House Of Vampires 2 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy)

by Samantha Snow

I didn't roll my eyes, but I really wanted to. "Are you serious? Do you really believe that? I have no intention of destroying anything."

  "You didn't intend this either," he said, stretching his hands out and showing off his desiccated body, "but look what your magic has wrought."

  He looked even worse. Maybe it was the moment or all the effort he had put into hurting me, but he looked like a thousand-year-old man with paper thin skin and no hair. He was crumbling right in front of me as a phantom wind swept around us.

  "No," I shook my head, "I didn't do this. This happened because you decided to keep me locked up in your damn compound. If you had approached me like a human being, like a person, and told me what you thought about this whole prophecy business, I would have listened with open ears. But no. My mom snatched me up with magic, and you guys locked me in a room while you were literally draining the life from an innocent vampire."

  His lips, peeling like cheap wallpaper, broke and bled as he smiled. Trails of red outlined his teeth. "Innocent? You think he is innocent?"

  I sighed. "If this is the part where you tell me that he can't be trusted, you are a little too late. I've figured it out myself."

  I wasn't being entirely honest, but it was close. Besides, it was totally worth the little lie to see that gross grin wiped off of his face. Then, it all twisted up again, and he shot his magic at me. I was ready for it. The shield that I'd been picturing over and over during this dream shot to my arm, and I used it to block the magic.

  "Stop this. I can help you."

  "No!" he snarled, his voice as brittle as leaves in a forest fire. "You'll kill me."

  "I don't want to."

  "Liar!"

  I sighed. "I won’t hurt myself to prove you wrong; stop this. Stop this now!"

  He didn't. He threw raw magic at me over and over again. But he was weak, and weakening with every motion. I knew that he didn't have long. I wanted to help him; really, I did. I didn't like the idea of me being the reason anyone died, but I also wasn't going to sacrifice myself for his temporary comfort.

  "Die!" he snarled.

  I peeked out over the top of my shield. His skin was peeling away from his body. He was a wreckage of his former glory. That wasn't good. His hands were in front of him, the long, aged fingers forming a sphere. I could feel the collection of magic building there. He was putting the last of himself into this attack, and I didn't think I was going to survive it. No, I realized, I knew that I wasn't going to make it.

  I reached out with my own magic, finding those tendrils of necromancy swimming through him. I tugged at them; I could have pulled them back. I could have saved him, but I knew that he wouldn't let me survive even if I did. Instead of pulling them back, I fed them.

  He screamed. His body jerked, and all that magic he had been building exploded around him like a bomb. Flashes of memories that weren't mine skipped across the gray nothingness, and, for just a moment, I knew him a little better.

  Instead of musing over them, I jerked awake and took what felt like my first breath in far too long.

  The face that looked at me bore little similarity to my own, but it was familiar.

  "Dad?" I asked.

  His eyes were filled with concern. "Lore? Are you alright?"

  I had to think about that. I tried to lift my arms, but they felt heavy. "I... don’t know."

  "You've been asleep for a long time."

  I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer to my next question. "How long?"

  He looked over his shoulder. I turned my head to follow the line of his gaze. Jenny and Reikah were sitting together on the couch that I could just barely see from my position on the bed. It was dark, very dark.

  "A week."

  "Are you serious?" I asked, struggling to sit up. It hurt. No, it didn't. I didn't feel any pain, just a great heavy weight keeping me down. "What happened? What are you doing here? Where is Wei?"

  He placed a hand on my hand. I was grateful that I could actually feel it. "You were trapped in that dreamscape, but you needed to be. We took turns keeping you asleep."

  I felt a twinge of anger. "Okay. What about the rest of it?"

  "I came back because you needed me."

  I hadn't expected that. I couldn't remember the last time that my dad had really done anything for me. He had moved me around a lot, sure, with my safety in mind, but that wasn't for me. That was because he was afraid, so really it had been for him. If he’d done all of that for me, he would have told me the truth from the beginning and let me decide what to do.

  "Oh," I said dumbly.

  "I'm sorry if you aren't' feeling well. It's been a long time since I used my magic."

