the genes mutated. Some of the offshoots might have happened as a weird sort of evolution when the population was unique…merfolks, for example, are often found in areas where the livelihood is dominated by water. Not just oceans, but rivers, and lakes. Witches interbreeding with humans, say in Ireland and Scotland. And that’s where we often see selkie and the mer. Our scholars think our DNA caused the mutation a millennia ago that gradually led to those changes—an adaption.”
She was getting scientific on me. Wonderful. I shoved a hand through my hair and gave it a hard jerk. “Es...where are you going with this?”
“You have absolutely no patience.” This time, the expression on her face was nothing but pure indulgence. It was the look a mother might have given a child. But it had been a long time since I had been a child, and my memories of my mother were very dim. Echoes of her singing...and I thought that maybe she had loved me.
“We are old, Kit. Very old. Vampires like to talk like they are the oldest of us…even older than mortals.”
My gut knotted in fear and I already knew I wasn’t going to like how this conversation ended. “That’s stupid thinking,” I said. “They feed off others. If humans weren’t here to feed them, how did they come into existence? And how did they make the new ones?”
“Stupid thinking,” she agreed. “At our core, we were all human once.”
I twitched. “The aneira weren’t. Witches weren’t.”
“You think not?” Her head tipped back and she gazed up at the sky as the wind tangled in her hair. “We are the closest to human even now. Genetically, we are just a few short strands away. A manipulation here. A mutation there. Although we are born genetically different, we are more human than any of the others. We even possess more humanity than they do.”
I snorted. “Oh, you’re wrong there. My grandmother has the humanity of a cesspit.”
“Well, there are humans who lack any sort of humanity, aren’t there?” She lowered her head and her gaze met mine. “A vampire bites a human and initiates the blood exchange. Within days, the human either dies or becomes a vampire. Within a few years, the soul begins to die and with it, the humanity. When a human is bitten by a were, the chances of him dying run about seventy-five percent. The few who survive will change. And they are no longer remotely human. We who were never human have no concept of what it is to crave blood. To look at another and see only prey...to have to fight the very instincts within us.”
She was making me nervous. Not just with what she was talking about, but the way she was acting.
She sighed and brushed her hair away, fisting it in her hand to hold it back from her face. “Our history tells us that for centuries, we hid in plain sight. Wise women, wise men...people might have suspected what we were, but they trusted us, let us aid them, and that was what we did. Because that was why we were created.”
“Created?” I had to force the word out.
She fingered the embroidery on her sleeve. “Yes. Just as your kind was created...with a purpose. We would protect mankind, while your kind hunted the monsters she had loosed.”
The monsters…
“Pandora,” I whispered.
It was true.
She slid me a look, mild disapproval in her gaze. I could hardly care at that point.
It was all true, then.
“All the legends about the box…death, sickness…?”
“She did loose death and sickness…vampires are known as the undead, even now. It’s an odd sort of death, and their hungers bring death. The were? How many die when they are infected?”
Death…sickness…
Swiping my damp hands down my pants, I tried to think.
“Think about it,” Es continued. “True death, sickness. They’ve always existed. But she brought about a new kind of death. A new kind of sickness…and with them came destruction. Those were her evils. Not all that rubbish in the legend.”
Blood roared, pounded in my head so hard, I thought I might be sick. My hand itched, and I closed it into a fist. T
here was no comforting whisper, nothing I could do to ease the fear I felt. Except face it and deal with it. My voice was surprisingly steady as I made myself ask, “Is this for real? You all actually know this to be fact?”
“It’s as close to real as any of the old legends.” Es tipped her head back, a small smile on her face.
“She made us.”
“No.” There was a pause, so brief it was almost not even there. She lifted her lashes to stare at me. “She made them. We were made to hunt them down, heal the poison from the blood...preserve the human race. But nature has a way of deciding what will win out. And nature decided she liked having all of us around.”
The array of thoughts running around in my head was dizzying.
Pandora created them…weres, vampires.
And we were created too. My mind screamed out in denial at the very idea.
I slammed my fist against my temple in attempt to slow that wave of thought, but it didn’t work.
“Es, I think you need to start at the beginning.”
“That...would be a very long story.”
Chapter Seventeen
“There are some...or were some, at least, who believed she was Lilith.”
I blinked.
Lilith. Bent over the mug of tea Es had pushed on me, I wondered just how many more surprises she had in store for today. Huddling over the table, I tried to pretend like I was drinking that tea I hated as I processed what she’d just told me.
Processing…and still not taking it in. I could only think one Lilith of real importance.
“Lilith. As in the first wife some people think Adam had before Eve?”
Human theology was a little outside my scope, but I knew the basics. Mostly because there were scores of bad things tied into human theology and sometimes those bad things collided with my world.
My world. I was already doing it...thinking of myself back in this world. Damn it all to hell. I wasn’t ready for this. And it didn’t matter. If I wasn’t ready, I’d better make myself ready.
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