House Of Vampires 2 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy)

by Samantha Snow

  I snorted. "Let me get this straight. You think because you like a romance novelist, or a person who enjoys romance in general, that you must want to be in a romantic relationship? For someone claiming to be logical, that's a pretty weird point of view."

  "Why?" she demanded.

  "I like murder mysteries, but I don't want to go kill someone and lead police officers on a wild goose chase. I play lots of video games, but I don't want to live all of those stories. Some of them, sure, but not all of them. You don't have to always want a romantic partner. It's fine if you don't."

  "They say that sex and love are some of the core desires of being human." This time, she did look at me. Her eyes were filled with an emotion I could not understand.

  Jesus, I was not the best person to be having this conversation with. I'd never doubted my identity, sexual or otherwise. Sure, I'd been out on a date with another girl, but at the end of the day, I considered myself to be straight, mostly. Here was this girl who I hadn't even known for a full seventy-two hours, who had spent her time with a group that had all the earmarks of a magical cult, complete with creepy leader, and she was telling me that she was, at the very least, confused about herself. Crap. I did not know how to deal with this.

  On top of that, I was feeling sorry for Jenny. Jenny, who knew who and what she was but lived in a place where there were not a whole lot of options to express herself. I had officially found myself in a rock meets hard place situation. I could suggest to Reikah that she ought to explore, try things, whatever. Maybe arrange things so that she ended up going out with Jenny...but that seemed like a crappy thing to do.

  No, I decided, I hadn't. I loved Jenny, but that didn't mean I had to push Reikah to do absolutely anything that she wasn't comfortable with.

  "Yeah, and a hundred years ago,” I continued, “ we didn't think that women could enjoy sex. Thirty years ago, we thought anyone who wasn't totally and completely straight was suffering from a mental illness. I mean, what we know about humanity changes from one span of years to the next. You are a human being; you need to know what that means to you."

  She gave me a long look. "Perhaps you aren't as stupid as I thought you were."

  "Cool. I'll take that as a compliment. Now, teach me your super strict magical system before I take back all the nice things I might say about you."

  "How kind of you. That circle is far less imperfect."

  "See, now you are getting better at this complimenting thing."

  She didn't quite smile, but it was close.

  ~~

  My first attempt at wizardry can only be described as a failure of nearly epic proportions. I attempted, via careful lines and confusing symbols, to summon the element of air. I am proud to say that I succeeded. A very small tornado had a short lifespan inside of my grandmother's living room. It was terrifying and neat all at the same time. When Reikah used her fancy skills to rip up my paper and thus banish the element, she decided that I needed more practice, but that that night wasn’t the best time.

  I was tired, and decided that she was absolutely right.

  Reikah took up residence on my couch, and if I was being completely honest, I was kind of happy to have her there. I didn't know her well, but I trusted her just enough to think that if something terrible happened when I was sleeping, she'd do something about it.

  I made my way back to my grandmother's bedroom. No, I thought, it was my bedroom. I was sleeping here now. The bed couldn't belong to a dead woman, no matter how strong her presence might have been in life, and I was one hundred percent certain that she had been a powerful person in life.

  When I walked in, there was Maahes, curled up on one of the pillows like a feline prince. The pillow did not notice the weight; there was no divot beneath his body, but I was happy that he was there too. I grabbed a change of pajamas and went to take a shower, wondering if it was a good thing or a bad thing to spend an entire day wearing pajamas...I was going to go with good. Pajamas were awesome.

  I picked up my phone, played a few games, and then switched to a novel. When I thought about getting up and investigating my grandmother's closet, I realized I was putting off going to sleep. It didn't take a therapist to understand why. Even my brain, lacking in college education, knew that I just didn't want another crazy dream. I'd had pretty much enough of those.

  I dragged my hand down my face and plopped back against my pillow. Maahes stretched his feet out until the tips of one paw brushed my cheek. It made me smile, short-lived as it was. I'd never had a cat; I'd never had a pet at all. My father had moved me around too much. He said it would be too difficult with his job.

  With the kind of courage that you can only get at one-thirty in the morning, I picked up my phone. I very nearly called my father, but the hour was not quite late enough for that kind of courage. Instead, I sent a text.

  "How much of this prophecy stuff do you believe? Is my mother crazy? Why did we travel all over the country?"

  There, I thought, hitting send, that was good enough. Right. Sure.

  I plopped the phone down, not really expecting to get an answer this late. Instead, I crawled out of bed and started looking around my grandmother's bedroom. No, I had to tell myself for the umpteenth time, my bedroom. Everything here was mine. The books on magic, the crystals cluttering the dishes, the simple wooden furniture. They were mine. They just didn't feel like it.

  I had never owned all that much before. Like I said, I moved around a lot. For most of my life, a couple of boxes of books, games, and comics were all that I had really treasured. I'd never had a lot of clothes. I couldn't say that we were poor; we weren't, but we never had all that much either.

