HAPTER ONE
What really sucked was that I knew it was a dream, but I still couldn't wake up. Most dreams were a foggy haze where things didn't fit together, like puzzle pieces from different boxes. This dream was real, too real, a half-remembered memory just distorted enough to know that I wasn't actually awake. It was full surround sound with the volume turned up and high definition television. It was full on 3D interactive with those fancy glasses and bright colors, a video game that I wanted to get lost in or maybe couldn't escape from.
In my too-real dream, I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an SUV. It, the car, not the seat, was too long to be realistic. There were an extra two bench seats so that it looked more like one of those weird stretch limos rather than the car that I remembered. The seats were filled with four vampire brothers, also known in the secret world of the paranormal as the Sons of Vlad. Yeah, that Vlad. Vlad the third, the second son of Vlad Dracula, more commonly known as The Impaler, and the very first vampire to ever walk the earth. There were three witches: one who I could only call organic, the other was very...mathematical, and then there was me, who was lucky enough to call myself a witch, if only just barely.
In the very back seat was Alan, who was quite possibly the most beautiful man who had ever been born. His angelic face was fixed into a charming and polite smile. His long golden hair floated around his angular face like a summer cloud. He wore dark leather pants on long slender legs and a sapphire blue French Renaissance jacket left unlaced to show off a bare chest. There were other men, bigger men, who were chiseled with washboard abs and other features. Not Alan. He was all slender lines and elegant beauty. His lips were parted just enough that I could see a glitter of fang.
“You'll have to choose, you know.” He spoke French, but I knew what he said. I had never taken French. My years had been spent sitting in Mr. Bergen's German classes instead. Woe is me.
“Choose,” he repeated.
Choosing. That's what this was all about. The reason why I was living in a great big mansion in the mountains of rural Virginia. The reason why I was learning about my history and the magic that lived inside of me. It was me deciding on one of three, or was that four now, who would become my beau and, ultimately, the father of a child of prophecy.
“I know,” I said. My voice echoed strangely in my ears, like I was talking down a wind tunnel.
“How beautiful.”
I was about to ask him what was beautiful when I realized his attention wasn't on me anymore; it was on the guy a few seats up.
The car rocked, shivering beneath me. I felt a trill of fear as we took a sharp turn around the mountain. I was pretty sure one of the wheels left the road, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Just me.
Dmitri, in his full Romani glory, was looking at me, completely unaware of Alan's provocative attention. He was dressed in black, but the outfit was out of date: loose billowing slacks trimmed with dark fur and a long vest so dark in hue that it got lost against the romantic profusion of curls. Beneath the vest, he wore a laced-up tunic left open just enough to catch a hint of the impressive musculature beneath. But I couldn't enjoy the view because of the look he was giving me. It wasn't a deep look, like you might give someone who was interesting to you, or even the soft look that happened when that special someone stepped into your view. It wasn't as if he cared that I was there, but that anyone was there, someone to give his intense attentions to.
“Pay attention to me,” he said.
“I do,” I promised.
The car shivered again, as if it knew something I didn't.
Then there was Zane, little more than a shadow, and not just because of the rich deep brown of his skin. His features were less perfect, less visceral from everyone else's. Perhaps because I didn't know him, perhaps because I knew he had been drained nearly to the point of death. I didn't know.
“You saved me.” His voice made goosebumps appear on my unconscious flesh. It was deep and rich and precise, as if he thought about each and every word before it left his lips. “I will save you before the end.”
The end of what? I wanted to ask him. The end of this prophecy? The end of this weird road trip? My whole life was a series of endings and beginnings. I needed him to be a little more precise.
The sky turned dark, and storm clouds in shades of purple, black, and green filled the horizon. It looked like rain but not the kind I'd wanna go out in.
“I don't know you,” I whispered. I wasn't sure if I was talking to Zane or the impending storm. Maybe it was both.
What I did know was that the girl sitting next to him was the closest thing I had to a friend. Jenny sat with one of her long, athletic legs tucked up beneath the perfect point of her chin. Her skin, a deep burnished brown, shimmered with the bronze blush she liked to wear. She was reaching a hand cluttered with rings out to me, offering something that I couldn't actually see.
“Are you okay?” Jenny asked, her voice echoing similarly to my own.
