Anaphylaxis

by SA Magnusson

  Magic burst from Barden. The spell slipped out of my barrier and slammed into the vampire.

  The shock of it caught the vampire off guard and he snarled, flashing his fangs.

  “Did you think that I would come unprepared?” Barden took a step forward, forcing me to shift the barrier with him. I hoped that in doing so, it didn’t detract from his ability to maintain his connection to magic. “And I know what you’ve been doing. Trust me when I tell you that I will rescue any of my kind. All dark magic users are under my protection.”

  “And mine,” I said.

  Barden glanced over his shoulder at me. The corners of his eyes tightened.

  “And who might you be?” the vampire said.

  “My name is Kate Michaels.”

  “Michaels? Could it be that we have a representative from the mage council?”

  “Could it be?” Barden asked, smiling.

  “Why are you here?” All pretenses faded from the vampire’s voice and he glared at Barden. The jolt of power that had slammed into him didn’t seem to have hurt the vampire, but it certainly had caught him off guard, enough so that he was unsettled by what had happened.

  “We are here because there has been an attack on the Veil,” Barden said.

  “Another one?”

  “This one is different.”

  “All of them have been different,” Roland said. “And it’s interesting to me that they would happen with such frequency. Perhaps others don’t feel the same, but I find the intensity of the attacks to be unsettling. First of all, we did lose one of my family.”

  I stared at Roland, looking for any sort of similarity between him and the vampire that had been sacrificed as part of Lexy’s plan to summon the demon king, but there wasn’t anything obvious. Maybe all vampires had a shared appearance, but other than the pale and waxy complexion and the dark hair, there didn’t appear to be any real similarity.

  “I was there,” I said.

  “You were? Then perhaps you can explain how my beloved brother was murdered?”

  “I wasn’t there when he was killed. The magic user who had taken him had murdered him long before I arrived.” I was careful not to say dark mage, mostly because I didn’t know if Lexi was a dark mage. She had risen high within the mage council, which suggested to me that she was imbued with Seelie magic rather than the Unseelie that came from the dark mages.

  “That’s quite interesting, and, I might add, convenient.”

  “You can find it convenient or not, but it’s the truth.”

  “And what did you do to get vengeance for my brother?” Roland asked.

  “It wasn’t my place to get vengeance for your brother. I stopped the demon king they were trying to summon across the Veil.”

  Roland took a step forward and slammed into my barrier. He frowned, but any surprise that I thought he might have faded quickly. He reached one hand out and a sharpened nail on his index finger scratched at the barrier. Red and blue sparks flew where he touched, and a hint of a smile began to spread on his face.

  “Not a representative of the council, are you?”

  “And what does that mean?” I asked.

  Roland straightened his back and sniffed.

  I understood the workings of my barrier well enough now to know that I could influence what could pass across it. I could make it so that sound did not, and I could solidify it enough that magic—and other things such as bullets—wouldn’t cross. I had used my barrier to protect myself from sword attacks, and had used it to defend myself from a Great One.

  At first, I thought that Roland attempted to smell us within the barrier, but as I watched, I realized that wasn’t the case. He was smelling the barrier.

  My magic.

  “Interesting. You would have made quite the catch.”

  “I’m not interested,” I said.

  “Oh. I think that you might have been. You see, we can be quite persuasive.”

  Gross.

  I’d gotten accustomed to strange come-ons within the ER. There were far too many men—especially older ones—who thought it was perfectly fine to hit on young women, regardless of whether they were part of the medical teams taking care of them. It didn’t matter to that kind of man whether it was a nurse or a doctor. All they saw were breasts and asses, apparently far too much temptation.

  Since gaining a foothold in the magical world, I’d found similar come-ons, though none were nearly as creepy as what I had just now experienced.

  “Take another step forward and I will ensure that it’s your last.”

  “Do you think you’re so powerful that you could end me? An Elder of the Vangalor family?”

  “I’d be careful, Roland. She had little difficulty with Perrander.”

  Roland turned his attention back to me. His mouth pressed into a tight line. “You were the one who removed the Siren family?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t about to argue with Barden that it was easy, as it was most decidedly not. It seemed that with the Vangalor family—and this vampire in particular—showing strength had merit, and regardless of what else, I thought that we would benefit from portraying ourselves as vampire destroyers. We wanted information, but it seemed the vampires responded best to threats.

  From what I had seen, many within the magical world responded best to threats. The shifters were much the same, as were members of the council. Even the Dark Council had been similar, though surprisingly, they had a greater normalcy than almost any other magical user.

  What did that say about me that I felt that way?

  “Perhaps I should thank you,” Roland said.

  “Thank us or not, we need answers,” Barden said.

  Roland studied us for a moment. When he nodded, it seemed as if more of the tension I’d seen from Barden faded. “I will offer you the protections of my home. You will not be harmed within my home or on my grounds.”

  “Does your protection extend to all of us?” Barden asked.

