by Sara Hanover
“How did it get in?”
“No idea. I felt it arrive . . . this incredible pressure and then my ears popped . . . and I knew something was in the house.”
“But you didn’t let it in.”
“No way.” Someone had put tea into a bottle container for me. I sipped at it, feeling the cool soothing nectar of tea and sugar make its way into me. “Good thing you thought of the salt, Carter.”
“It was descending on you like a cloud when I got here. You conjured up that yourself.”
“I did? Did it work?”
“Kept the vampire busy until I could dispatch it. We might remember that for the future.”
“There had better not be a vampire in the future!” my mother snapped. Both men stepped back a little.
I cleared my throat hesitantly. It did not reward me with sharpness and agony as it had earlier. I might even be able to swallow a cookie. I had half of one nibbled down when something else occurred to me. I pointed at Scout. “It didn’t like Scout’s taste.”
Carter looked at my pup in surprise. “Oh? That’s . . . interesting.”
“Worth remembering.” Steptoe took a promised cookie from my platter and bit into it with a satisfied sigh. “Not just a dog, obviously.”
My mother sounded a tad unhappy. “He’s not?”
“Not entirely.”
“I thought he was a Labrador retriever.”
Carter smiled encouragingly. “Oh, he is. Also a bit of a mutt. We’re not quite sure what the other bloodline is. Elven hound, most likely.”
She set a cup and saucer down on the coffee table. “Good elf or bad elf?”
“Let’s just say there are no bad dogs if they’re raised right.” And I think Carter had the nerve to wink at her.
Something else struck me. “Oh! How are the tell-tales?”
“They can only take so much shock. I’ve pulled them for now,” Steptoe told me. “I’m going to swap them for a new, hardier bunch.”
“What will happen to these?”
“They’ll return to their beds. Grow a bit. Recover. They did the best they could.”
“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” I told him.
“Too right.”
“If no one let the creature in, I think we have to consider the possibility that the threshold may have been breached before you even moved in here.”
“Before—” I paused. “My father?”
“Seems likely. I don’t know if a welcome wears off or resets, although frankly I would think the professor had circumvented that, but it seems he didn’t.”
I scrunched around on the sofa to have a better look at my mother. She wore a silk shirt and jeans, her light blonde hair held back with a colorful headband, her eyes a bit shadowed. “Did you have a visitor the other night? Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich night?”
“I did, but—” she paled. “That couldn’t have been that . . . that . . . thing.”
“Not the vampire who came here today, but it could have been a Master.”
She shook her head in denial. “We met at the university coffee bar. After the classes for online teaching, and he’d just come from the bookshop, putting in his semester order for textbooks. We’ve met up several times. He’s new to the campus and Virginia. It seemed a neighborly thing to do. I didn’t . . . you don’t think . . .”
“We don’t know what to think,” offered Carter. “Any chance we could meet him? Name?”
She paused, looking thoughtful.
“Mom. We would like to know.”
“I just hate to rope anyone in on this. It can be very complicated.” She met my gaze steadily.
“Don’t I know it. But Carter can probably check him out without his even suspecting.” I snagged another cookie while deftly moving the plate out of Simon’s reach. One of the cookies slid off and fell on Scout who, to his credit, took a thoughtful sniff before devouring it.
“He has his doctorate but doesn’t go by it. Meyer Gregory.”
“American?”
“Maybe. He has a very slight accent, maybe Germanic. Something. Definitely not a Southerner. Please be as discreet as you can. He seems well-spoken.” She stood up. “And now I’m going to clean the kitchen up, and I suggest Tessa gets some more rest.”
She hardly needed to suggest it. After my third cookie, my eyelids started sagging to the point where I either couldn’t see straight or saw three of everyone. I yawned. Carter leaned down, gently peeling Scout off my legs, and sat me up.
“Can you walk?”
I was not too tired to blush. “Of course, I can walk.” I stood up and proceeded to sashay toward the stairs in three different directions before I got my inner compass straightened out. Common sense prevailed, so I leaned on him heavily as we made our way up the front stairs. I pointed across the house. “I heard it in the kitchen area,” I told him. “And came down the back stairs to surprise it. Would have made it, too, but Scout sneezed at the bottom.”
“Sneezed?”
“The thing stank. Blood and mold and dusty—and Altoids. Really strong peppermint. Like all the Christmas candy in the world, laid end to end.”
“Huh.”
“Curled its lip and got to the dog. If it looked human enough to pass and was trying to hide its breath, I could see it, but it didn’t, and it wasn’t.”
“Interesting.” We’d reached my bedroom door, and he nudged it open with his shoe, guiding me inside.
“I had to call for you,” I said.
“And it was a good thing you did. Salt slowed it down but wouldn’t have stopped it. It had orders and a certain desperation about it.”
“You did kill it.”
Carter sat me down on the edge of my bed and carefully took my shoes off before fluffing my pillow. “I did.”
“Damn thing healed every strike I got on it. Spooky.”
“They can do that, I hear—but know this. It couldn’t have taken much more. You damaged it almost to the point where it couldn’t regenerate anymore. You almost drove it back into the ground.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“It outlasted me.”
