by Kater Cheek
He stepped forward just past my hiding spot, gun in hand, staring towards the river where my squelchy footprints led. Before he could take another stride, I stood and sidestepped towards him.
Fumikomi. The name of the kick came unbidden to my mind as my still shod left foot stomped down against his knee. Kishimoto-sensei had taught us to channel our ki into our strikes. That was how you broke bricks with your hand. That was how you broke through a block. That was how you bent an old man’s leg at an unnatural angle with an unclean snap like a wet branch.
With a howl of agony, Mr. Thorn fell to the ground, hands fluttering around his leg frantically. He dropped the gun as he flailed, still screaming and moving everything but the damaged leg.
I ignored him, ignored his weak liver spotted hands clenching in pain, and scooped his revolver from the mud. It was a thing of beauty, silver plated, with carved ivory scrimshaw on the handle depicting buffalo and the brave men who slaughtered them. Two bullets left. Two.
Plenty to kill me.
Plenty to kill him.
No. I had a better plan. Fifteen feet down the slope gave me a clear view of the river. I held the gun by its muzzle and threw. The silver gun flew like a bird towards the river and plunked beneath the gray water.
Mr. Thorn wailed even louder. “You foolish girl! That was a priceless antique!”
I walked back up the slope towards him.
“You horrible woman! My knee! I can’t believe what you—”
“Shut up!” I cut him off with a kick to the head, gentle compared to the blow I had given his knee, but enough to show him who was in charge here. “You stupid little shit. You think I give a damn about your financial troubles? You think I don’t have trouble of my own?”
“My knee! Ow! My knee! I’m going to have you arrested for assault! How dare you attack an old man like that! It’s going to be my word against yours, you know.”
I kicked him in the head again, this time hard enough that his teeth cut his lip. “Give me your car keys.”
He pulled them out of his pocket and extended them towards me with trembling hands. “Don’t steal my car,” he pleaded.
“I,” I told him, as I flung the car keys into the river, “am not a thief. However, it’s going to be a long walk home for you. I hope you’ll take the time to think about this little discussion.”
“You bitch,” he called me, pronouncing it as if he had never uttered that word before.
“Call me a bitch if you like, but we both know who's the victor today.” I mocked him with the Altoids tin, shaking it in front of me, then turned and walked up the path. He was still moaning about his ruined leg, but he was watching me, I was sure of it.
I started to slide the tin in my pocket, then ever so carefully, let it fall out onto the ground. Lot’s wife understood how hard it was not to turn back and look, to see if he had fallen for it. But I was stronger than that.
A brief pause in his moaning let me know he had seen, had marked the spot where the tiny tin had fallen.
He would, I assured myself. He would crawl back towards his car, scoop the precious replica as though it were the one ring of Sauron.
And then he would sell it.
As to what repercussions came of that, it was no longer my concern. Despite the mud and grass clinging to me, I felt nothing but peace as I climbed the bank and retrieved my right shoe. Two miles down the road and forty-five minutes later the 115 southbound bus took me back to the city.
Epilogue
My feet hurt. Here I was, kneeling in front of twelve vampires, most of them older than the United States of America, and all I could think was that my feet hurt. If only I owned a more comfortable pair of black dress shoes.
“Wear black,” Palmer had said. “It’s traditional.”
So, I did. I dropped way too much money at one of the hot young Goth shops in Old Town and found a floor-length boned Victorian thing that Morticia Addams would squeal over. The cloaks were another tradition, Palmer said, and he kindly lent me one.
“Back in the old days, if you dared enter another vampire’s territory, you’d hide your face until you got permission to be there from whoever the Leader was, mostly because they’d kill you on sight if they knew you were a trespassing vampire. This will help remind the Council that you’re applying to become a Guild member, not an initiate.”