Was I? Maybe. I didn't know that either. The dream was beginning to stretch, like too little fabric across too much skin. I didn't answer her, not because I didn't want to, but because my lips wouldn't move. I wanted to wake up, but the dream held me down.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
When I could focus on her, the beautiful skin that she took such care of was cracking. A soft glow was spilling through the lines in her flesh.
“Are you?” I asked.
“I... don’t know.”
Count on Jenny to be the only one to answer me, even in a dream.
On the other side of her was another woman whose face was vivid, but the rest of her wasn't. She was hidden in a robe in shades of smoke. The center of her forehead held a diamond, like a bindi charm, which suited her, considering it was Reika. The apples of her cheeks were decorated with mathematics symbols. Not plus signs or anything like that, but strangely perfect interconnecting lines that formed pictures.
“Do you have to follow the prophecy?” she asked, her eyes flashing with a power I didn't really understand. “Do you have to end the world?”
Rain hit the windshield, green and acidic. Thunder, like the howling of wolves, rolled down the mountains. Everything started to shake. Fear turned inside of my belly. I didn't want to end the world.
“Ya gotta choose.”
This voice, rich with the drawl of Appalachia, drew me to a woman I was sure hadn't been in the car before. Marquessa sat in the very back, next to Alan, and smiled an enigmatic smile that turned the deep mahogany of her cheeks into apples.
“No, she doesn't.” a woman answered. I couldn't see her, but I knew my mother's voice now. “She can just walk away.”
They started to bicker, but not with words. I knew they were arguing in the way that you simply know things in a dream, with unconscious certainty.
A hand reached out and touched my face. It was strong and sure. My fear dwindled inside of my belly, and I looked into eyes of flecked obsidian. Wei was beautiful in the way a sword was beautiful, honed to perfection. His long dark hair was coiled into a topknot, held in place by a bright band. A changsun top in shades of green brought out the natural gold in his skin. But he, more than anyone I had ever known, was more than a collection of colors and shapes. He was lethal and glorious and proud, and every emotion was held behind a perfect veneer, invisible unless you knew how to look. I knew, or I liked to think I did. He loved me; I could see it in those eyes.
“Watch me,” he said, even as the SUV plummeted over the side of the mountain. I felt my stomach jump into my throat as we fell, and a dozen hands reached out to grab me as the rest of us fell. “Just watch.”
I jerked awake with a suddenness that left me breathless. Rain pounded down against the window of my bedroom, turning the rose-stained glass into a pattern of colors through water. Lightening flickered in the distance, illuminating the shape of a man who stood in my bedroom doorway. I knew the shape instantly.
“Wei?” I asked, just in case I was still dreaming. A flash of lightning illuminated my otherwise dark bedroom. The usually warm wood of my furniture looked cold in the hard temporary brilliance.
“You cried out.”
He was careful to keep his voice empty, but I knew better. I could feel him. I was...aware of him. To be fair, I was aware of the undead in general. I was a necromancer, or at least, that was what everyone was telling me; it gave me an edge when dealing with the undead. What all those edges were, I wasn't sure.
“Sorry,” I said. I meant it. He looked tired. It was little more than a tightness around his eyes, but it was there. Everyone was tired. Not two days ago, we had escaped a compound of creepy cultists who thought that I shouldn't fulfill a prophecy. For some of us, the escape had been a near thing. A prophecy, by the way, that I had mixed feelings about all around.
He hovered there, standing with the light of the hallway behind him so that all I could see was the sleek line of his shoulders. He wore a robe, Chinese in origin, like the rest of him, a bo staff in one hand. I'd bet my substantial comic book collection that he'd been practicing some kind of martial art. He wasn't sweating. Vampires, so far as I could tell, didn't sweat, but his hair was tucked up in some fancy braid to keep it out of his face.
“You just gonna stand there, or are you going to come in?” I didn't mean for it to sound sultry, but my still tired voice made it sound that way. “You just standing there makes me feel anxious.”
He hesitated and then crossed the threshold into my room. He moved so nicely, like he was made of muscle and silk. He stepped a full foot into the room and then stopped.
“I had a nightmare,” I said, realizing he was looking around the room for some kind of threat. “Just a nightmare.”