  Oh right. My father was a witch. I had forgotten. It wasn't easy for me to reconcile the everyday businessman vision that I had of my father and the idea of a magical spellcaster.

  "I didn't know you could heal," I said. "That's what you did, right? In the dream?"

  He nodded slowly, looking pretty tired. "It is. You were hurt. I did what I could."

  "You helped," I promised. "Thank you."

  We shared a long, awkward silence. My father and I, despite having only one another for a lot of my childhood, weren't what I would call close. Maybe I had always known that he was keeping something from me, or maybe I just hated him for making us go from one place to the other with no other explanation but work.

  I looked out the window. A week had completely changed the world outside. It was snowing, and had been for quite some time. Piles of it hid the road and even the small patch of lawn in front of my grandmother's house. No, I corrected myself for the zillionth time, it was my house. I had earned it. I had nearly died, not once but twice. The first time had been at the Order of the Loyal Hermit's compound; the second had been within my own dreams. I had cleaned it out, even taken up some of the shelves with my stuff. This was my place, and I couldn't keep thinking of it as belonging to my grandmother.

  "I'm sorry, Lorena."

  I looked back at him. The moonlight was reflecting off the snow bright enough to illuminate the entire room. For as long as I had known him, my father had always dressed in the uniform of mid-level business: khakis, button-down shirts, and loafers. Tonight, though, he wore a loose-fitting t-shirt and jeans. It was a little jarring. His hair, a few shades darker than my own ash brown, with a few strands of silver woven artistically through it, had grown to his shoulders rather than its normal ear length. He looked like my dad, but not all at the same time.

  "I was wrong," he continued, "I should have told you about the prophecy. I should have given you a choice. I could tell you that I was just being a protective father, but for the life of me, I can't think of a time when that's been a good excuse for anything a dad has done for his kid."

  I wasn't going to argue, but even if I wanted to, I was shocked to silence.

  "When I was a kid," he said, "I got made fun of. Everyone on the mountain knew who my mother was and what she could do. Quinn witches were a bit of a local legend. When I was young, I thought it was cool. Here my mom was, a woman who could just make things happen, who saw things before they happened, and my father was stupidly in love with her. Then, I went to school, and it all changed. I showed off a little, and it scared some people and bothered the rest."

  He stood up and walked around the bed, adjusting the curtains over the screen. My father had a terrible habit of fidgeting when he was nervous about something. I remember him doing similar things every time he was about to tell me that we were moving.

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  He shook his head. "It's just an excuse at the end of the day, Lorena. I could probably have had the greatest experience, and I may have made the exact same decision. When I heard what my mother had to say, I was...I was in a poor state of mind."

  "My mother," I said softly.

  He nodded. "You've met her then."

  "I wasn't give much of a choice. She has...a way with manipulation."

  He laughed, but it wasn't a happ
y laugh. It was the very definition of bitter. "She does. I'm sorry I never told you about her."

  "I can't imagine it would have been a happy conversation to have."

  He shook his head. "But parents don't get to choose to just have comfortable conversations with their children. That was my fault. I'm going to help you, whatever you want to do."

  It was so weird. Here my dad was telling me everything that I had ever wanted to hear. There was a terrified part of me that wondered if this wasn't just some other dream, that I wasn't trapped. I looked down at my arms, seeing the smeared sigils there that would have kept me in lucid dreams. I could see bruises, ugly and yellow in all the places that I had been hurt, and there, at my feet, was Maahes.

  "Thanks," I said, continuing to be the universal master of the awkward conversation. "Right now, I just want to know where Wei is."

  He gave me a look, and I felt my guts twist into knots.

  "They've found him, right? It's been a week," I whispered it, really hoping that the terrible thought in my head was wrong.

  "We know where he is, Lorena, but he's dead."

  Well, I thought to myself, I guess I wasn't dreaming.

  To Be Concluded....

  * * *

  Ready for the final part of the story?

  Dear Reader,

  I want to personally thank you for taking your time to read “House Of Vampires II” I really hope you enjoyed it and you are hungry for the next part in the story.

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  See you in the next book :)

  Samantha x x

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