by Ash Krafton
Ripped out of the snare of Eirene's compulsion, I snapped to my feet, looking down at her surprised expression and the cold white light trapped in her eyes. I watched the white flash into Sophia blue but it was too late. I saw. I knew.
Eirene was vampire.
Her surprise rotted into haughty rage and she crouched on the cushion like a beast before the springing attack. "Only now you see the truth. Sophias are not so wise, after all."
"Wise enough." I fought to remain calm. I sucked at remaining calm. "I revoke my welcome. Leave my home."
"Silly child," Dorcas said. "You cannot banish us by invoking a superstition."
Eirene's brows drew cruel lines over her eyes and she smiled with malicious glee. "Didn't Marek teach you any-thing?"
I had a hundred snotty retorts to that question but my wisdom proved its worth. It told me to raise my barriers and run. I bolted into the dining room and charged through to the kitchens. "Bethany! Vampires!"
The kitchen was black and I charged through the darkness. My foot caught on something and I tripped, sprawling face first and hitting something soft with my shoulder and chin. Peering through the darkness lit only by the lights of appliances, I strained to see what I tripped over.
Bethany. Eyes open, mouth slack. I reached for a pulse. Nothing. I reached with my power.
Nothing. Dead. My Sophia sight showed her body was cocooned in a black fog the color of Dorcas' power.
I never felt her go. I never—
A hiss rattled behind me and I clambered to my feet, racing once more, having no idea where I'd end up. This was what I got for never learning to cook. The kitchen and service rooms beyond were completely unknown to me. I ran through hallways and pushed open doors, looking for a way out of the house.
Rounding a corner, I emerged through a door in the foyer. Great. I'd run in an effing circle. Eirene strolled from the dining room, hands clasped in genteel delight. "You are entertaining. I enjoy watching you run through the rooms. How your blood crashes through your veins."
I backed away, pounding heart stuttering my breath. "I have holy water."
"Useless. Now, give me your death while you ride on the waves of terror. You intoxicate me. Give me your death and the sweet taste of Sophia."
A growl sounded behind us. "Give me a break."
She whirled at the sound of Toby's voice as he stepped from the den. "Were!"
"Right here, you pampered pig. You think you could shoot dirty pool with me here? Think again." Watching her, he flicked his hand at me.
I understood at once and edged away, feeling behind me for the wall.
"You will pay for your insult." Eirene seethed with rage, the whites of her eyes ringing the silver gleam of her irises.
"I just quit my job so I don't know when I can pay you."
"Insolence!" She whipped a look at me. "Stop there."
I bolstered my barriers and her compulsion slid past, ineffective. Carefully I continued toward the door. "Toby. She's vampire."
"She's trash." He snorted his derision at her. "That's what she is. She's rude, she's old, and she messed with the wrong people."
"How dare you!" Anger stripped away her humanity, revealing the wizened ridges of vampire. Beauty and culture vanished, leaving only ugliness and a corpse-like appearance: brow ridges shoved out, hair thinned, skin shriveled. "You will regret that."
"I regret it now. Boy, your outsides are uglier than your insides."
She forgot me and turned her full fury on Toby. I hoped he knew what he was doing.
I spun toward the staircase, focused on getting up to my room, behind those wards. Dorcas stood on the steps, still and staring, wearing a broken smile. Only one alternative: through the basement and out through the service entrance. I yanked open the basement door, slamming it shut before taking the steps two at a time. A floor-shuddering thump made me pause on the stairs.
"Toby!" I screamed.
He yelled a single word. "Run!"
I ran.
The automatic lights came on as I entered the gym, and I dodged the equipment, tripping my way to the showers. I ran through the shower room to the far side; be-yond the sink and stalls was the boiler room and its service door. I prayed it would open easily.
The grounds crew used the boiler room for storage and for access. It had to be open. I flipped the light switch and they popped on, illuminating the cool rooms.
To a dead end. The door was no longer there. Only a smooth sheet of concrete that didn't match the rest of the wall.
No. Crap. No!