Being an initiate meant you had the blessing of the Council to attempt to court a sire. All that meant was that you were allowed to make friends with vampires and try to pester one into bestowing vampirism. It wasn’t easy. The ice-cold shoulder Guild members gave to initiates deterred many a would-be vampire before his two-year waiting period had expired. Initiates, those humans who sought to become ‘of the blood’, were about as popular with vampires as paparazzi had been with Jackie Onassis.
It wasn’t easy for me, either. Forms filled out in triplicate. Background checks. Long discussions with Palmer about what it meant to be a Guild member. I had to begin tithing too, long before my application was accepted. (I was below the poverty line, so my tithe came out to about as much as Fenwick’s cable bill.) I had done it, passed every test, though not without the Guild Leader pulling the strings.
All this had led to this wood paneled and richly carpeted room in the Guild House in Wasserhausen. And here I was, kneeling, the Vampire Guild Council arrayed before me in a semicircle like a henge of flesh. Nylons and dress shoes peeked out from the hems of their black hooded cloaks.
Unlike me, none of them were fidgeting nervously. And why should they? They had done this hundreds of times.
I recognized Holzhausen’s voice, though the Vampire Guild Leader was cloaked like the others. He spoke for the Council.
“Kit Melbourne, you seek to share our blood.”
I smiled at the sound of my new legal name. No one would ever call me Mildred again.
“I do.” I replied, as rehearsed.
“Who will vouch for your honor?”
“I, Theodore Roosevelt Palmer, speak for the loyalty and honor of this one.”
I had asked him about his name. Palmer said his mother admired Teddy Roosevelt, and had actually met him at a rally once. I wasn’t surprised to hear how old Palmer was. I had been off by less than a decade. I was getting good at it.
“Do you swear to never betray the Guild?” Holzhausen asked.
“I swear.”
“Know the price of betrayal,” Palmer threatened, and pressed a sharpened stake against my back.
Palmer was my sponsor.
“It’s my responsibility to kill you if you betray the Guild,” Palmer had told me casually, over beer at the 5th Avenue Dive.
“With a stake?”
“No. With a gun. Stakes don’t work. It’s just symbolic.” He tilted his head to one side. “Though I bet a stake through the heart would kill a human pretty quickly.”
“Just tell me how to not betray the Guild.”
“Basically, it boils down to this,” Palmer said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Don’t kill innocents for blood. Don’t reveal anyone’s daytime resting place, though that’s not a biggie anymore, since we usually sleep in our houses. Don’t flaunt your vampirism, or discuss it with the media.
“Course, that won’t affect you, since you’re not even vampire, but you might want to keep quiet about it anyway. There are over two hundred vampires in Seabingen, and most of them do not want anyone to even know that they exist. You start going on the media circuit, our Guild will cut you down before an out of towner does it for us.
“Truth is, there are a lot of Guild members who don’t like the idea of human members. Holzhausen had to call in favors to get them to allow this, and, well, forget I said this, but having the Guild Leader back you has already won you enemies. Just keep your head down and pay your tithe. That’s what we tell the fledglings.”
“So, if anyone asks, there’s no such thing as vampires?”
“You got it,” Palmer said.
It was hard
to pretend that there was no such thing as vampires when you were kneeling in front of them.
“Do you swear to obey my will, and the will of the Council?” the Guild Leader was asking.
This, of course, was what Holzhausen was getting out of it. Control of me, and therefore, control over the bindi. Kind of like extortion, really, but there you have it.
“I swear.”
“Know the price of disobedience.” Palmer pricked me again with the stake.
“Do you swear to call us brethren, and lift no hand against your kin?” The Guild Leader asked.
“I swear.”
There were exceptions to this. Self-defense was allowed. Defense of innocents was allowed. Killing traitors was also allowed, as Palmer’s stake reminded me.
“Know the price of failure.”
“I know the price of failure,” I said.
Behind the Guild Leader, a wooden paneled door opened and a very young vampire entered, bearing a golden cup on a silver salver. He bowed as he offered it to the Guild Leader, then scurried back out the door.
“Rise and reveal yourself,” The Guild Leader said.