  I opened the top dresser drawer. Mostly undergarments. I probably wasn't going to keep those. It was a little weird to keep my grandmother's bras. The second drawer was t-shirts, comfortable-looking and well taken care of. My grandmother and I shared a love of comfortable clothing in common, I discovered as I found that she had more sweatpants than she had jeans or slacks. She did, however, own a lot of bohemian clothes. I might go through those and keep some of them. I didn't want to get rid of her completely.

  I went to the closet and rooted around in there for a while. There were shoes, not in my size, and some nicer dresses. Cute ones, but nothing that I'd wear. Behind all of that, in what looked like an old-fashioned hat box, I found a set of journals.

  Jackpot, I thought as I pulled them into my lap. They were the epitome of variety; some of the journals were fancy, leather-bound and hand-stitched, and some were cheap dollar store composition books, but all of them were filled from front to back with the familiar scrawl of my grandmother's handwriting.

  They started when she was sixteen. I had to be careful turning the brittle and yellowed pages of those earliest days, but as I read, I realized that, in a weird and distant way, I was meeting my grandmother.

  July 15th, 1961

  Today is my birthday, and my Great Aunt Sandra decided that a journal was a good enough gift for a young witch. I suppose it is. It is not the Buick that I had hoped for, but then again, it was probably foolish of me to ask for a car when daddy is still sending money back from the mines. I don't much like him working like he does. Aren't momma and I witches? Shouldn't we be able to provide? According to momma, we can't use our skills that way, but I don't know why not. Plenty of people would pay to learn the future. Why can't I tell them for money what I learn for free?

  Daddy sent me a card with enough money to buy cloth for a dress. He asked that I wear it when he comes back at the end of summer. I'll ask Marquessa to go with me.

  Maybe I'll wear it when Jake Quinn asks me out on that date he's trying to talk himself into. He's a good boy, and I've already seen that we will get married. He won’t be a coal miner. I've seen that much. It'll be good enough for me.

  July 27th, 1961

  I bought a pink fabric. Marquessa says it'll look great on me. She ought to know. She looks great in everything. Then again, her sister is a fa
bric witch; she can make anything look good. I'd ask her to help me make my dress, but I don't think she likes me. That's okay. Seers make people uncomfortable. They think we know everything.

  Momma will help me sew the dress. I wonder what is taking Jake so long to get around to asking me out. See, prophets don't know everything.

  August 7th, 1961

  Apparently, Jake has been distracted my Missy Mortin. What kind of name is Missy, anyway? A foolish one, that's what. It's alright. I won’t hold it against Jake. He's just a boy, after all, and the idea of being in love with a witch makes him nervous. Not that he believes in witches.

  Then again, why should I wait? Just because I know he'll be the man I marry; does that mean I shouldn't have a beau or two in the meantime? Just because I know it won’t last, does that mean I shouldn't try at all?

  August 19th, 1961

  Daddy will be home before school starts up again. I saw it last night in my dreams. How do I tell momma it's because he lost his job, not because he got the time to come back and see us? Maybe I shouldn't tell her at all. I can pretend like I don't know. It'll be okay. It has to be okay.

  August 31st, 1961

  Daddy is home. Momma is mad at me that I didn't warn her about the job loss. She said she could have prepared. Prepared for what? Prepared how? I didn't see this years ago; I saw it two weeks ago. She didn't care to hear it. She said my gift was special. That I ought to be proud of what I could see, good or bad.

  What would she know?

  I had never thought about what it would be like to be a Seer. I closed the old journal and let it fall into my lap. Almost all of those early entries talked about how her seeing visions complicated things. If she knew who she was going to marry, should she bother with other romances in the meantime? If she had seen her father's layoff, should she tell her mother?

  I found myself wondering if it was easier to be the prophecy teller or the one who the prophecy was about.

  With that thought swimming in my head, I laid back on the floor. I stared up at the ceiling and placed a hand just beneath my belly button. My prophecy wasn't just about me though, was it? It was about me and the child I was going to have. What if that kid had no desire to bring magic into the word? Not everyone was like me, desperate to see all the fantastic things that I had daydreamed about. Stack on top of that, the fact that I had no idea how the child was supposed to do this great task...talk about pressure.

  A striped feline head peeped out over the edge of the bed. It opened its mouth and gave a soft meow. It didn't sound real. It was a meow, but it had a strange echo in it, as if I were listening to the sound in a bathroom.

  I remembered the cat-like meow in my dream and wondered if there was some kind of connection.

  Then, I thought about the eyes in the dream. At first, I’d thought they were Wei's, dark and luminous. But maybe they weren't. Just because I saw the eyes didn't mean that they were Wei's. They could have been anyone's, considering the moment. Maybe I just wanted them to be his.

