NINE
When you break past a magical circle to get into a room that is spilling acrid mist out into a too long hallway that shouldn't exist, you pretty much prepare yourself to see anything. Okay, I thought, almost anything.
It was not a room that existed beyond the door, but a swamp. Elegant trees with roots invested in constantly wet soil were heavy with Spanish moss. The moss was long enough to stroke the surface of the nearly green water. The scent of wet dog and moldy things was strong here. A single beam of moonlight illuminated what looked to be a pier. A small motorless boat was attached to it by the length of moldy rope.
“Okay,” I said. “That's different.”
I felt Zane move up behind me. My magic reverberated with his nearness. “It's a swamp witch’s ream,” he said, his voice a hushed rumble.
I bet it was, not that I really knew what a swamp witch was. “Why would there be a magical door to a swamp witch’s dream world inside the house of Marquessa Green? That's...ridiculous. Right?” Not that anything in my life hadn't been ridiculous recently.
“You misunderstand, I mean it is literally a witch's dream.” He lifted his nose and sniffed at the air. “I can smell it.”
“Dude, how can you smell anything but wet dog?” I demanded.
I looked over my shoulder and he shrugged. For a moment, his dark eyes stared into my hazel ones and I felt the urge to ask him about my sister. What was it that he saw in her? Why was he doing this for someone who had hurt him so much?
“We won’t know unless we go inside,” he said, interrupting my train of thought.
He was right, but the fact that he was the one who said it had me hesitating. I still didn't trust him. I took one step over the threshold and felt the soggy ground squish beneath my boot.
“Hey, so before you follow me into the world of swamp dream magic-” God, that sounded absurd even to me- “maybe you ought to find some pants.”
Zane looked down at himself, as if only just now realizing that he wasn't fully clothed. The Zane I knew liked to be clothed. In fact, on our one and only date he had been dressed from Adam's apple to toe. It had all been very attractive, but if I was being honest, Zane could probably have been wearing a paper bag and be hot.
“I might have something in the room I was in.” His hands were clasped in front of him to hide his dignity.
I waited. He didn't move. I waited some more.
“Well are you going to go get it?” I asked.
He gave me a sneer. “I cannot.”
“Why?”
He looked down at the invisible lines that tethered us together, the magic neither of us could see but we could both feel.
“You hold the reins.” he snarled.
I couldn't be mad at him for being pissy about it. Heck, I wouldn't have liked someone to have the magical whammy on me either, but I didn't trust him enough to let him go.
“Right,” I took a deep breath and concentrated on the line. “Go get your clothes from the room you were being held in.”
He turned and walked away. The line would let him do just what I asked and no more. I wish I could say I didn't watch him go, but the view was too good not to give an appreciative look. When he returned with clothes in his hand, but not dressed I realized I should have worded my command better.
He must have seen my thoughts on my face. “This would be a great deal easier if you relinquished the hold.”
“I don't trust you,” I said.
“You will need your magic for other things,” he reminded me. “And I will be accompanying you anyway.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, that whole thing sounds good and logical right up until you realize the easiest way to keep your creepy girlfriend from getting hurt is to push me off a cliff or something. Just get dressed and let’s go. I'm a little freaked out that I can't smell wet dog anymore.” I was pretty sure that my nose had just grown accustomed to the smell, but that didn't make me feel any better.
I turned around to give Zane a bit of privacy as he pulled his clothes on. The brief pause had my brain going a million miles an hour. Did Wei feel for me the way Zane felt for Connie? Was he being punished for feeling what he did? Was everything that was going on my fault? Ugh. I didn't like these thoughts. I wanted them to go away. I wanted things to be simple and easy. I wanted to sit on a couch with my vampire boyfriend and play video games and remake the world in magic.
A hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped. When I whirled around, absolutely sure that Zane was about to push me into the swamp or something equally villainous I was struck by the sadness in his eyes.
“You are worried for him.” He didn't ask it, he said it. He was dressed now, and I was sure the clothes were his, a dark gray button-down shirt and a pair of deep brown slacks. While the other vampires liked to dress in stereotypes, Zane dressed like casual Friday at the CEO's lounge. It was always khakis or other slacks, and button-down shirts or expensive turtlenecks. Of all the vampires, his clothes seemed to be the most modern. I wondered why that was, considering I had been told he was the eldest of the brothers.
I shrugged. “What was your first clue?”
He reached a hand out and dabbed the wetness of my cheek. Great. I had gotten so used to crying that I didn't even realize when I did it now. Fan-friggen-tastic. He gave me a gentle look and I resisted the urge to cry some more. What was it about people being nice when I felt like crap that made me want to cry? Not cool.
I swiped angrily at my cheeks and took a step away from him. “Come on.”
Maahes sprang in front of me, his tail curling as he started to walk along the edge of the swamp water. His ghostly feet didn't make a single dip in the ground as he moved. I started to follow.
“Are we going to follow the cat?” he asked dubiously.
I shrugged. “That cat has a name, and yes. So far Maahes hasn't led me wrong.” We lapsed into silence as the swamp stretched out in front of us. When I couldn't take the sound of my feel on soggy ground anymore I asked, “how can this be a dream? I've been involved in dream magic before and you have to be asleep for it.”
“You do when it's somniamancy. But it is not the only magic that can produce a dream world.”
Great. More stuff about magic that everyone else seemed to know but me. “What else does it?”