At this command, I stood and drew back the hood of my cloaks. I stared straight ahead, like when Kishimoto-sensei was really pissed off at us, not daring to look any of the Council members in the eye. Jesus. These shoes were killing me.
“We are brethren,” Holzhausen said. He drew back the hood of his cloak, and then drank from the cup and passed it to his right.
“We are brethren,” the next Council member said, and drew back her hood as well. She drank from the cup and passed it to her right. The cup passed along the line until it reached me. I dared a glance over and saw a flicker of red in the cup. God, please don’t let it be blood. Please don’t let it be blood.
My hand closed around the cool gold stem of the goblet. It looked like blood. It smelled like blood. What was my line? What was my … oh, yeah.
“We are brethren.” I drank before I could think about it and passed it on to my right. My stomach roiled with disgust. It was blood. Jesus, don’t let it be human blood. Don’t let whoever it was have AIDS.
The vampires drained the cup by the time it reached the Guild Leader again, some of them licking their lips with pleasure.
“The oath is sealed,” Holzhausen said. “Mildred Anne Melbourne, you have shared blood with the Council. You are bound to the Guild. Let none sever our bond. Let the blood of our enemies nourish our bodies, as their bones nourish the soil.”
And then it was done.
I bowed to the Council, and Palmer led me out the door. Only time would tell how this would change my life.
All I could think was, I hoped they gave me some leeway on the ‘nourishing our bodies’ part. I wasn’t sanguine about drinking blood again.
Thank you for reading WITCH’S JEWEL, book one of the Kit Melbourne series. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it.
Keep reading for a preview of the sequel, DRYAD’S BLADE.
Chapter One
“Mandatory fun,” Palmer had called this party. Mandatory, as in, “we’re in deep shit with a bunch of vampires if we don’t show up and play nice.” I stared over my shoulder at the double French doors leading into the Pepperwood Country Club. My feet had grown completely numb inside the cheap yellow pumps, and my jean jacket wasn’t keeping the cold away either. Fifteen minutes outside in what was shaping up to be Seabingen’s coldest winter on record was plenty long enough.
I’d already given Fenwick twenty minutes and two phone calls from a borrowed land line by the side entrance. No answer. Maybe it was his change night? Not that he’d be able to use that as an excuse for not being here, unless he wanted to tell them what he did once a month. Inside, the warm chatter in the ballroom beckoned. I climbed the stairs. Twenty minutes in this kind of cold was long enough to wait for anyone, even my boyfriend.
“May I see your invitation, miss?” The doorman intercepted me, eyes running from my yellow acetate dress, to my paint and glue stained jean jacket, to my very human face. He crossed his arms and frowned.
“What?” I put my hand on my hip and wavered between whether to flirt or go for indignant. “Do you really think anyone would be dumb enough crash a Guild soirée?”
The Vampire Guild was an elite club, to say the least. All the vampires knew each other, and had known each other for years.
“May I see your invitation?” He gave me a bouncer stare.
A skinny young man with brown hair, freckles, and an out-of-date light blue tuxedo climbed the red-carpeted steps. To my bindi-granted second sight, he appeared to have a black cloud around him, like a smudged charcoal aura. There were other signs to recognize vampires; fangs of course (though they were careful not to show them), pale skin, unusual strength, and that inhuman stillness that some of them never learned to hide. The shadow around his body faded after a slow count of seven, which meant that he’d been made a vampire back when his retro-zoot-suit tuxedo had been the height of fashion.
The vampire could have waved me in along with him, but he didn’t. He could have smiled a greeting, but he didn’t. The only non-vampire Guild member was like the only black person in a small Midwestern town. Everyone knew who I was, and no one would talk to me. I tried a smile at the doorman instead, but he was as flirtatious as a prison guard.
The doorman must have been an initiate, because he gave Mr. Zoot-Suit the vampire an ass-kissing bow, right before blocking my path again. “Invitation, miss?”
My vampire sponsor appeared suddenly behind him, in that sneaky too-fast-too-quiet way they’re so good at. Finally.