“Yes. You might have tried a fireball or two.”
I blinked. “I didn’t think of it! I had trouble thinking at all.”
“Part of a vampire’s glamour. Steptoe had that vampiric dust analyzed, he told me. I got a touch of the remains. We’ll see if it’s the same creature.”
I shook my head and immediately regretted it, as great, dizzying waves rose up to greet me. “I don’t think so.”
“It would explain how it breached your door. Part of it was already inside.”
“Oooh. Maybe we should burn that box.”
Carter squeezed my shoulder, his hand warm and strong. “We’ve already removed it and put a warding around it in the garage. I also put new runes on all the doorways and window frames. Even the chimneys and the plumbing vents.”
“Boy, ain’t nothing getting in here now.”
He grinned. “Not unless you give it an invitation.”
I made a cross over my heart. “Not this gal.”
Leaning over, he kissed my forehead. I wrinkled my nose. “Call that a kiss?”
“For now, yes.” Then he added in a whisper, “I’m very thankful you’re okay.”
“Tell me that when I’m able to walk straight again.”
He laughed. “Deal.”
And then he closed the door after him, leaving me alone with my throbbing head, lips that still tasted faintly of salted pretzels, and a body that hurt all over.
Scout snuffled from the hallway. I got out of bed to get him, settling for crawling along the floor. He crawled along after me as if I’d invented some new game, and we both got back in bed. The house felt a bit chilled, so
his sprawled body warmed mine as I huddled under the comforter, thinking too many thoughts.
And no one but me seemed to have noticed the two fang marks on the inside of my left elbow while I wondered how much blood had been taken and if I might be poisoned. Was that even a thing? I should ask, but it would mean more questions back at me, and I really didn’t feel up to it.
The last thing that drifted across my mind was the look on my mother’s face when she talked about Dr. Meyer Gregory. Was he a deceiving Master or had she just been impressed by a nice guy? Had she betrayed us unwittingly—and if she had, and Carter or I found out, how do we stop her from doing it again? And how could she even think about moving on, with my father stuck in limbo? But if betraying ran in the family . . .
What if I had the stuff in my veins (or missing from my veins) to be the traitor myself?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
INVITATIONS ONE AND ALL
I ROLLED OUT of bed cautiously the next morning and checked the weather on my phone. It promised to be a miserable day, the first of three miserable days in a row, but a glance out my window told me I might have time for a run before it started.
I didn’t want to run. That brick wall which had fallen on me left bruised and cramped muscles that insisted on staying motionless, but I knew from experience that I needed to move. I also needed to run because field and track season awaited me. I dressed with a moan here and a smothered gasp there, grabbed a fleece hoodie, and went out. Rain and sleet hung in the dark clouds overhead, promising a deluge soon. I ducked my head down. Scout trotted beside me, not as unhappy as I was for the exercise, but not altogether go-lucky either. I had, after all, not fed him first.
We had a route, the two of us, which would measure at the minimum five miles and if I added a loop, would be closer to seven. Seven is a good measurement for me, distance as well as minutes count, and I did my loop at the beginning because if I waited twenty minutes, I’d chicken out. I knew my work ethic today absolutely sucked even though my body relaxed as I moved, and most of the sore spots lessened.
The wind rose, and clouds began to swirl even more ominously. I’d been jogging/running and moved up my pace, wanting to get home before the skies opened up. A warm shower sounded a lot more desirable than icy sleet. More posters fluttered about the circuit I took. Dogs and cats, gone missing, right out of their backyards. I didn’t like what I was seeing. Was the neighborhood harboring a would-be junior serial killer? Or was there a creature feeding hereabouts? Had my recently deceased vampire been snacking? Or, more mundanely, Virginia had coyotes, though they were seldom seen, they were definitely about. They might be patrolling our part of Richmond. I tried to convince myself of that.
I might have been leery about going out on my own, but a smallish brown-and-gray–speckled owl came out of high branches, circled above us once, and got into position overhead. It soared along with us. I was at least being watched, at most escorted, and it felt friendly. Whether Carter had let Goldie know I needed some assistance or if the harpy left orders on her own, I had eyes in the sky. Worries that it just might be me and Scout against a coyote pack evaporated.
Scout moved with me effortlessly, tongue hanging out just a bit, soft ear flaps on alert, and tail wagging with his body movement and also because he just loved to run. He’d started off a little stiff as well, poor guy, but I knew I’d been right to bring him along.
By the time we got home, the blood sang in my ears, the hoodie felt almost too hot, and my feet let me know I should buy new running shoes because I could feel the pavement keenly through thinning soles.
Mom’s car, in the driveway when I left, was now gone, so she was off to the campus again for her training classes. I showered and clattered downstairs in fresh clothes and better sneakers and fed Scout who had parked himself under the kitchen table and watched with soulful eyes until I filled his stainless-steel bowl.
“Simon! Need breakfast?” Paused by the counter, I waited for an answer but got none. It bothered me that Steptoe had a project or errands going that I knew nothing about. How much trouble could a lesser demon working on redemption get into? But the house lay absolutely empty. Run me up a tree and call me a possum, but they’d left me all alone again. I hadn’t thought that possible after yesterday’s battle. It wasn’t until I sat down that I saw the professor’s handbook sitting by my placemat, with a tiny Post-it Note on the front cover. I recognized Carter’s scribble: Study.