He didn't answer at first. I looked over my shoulder at him, but he wasn't giving me that insufferable look that I was expecting. Instead he was looking over my shoulder, past me to something that lay beyond. I had a sudden urge to stay completely still. It was as if my body was telling me that if I didn't look at whatever had Zane's eyes glittering, I wouldn't see what had the vampire preparing himself for battle.
“Don't...move,” he whispered.
I didn't. I didn't even want to breathe. Maahes had hunkered down by my legs, his ears pinned back and the tip of his tail flicking like an anxious bird. It matched the beating of my heart. A fierce rumble reverberated out of his throat, sounding even more eerie because of the mist.
“What's going on?” I asked, so quietly that it would take a vampire's acute senses to hear me.
“Swamp hag.” He breathed the word, barely giving it any sound. If I had not been looking right at his mouth, watching the movement of his lips, I would not have been able to figure out what he was saying at all.
I flipped through the files of my memory until I came across the one about Hags. I had read about them in my grandmother's book. Okay, okay. I had skimmed about them. I was not the best student in the world. There is a chance I'm lazy. I'm working on it...you know...after I recreate the world with magic.
Hags were corrupted witches. Witches who, through some action usually involving blood sacrifices or forbidden magics, had bound themselves to other entities or creatures who gave them more power. It sounded like a great deal until you realize that the hag now corrupted the very land she walked on because she had done something terrible, something the very world couldn't abide.
I probably should have paid better attention, because I was pretty sure that a hag was a witch's greatest enemy or something. Yeah, I definitely should have researched that more.
“What do I do?”
“Have you ever dueled a hag?” he asked.
“What? You mean like pistols at dawn? Ten paces? All that crap?” I hissed between my teeth.
He gave me a look that told me that I had the complete wrong idea. Yeah, I wasn't surprised. I was one hundred percent sure that I had the wrong idea.
“Get behind me.”
“What?” I demanded.
“Get. Behind. Me.” He punctuated every word, as if I couldn't understand them as a sentence, but might as individual sounds. I was not amused.
“Dude-”
“Lorena, now.”
I was just about to tell him that I was the necromancer here and he couldn't order me to do anything when Maahes gave an almighty hiss. I whirled around and saw her, at least I was assuming it was a her, she barely looked human. She had two arms and two legs and one head, but that was about where the similarity stopped. Her back was curled over so much that her body looked more like a question mark with a lump growing out of the top. Her arms were too thin, and had the gnarled look of branches. They swayed like willow limbs as she walked. Her dress, barely more than a belted sack, hung on a lumpy body, and all of it was held up on two legs that would have looked more at home on a chicken.
She peered at us through a curtain of moldy hair. Her lips, thin and green, formed into a knife sharp smile. Fear froze my blood in my veins before she threw her head back and let out a wild shriek of laughter. I wasn't frozen anymore.
My legs were moving before I even thought. The ground was too wet and soggy beneath my frantic steps. I went knees first into the swamp ground and my pants became soaked in moss covered earth. It was not as pretty as it sounded. Truth? It hurt. Shocks of pain radiated up into my hip and then my back. I crawled like a crab behind Zane as another laughing shriek surged up behind me.
Zane had changed. I had seen vampires shift before. Dmitri and Yasmina had become more beast that human when they prepared for battle. Alan and his sister had been quick as lashes when given the opportunity. I had even seen Zane fight before, and I had heard from all of his brothers that he was the most powerful of them, as first born he was the closest to Vlad in strength. Even with all that I still didn't expect the guy I saw before me.
His muscles stood out beneath skin the color of a shadow. Not brown, but black. A rich dark black that you got on a moonless night. His eyes were like red suns glimmering out of his angular face. His teeth were elongated and sharp, making twin pearl points over his full lips. He was beautiful and terrifying.
A few weeks ago, he had saved me. Dmitri had gone a little bonkers, as the more primal vampires tend to, and I had been pretty sure I was done for. Then Zane had come out of nowhere and rescued me. He had called himself the Shadow, and now I could see why.
“Little witch, little witch, come out to play.” The hag's voice was like wet bark, grating against one another. She spoke with the sing-song tone of a nursery rhyme as she peered at me around the dark line of Zane's body. “Come out and play.”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “Nooo. Hard pass. Not gonna happen. I'm totally grounded.”
She frowned at me. “You decline?”
She said decline like it should be capitalized. I blinked. “Yes?”
Her already ugly face twisted until it would have done Picasso proud. A shrill scream reverberated through the swamp. The mist swirled around us forming a hurricane of smoky air. The scent of old dog surged up around me. My head went light. It thickened until I could barely see. All I saw was a swirl around me before the mist engulfed me completely. This was not where I wanted to be. All I could see was the shadow of Zane's body in front of me. Maahes was completely invisible.
My eyes fluttered closed and for just a moment I forgot what I was doing here. Fear leeched out of me. My body felt like rubber. I wanted to lay down. God, I was tired. I was so tired. And why wouldn't I be? Everything was wrong and nothing I did ever seemed to help. I didn't belong here. I belonged back at the burger joint, listening to people yell at me for not having the ice cream machine up at eleven thirty at night. I was just a gamer. I couldn't even make it in college. I took a deep breath and slithered to the ground. I didn't care that the wet, soggy ground was ruining my jeans. I didn't deserve to have them.