His eyes flicked to me. “You are...unwell.” For the first time, I heard a little lilt in his tone. In another person, it would have been a rush of concern.
I scoffed. “Gee, I can't imagine why that would be. Maybe because everyone has this grand opinion on what I need to be doing and whom I need to be doing it with. Maybe because, in the past three months, my entire life has changed. Maybe because I am struggling to figure out a plan for my own damn life. Should I just suck it up and have some prophecy baby? Damn my feelings. What does any of that matter? Should I just leave this town and never come back? I mean, I was doing fine with french fries and all that.”
I hadn't expected all of that to spill, and from the look he was giving me, Wei hadn't expected it either. I couldn't figure out if we were close or not. We had lived together for three months (he, I, and his two vampiric brothers), but our closest moments had been while he was teaching me to fight.
“What do you need?”
I curled my knees up to my chin. My print pajama pants with vintage Wonder Woman pictures all over them bunched with the movement. What did I need? It was the most loaded question. This wasn't some fast food shift where I just needed to get into the groove of things. I needed...well, I needed a plan.
“We could practice.”
He wasn't talking about magic. That, I practiced with Jenny and Marquessa. Reikah, a girl from the same cult that my mother and half-sister were a part of, had said, before I’d passed out, that she wished to help me learn magic as well. I didn't know how I felt about that, but I figure that all knowledge, no matter how different, is a good thing to learn.
Wei was talking about martial arts. Forms of Kung Fu, if we were going to get specific about it. I wasn't half bad. I wasn't all that great either, but I was learning. Even so, I was too worn-out for magic. Everything in me still hurt, and that weird dream had not left me feeling at all rested.
“Will you talk with me?”
He blinked. “Talk?”
I gave him a little smirk. “I know you can talk. I just...I need to figure out my plan, and I do better when I can talk it out.”
“Alright.”
Now that I had someone to talk to, my mind went a little blank. “Will you tell me how you became a vampire?”
He went very, very still. Most people's eyes went wide when they were surprised by something, or their eyebrows might go up their forehead. Wei went as still as a statue. He didn't even breathe. Vampires, after all, didn't have to breathe or eat, though most of them did the second one anyway.
“Why?”
I looked up at him. “Because you know an awful lot about me, and I know relatively little about you. Where were you born? When? Why did Vlad choose to make you one of his?”
He stayed so still for so long after that that I had to wonder if he was still alive, or as alive as an undead vampire can be.
“I was born in Yunnan Province, China, in your year of 1673.”
I had to blow out a long breath. That made him just shy of three hundred and fifty years old. Impressive to say the least.
“Do you speak Chinese?”
“I do, but it is not my first language.”
Now I was interested. Languages were cool. “What was?”
“Why?”
Well, that was a harder question to answer. I wanted to know because Wei was a bit of an enigma for me. I knew Alan well because the flamboyant vampire wore himself out for everyone to see. And I knew Dmitri because we both spoke the language of books and creativity; we had that in common. I didn't know Zane, the eldest of the vampire brothers, because I had been passed out for a good amount of the time that he had been back at the mansion since I had helped rescue him.
But mostly, I wanted to know Wei because I knew that he was in love with me.
Maybe that was weird, maybe a little childish, but there was a part of me that really liked the fact that he was interested in me. Then again, I remember hearing once that another person's interest was the greatest aphrodisiac.
“Didn't we just cover this?” I asked. “You know plenty about me. You know my name is Lorena Quinn, most recent legacy of the Quinn witches. You know that my mom is nuts and my dad was stupidly over protective. You know that my half-sister, Connie, pretended to be my friend so that she could help my mom kidnap me. You know that there is a prophecy about me and that I am obsessed with books and comics and video games.”
I plucked at my Wonder Woman pajama pants, which were so worn in some places that the yellow W symbols were faded to almost white. I traced one of the symbols with the tip of one chipped nail and shrugged. “I know that your name is Wei, no surname given, and that you can beat things up pretty well.”
I also knew that he had come charging to my rescue once they’d discovered where my mother had taken me, and that it had been Wei who’d been desperate to get me back. I had seen it in his face, felt it cross my skin. I was a necromancer, and that meant I had a little more insight into the undead mind than the average witch.
“Na.” he said.
I raised my brow. “No what?”