I mock saluted as I dropped my plate filled with waffle and scrambled egg next to it. “Sir, yessir.”
He’d even put a bookmark in the slim book for me. When I opened it, it fell out of the pages inked: Fire and Lightning Offense.
Or that’s what I thought it said. Ink had faded, whoever had written it had terrible penmanship, and it looked like the language itself wasn’t quite English. That, I’d become used to in some of the professor’s other books. It seemed language evolved far faster than civilizations and humans. At Skyhawk, we’d listened in lit class to how Shakespearean plays actually sounded, and it was a revelation.
As helpful as the booklet tried to be, it had one caveat. To use a fireball or a lightning strike as a weapon, one first had to be able to produce basic flames or an electrical sprite. I could do one if not the other. A sprite was a fairly impressive lightning phenomenon rarely seen, and I certainly had no idea how to reproduce one albeit this one should be in miniature. I gnawed on the crisp corner of a waffle while Scout rattled his empty pan, hopeful for a refill. How does one produce an electrical spark? Static electricity perhaps? I leafed back and forth, finding no hint on producing the core of the spell. Either one could or couldn’t, it seemed.
But I had fire. It seemed rather lame and mundane compared to the other, as if one was a scooter and the other a hot sports car. I pushed the book aside and finished my breakfast, rather than get syrup and jam drops where they didn’t belong.
Scout put his head on my knee and whined. I looked down. He rolled his eyes up at me.
“Oh, all right.”
He settled down to munching as I cleaned up the dishes and sat back down. Then, remembering something, I got back up and leaned into the dining room where the big table and chairs sat, and Hiram’s redwood chair.
A black gash along the back marred the big thronelike chair, but otherwise it seemed to have weathered yesterday’s assault in fairly good shape. Here and there I could see the random sparkle of a salt crystal winking up from the floor. I’d sweep and mop again. If I thought I’d just imagined the whole scene, I looked at proof I hadn’t.
With a shudder, I sat back down to my study book.
Scout settled with one paw on my foot, and the rest of him splayed on the floor. I looked down for a moment, remembering when we’d gotten him that, although he’d been half-grown, he hadn’t taken up half of the space he did now. He wasn’t quite a pup anymore.
Rain started in a soft patter against the kitchen door. It sounded mild compared to what we expected around noon. I squinted at the spell book, conjured up a fist-sized fireball, and stepped outside to aim it at some overgrown bushes in the backyard.
It sat like a bowling ball over my palm, and I could feel my limb protesting at its density. I released a bit of it, lightening the weight so my arm wouldn’t break off at the wrist. Took three breaths, eyed my potential target, and let go with an overhand baseball throw that tweaked my shoulder a bit.
Red and orange streaked across the yard and dove at the sedum border near the back wall, the flowering plant tucked in for the winter and frost; otherwise it would have taken up half the yard. The fireball exploded at the perimeter, sparks going up like a Fourth of July fountain, smoke hanging in the air, plants curling back into ash. The only thing missing was a whistling scream as it detonated.
I blinked.
Then the weather descended and whatever damage I had wrought quickly drowned and sluiced away, threatening
to sweep me off my feet as well.
Lesson One: less is more, and definitely easier to handle. No, make that Lesson Two. Lesson One was that I was definitely capable of doing the spell.
I conjured up another fireball, the size of a tennis ball, and bounced it up and down a few times to see if there was any danger of it backfiring on me. Didn’t seem to be. I took a step rather like a pitcher in motion off the mound and fired it toward a corner of rather pesky and thorny weeds that survived frost, drought, direct sun, Scout, and whatever else could be thrown at it. It almost survived my attack. There wasn’t much left but a charred patch, but I bet myself that come spring, it would be green and growing again.
Maybe we should buy a goat.
I ducked my head and ran for the shelter of the house as the rain got colder and pea-sized hail began to bounce over the drive and lawn. By the time I got inside, my clothes were drenched and the noise of the hail could be heard drumming on the roof. It had stopped by the time I changed clothes, but the steady surge of heavy rain stayed. The house grew colder, so I bumped up the heat. The old furnace started up with a roar and sent out gusty clouds of air that grew hotter as it fell into its routine.
I pulled out an old notebook from one of my classes, copied the spell, and made appropriate notes. I would have to manifest and throw right-handed, tender though it seemed to be now. Less energy and possibly protection on my palm might help. No sense having two hands out of order.
Midafternoon, the mail came. I put up the hood on my second fleece covering of the day and made a mad dash in and out. Little of importance filled my hands, although my mother would argue with me about the letter from the university later, no doubt. Still too stodgy to rely on email, they send pompous missives from time to time. I’d never been impressed. I put her mail on her desk and then retreated to mine, of which there was a confirmation from Skyhawk Community about my spring registration (done online) and then a manila envelope without a return address. Curious, I opened it and dumped out a glossy, trifold brochure extolling the virtues of the Butchery as a meet and greet place for the hip.