I heard the slap of flesh against flesh. I looked up and saw a dark shadow grabbing a green one. A clawed fist slammed down, and the hunched figure went to her knees. But then her hands shot out and Zane went flying. His dark body slammed against a tree.
“The dead are foolish to walk in my domain.”
Hey. That wasn't cool. Zane was alright. Yeah, he was a lying vampire but he was my lying vampire and if anyone was going to send him halfway across a swamp clearing it was going to be me. Another wave of mist washed over me and I was overwhelmed with the same self-loathing ennui I had been a moment ago. I shook my head. Crap. It was the mist. It was messing with my head.
Zane lunged at the hag again and managed another strike, but this time it barely seemed to hurt her. When the moonlight hanging between the Spanish moss caught her face I could see that her skin had changed. It was more like bark than flesh. When Zane's usually lethal claws hit her skin, he scraped off wood. She laughed, a high shrill sound and returned the strike. Zane didn't move, but her hand, tipped with twig like claws, hit nothing but smoke.
It was like watching two titans fight. One made of wood and stone, the other made of smoke and mist. Each hit did so little damage it was as if nothing was happening at all. It should have made me feel better, it didn't. Zane was a vampire, and that gave him more stamina than most, but he'd been locked up in a room for who knew how long and his weakness showed. No, I thought. It didn't show. The shadow of his movements masked everything, but I could feel it in the connection that we shared. He was weakening and it was happening quick.
I could help. I don't know why it took me so long to remember, I blamed my brain being scared witless, but the dead were my domain. My magic sought them like water to the river, or something as equally poetic. I could summon them. I could command them. But those weren't the first tricks I had learned. The first one had been my ability to invigorate them. I could pump a vampire so full of energy that it was like he'd been eating five course meals and preparing for a triathlon.
I opened that connection between Zane and I. My magic traveled down that line until I was so aware of him that I wasn't sure where he started and I began. I could feel his exhaustion. It wasn't like human exhaustion. Vampires didn't breathe or sleep. It was more like a pile of bricks had been laid on his shoulders and he was still trying to move. He shook beneath the weight of it.
I summoned up that energy that made me a necromancer, the magic that felt like ozone and summer nights on my skin. I pushed it down that connection, spilled it into him like he was a cup. He jerked when it hit him, stumbled down on one knee. For a moment, I thought that he was upset. His shoulders became a set, rigid line and his shadowy head bowed. Then I felt his gratitude. The hag slammed her hand down, aiming for a strike to the back of his neck. In a faster move than I could follow he snapped his hand around her wrist and yanked. I heard the snap of a branch and dimly realized that was her arm breaking. She trilled her pain and lashed out with her free hand, catching him across the cheek. He didn't shift to shadow and I felt my own head jerk with the pain that I felt.
Anger suffused us. How dare she strike us. How dare she not know when she had lost. Only a fool did not realize when the fight was over. It was far better to bow to a greater opponent than to hurtle yourself against insurmountable odds.
It was so strange to be in a vampire’s mind, or maybe it was just Zane's. I had touched the minds of vampires before, it was how I knew that Wei loved me. My own brain was liable to run around with thoughts until everything was a great big tangled web. His mind was so organized. I could follow each thought to the inevitable conclusion. She had lost, he had won, and it was idiotic that she hadn't realized it yet. I wondered what it was like to live with that kind of confidence.
He slammed an open palm into her bark like face. There was another crack of branches. It wasn't blood that spurted out of her nose, but something thicker, more like sap. Her head snapped back and she would have crumpled to the ground were it not for the way he still held her broken arm.
“Stop!” she cried. “Stop! I relent. You win.” She held her hands up in submission.
He still held her. We wanted to break her neck. We didn't trust her. I shook my head. Now that things weren't so hectic I could separate his thoughts from my own. I could feel that he didn't believe her, that he thought it was a trap or some kind of trick. He didn't say it out loud. Instead he held her and turned his glimmering eyes on me. What did I want to do, he seemed to ask.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She looked at me. The sap had filled the cracks of her face. “They call me Dora, at least they did years ago. Now I am traitor, and hag.”
I didn't need to ask who “they” was. I assumed that it was other witches. “Because you made a compact?” I asked, curiosity overriding my other worries. I might be a lazy student, but that didn't mean I didn't want to understand.
She laughed. “The Green Man needed a herald, and I was more than willing to give myself to his clutches.”
A Green Man, now that was something I had read about. Every forest, or bastion of wild greenery, had a Green Man who protected it. He was some kind of fae and it was his place to protect where the wilds were still free of man. My grandmother's journal had said that they were extinct, or at least on the way to being extinct.
“There are no Green Men,” Zane said. “They left when the Queen of Fae called her people home.”
Okay, more information. What the heck. What I knew about the Fae could fit on one side of an index card. I knew that they had a Queen, and that she ruled them for a few thousand years or something like that. That was pretty much all I knew.
Her wooden lips curled into a smile. “Not mine. Not mine. He did not wish to leave me, nor the swamp we had tended together. But we couldn't survive, could we? Not alone, not apart. We needed each other. And so we bound ourselves together. Him to me and back again.” She shuddered as if she was remembering a particularly good kiss. “We shared our essence.”
I felt a desire to blush and I wasn't entirely sure I understood why.
“You committed a blasphemy of magic,” Zane spat.
She shrugged her good shoulder. “Is there something you would not do for love, vampire?”
