She had died because nobody cared and Caroline had started prostituting at the ripe old age of eighteen because nobody cared. She would have died, too, just as her mother had, if it hadn’t been for Antoine. He had found her and turned her, made her one of the first of his children and brought her into the order. She had continued to take care of her little brothers until they were old enough to take care of themselves and then she had watched from a distance as they aged and eventually died.
She had traveled from time to time, she had gone through her own wanderlust phase and had to skip town from time to time when living forever got too tricky, but Paris was her real home in a way that Philip felt his could never be.
That was to say, if she was here, there was a reason. There was a good reason. And she looked troubled, which was maybe the biggest sign. Caroline and all of her intimidating beauty rarely got ruffled, so to see her gnawing worriedly on her lip now showed him that things might be getting a lot worse before they got better.
“They are dangerous, yes, they most certainly are. At least some of them. She isn’t, at least not yet, but she could wind up that way if we aren’t careful.”’’
“What does that mean,” Philip growled, feeling genuinely threatened for the first time in maybe, well, forever, “how would she wind up that way?”
“She doesn’t know what she is yet. She has no idea, but a subset of her family are here in the States looking for her and they definitely aren’t going to show her the lighter side of things.”
“Here? They’re here?! Shit, Caroline, how could you wait this long to tell me that part? If they’re looking for her she could be in danger. You should have started with that.”
Finally, something he could understand. Finally something he could hold onto! He didn’t really know her at all, but that girl, that Megan Wright, had worked herself beneath his skin. He hadn’t wanted her to go in the first place and would have done his best to convince her to stay had he gotten half the chance.
Knowing that she might be both dangerous and also in danger did nothing to curb his appetite for her. Quite the contrary, he felt a burning for her. Without her there he felt like a man dying of thirst who had been handed a glass of water only to have it taken away again.
He realized now that all he had wanted to do, even while he had thought that he was perfectly engaged in conversation with Caroline, was go after her and now he had his perfect excuse to do it. He stood up so quickly that he knocked over two of the three glasses of liquid on his desk, caring neither for the fact that it was a very expensive scotch and a very expensive desk to boot.
It was time for him to do something. It was time for him to remember who and what he was.
“Philip, stop!”
He ignored her entirely. He had no intention of stopping. Nothing was going to convince him to formulate a plan before acting, which he was pretty sure was exactly what Caroline was going to tell him to do.
He wasn’t a fan of waiting, and that was doubly true when it might mean something he cared about was at risk. And was that true? Did he care about her? Having known her for only a matter of hours could he say that he cared about her? Some people might think it was a bunch of bullshit, but he believed that he could.
And that was why he ignored a sister who had traveled so far and was looking more and more distraught with each move he made. Because he cared about Megan and he couldn’t stand the idea of her getting hurt. Somewhere deep down, his sudden action might have had something to do with the fact that he wasn’t ready to hear about Megan’s connection to Celia yet, too, but he wasn’t ready to think about that yet. Not yet. Not while he still had someone to save.
“Philip! Stop, come on! You don’t even know where you’re going!”
And that was true too, he didn’t know where she was going but he was a really fantastic tracker. He had honed those skills out of a combination of necessity and just plain boredom and he had been graced (or cursed) with plenty of time in which to do it.
There was nothing Caroline could do to stop him now. She was strong, very strong in fact, but she wasn’t as strong as he was and they both knew it. She couldn’t physically block his progress and there were no words in her arsenal to talk him down. The best she could hope to do was accompany him and in order to do that she was going to have to keep up.
He was up and out of his study like a shot, completely unconcerned with the beautiful things around him that he may or may not be breaking (he had run into an incredibly expensive vase that there would be no way to replace and no chance of fixing). He stalked through the house, ready to tear to shreds anything that got in his way.
He could smell her. He could smell the traces of her in his house and followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs out the front door and the little iron gate she would later tell him she loved. He could still hear Caroline calling out to him desperately but it sounded like it was coming from some place very far away.
He wasn’t really hearing her, not with the part of his brain that mattered. He was following her scent and he had to believe that it would take him to her before she met any harm.
“Megan!”
He roared her name up at her building like some invading tyrant come to claim his prize. He had no idea what he was doing really. Philip had seen that there was a very specific conception of vampires in pop culture. They were seen as strong and stoic, vengeful, lustful.
They were seen as many things but not ever as incapable of being able to control their emotions. Not from what he had seen, which was admittedly not a lot. None of that seemed to matter now. All he had to do was go inside and instead, here he was screaming up at the building like some lovesick, scorned lover. Pitiful. It was pitiful and yet he went on doing it until someone opened a window and told him to shut the hell up already. That was enough to snap the spell he had cast on himself and he moved inside, much more cautiously this time.
