by Aya DeAniege
The sudden change of heart was strange. To me, that said that Helen was up to something, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what. The only thing I could come up with was that she planned to destroy the heart, and that might kill Lucrecia.
“You’re not going to try and kill her, are you?” I asked.
We might not have been family still, but after centuries, it was hard to ignore a possible threat. It didn’t matter that I had been her whore. Lucrecia had taken me in and given me the tools I needed to escape and survive. I didn’t want her to die just because of some prophecy and Helen’s attempt to control it.
“No,” Helen said slowly with a shake of her head. “She can turn things into acid and might light on fire if you upset her. That sounds like a bad time. All Bau can do is, like, whip stuff at me or scream a bunch.”
“You’d think she’d be able to light things on fire.”
“Uh, given what little I know about magic, in my expert opinion, she’s not using a lot of powers to reserve said power-slash-magic for the bigger picture.”
I stared at Helen, not understanding.
“Big spells that make big booms take more power than little spells,” she said. When I shook my head, she frowned at me. “Like a squirrel and nuts for winter.”
“Oh damn, and this is her winter.”
“No, this isn’t her winter. That’s the problem. If it were her winter, there’d be explosions and sparks and stuff.”
“True,” I said, reaching to take her hand.
I led her down the road, our hands swinging between us. As we walked, there was an urge to bite her, but I knew I couldn’t, not without risking her protection.
The werewolf blood would last into the next night, but would slowly lose its potency, unless I bit her or she was ripped into more. That same blood slowed bleeding, but the closer to dawn we came, the more her blood would leave the cells and veins.
Hopefully, her side stitched together enough to keep her blood inside her body before the wolf wore off.
“You want to be all Maker,” she said with a little smile.
“Is it that obvious?”
Helen shrugged. “Obvious enough. I was kind of thinking the same thing.”
“We cannot be Maker and Progeny on record. It’s not mortal friendly. Even if I would like to drag you behind one of these buildings and have my way with you.”
“You’re so weird.”
I shrugged. “Control for me has always been sexual. You being available to my advances at all times means to me that I have control over you.”
“Couldn’t be that you’re good at it, or that I enjoy being with you. No, it’s just that you own me.”
“I’ve had a very disturbing life.”
“Balor hurts Troy.”
“Troy tried to slit Balor’s throat while in a mood,” I rumbled in response. “There will come a day when you think you can take me and I will respond more brutally.”
She sighed and looked away. I could tell that she wanted me to take that control over her, and I wondered if she enjoyed it a bit more than she should have. I didn’t voice my concern, however. I was afraid that if I did, she would be defensive and then refuse to submit at all just to prove a point.
“I’m sorry, but we agreed to put Maker and Progeny on hold. You aren’t going to manipulate me into behaving like that.”
We walked in silence for a while, my hand still entwined with hers. I growled under my breath.
“We are not encroaching on the subject because you think mortals want to know.”
“I’m sorry, no sex, no Maker being all growling and dominating, and a boring boss mission? This is so stupid.”
“This isn’t about that.”
“I realize that.”
“It’s about surviving the night. Survive, then have sex. In fact, I might just start on the trip out of the country.”
Her step faltered, but only for a moment, then she fell in beside me again and slipped her hand back into mine.
“Brutal enough?” I asked.
“I… I think modern humans typically link brutal with violence, not threat of—what would that even be? Necrophilia? Or just, I don’t know, date rape?”
I considered, then nodded once. “That is a debate that could take up quite some time.”
“Really, while I was asleep?” she asked. “Is it to fulfil a fantasy of complete submission, or has the act of having sex with a warm body lost its appeal after so long?”
“Thanks for over analysing a playful threat,” I said.
She shrugged.
“I don’t need you telling me how to live my life. If I want to practice vegetable sex, it’s nothing for you to comment on.”
“Yes, daddy.”
“I thought you didn’t want to use that term.”
“I don’t,” she said with a little smile.
She was teasing me, and I didn’t like it. I realize that daddy had a different meaning for her, and probably many mortals, but such terms were interchangeable in my world. Not all Makers were called Maker, and not all Progeny were called Progeny.
To put it simply: I wouldn’t have minded one bit if she called me daddy.
It might have made me go easier on her.
“If you use the term again, it will be the only one you are allowed to use for me, understand?”
“Yes, Maker.”
Her little joy was gone, but the point had to be made. There was a time and a place, even a way, to teasing a Maker. Right then may have been the time and the place, but that was not how one did it. The title was sacrosanct and could not be questioned.
Lucrecia’s house came into view. We walked towards it, pausing to knock on the door but not long enough to wait for an answer. As we walked in, Lucrecia left her kitchen with a mug in her hand.
She looked haggard.
“I think we need a professional,” she said. “Rosalyn is going on about trace magic.”
If Rosalyn isn’t a professional… who is?
I was just as baffled as Wraith was by the comment. The Oracle had access to knowledge and magics which were put out of reach of other witches. From their interactions with other races they learned a great deal more and were more powerful for the link that they shared.