  “All who are with you are granted this protection.”

  Barden glanced back at me. “It’s okay, Dr. Michaels.”

  “Just like that?”

  “His word is a bond. We won’t be harmed.” He turned his attention back to Roland. “I hadn’t expected him to be quite so open with his promise, but I’ll admit that I’m pleased that he was willing to see reason.”

  “I’m willing to see reason because you brought with you someone that I have been most eager to meet.”

  With that, Roland Vangalor turned toward the door and, with the wave of his hand, it opened, almost as if he had magic, but that couldn’t be. Vampires didn’t have magic of their own, did they?

  I glanced over at Barden and Darvish. Neither of them appeared nearly as nervous as I felt. Either they were hiding it well or they simply didn’t feel it.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “As sure as I can be,” Barden said. “Chasing the answers that we do, I think this is necessary.” He took a step forward and then hesitated, glancing back at Roland. “Perhaps you don’t fully let go of your barrier.”

  I released part of the connection but not all of it. Doing so left me feeling uncomfortable, and as I stepped into the home of the most powerful vampire family in the Minneapolis area, that discomfort only increased exponentially.

  13

  The home was amazing. It had an Old World style, and many of the decorations appeared to be antiques, the kind that would be more suited for homes out East, multimillion-dollar mansions that celebrities would live in. Jen would have loved to have seen it, and I wondered what she might say when I told her that I had come to a vampire’s mansion.

  Paintings along the wall looked incredibly expensive. I knew next to nothing about art, but the detail and the colors left me thinking that they were extremely valuable. It made me think of when I had gone to the Minneapolis Institute of Art when I was in school, though I don’t recall having the same sense of dread as I walked along halls there.

  A slender
man sat on a velvet bench, staring across at the wall. His eyes had a glazed appearance to them and as we passed, I noticed a few faded markings on his hands.

  Familiars.

  I looked over at Barden. He recognized the same thing as I did. “The markings were gone,” I whispered.

  “They might be gone, but the intent is still there.”

  “We will rescue as many of your people as we can.”

  “Oh, I know that we will,” he said.

  We might have been offered safety, but I had a sense that Barden wasn’t necessarily interested in maintaining that. How many vampires were in this compound? We had barely survived with the Siren family, and if the Vangalor family was as powerful as everyone seemed to say, I doubted very much that we would be able to withstand an attack from them.

  The home was much nicer than that of the Siren family. That had been very sparsely decorated, and though it didn’t appear so from the outside, it was almost a modern styling.

  There was nothing modern about this.

  “Everything here has the look of wealth,” I whispered.

  “It should. The Vangalor family is incredibly old. Centuries old. They have accumulated much over the years, and they have secured more.”

  “Secured?”

  Barden’s gaze drifted back to the man sitting on the velvet bench. “Familiars. Men and women of power and wealth who would do anything to become one of them.”

  “If they have power and wealth, why would they want to become one of them?”

  “How old do you think Roland Vangalor is?” Barden asked.

  “I don’t know. He looks to be in his forties, so considering the way mages age, I suspect that puts him well into his eighties.”

  It seems strange to talk like that, but it was a fact of magic users that age was different. It was part of the reason that Jen didn’t believe that my grandparents were actually my grandparents. Though they were considerably older than me, they looked to be barely in their forties. Barden shared a similar look, and I suspect he was closer to his seventies.

  “From what I’ve been able to ascertain, Roland Vangalor is nearly five hundred years old,” he said.

  I stopped short, staring at the back of the vampire. He continued along the hall and Darvish gave me a small push, encouraging me to go forward.

  I glanced over at Barden. “Five hundred years old?” I knew vampires were old, and I knew they had something of an immortality, though they weren’t quite as immortal as the movies would make them out to be. Or so I thought.

  “And he’s not the oldest of their kind. He sits at the head of the family in Minneapolis, but the Vangalor family extends throughout the United States. There are other families outside of the US that are even older. There is one vampire in Europe who is well over a thousand years old. As you can imagine, living that long has benefits, not the least of which being that you have time to accrue wealth. It is why all powerful vampire families are incredibly wealthy.”

  I didn’t even know what to say. The idea of someone being that old—truly that old—boggled my mind. Bodies shouldn’t survive that long. We were meant to break down over time. Cells no longer regenerated the way they were supposed to and eventually everything began to change. Modern medicine did its part to try to slow those changes, and considering the average lifespan had continued to increase over time, it had done its part.

  And all we had needed was to allow vampires to bite us and we all could have lived much longer.

  “It’s tempting, isn’t it?” Barden whispered.

  “To live that long?”

  “To have seen what he would have seen.”

  They reached the door at the end of the hall, and I realized that despite their differences, and despite the antagonistic relationship between the dark mages and the vampires, Barden carried a hint of respect for the vampires, at least those who were as old as Roland Vangalor.