A flicker of some emotion passed through his eyes. I think it was amusement. Wei? Amused with me? Certainly not. Wei was the master of the stone face, the man who felt little. That was what made him so untouchably cool.
“I did not say 'no.' I said 'Na.' Na is my surname.”
“Wei Na?” I asked, trying out the name on my tongue.
“Na Wei,” he corrected.
I couldn't help it. I giggled. Perhaps it was those couple of years that I spent in California, but the idea that his name was Na Wei tickled me. “It suits you.”
“You are laughing at me.”
“A little,” I admitted, “but you rarely give me anything to laugh about; I'll take what I can get.” I tugged a pillow into my lap and shifted until I could lean over it. “What can you tell me about the Yunnan province?”
He frowned at me and then shrugged. “What do you want to know? That it is in the southern part of China? That it was once taken over by the Mongols? That its past was a hard one, a difficult one, but that the people born there are strong and proud and brave? Or would you rather know that it was beautiful?”
He sounded almost wistful, I thought, as he began to describe his homeland. “There are many mountains and rivers. Years of growing rice on the sides of the mountains has carved hundreds of ledges that change colors with the seasons, where small fish and frogs gather in pockets of wetness. Women roll up their sleeves and wash off dirt in one of the hundreds of small waterfalls, and the men watch for birds that sing the songs of springtime.”
I have to admit, I was a little caught up in it all. I didn't know that he could speak so poetically. “It sounds beautiful,” I said, once I knew that he wasn't going to say more.
“It was then; I do not know if it is now. The world has changed many times since I was alive.”
“You can sound so angsty; did you know that? Like, extra angsty.”
“Angsty?”
I rolled my eyes. “I do not have the ability to explain the depth and complexity that is angst.”
“I know the meaning of the word, but I don't think you mean it the way I define it.”
I shrugged. “Must be the generational gap. When was the last time that you went out into the world?”
“When we went dancing.”
“Oh, right.” I don't know why I blushed with the memory of the way Wei had looked in a simple outfit of jeans and a shirt, but I did.
“What are you thinking about?”
I could have been coy and said “nothing” but I wasn't particularly good at coy. Awkward and socially inept, that I could do. “You.”
He went still again. “What about me?”
“How you looked when we went out. It was a good look. Maybe you should wear that again, and I'd take you to the movies or something.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
I shrugged, surprised by my own forwardness. “A little. Unless you are going to tell me no; then I definitely wasn't asking you out, and you should feel ashamed for thinking such a thing.” There was another flicker of amusement, and I considered myself on a roll. “You know, you don't have to keep hanging out in the doorway. You can come sit down.”
Another hesitation, and then he moved further into the room. It took a little encouraging on my part, but I got him to sit on the edge of the bed. It made my heart beat just a little faster to think of Wei in my bed.
“Well?” he asked, tucking his legs neatly beneath his body.
“The Order...uhhh,” I struggled to remember the name.
“Ordo Hermeticus Fidelis. The Order of the Loyal Hermit,” Wei supplied.
I waved my hand in gratitude and nodded. “Yeah, them. The ones that think I should just walk away from all this, ignore the prophecy or maybe even hand it off to Connie...little unexpected half-sister. They truly think that it's better to keep magic locked up, that releasing it is tantamount to setting off a nuclear bomb.”
“Do you agree?”
I had to think about that. Really think. I mean, I got where they were coming from. I really did. I was thinking about just unleashing magic. “I don't think so. I mean. On the one hand, I get where they are coming from. Magic is a power; it's a wildness, a creation. I dunno. It's not like I'm going to be handing everyone a gun...but I can see why they could think that.”
“So, you want to fulfill the prophecy?”
I laughed. “Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of magic. I dreamed of a world where all the things I read about existed. I have that chance and that pretty much rocks. But...”
“But what?” he asked.
I sighed and wrapped my arms around my legs. The tears sprang into my eyes before I even realized I was going to cry about it. “But what if they are right? What if I'm just unleashing a weapon?”
The mattress moved beneath me, and a moment later, Wei's arms were around me. I collapsed against him and just started crying. I had never thought of myself as one of those people who cried when things got tough, but there I was.
“Anything coming from you could not be a weapon.”
His voice was so soft, whispered right in my ear. I heard the softness of his accent. It sent an unexpected thrill down my spine.