And the Oracle doesn’t know what to do.
Lucrecia must have had a name in mind, however, otherwise she’d not be commenting on seeking help elsewhere. She was a pragmatist, if Rosalyn couldn’t help her and she didn’t know the name of someone better, then she would accept her fate.
“What exactly is in your chest?” I asked.
Lucrecia rubbed her free hand over her chest, then held the mug out to me.
“Do I pry into your life?” she asked, rather than answering my question.
“I’m prying for a reason,” I said before I sniffed and then drank the from the cup.
It wouldn’t have been the first time that she handed me a poisonous drink.
And no, she hadn’t done it to teach me about poison, or to prepare me for the future. It had been to hurt me and punish me for something that had upset her. More than once she had poisoned me for declining her sexual advances.
Lowering the cup, I watched her, watch me.
“You’re weird,” I said, parroting Helen’s favourite saying from the past week.
“I don’t owe you an explanation,” she said as she turned and walked away.
“Oh, you do,” I said, following her as she retreated into her kitchen. “You owe me a big explanation. But tonight isn’t the night for that. Tonight, we’re just trying to stay alive long enough to kill your Maker.”
She turned to me, and the air crackled. Her skin darkened once more, light coming out of her eyes. I swore the very ground called out in joy at her anger, as if eager to leap and obey her every whim.
“And that’s why they’re called Elders,” Rosalyn said pointedly from the kitchen table, a book and the closed cooler before her.
“Hey, witch?
Fuck off,” I snapped.
Rosalyn peered at me, then returned to reading the book with a sigh and a shake of her head. She muttered something under her breath that might have been, “vampire drama queens,” but I couldn’t be certain.
I focused on Lucrecia, who was still fuming mad.
It amuses me that there are fumes coming off of her.
Which was why I had chosen that wording to describe her mood. Lucrecia of before was very calm and controlled, but she had the ability to control everything within her territory, and a family that would leap to do her bidding.
It seemed, since my leaving the family, the others weren’t so eager to back Lucrecia. Her temper, or her lack thereof, had caused them to leave as I did. I had been her hound, without a hound, there was no way to protect the family. If there was no way to protect the family, the family would find someone else.
I thought that made them cowards, but since the announcement of the disbanding of her family, Lucrecia had been a great deal moodier.
“Unless you’re going to do her in yourself, that’s my job for tonight. And I’m told there’s a really good chance that I won’t survive tonight.”
“It’s like… ninety percent now,” Rosalyn said. “And to not die, it’s this whole thing with betrayal of trust and such. Not going to happen, too passive to collect her balls. So, yeah. He’s pretty well dead.”
Except she seemed to be talking to the cooler, not to me or Lucrecia. Her shrug at the end didn’t help my mood any as I glared at her around Lucrecia’s darkened form.
“Witch!” I shouted.
“Bite me, you whore!” she shouted back, then focused pointedly on her book.
“I am not a whore.”
“Your services can be purchased, apparently,” Rosalyn countered loudly. “Hey, Lucrecia, how much did you sell him out for?”
“Trading sex is part of our economy,” Lucrecia snarled.
Except her anger had tempered. It was normal anger, not the unholy raging monstrosity that she had become when I had suggested killing her Maker.
“That makes you all whores. You realize that?” Rosalyn asked.
“At best, you could call me a sex slave,” I countered. “And this is between her and I, not you.”
Rosalyn did some sort of wobbly with her head back and forth, then turned the page of her book and went back to work.
I turned to Lucrecia.
“We have things that need working out, and no, I am not going to let it go. This is not going to sink into the past like so many other things. I shouldn’t have to check a cup you give me, to make certain that you aren’t poisoning me because I turned you down recently.”
“Fine, we can talk about it another time,” Lucrecia said.
“Yes, another night, when it’s not your Maker hunting me down.”
Again, there was a moment of near explosion, but then it submerged once more, and it was just Lucrecia standing before me. Clearly bringing up her past was a trigger for her. I was also clearly enjoying poking her with her own trigger, and if Rosalyn wasn’t in the house, I might have just started shouting it over and over again.
Something in me just wanted to maliciously cause trouble for those who had hurt me in the past, and I was more than willing to embrace that part of my being.
“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Rosalyn, is the heart beating?”
“Screw you and your stupid drama play thing. You know the answer to that.”
I sucked in a loud breath through my nose, focused on Lucrecia.
“The way I hear it, Witchblood isn’t subject to the commands of the Great Maker. That means you can do something about this. You can end it. One more death, right, Rosalyn?”
“Hmm?” Rosalyn looked up. “Did you use your head thing on her?”
“Yes.”
“Last I heard, that should mean she’s dead. If she’s still alive, that’s because you missed, not because of some kind of magic spell.”
“I didn’t miss. I hit her with everything I’ve got, and she still didn’t turn to goo.”