I felt an image of my sister's face flash into Zane's mind. She looked soft in his memories, one arm throw over her head as she slept. Her freckles looked like stars to him. Her lips were pale rose petals. I wasn't surprised to see her. What I was surprised to see was a brief glimpse of myself, curled up with him on the couch. He locked the thoughts down and away from me and I blinked at the sudden lack of contact.
What the heck had that been about? I shook my head, unwilling to think about it. I had enough on my plate without wondering if Zane was beginning to have conflicting feelings.
“I wouldn't corrupt myself for it.” I shook my head. “Not for anything.”
She laughed. “How do you think you will bare a vampire's child? They are dead, you know. They cannot bring life without life being brought to them.”
Honestly? I hadn't thought of that. I had just kind of assumed that there was some spell or something that would let that whole thing happen. Was she right? Was I going to have to bind myself to a vampire to make this whole prophecy thing happen? Oh crap. I shook my head. No. She couldn't be right, she couldn't possibly be right.
She smiled that knife-like smile and gave a cackle that sounded like branches caught in a hurricane wind. Her nose had stopped bleeding but the lines of her lower face were still filled with that strange ichor.
“Oh, you foolish little witch. Did your teacher not tell you?” The look on my face must have given me away. “You don't have a teacher, do you?”
“I did.” I snapped. “I had two of them. You took them. They are here somewhere. Where are they? Where are we?” All the questions that had been building up came out of my mouth in a tumble. I wasn't going to be distracted by her tidbits of knowledge.
She tsked and shook her head sadly. “If your teachers had been worthy of your loyalty, they would have told you all about pocket dimensions and witches’ travel.”
Pocket dimensions sounded like something I should be hunting for through a temporarily popular phone app.
“I don't understand.”
She tugged on her broken arm and Zane gave me another look. I gave him the barest of nods and he dropped her to the ground. She crumpled into a pile of spindly limbs, but righted herself quickly enough.
“It used to be when a witch got strong enough she could use her magic to create a place just for her. It wasn't very large, but it was necessary. After all, once upon a time, people would come to us for all manner of things -- charms, rituals, knowledge; both humans and otherwise. We were the crux between the world of magic and the mundane. We needed a place to be ours, to get away from it all.
What it was depended on the witch. Yours might be a cemetery under a full moon, or a little house in the middle of nowhere where it was perpetually autumn. It would be entirely up to you. You could take all the time you needed.
We could bring whomever we wanted there, make what we needed. All the time in all the world was ours to be had in these places. But when magic started to fail, so too did our dimensions.” She spat the word, and a hunk of that drying ichor to the ground. “But when I bound myself to my Green Man...” she spread her fingers wide and swept them in a semi-circle.
“If this is yours, how are we here?”
She laughed. “Well, that's Marquessa's fault, isn't it? She tried to bring us all together.”
My heart did a little leap. “Marquessa did this?”
“No, but she found the witch who could. One who could summon us all at once. It didn't go well.” She rubbed her wounded arm.
“What do you mean?” I demanded, feeling more confused than ever.
“Witches are solitary creatures by nature, little witch. We enjoy our solitude and we do not much enjoy it being interrupted. Ornery women were disrupted.” She shrugged and waved a hand towards the broken door that I could still see behind me. “And all of this ensued.”
“I still don't understand. Are you saying that Marquessa found a witch that could summon you all, that this witch did, and all of those doors are pockets to dimensions?”
Dora nodded, her willow-like hair moving around her face. “Is that not what I said?”
I wanted to tell her no, that most of this I was piecing together through bits and pieces of what she had said and my own knowledge, but I didn't. “And that some of them took offense to being uprooted and a bitch fest went down and that ended....how?”
She sighed. “We fought, and magics combined, as they are inclined to do, and some are stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“Mmm.” She plucked at her scrap of a dress. “Stuck.”
I blew out a breath. “Great. Something else to add to my to-do list.”
This was like one of those open world video games were the quests just kept piling up and I wasn't sure how I was going to get everything done before I got to the main quest. I jerked my hand through my hair and growled. “Okay. So, do you know where Marquessa and Jenny Green are?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Not here.”
That had me pausing. “Who is here?”
She gave me a wicked smile, but didn't answer me. I didn't even need to give Zane a look for him to swipe Dora up. She gave a protesting squeak. “Only the Frenchman!” She said Frenchman like it was a title. Then her lips shifted so the creepy smile became an even creepier grin. “He could help you.”
I snorted. “uh-huh.”
“He has the same affinity for the dead that you carry. He could teach you many things.”
I have to admit it. I paused. I knew so little about my own magic, and the lore about necromancy was very, very low. Most of the books I had thumbed through had little more than a paragraph about what I could do and it usually boiled down to “can raise the dead”. Everything that I was doing came from instinct, not knowledge, and instinct was only going to get me so far.
“What do you want?” I asked, knowing that it wouldn't come without some kind of strings.
“Let me go,” she shrugged. “That's all I ask. I have never hurt anyone. I wish only to be returned to my Green Man and my home.”
“She should die,” Zane said. “She will only be more difficult in the future.”
She gave Zane a look. “I have never been difficult to anyone who did not tread on my own lands. And, given the right education, I could never stand up to a necromancer of prophecy. Have you any clue how powerful you could be, witchling?”
Temptation beat around me like a storm. I was really tired of not knowing what my magic could do, and I was really tired of being the weakest witch.