Whatever else happened, he needed to be mindful of the fact that making a scene was not in his best interest. If Megan really was what Caroline said she was, a scene wouldn’t be good for her, either. And what if this whole thing was an overreaction? It wasn’t as if Philip hadn’t done that before. At one point in his life, Philip had garnered a real reputation for being a hothead.
And Caroline. She wasn’t a hothead but she did have a tendency to get completely wrapped up in her books and when she made even the hint of a discovery she ran with it. She ran with it like it was the absolute truth and how did Philip know that wasn’t what was happening now?
“Megan?”
He whispered now, following her scent up a shitty stairwell that smelled like dead animals and feces. God, she lived here? In this hovel of an apartment? He couldn’t stand the idea of it. A woman as beautiful as she was, as impressive, deserved to live somewhere that reflected those qualities and if given half the chance, he would see to it that she did.
He had this half-cocked vision of her moving into his mansion and making it feel like a real home for the first time but if she didn’t want to do that he would figure something else out. He would do whatever he could to get her into a better situation than this one as soon as he had her sitting in front of him. Which should be pretty soon.
He had followed her scent to a doorway in which that scent became much stronger, telling him that it had to be her place. He tried the knob and found that it was locked. That should have made him feel better, told him that she was tucked away safely and hopefully sound asleep, but it seemed to be having the opposite effect.
She should be in there on the other side of that door but until he could see her he wasn’t going to be able to rest easy. He needed to see her, just to get a look at her. “Just a look,” he told himself, over and over again it played in his mind like some creepy stalker mantra. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” was another thought that occurred to him as well.
For a minute, only a second really, but long enough for him to be ashamed of it when he thought about it in the future,
he resented the fact that she had come into his life at all. Things would have been much easier had he never intervened. It sounded cold-hearted but since he didn’t have a heart that wasn’t such a problem. He wouldn’t have been here, that was for sure. He wouldn’t have had to worry about her or anyone else. He thought it and then he felt disgusted by himself and raised one fist to softly tap on her door.
“Philip! Don’t!”
Caroline hissed at him in a whisper from behind. He had thought that she wouldn’t be able to follow him (she hadn’t ever been as fast as him and she wasn’t much for tracking) but here she was. He had underestimated his sister, hadn’t taken into account all of the training she must have done since the last time they saw each other. He hadn’t done that because he hadn’t known about it and he hadn’t known about it because he hadn’t asked. Once they sorted through this mess (if they did?) he needed to make more of an effort with her, with all of his family. “Just one more thing to add to the list of fuckups,” he told himself, allowing himself one tiny moment of self-pity. But then she was standing beside him and there was no more time for self-pity or doubt.
“Why?” he shot back, not understanding but still keeping his volume as low as hers.
She didn’t answer but took out a little pickpocket set and jimmied the door open.
“I’m impressed,” he whispered, glancing at her in surprise.
She held up a finger in front of her lips, the universal sign to shut the hell up. They moved inside and Caroline shut the door before walking into the middle of the disheveled room. There were clothes everywhere.
Philip realized that might just be the way she lived, he didn’t know her well enough to know whether she was tidy or disorganized, but it was also more than that. Left halfway on and halfway off her naked mattress was a knapsack half full of clothing that looked like it had been in the process of being hastily packed.
The worst part, the part that sent cold jolts of fear through his body, was the money. There were bills leaking out from under that same mattress and several fistfuls of it laying on the floor. He didn’t care how disorganized a person was, there was no way she had just left her money lying around as carelessly as all of this. He turned to look at Caroline and saw that she had a grim, set expression on her face.
“She’s not here,” he said with the wounded wonderment of a child expecting a superhero who never came to the rescue in the end.
“No, she’s not. She’s gone. They’ve taken her.”
“How do you know? How do you know it was them?”
In lieu of an answer she pointed to the wall beside her and he squinted. Even in the dark of the room, he could see what she wanted him to get. He still didn’t understand what it meant, but along the wall and the floor as well, there was a fine film of what looked like purple sand. He knelt down as if to touch the stuff and Caroline rushed forward, grabbing him with more force than he had given her credit for having.
“No!” she whispered harshly. “Don’t, Phillip. Don’t touch it. You don’t have any idea what it can do and we don’t have time for you to go hurting yourself. We’ve got to move.”
“To where? We don’t have a fucking clue where she is.”