“Evening, Melbourne.” Theodore Roosevelt Palmer never went anywhere without a gun or three, though tonight his well-fitting tuxedo hid them all. His skin was a couple shades darker than most black people on television, but still not as dark as the smudged aura which clung to him for a slow count of ten. “Are you having some trouble?”
The doorman stood up straighter. “She’s trying to enter without an invitation, sir.”
“I am her sponsor. She is invited, Initiate …” Palmer paused, then reached out and touched the doorman’s name lapel. “Initiate Bryce. As is her friend Alan Fenwick. Please do not detain our guests.”
The doorman started to stammer an apology, but Palmer had already taken my arm and was escorting me towards the entrance. The double bay of French doors were flanked by miniature orange trees, and I couldn’t help touching a leaf as we passed them to see if they were silk or real. They were real. Memo to self: Solicit the resort to see if they wanted to commission fake ones.
Palmer helped me out of my jacket. “Where is Fenwick?”
“Maybe he got stuck in traffic?” What if the bus he was riding got in an accident? What if he were in the emergency room right now?
Palmer draped my jean jacket from the tips of his fingers, extending his arm towards the coatroom, where another human initiate took it from him. “You have a purse?”
“I keep everything in my jacket pockets.” Another reason not to leave the thing at home.
Palmer took the coatroom token from the initiate without looking at her, then pressed it into my hand, having already gone and come back. He took my arm again, as though afraid I might wander off, and led me towards the ballroom.
The room held several hundred people, most of whom were dancing to the sounds of the band at the far end. Polished wood reflected swaying skirts and smart tuxedo pants, and tall French doors surrounding two sides of the ballroom were curtained against the chill, although with the huge crush of people it felt warm and almost claustrophobic.
Most of the guests were vampires, initiates (some pathetically Goth) or dates of Guild members. I recognized two humans, but one was the local newscaster, and the other was the mayor. The latter probably had no idea he was among vampires. Most saw the Guild’s public face, that of “exclusive social club.” Some would know better. They’d look at the Guild and see the payer of bribes, the puller of strings, the owner
of real estate. Not many learned the truth. Most people have a hard time believing in vampires.
Palmer led me across the ballroom and introduced his wife. He had mentioned her once or twice, but mostly shielded her from Guild affairs. She was a beautiful, fifty-something black woman with cat-eye glasses and an emerald green gown. She gave her first name, something unpronounceably French, and offered me a wink of human-woman solidarity and a diamond covered hand.
“Kit, I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Palmer.”
“Oh, please,” she said, “Call me ‘Ell-of-a-lot-of-vowels.” That’s what it sounded like, anyway.
Palmer saved me from having to mangle his wife’s name. “Melbourne, are you going to be alone?” Palmer infused this question with a lot of meaning, meaning completely lost on me.
“Until Fenwick gets here. Why? Was there someone you wanted me to meet?”
‘Ell-of-a-lot-of-vowels clung to his arm and looked pointedly away from our conversation. Yeah, that was how they wanted us humans to act: polite, demure, non-threatening. None of those traits came easy to me. Well, I could be polite, at least.
Palmer pursed his lips as though deciding how much he could say. “The Guild Leader wants to see you.”
“He wants to talk to me?” My heart started beating faster. The Guild Leader was a seriously creepy guy.
Palmer shook his head. “No, just let him see that you’re here. Fenwick is going to come, isn’t he? Did you two fight?”
“No. Maybe he had car trouble.” Like if he borrowed a car and it burst into flames right after it was carjacked. I craned around, but Fenwick’s blond ponytail would have stood out above the heads of the rest of the party. He better have a damn good reason for not being here.
“I’m glad you came, at least. It would have made me look bad if you didn’t come. Politics, you know.” Palmer gave me a tense smile, which eased into his more usual phlegmatic expression as he allowed his wife to tug his arm towards the dance floor. “Don’t leave until you are seen by the Guild Leader.”