“Show me the necromancer first.”
“Lorena!” Zane snapped. “She is a hag! She is lying.” His brilliantly gold eyes were filled with disbelief.
“I never lie,” she hissed. “Not once has a lie passed my lips. The truth is terrifying enough.”
He shook her and her wounded arm snapped back and forth like a branch caught in a breeze. She heaved out a whimper of pain.
“Zane, stop!” I cried out. “This is my decision to make.”
He stopped as if I had hit pause. The look he gave me was filled with anger. “I forgot,” he snarled, and I didn't need the tether between us to feel the anger radiating off of him. “I am your thrall.” I could tell by the way he said it that “thrall” was not the first word he had wanted to say. A sick feeling slithered through my belly. It was true enough, my magic kept him tethered to me, took away his choices. I felt bad for it, but I was also too afraid of what he would do without it there. He was my undead slave, and it was wrong.
He dropped her to the ground with more force than was necessary. She managed to look both amused and offended.
“Come along,” she said, beckoning with a hand that looked a little less like a branch and a little more like flesh. “I will show you where he slumbers.”
I followed. I knew Zane didn't want to go, but after a moment he fell into step beside me. Dora was humming as she walked over soggy ground and raised roots. I stumbled in her wake. On a particularly bad one, Zane caught me.
“Thanks,” I said as he helped me over the roots. He didn't answer so I continued. “I'm sorry for the...enthrallment.”
He snorted. “Are you?”
“I am,” I answered. “I wish it didn't need to be there. I wish I weren't afraid of you. I wish we were friends.”
“You fear me?” he asked, sounding annoyed. “You could command me with a wave of your hand and you claim to be afraid of me.”
I stepped over a fallen branch that seemed to squirm out of my path. “You are stronger than me, faster than me. You've got that mist thing going for you. Not to mention that whole immortal thing. And at the end of the day you are in love with my sister...who wants me dead. I think I'd be stupid not to be afraid of you.”
He was quiet again, but there wasn't the same weight. “She is not so terrible as you believe.”
I couldn't help but roll my eyes. “Are you serious? I mean, really? The girl spent the first few weeks I knew her pretending to be my friend. And when my mom decided to use her mental magics to kidnap me Connie helped set it up. I'm not an idiot. There is only one way my mom could have found us at the club. My sister betrayed us. And then there was the fact that she was willing to drain you of your life to change the prophecy? I mean, I don't know how you are the one who is still pining after her.”
“She's dedicated,” he insisted. “She believes in her cause. I cannot hold that against her.”
I sighed and shook my head. “I dunno. Seems to me if the person I love is willing to drain me of everything that keeps me alive for their cause...”
“I know she does not love me as I love her,” he interrupted. I stumbled again and this time his hands weren't half so gentle when he righted me. Instead he whirled me around and I found myself looking into his eyes. I expected them to be red, but they were his normal gold flecked with copper and yellow. So far as I could tell all vampires had beautiful eyes. Maybe it was a prerequisite. His hands gripped my upper arms. “I know that she doesn't. She loves her cause, and her family more than she will ever love me. But love does not need to be returned to be real, Lorena. And pretending like the love between two people must be equal to matter is foolishness. You should know that.”
I blinked. “What the heck does that mean?”
He gave me a sour look. “Do not act so blind.”
I frowned harder. “Don't be so vague then. What are you talking about?”
His eyes bored into mine as if they were looking for something. Then his sour look rearranged and he was smiling at me. Then he laughed. “How old are you, Lorena?”
I wasn't even a little sure about why that mattered but I answered him anyway. “I'm nineteen.”
He shook his head slowly. “So very young.”
I gave his chest a shove. He moved back, but I knew better than to think it was because of my strength. He moved because he wanted to.
“I'm nineteen, dude, not ten. I'm not that young.”
“Age and youth are not the same thing. A person can be fifty and still be young, or twelve and know too much of the world. But it takes someone very young to mistake lust for love so easily as you have.”
The words were like a punch to my gut. I watched in shocked silence as he wandered away following the now barely visible trail of Dora the swamp hag. If it weren't for Maahes blinking at me halfway between her and us I might not have seen the trail at all. Zane's broad back was a shadow in the mist.
“Hey!” I called, charging after him, clamoring between roots and branches to do it. “Don't you walk away after saying something like that. This isn't some stupid TV show where we can cut to black after some zinger has been delivered. What do you mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders, but his lips were twisted into an amused grin. “I mean exactly what I said Lorena. Lust and love are not the same thing. I had assumed you knew that.”
“I love Wei.”
“Do you?” His words were light, twisting them into mock sympathy.
I resisted the urge to punch him in the shoulder or something equally futile. “Wei is...he's awesome.”
Zane nodded. “My brother is both honorable and loyal. There is no better person in the world. But I do not think that you love him.”
The ground was soggy beneath my boots, and my steps were so hard that I was leaving deep grooves in my wake that filled with murky, foul smelling water but that's not why I wrinkled my nose. “What would you know?”
“I watched you, Lorena. I watched you with him every night that I could. More than you realize. I can be a shadow after all. I saw how you two interacted with one another. There is a great deal of lust there. You two can hardly keep your hands to yourselves. It's why he was stolen away. The Order couldn't trust you to wait to fall in love before you,” he paused before saying, “enjoyed him.”