I pounded my fists on the remains of the exit. Rodrian said he'd made some security enhancements after the Were attack. Oh, God. He'd sealed the door to eliminate unauthorized access.
He had sealed my doom.
As I backpedaled, I heard the upstairs basement door shatter and splinter.
"Sophia," Eirene called. "Let's be civil. Come die for me."
Only one place to go.
I ran to the pool. If worse came to worse, I could always drown.
No place to hide. I circled the pool, wondering if the trees were enough, knowing I was trapped, and circuited back to the door. Reaching up, I pulled the necklace Marek had given me out of my shirt. I gripped the smooth pendant between my fingers and concentrated. Marek couldn't save me, but maybe a higher power could. Blood of Isis, protect this one...
Hope bloomed and exploded in a flash of inspiration. I yanked the necklace, snapping its chain, and focused my Sophia power on it a moment before flinging it across the pool. The stone thunked onto a plastic storage box. I pulled up my barriers, as thick as they'd go, and took a deep breath, hunching into the corner by the control panel.
The door crashed open with the violence of a hurricane, shattering the glass. Eirene stepped through daintily, one deliberate slipper at a time. She never glanced toward the corner where I huddled and sipped at the air, statue-still.
"You are very good, Sophia," Eirene said, her voice as cultured and refined as the day I met her. She didn't sound like she wore her vamp face anymore; maybe she had lips again. "Very powerful. It would have been easier if I hadn't taught you how to use your power but you had to trust me. You give thrilling chase. It will make a powerful death."
She slowly tread deeper into the room, approaching the pool and veering away from me. I remained still, wanting to spring but holding myself back. Not yet. Too close.
"You have nowhere to run," she said. "Only one door, and you won't make it past me. Oh, I shall linger over you. I shall sip at your life and relish the flow of your Sophia into me. I see what it had done to Stolus' eldest son and I suspect it is responsible for the younger son's rise in power as well."
She was on the far side of the pool now, edging closer to the wall and the cabana box against it. Slowly, I unfolded myself and slid up the wall, feeling my knees protest.
Eirene stopped a few feet from the far wall, her back completely toward me. "I will consume you and I will be unstoppable. I will rule and I will conquer and I will not be denied!"
She flung open her arms and the cabana box exploded, the sides ripping away, revealing nothing but vacuum hose coiled within. It slid down into loose piles, spilling shapelessly onto the floor around her feet. Eirene leaned and picked up something from the mess.
My pendant.
She screamed. Voices and voices and voices screamed and clawed against my barriers. I steeled myself against the sensation and slid toward the panel. Just a few more inches.
"You!" She spun and saw me, spitting in rage. "You warded this trinket! Deceiver!"
I sprawled the last of the distance to the control panel and cranked the dial to maximum UV intensity and flicked the switch, flooding the room with a supernova of sunshine. The heat glared down on my neck and I squinted.
"What have you dooo—!" Her voice rose higher and higher, ending in a shriek. Rage erupted, engulfing me and scorching my barriers, corroding them like acid. I pushed all I could into my shields, desperate to ke
ep her hate from destroying me.
The sunlight showed no mercy. She smoked. She blistered. She flaked until her crumbling body disintegrated into a heap of smoldering ash. Marek's necklace lay in the mess, glowing from the extreme heat.
My nose stung from the smell, acrid and cloying. No wonder Buffy preferred a stake, I thought. Burning vamps was stinky work. Covering my nose and mouth with the neckline of my t-shirt, I fanned the air in front of me. "And stay dead."
I heard the door open. Unwilling to take my eyes off the smoldering mess lest it stand up again, I quickly reached out my awareness. There was no DV power.
"Toby," I said. "Are you all—"
Behind me, a tongue clicked in disapproval. "Sophia."
It wasn't Toby's voice. It was many voices, speaking in discordant unison. The noise of it jangled through my head. I jerked around.
Dorcas hovered in the doorway. "Eirene, my Eirene. What has this wicked Sophia done to you?"