“You may not,” grim set of the mouth, cold eyes, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t. I think I know exactly where they went. It looks like you’re going to have to actually listen to me for a change.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Why did you go, little magpie? Why did you leave him? Things are dangerous now, very dangerous indeed. You’ve got to be careful, to make the choices of your light ancestors. You’ve got to be so very careful or all will be lost, and lost, and even more lost. All will be lost and nothing will ever be the same again.”
“But nothing ever will be!” she cried out in the dark, turning wildly from one direction to the next in the hopes of pinpointing exactly where this voice was coming from. It was an impossible task and although she kept trying, she knew that it was impossible.
She knew that the same way that some separate part of her knew that she was dreaming again, dreaming of the magpie woman and all she had to foretell. There was that same sense of clarity and her mind’s stubborn desire to reject it, the way she had before when the magpie woman had told her to stay by the dead man’s side.
She understood what that meant now, that she had always known on some level that things in the world weren’t exactly what she thought and what people in the general population wanted so badly to believe. Vampire. The dead man was the phrase used for vampire by somebody from so long ago that there hadn’t really been a commonly known word for it.
She had known that in the dream in Philip’s house, but still she had done exactly the opposite of what she had been instructed. The voice had been very clear that it was imperative that she stay close to her vampire lover and instead she leaped out of bed and ran as far and as fast as she could do. She ran and ran herself straight into the arms of the enemy. Was that right? She moaned in her sleep, writhing with the uncertainty of it all, still fighting against the magpie voice still speaking to her in a soft, steady voice.
“It will be the same and not the same,” that voice said with an almost irritating calm, “it will be the same as it has always been inside of you in the places you dare not visit and nothing at all like the life you’ve lived before. Awakening is like that, little magpie. Learning means having to change and change is not the same. You know that, little girl, you know that and the time for your awakening is now. Wake up now, magpie. Wake up. Megan, WAKE UP!”
Megan gasped and shot up, thinking vaguely that she had to stop waking up this way. It was the second time in...in how long? How long had she been asleep this time? For a woman with chronic insomnia, she had sure been doing a lot of sleeping these days and in the most inconvenient times and places.
How long, it was one question and one she wanted answered, but it wasn’t the most important one. It wasn’t the most important one at all and after a moment of confusion in which she shook her head quickly, trying to shake out the beginning of a pounding headache, she realized which one was.
“Where am I?” she whispered, her voice sounding like a scared little girl. It reminded her of the way she used to wake up in her foster homes, in the group homes that never felt safe, terrified until she got some grip on where she was. It was the fear that had been the root cause for her insomnia, her body’s cranky unwillingness to let go and get some sleep.
She hated coming to and not knowing where she was. And in that respect, this was kind of her nightmare, wasn’t it? Because no amount of struggling to swim away from the remnants of her dream would tell her where she was this time. Because she didn’t know.
You couldn’t remember something you didn’t know, no matter how good you were or how hard you tried. Her head pounded more and more with the effort of it all but there was nothing she could do. She didn’t know where she was and as she started to recall the details of her having been taken, she knew why.
“What was it? What did they do to me?”
She could see it now, the scene with her and the strange men in her pitiful apartment. For a moment, she turned away from it, not wanting to see. Again with the mindset of a child, she did her best to turn away. She didn’t want to see because seeing it would make it real. Seeing was believing and Megan Wright wasn’t interested in believing.
She would gladly have gone straight back to the dream with the magpie woman (except that she was the magpie, wasn’t she? In the dream the woman used the nickname magpie for her) if it meant not having to look at things for what and how they really were. But it was the way things usually were when you tried not to think about one particular thing; it became the absolute only thing she could think about, the only thing she could see.
There she had been, kneeling practically on all fours in order to get to the money stuffed under her bed when she had been made painfully aware that she was not alone. There had been two men there, one who didn’t seem
to be able to stop talking and one who would not talk at all. It was the one who spoke she had paid attention to, but it was the one who wouldn’t that she should have kept an eye on because he was the one who had caused the real trouble.
He was the one who had opened his hand and revealed a palm full of what looked like purple dust, had blown it into the air like a kid playing with the pieces of a dandelion. Except that if it was dust it would have acted like dust, and whatever the hell this was didn’t act like dust at all. At least not any dust that Megan had ever seen.
Because it didn’t settle in any kind of a way. It just kept going and going, traveling across the room and through the air like a bullet that was meant for her and her alone. It was dust with a target in mind and it was going to hit that target, come hell or high water.
She did her best to hold her breath but she couldn’t go on without breathing forever, could she? No, she couldn’t, it wasn’t a reasonable thing to ask of her and so she opened her mouth and took in a deep, gasping breath and saw with horror that the purple dust happily made its way inside.
Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Page 11