  This would be a whole lot easier, I thought, if a prophecy wasn't involved. I could just fall in love with whoever and go off to live my life like everyone else did. But no, here I was at two in the morning wondering about my late grandmother, the child I wasn't even close to having, and everyone involved.

  The light from my phone caught my attention. I slid back into the bed, expecting one of the vampires to have sent me a message about coming home. Instead, it was from my father. I hesitated before opening it. I had asked some really heavy questions, and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted the answers anymore.

  Screw it, I thought, and swept my thumb across the screen to get the text.

  "I'm sorry."

  That's it. That's all. I frowned down at the phone face.

  My dad didn't apologize all that often. He said that apologies meant you thought you did something wrong and he rarely did. Yeah, that was my dad alright, the son of a witch. The only time he ever really said he was sorry was when we had to move from one place to another, just as I was beginning to settle down. Ugh.

  "Yeah," I said, a wealth of bitterness exploding from my lips. "I'll just bet you are."

  I tossed down the phone and shook my head. The screen lit up again. Angry curiosity had me looking at it. Unknown sender. The text was similar to the other one I had received. Just a bunch of weird symbols. In a fit of disgust, I tossed the phone.

  "Screw you, unknown sender; I've got too much going on to help you out."

  I crawled back into bed, pulled my blankets up to my chin, and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Winter in Appalachia was no joke. The autumn had been warm enough, light enough. It had been gentle breezes and cool, clear nights. Winter was hard. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees as the middle of December approached. I had spent the past few weeks cleaning up my house, reading my grandmother's journals, learning magic, and, after some deliberation, letting the vampires visit from time to time.

  I even started working with Jenny at the shop. While I had money on the way, my miniscule savings had dwindled now that I wasn't living with the vampires. There was a part of me that missed the lap of luxury that was the mansion with its friendly butler and handsome men, but I liked the ritual of work, the mindless monotony of scanning objects and greeting customers. I had always been good at it, and it felt good to be something that I was good at.

  I don't know why I was surprised when Zane came to see me at work, but I was.

  I had been doing the late-night stocking, when the smattering of customers that came in were exhausted truck drivers or construction guys who either had to work too late or too early and were desperate for the coffee that we kept perpetually prepared. My hands were wrapped around a couple of aspirin bottles when I felt his approach.

  "Hey, Zane," I said, not bothering to turn around. "What's up?"

  "How did you know it was me?" he asked in that voice like liquid gold.

  I shrugged, continuing to stock pain medications. "Because you feel different. All of you guys do."

  I could almost feel him smile. I turned around and blinked. "What are you so dressed up for?"

  Normally, Zane stuck to t-shirts and jeans. Of all the Sons of Vlad, Zane tended to look the most normal. His long, lanky body wasn't wearing a t-shirt and jeans now. Okay, the pants were jeans, but they were so dark and crisp I had to assume that they were new.

  His button-down green shirt was done in plaid. He wore one of the bolo ties around his neck, like cowboys used to wear. Tucked under his arm was a picnic basket.

  "Where's the horse?"

  He smiled slowly. "It's been a long time since I had horses."

  I blinked. "You were a cowboy?"

  I thought Zane had been the oldest of them? I vaguely remembered someone telling me that. Cowboys were new in the grand scheme of the world. There was no way he could be a cowboy and the oldest of Vlad's offspring.

  "No, but I roamed with them for a time."

  "How?" I asked.

  "Have dinner with me, and I'll tell you."

  I hadn't gone on a date with any of the vampires since I’d moved out. I had this paranoid idea that they, as a group, had decided to give me the space that I had demanded. It was smart of them. I really didn't feel like dating.

  But it seemed Zane was ready.

  "What did you bring?"

  I plopped the last medication bottle into place and ran my hands over the short work apron.

  "Soup and sandwiches."

  I raised my brow. I could never say no to a good sandwich. Add in soup, and I was done for. I took a tentative sniff. "Tomato?" I asked.

  His grin was amused and cheerful. "And grilled ham and swiss."

  I nearly melted into my shoes. After moving out, I had pretty much been living off a diet of prepackaged and take out. It wasn't that I couldn't cook; I wasn't half bad in that department. It was just easier to pick something up from the shop on my way out the door, and I'd been craving eas
y things recently.

  "Sold. Come on, we can eat in the back."

  He followed me, and after a little arranging, we turned the employee table into an impromptu dating spot.

  "I have to admit I thought you'd put up more of a fight," he said as he poured the soup from a container into simple white bowls. "You made a point of leaving when you did."

  I shrugged, swirling my spoon through the soup. "You brought food; that's fighting dirty."

  He split a long baguette sandwich into two pieces and handed me half. I knew that vampires didn't have to eat. They could, and most of the guys did, but blood was the only way they stayed alive. I wondered how they were feeding, and who they were feeding on. I had been told that biting gave them power over a person. In fact, I had nearly been bitten during my first encounter with the vampires.