She glided toward me and the pile of Eirene. I'd never seen Dorcas move like this, never heard this voice. Oh, eff, another vampire! I can't fight another! I can't throw the switch from here!
Wait. Not vampire. The UV lights were on.
What was she?
I watched her warily as she approached the greasy ashes, which still gave off faint wisps.
"Do you know how long I've had this child? She's been mine since her young mortal days. I've invested centuries. Centuries since she turned to vampire, and rose to new levels of ability." Dorcas glared at me. "I expended vast amounts of power cloaking her nature from you fools. And you turned her into useless dust."
The closer she got, the blacker she felt. All Eirene had ever said was that she was unique. I never questioned it, just accepted it. Was that Eirene's compulsion, making me forget?
There was no more compulsion now. Dorcas didn't hide in her shadow anymore. Now I sensed her. She had a negative aura, like a black hole's event horizon. There was a void around her, through her. It ate life and energy as it passed near.
I backed up. Things that went in black holes tended not to come out again.
"What are you?" I whispered.
"Disgusted, is what I am." She sounded like an aggravated school teacher. "All that work, wasted."
Dorcas seemed to have forgotten the ashes, and now looked very interested in me. Bad stuff. She continued her boneless glide, and I paced back to keep from getting closer to her voidy feeling. Trying not to trip, I felt my way around a pot of pampas grass, putting it between us. As she drew up alongside it, the grass perished. Just drooped and ceased to live.
She hissed a scratchy ahh, as if she'd taken a big drink of water.
"I am of the Unseen. I am of the Balance." The voices rose and fell with the cadence of a litany, the sounds of Dorcas worshiping herself. Her mouth never moved. The words seemed to form themselves in the air around her and in my head.
"I am darkness. I am the Anti-Life. I am an ending. I collect screams of pain. I bring dreams of despair. I am the agony of childbirth. I am the grief of death. I am the pleas of the forsaken. I take where fools are doomed to give and give again. I am the moment between life and death. I am Truth."
"You are evil." Backing up, step by careful step, I didn't dare to leave her out of my sight.
"Evil is a shallow word. It is a coward's word. I am power. I am the love of the Self. I am the love that lasts. I am part of the Balance. There is no good or evil. There are only shades of Truth."
I was running out of room to maneuver. She backed me into the far corner, where there was no door. No escape. "What are you going to do to me?"
"Ah..." Her voices sighed and she reached out a hand toward me. The gesture was tentative, a caress of the air around me. The bloody blackness leaked from her, the same color of her power core. Circling around me, she continued her examination and corralled me. "What will I do with you?"
Desperately, I reached out as hard as I could to see who else was in the house. The strain of the effort ripped a laser beam of migraine through the front of my skull, and it was all for nothing.
I sensed no one. I was on my own. I sank inside, and stared at the thing that had been masquerading as a vampire's servant.
"Nothing," she said mildly. "I shape, I do not avenge. I collect pain, not retribution. I am merely...curious. What might you be?"
Dorcas unfolded, splaying out many arms, like Kali and calamari. With the speed of a striking viper, arms flipped out, wrapped around me, pulled me into her void. The artificial sunlight dimmed like a wicked eclipse, blackness fitting like a hood. I couldn't breathe.
Too fast to wonder if I was a goner.
The room returned. I was on my knees although I didn't remember falling. I didn't seem hurt. Dorcas glided away from me, murmuring to herself in her jangle of voices. "No, no. She won't do. I must find another. In a city this large, it won't be a task."
She bent to regard Eirene's remains once more before glaring at me with a contemptuously bored look. "Such pity. All that, wasted."
Her image began to shimmer like heat waves coming off a distant summer highway, and she faded, as if she'd simply wished herself to be elsewhere. As she disappeared from sight, her voices echoed. "Wasted."
Exhaustion finally overpowered my adrenaline-fueled instincts and I sank onto a chaise under one of the potted palm trees. I didn't feel too much like moving. I sprawled and I boiled in the noon-strength sun and hoped Rodrian would get home before I developed melanoma.