  The vampire opened the door and we entered a comfortable study. A massive oak desk occupied one end of the room. A computer looked out of place on the lacquered surface. Rows of bookshelves surrounded us, shelves packed with books. Two Victorian-style chairs were angled across from the desk.

  Roland made his way around the desk and took a seat. He motioned for us to follow.

  I let Barden take a seat first, and then waved for Darvish to sit. I would prefer to stand, mostly because there wasn’t the same temptation to relax. And I was accustomed to standing.

  “I can have a chair brought in,” Roland said.

  “I prefer to stand,” I said.

  “A lady should not remain standing.”

  “Is that right? You don’t think that I can stay on my feet? Or would my womanly sensibilities be somehow offended by standing while you sat?”

  Roland studied me. Now that I had some sense of his age, I wanted to get a sense of how he would react to me. Barden smiled. I knew how he would react to me. Regardless of his age, he shared a modern sensibility.

  “Is your name actually Kate Michaels?” Roland asked. He set his hands on the desk, clasping his fingers together. He leaned slightly forward, the posture nearly perfect. It left me feeling a little bit embarrassed about the slight stoop to my shoulders.

  “It is. Why? Do you intend to stalk me?”

  “I intend to find out all that I can about you. Much as I imagine you have already done with me.”

  I tilted my head in a nod, wishing that I had taken the time to learn all that I could about Roland. We had hurried off too quickly and I hadn’t had the same opportunity that I would have preferred. I didn’t like being unprepared, certainly not like this, and not when it came to someone like this. I had always been the kind to study. It was why I had done so well in medical school, along with undergraduate school before that.

  “And if your name is Kate Michaels, I presume that you are related to Cynthia and Veran Michaels?”

  “I wouldn’t call her Cynthia,” I said.

  “She doesn’t care for her given name?”

  “Not her full name. It’s sort of like me with Katherine. I’m not so much of a fan.”

  “I find Katherine to be a lovely name.”

  I decided not to take the bait and pushed him on commenting on his age. “We don’t need to spend time on these formalities.”

  “You aren’t in any danger. I’ve already offered my protection, and I do not intend to violate it. Regardless of what you have done to my cousins, I will offer you—What is the saying?—an olive branch.”

  I glanced over at Barden. He sat stiff within the chair, and the way he leaned suggested that he wasn’t completely comfortable. He didn’t trust Roland, though he might respect him.

  “You offered your protection, but are there situations when you may violate that?”

  “If you decide to attack me in my home, then of course I am honor bound to respond in kind.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But I imagine your interpretation of an attack leaves quite a bit of flexibility.”

  “I have no intention of exercising my right to attack. As I’ve said, I—”

  “I know. You have offered your protection. And Barden is willing to accept that, so I am, too. But whatever protections you think you have within your home, protections that you think would keep me—and my friends—from their magic, won’t work on me.”

  “So it seems. And yet, as you likely have ascertained, we have superior numbers. You will find that I am difficult to kill. You may have had an easy time with my cousin, but a Vangalor is a much different creature.” He smiled again, flashing his fangs.

  For a moment, I had an image of those fangs sinking into my neck. With it came a longing, a desire for those fangs to touch across the surface of my skin, to pierce me, to draw forth my blood, and I would offer it to him willingly…

  I pushed away that thought.

  It took an incredible force of will. Barden had warned me that the Siren family had a way of persuasion, but the Vangalor persuasion was different, seduct
ive, and I suddenly realized that he was much more powerful than I had given him credit for.

  I took a moment and wrapped my barrier around me. I didn’t know what sort of magic he might have used on me, but I wasn’t about to succumb to it. I would withstand whatever influence he thought he might exert upon us.

  Roland smiled, locking eyes with mine. He knew exactly what I had done.

  Within that gaze, I had a sense that he viewed me as a challenge, something that he needed to conquer.

  I suppressed a shiver.

  There was a very predatory gleam in his eyes, one that I hadn’t even seen within the shifters’ eyes. This vampire was dangerous.

  And I absolutely couldn’t let Jen be around him.

  “I think it’s time you tell me why you’re really here.”

  “We need access to your knowledge of runes,” I said. There was no use in delaying. We had come for a specific purpose, and the sooner we managed to learn what we’d come for, the sooner would be able to leave and I would no longer have to struggle with resisting Roland’s personal brand of persuasion.

  “What makes you think that we have any particular knowledge of runes?”

  “For beginners, the familiar that was sitting out in the hallway,” I said. “And our experience with what we saw from the Siren family. We need to understand what you know about the runes so that we can stop a greater threat.”

  He chuckled. “What you ask can’t be given.”

  “Even if it means ensuring the safety of the Veil?” Barden asked.

  “As you have mentioned before, the Veil is often in danger, especially of late. If we hand over knowledge that has given us a benefit within the treaty over the years, then we would be placed in a position of weakness. You can understand that I cannot simply allow my family to be placed in such a position, not when you have already demonstrated your absolute willingness to destroy an entire family.”