The blush that rushed to my cheeks was enough to make my head feel light. “First and foremost, the fact that you saw us get...handsy with one another is nothing short of creepy. Just throwing that out there. And secondly, I can love someone and lust after them. They aren't mutually exclusive. Would I be on this quest to get him back if I didn't love him?”
He smirked. “The average person? No. They wouldn't. They would talk themselves out of it a thousand times before they got to their destination. But you have a broad streak of resolve, Lorena. I think it could have been Vlad himself locked up by the Order and you still would have gone after him because you cannot let those around you suffer.” He shook his head. “That's kindness, not love. Love is trust, respect, and friendship all rolled up into one.”
I frowned. Was he right? Maybe a little. But not about Wei. I loved Wei. I was sure of that. I trusted him. He was easy to trust. And I had respected him from day two.
“I care about him,” I finally said. ”I trust him.”
He nodded. “You might. But that's not love. He loves you but that's not the same.”
Whatever I might have said next was interrupted by Dora giving a shout of glee. “Hah! Here he is, here he is. I knew I had not lost him.” She started humming again, her spindly hips swishing as she approached what looked like three willow trees woven together. The swamp water was exceptionally low here, and the ground was merely wet rather than soggy. The long slender branches wrapped around what looked, at first, like a cocoon. She tugged at them until they slithered apart to reveal what looked like a long, smoky white crystal with a man trapped inside.
He was an older man, old enough to be my grandfather. His hair had more salt than pepper and was thin enough that it was nearly lost in the bright white of crystal that entrapped him.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Marco,” she said fondly running a hand over the face of the crystal as if she could touch the man beneath. “We were friends once, you know, dear friends. He came to see me. Foolish of him. He got caught up in a spell anyway.” She gave the crystal a pat. “Well, he's all yours.”
“Once you free him he is.”
She frowned. “Was that part of the bargain?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is. You said you'd give me someone who could help me learn.”
She gave a bark of laughter. “Well I'm giving him to you. I can't free him. I never said that I would.”
“Hey now-”
Her face was filled with an emotion I couldn't place. There was a brightness to her eyes that I didn't understand. It looked similar to a dog's look, when their favorite person picked up their favorite play toy, but I was not her favorite, and she was wasn't a dog. She moved to the very top of the mound we all stood on. Her feet so light she barely displaced the grass. What the heck was she even made of?
Zane was suddenly in front of me. His skin had gone darker, taking on the hint of shadow. “Stay back.”
I took a step away. “What are we supposed to do with him?”
She waved her hand flippantly. “I don't care. Just leave, leave and keep your end of the bargain, let me go. Free me.”
I shook my head. “I can't use him like that. Not trapped in a crystal.”
Her eyes twinkled and went wide with mock shock. “You would break our bargain.”
“You broke it first, you lured me here under false pretenses. I can't do anything with that.” I waved my hand the length of the crystal. “You lied to me.”
Her eyes took on a lethal shine and a ripple of fear swam through me. “I do not lie,” she repeated herself, “not once had a lie ever left my lips. What reason would I have for that when the truth is terrible enough?”
A mighty howl broke through the everlasting night. Goosebumps erupted on my flesh, making my skin itch. I took another step back. I got the feeling that something was very, very wrong.
“Lorena, run,” Zane said it so softly at first, so flatly that I couldn't make sense of the word. “Lorena!”
“Come to me my love! My Green Man! I've brought something good for you to eat.” She sang it like a nursery rhyme, continuing to waggle her nonexistent hips.
My legs prepared to run but I couldn't make them do it. They felt almost hot with the desire to move but I was frozen in place. Another howl ripped through the night and I couldn't move an eyelash, much less my legs.
The barely soggy ground spread apart. The trees shifted as if to make way for what was coming from beneath. Zane shoved at my shoulder and I knew I should be running but fear kept me pinned in place.
A massive shape made of mossy green fur crawled out from the ground. Muck and branches clung to its body as two clawed paws heaved an enormous bulk up. It was a massive shape, and after my eyes adjusted to the fear pounding behind them I realized that this was where the smell of wet dog was coming from. The beast was decidedly lupine, with a long nose and paw-like hands and feet, but the body had a man's shape, and when it finally stood it stood on two legs, not four. His eyes, black as obsidian, stared down at us and it began to drool.
“RUN!” Zane cried, shoving me hard again.
I ran. Something broke inside of me and I ran blindly into the swamp, disrupting frogs and snakes as I went. Maahes launched himself after me. Water splashed around my boots and I fell at least twice that I could remember. It was probably more. I didn't care. It wasn't just that the creature looked so inhuman, it had been the look of hunger in its eyes when it looked at me and Zane, as if we were the top shelf kibble.
When I fell the third time, I chanced a look over my shoulder. I expected to see Zane right behind me, but he wasn't. He hadn't followed me at all. I blinked my confusion. Where was he? What was he doing? A brief touch to the magical line between us told me that he had stayed behind, he was going to fight the beast.
I should let him fight it. I should run. These were my first thoughts, but I shook them away. Zane wouldn't be in this place if it hadn't been for me. I wasn't going to leave him behind now. I just didn't have that in me.