Turned out it wasn't Rodrian that found me.
I heard Toby shouting my name long before the door flew open. He charged in wearing a cut high on his cheek-bone. The blooming bruise on his temple hinted at a blow that would have killed an ordinary person.
By then, I was cooked and ready to get into the pool, ashy film on the water or no. I vaguely worried about the scum clogging up the filter and how much it'd cost to have the water replaced and I waved limply from the chaise. "Hey, bud."
"Sophie! Are you okay? Yuck. What did I just step in?"
Toby stopped and looked at the bottom of his sneaker. He leaned over at the dusty pile, touching his fingers first to the ashes, then to his nose. And sneezed. "Is this her?"
"Yeah."
He rubbed his fingers together before scrubbing his hand on his pant leg. "Wow. You killed her."
Didn't matter that she was a vampire. Didn't matter that she couldn't be saved. I didn't like knowing I had to kill someone to stay alive. I was trying very hard not to dwell on it. "Like a boss," I said. "You okay?"
He scraped his sneaker on the patio bricks. "I'm fine."
"Let me see your head." I pushed up on the chaise and flopped my legs over the side.
He backed up, waving a dismissive hand. "Where's the other broad?"
"Gone, I think. She just—faded." Another thing I was trying very hard to avoid thinking about. That, and the odd sensation in my head that felt like wind in a big, empty room. She'd done something to me. The scariest part about it was that I had no idea what it was and I had no one to help me with it. I had to keep it secret for now. "I have no idea what the hell happened there."
"I'll sweep the house just in case. Stay here in the sun." He turned and trotted away, still wiping his fingers. Guessed vamp dust was on the greasy side. I could only guess what it would do to the washing machine.
When he reached the door, I had an idea. "What time is it?"
"Nine-thirty."
"Hit the real-time switch for me?"
He shrugged and tapped the control. The sunlight wavered and reduced itself to morning glow, the heat rapidly diminishing. My perspiration chilled and I goose bumped. Reaching behind my chaise, I grabbed a towel from the table and huddled under it, trying not to shiver.
Nothing like a brisk winter morning to make you feel alive again.
Toby let me come up after deciding the house was empty. Although he said nothing about Bethany, I knew he'd found her. His eyes looked haunted and hollow. All he said wa
s he made a call from Rodrian's phone, which he'd found in the den.
Rodrian. Shiloh. They still hadn't come home.
I checked all our phones for missed calls or messages. Finding nothing, I went straight to my room and dropped into bed. Euphrates lay on top of my head, doing his best to hide me.
Rousing from a half-nap, I heard a car coming up the drive and glanced at the clock. Three thirty? Already?
Thank God. Rode's back. With the sun safely up at least I wouldn't have to worry about vamps busting down the door. Well, this time, anyway.
"Toby!" I yelled his name but there was no answer. When I'd gone to my room earlier, I'd seen him heading downstairs wearing a very determined look on his face. He had a bottle of holy water in one hand and a roll of paper towels in the other. I imagined he was going to clean up Eirene.
What a mess that bitch left. I clamped a hand over my mouth when my giggle sounded like it was two notes away from hysteria.
I hurried to the foyer just as the car door was slamming outside. First thing I would do was crack him in the forehead with his cell phone. Maybe a red mark would help him to remember to keep it in his pocket. Breathless, I punched the disarm code, unlocked the locks and threw open the door to let Rodrian in. The bright sunlight was startling and I squinted into it.
"Thank God, you're..."
That was as far as I got.
It was Marek.
I pulled back, not out of fear but rather from sheer dumb surprise. Marek was the last person I expected to see on my porch. This was the first time he'd shown up here since I moved in. There wasn't time for me to gather my emotional front or put up my walls. There wasn't a chance for me to protest.
One look, one accidental touch of his power and I knew something was wrong.
I forgot how I'd worked so hard to learn to avoid his touch and instinctively reached out to him. His power wore a black oily-feeling shell as if polluted. I found the tiny cracks in his barrier and pushed through to find the part that was still him.