“Oh, right, the goo,” Rosalyn said. “We probably should have hung around and hit her again.”
“It’s like a crossbow, not a pistol.”
“That’s useful, so you missed. It happens to the best of us,” Rosalyn said. “I’ll see if I can find the murder of the month, since that’s the last option we’ve got.”
She disappeared without standing up.
Rosalyn could say what she liked. I believed that she was better at magic use than she claimed to be. Teleporting while sitting didn’t seem like something that just any witch could pull off.
I sighed out and looked at Lucrecia again.
“Can’t you get your head out of that cloud long enough to help us out?”
“No, I can’t. You might be young and bright and stupid with optimism, but I know who and what she is. When she was sane, she was dangerous. She was the sun of my world, the only one I ever loved, the only one I ever let into my heart.
“And then she went mad. Talking about the afterworld, how we were all just extensions of the afterworld, doing the bidding of a dark god in our world. Feeding his hunger, delivering souls unto him. Like life was created by a woman, so death should be created by men, not women. She wanted to kill us all, leaving only the men.
“Because of her, the female was delegated the place of broodmare because they exist only to make more of themselves, and the men so that the men can kill them and continue the cycle.
“You can’t reason with her. You can’t kill her. She’s too messed up in the head to realize that she’s supposed to be dead, she just keeps going.
“We didn’t lose because they didn’t believe. We lost because she just wouldn’t die. So what makes you think that you can kill her? That I could do it, or even that Missy the witch could do it? None of us can kill her. She’s a god!”
“She’d be no more a god than Lu was. And before the sun rises today? She’s going to be one of two dead immortals. Even if it’s my body laying beside hers.”
“You can’t beat her.”
“Suck it up,” I said. “It’s been thousands of years. My Maker is dead.”
“At the grace of the Great Maker,” Lucrecia hissed out. “She’s not here, now is she? Even she failed at ending the god. She is less powerful, was less powerful. No doubt dead now.”
“Not dead, just tied up and mauled,” I said with a shake of my head. “And if you won’t help us, so be it. I’ll drain Helen and recharge my own damned self.”
My phone went off. Frowning, I reached down and pulled it out.
“Hello?”
A child’s giggle. Then several voices all rising up in song. It was a song that had come around sometime around the Black Death. They sang their little hearts out, then giggled.
“I’m coming for you, boy.”
A shudder ran down my back. I stared at my phone as it went dead. Not dead as in, the call ended, but full on dead. As I stared at the screen, it cracked, causing me to toss the phone away from me.
I had seen a video once of those things exploding.
Lucrecia must have seen the same thing, because she snatched a pot out of the sink and slammed it down over the phone, then sat on it for good measure.
“Still think you stand a chance?” she snapped.
She jumped just a little. Smoke trailed out from under the pot, and she made an annoyed face. It was her pointed, ‘stupid male still talking’ face.
“Helen,” I called. “We need to up our game.”
I glared at Lucrecia. Then she glared at me. The two of us got into a pouting match, basically. It was about the third expression that I realized I was falling into old habits and that Helen hadn’t interrupted and made fun of either of us.
So what? Sometimes vampires were drama queens. Shut up about it
I left the kitchen and looked around the living room. Helen wasn’t there. I headed to the front door
and stopped.
It was closed, of course. The chill that ran through me was difficult to explain. Looking around the little entrance way, I struggled to figure out what else was missing.
“Lucrecia?” I asked as I turned towards her.
“The mace?” she asked with a motion to the little table to one side of the door.
Where I had left the mace after bringing it into the house. I looked at my hands. Burned still, despite the hours and the blood in between my picking it up. I had held it for a few minutes at most.
“Helen?” I called, opening the front door.
I looked up the street, down the street, but she wasn’t within view. She was just gone.
In that day and age, without an IT guy to track her phone, it was just that easy to disappear.
I had no idea where she might be headed. I had an idea of who she would be finding, but there was only one way to get her attention, and I wasn’t ready for that.
“What the hell do we do?”
Wraith cackled at the back of my mind.
Two choices.
“Which are?”
Let me loose.
“You can’t use my power.”
And you can’t attempt another murder when we’re halves of a whole.
“You’re saying the other option is to fix ourselves somehow?”
Let me in.
“Quin, are you all right?” Lucrecia asked.
I’m not certain which of us responded. “I’ll be fine. Stay here. I’m going to find her.”
“And then?”
I growled instead of responding and strolled out of the house, headed back towards the heart of the downtown. I’d give her one hour. If I didn’t find her by then, I was going to call down the devil herself and do whatever was necessary to end this.
Even if it killed me.
I was almost certain that stealing the mace and leaving Lucrecia’s without permission would result in discipline. I use the word discipline because I couldn’t even come up with what Quin might do to me once he caught up. If I were very lucky, the kind of lucky that meant winning the lottery six times in a row, I’d be dead for good before he found me.
If my luck was anything like it had been for the previous two decades, he’d find me and it’d hurt and never stop hurting.