I turned and charged back across the wild path I had made. When I got to the triple tree clearing, Zane was pinned to the ground by the Green Man and Dora was kneeling over him, drawing her claws down Zane's chest, opening him up like he was a package. His skin split. His head thrown back like in a silent scream. Why wasn't he turning into mist? Her eyes were bright with pleasure. She lifted one hand, coated in Zane's blood, and brought it to the creature’s lips. The beast licked it off with dog like delight.
Ew. Gross. Not cool. What was wrong with these people? Okay, scratch that, I knew what was wrong. They were all kinds of magically screwed up. Well that ended right now.
“Hey!” I cried out. “Back off my vampire!”
I shoved my magic into Zane like a fist. It was easier this time, as if my magic knew him. It spilled through him, over him, into him. With one mighty shove of obsidian the Green Man went tumbling across the clearing, landing in the swamp with a wet slap.
Dora whirled on me, her teeth drawn back to reveal brown and yellow teeth inside of her mouth. “How dare you!”
“Woman, you started this!” I snapped back.
But she wasn't listening. Instead she launched herself at me, her willowy body slammed into me with more strength than I would have given her credit for. I didn't care. I tumbled with her to the ground, my robes tangling around my legs. She tried to hit me, but the magic that lived in the fabric flared and all she got in was a muted slap. My cheek would grow red, but nothing more. She tried again, her clawed hand nearly shimmering with magic but the same thing happened.
While she was busy glaring at me I shoved my hand into one of the pouches. I came up with a fistful of salt. Salt was the great magic compensator. It was the base to our acid. I threw it in her face and she howled. I rolled, tumbling her off me. She grabbed my leg and jerked, and I slid across the ground.
My training with Wei kicked in. My muscles responded to her attempts to stroke at me before my brain could follow what was happening. I went to some cool place in my head where I was almost watching us fight rather than being a part of it. My arms blocked, my fists struck and I used her strength against her. I could hear Zane fighting in the background, but I couldn't pay attention to it. I had my own battle to win.
Dora shrieked at me, that brittle branch against branch sound echoed in my ears, but it sounded far more human than it had before. I looked at her, and all the places where the salt had brushed were fleshy. She had been pretty once, I realized, with dainty feminine features and sun-tanned skin. Her hair was golden brown, not green, and rich with curls. She swept out at me, but her arm was still broken with Zane's earlier attack and it was nothing. The other one was flesh. It slapped against me, but she didn't have the same training I did. I blocked it.
“Free him!” I grabbed her flesh
“I can't!” she growled.
“Bull.” I grabbed her by her now human hair. “You made an entire dream world. There is no way you can't free one witch from magic.”
She hissed at me, scrapped a hand down my arm. But in the end, we both knew I had won.
“Call off your beast and free the mage.” I gave her a shake.
She spoke in a language I didn't know, but it sounded vaguely Celtic in nature. I didn't know enough of any form of Gaelic to say which it might have been, but the Green Man came to a halt, turning to face his mistress with disappointed eyes. Zane sagged to the ground. He looked tired. He felt tired.
“I do not know if I can do what you ask.”
“Well you are going to try.” I said, refusing to release her. I understood Zane's resistance to letting her go earlier.
She hesitated. “It will take time.”
“We are in a pocket dimension,” I said, recalling what she'd told me earlier about having all the time in the world when in such a space. “We've got nothing but time.”
~~
Zane was pretty badly injured. He managed to fumble his way to Dora's hut, carrying the big crystalline witch in his arms, but I had to steadily feed him magic to do it. If I was being honest with myself, something I didn't like to do, I wasn't going to be able to keep it up. My magic was like a well, and it was starting to run dry.
We arrived at a hut, barely more than a shack, in the middle of nowhere. It had a single room and a sagging roof. One side of the hut was taking up by a large cooking area, complete with a big cauldron hanging on a swinging arm over a long cold fire. A small bed took up the other side of the room, piled high with patchwork quilts. The whole place smelled like herbs and must.
Dora stoked the fire, and the warm blaze pushed away the bad smells and the dank cold. She pushed food into my hands, and surprisingly it looked good. Sure, it was just bread, sausage, and cheese, but it wasn't covered in muck or mold which made it the most appealing thing that I had seen in the entire swamp.
“Eat,” she told me flatly. “I must gather herbs.”
“You are leaving?” I said, feeling automatically defensive. I didn't trust her to return.
“I do not have what I need at the hut, and your feet will not do well in my swamp. Rest, and I will return.”
Zane was too weak to argue, I was too tired to argue. I watched her go without saying anything else. I sighed. Some heroine I was. I needed to eat, sleep, and regain my energy. Real heroes just kept going even when things sucked. I failed. With that happy thought, I took a bite of bread I hoped wasn't poisoned or enchanted and plopped down on the bed. It was more comfortable than I would have expected.
Zane continued to stand in the doorway, looking like a pale shadow of himself. I scooted over and patted the spot next to me. It was apparently enough of a command that he flopped, face first, on the bed.
His nice clothes were ruined, and he was limp with exhaustion. I felt a wave of sympathy and patted his shoulder.
“I'd offer you some of the food, but vampires don't gain anything by eating.”
There was a long bout of silence. “I need blood.”
I paused. Then I took another bite and held my arm out to him. He turned his head towards the skin, then looked up at me with golden eyes.
“You would let me feed from you?”
I shrugged. “I have discovered that I have absolutely no problem with being a meal for bloodsuckers. Maybe other people do, but I don't mind. Besides, you are currently connected to me. The very least I can do is open up a vein for you.”
He gave me a look so blank of expression that I knew he was being careful. I could have pushed, with words or magic, but I decided not to. Instead I just gave him a smile. “Limited time offer, my friend.”
It wasn't the first time that I would feed a vampire, that honor went to Wei. I almost shivered at the memory of it. I don't know if it's me, or vampires, but being bitten felt really good. Like...two hours’ worth of hot and heavy make out session good.
“You are thinking of him again.” Zane's lips brushed against my inner wrist as he spoke. This time I did shiver.
“Sorry. Can't help it.”
“It's....it's alright.”
I gave Zane a look. But he wasn't looking up at me, He was looking at my arm. I had pale skin. Both of my parents are some form of European, so my skin is naturally fair. It didn't help anything that all of my hobbies were indoor hobbies. I never got much sun. You could follow the veins in my arm all the way up to my neck. Zane's eyes were doing that. I became very aware of how blue they looked beneath my skin. His brown fingers gently cupped my arm, one around my wrist, one just above my elbow. He laid a kiss against the flesh.
“Dude,” I said.
“Forgive me,” he whispered. “It has been a long time since a woman has offered her flesh to me.”
I raised my brow. “Connie doesn't....”
He shook his head slowly. “No, she does not.”
I wasn't sure why that made me feel good, but it did. Perfect Connie, so focused on her quest to screw me over that she wouldn't even offer her blood to the vampire who loved her. I tried to push that down. It wasn't fair to think it, but I did anyway. Oops.
His fangs slid out slowly, and they pricked against my skin. The graze made me gasp. He looked up at me, and his eyes were shimmering gold.
“You...like this...” he had to speak carefully around the fangs.
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I do.”
This time it was him that shivered. I liked seeing him shiver. Jeez. What was wrong with me? Wasn't I in love with someone else? Didn't I love Wei? Of course, I did. I had to. Wei was perfect. I could trust him. I didn't trust Zane. I didn't even get along with Zane...right? Okay, not true. Right up until I realized he was a backstabber I had gotten along with him just fine.
He bit and I gasped, but he didn't pull away. The fullness of his lips was vivid against my skin as he drank me down. My fist clenched and unclenched as waves of pleasure shivered through my body. Parts of me that didn't get nearly enough attention tingled and I had to resist the urge to ask him to do more.
He drank from me. His eyes closed and he took deep swallows from my skin. The connection that existed between us blossomed and I could see exactly what else he wanted to do. A blush surged to my cheeks as his thoughts invaded my own. Zane was...creative.
“Oh,” I gasped.
His eyes flashed open and he jerked suddenly away. Two lines of blood trickled down my wrist, but it wasn't as much as it could have been. I felt a little light headed, but I didn't think it was just the fault of blood loss.
“Forgive me,” he blurted out, his fangs still bright against his lips.
I shook my head. “Dude, you do not need to say you are sorry for that.”
He gave me a long look. “You don't...you aren't...upset?”
I laughed. “Why the heck would I be upset?”
His head tilted to the side. He was definitely feeling better. His color was better, not half so gray. His eyes didn't have the sunken and weary look anymore. I however, definitely needed to eat, and probably take a nap. Yeah, a nap was a fantastic idea.
I ripped off a chunk of bread, wrapped it around on of the sausages and a bit of cheese. He was still looking at me when I took a bite of my slap-dash sandwich.
“You aren't offended?”
I knitted my brows. “I just got a glimpse of your really vivid fantasy of being a human sandwich between you and Wei. That is, in my opinion, the coolest fantasy ever and I am pretty much the exact opposite of offended.”
It had been seriously vivid. I hadn't known that a dude would be okay with that kind of pairing, but I had seen it with...well...not my own two eyes, but it was pretty close.
The blush on his cheeks was so dark it was nearly purple. “You are blunt.”
I shrugged and took another bite. I could almost feel my body breaking down the food. “Let's be honest here. Blunt gets things said. Some people are super polite, beat around the bush types, I don't have time for that. I liked what you thought, I've said so. What more do you want?”
He paused. “Connie...does not like to be touched.”
Okay, while I did appreciate the honesty, that was probably way more about my half-sister than I ever needed to know. Even so, I felt sympathetic. “I'm sorry.” I thought of Reikah. “Is she asexual? Sex repulsed?”
He gave me a look like he didn't understand my phrases.
“There are some people who are really adverse to sex. There is a whole spectrum of it, but some of them are sex repulsed. They aren't just neutral about sex, they are turned off. It's no big deal.” I shrugged. I was of the opinion that everyone needed to find out who and what they were. I had recently found out that I liked being a vampire snack and was totally cool with being a buffet for two. Neat.
He thought it over. “I don't know what she is. We don't talk about it.”
I finished off my food. “What do you talk about?”
“Her quest, the order.”
“Sounds like she likes to dominate the conversation.” I couldn't help but feel a little petty about that. If Connie wasn't down for naughty time, that was cool, but only talking about the things that interested you wasn't what I would call a nice thing.
“She is driven.”
I nodded and laid down on the bed. “Yeah, I know.”
He went quiet and I closed my eyes. I seriously needed a nap.
“If I go to sleep you won’t kill me, will you?”
I was surprised when I felt him lay down in front of me. It took me a moment to realize he had put himself between me and the door, the only way into the little hut.
“No,” he said, “I won’t kill you.”
I believed him. Shock and amazement.