I lifted my head and found myself looking into his face. At first glance, his eyes looked empty and emotionless, but I knew better. Wei hid everything about him beneath a layer of stillness. But this close, I could see there was something moving beneath those obsidian depths. It was only because I was watching him so carefully that I saw his gaze flick down to my lips.
My heart jumped.
My hand went to his cheek. It was warmer than I expected and soft. I had never known a guy to have such soft skin, but there it was. The golden tones of it made my fingers look pale, or maybe it was the other way around. There was the tiniest patch of hair on his chin, just a few shades lighter than the hair on his head, no wider than the pad of my thumb. I ran my finger across it, and his lips parted.
He was still beneath my touch, like a statue, as if he were afraid to move. I don't know why, but I was totally into it. I went up on my knees and laid the tiniest kiss on the broad line of his forehead, and still he stayed still. He didn't reach out for me. He didn't clutch or shift to make it easier. He simply let me touch him. I would have thought him utterly passive were it not for the way he seemed to vibrate beneath my hands. Every touch fed this ball of electricity that built inside my belly.
Everything in my life was so wild, so crazy. But here, in my room, with a thunderstorm rolling outside, he was a wave of calmness beneath my touch.
I bent my mouth to his, and the world seemed to shift. His lips were like satin beneath mine, warm and soft and pliant. For a moment, it was just my mouth moving against his. Then, his hands went to my hips, and the electricity turned to fire.
He levered himself up and over me, keeping our mouths fused together, and the next thing I knew, my back was against the bed. My arms went around him, and I drowned in the sensation of his kiss. I didn't know that this man, this vampire, could hide so much passion beneath that cool exterior. His hands were a blur along my skin, leaving a trail of flame in their wake.
I arched towards him, and he pushed against me; for a moment, I thought that I would burn. His mouth went lower down my neck, nipping along my skin. Then, I felt the brush of his teeth, and I knew they were fangs. Maybe there was something wrong with me, but right then and there? I was totally okay with it.
I turned my head, offering my neck to him, and I felt his teeth scrape along the skin. I shivered and made a sound that I had never made before. Everything in me felt alive, awake, and hungry. I had never felt quite like that before. I placed my hand on the back of his head and pulled him towards me. The sound that came out of his throat was more beast than human, and I liked it. I felt the barest press of his fangs against the fluttering in my throat. My free hand slipped inside the robe he wore, touching the skin of his stomach, feeling the lines of his body beneath.
I was absolutely sure that this was going to be it. That in a moment of unexpected passion, something incredible was going to happen. To be honest? I was totally ready for it. Maybe it was all the stress, all the pressure to choose or not choose or whatever. I pulled him to me and whimpered for more.
The next thing I knew, he was across the room. Not just pulled away, but all the way back at the door. His eyes, normally a deep obsidian, were a shade of ruby so bright they cast shadows across the room. His fangs were visible over the fullness of his lower lip. It was not a terrible look, but it was ruined by the shame splashed across his face. That look was better than a cold shower.
“What did I do?” I asked.
He didn't answer. He looked at me, sitting in the middle of rumpled sheets, in my equally rumpled pajamas, and whirled away like the creature of the night I knew him to be.
“What the hell?” I muttered, not sure if I was speaking to myself or the man who was no longer there.
It took me a full two minutes to get out of bed. I thought, at first, about going back to sleep. I even laid down and pulled the sheets back around me. But it was pretty much futile. All I could think about was how incredible I had felt and how awful it had turned.
Had I done something wrong? I couldn't say that I had the most hands-on knowledge of more intimate relationships, but I read enough fanfiction to know how everything was supposed to go. This was not it. Right? He had wanted me; I was pretty much sure of that, I thought, as I tossed back the coverlet and plodded over to the bathroom.
I looked in the mirror, wondering if something repulsive had happened to my face while I slept. Nope, same face I'd had all my life. Same ash-brown hair, same pointed nose. There was a yellowing bruise along my forehead and another on my shoulder. Maybe Wei just really disliked bruises? Yeah, I didn't think so. It had to be something else.
I looked a little lower at the tiny scrape on my neck. No, I decided, it wasn't a scrape. It was two pinpricks, like someone had bumped me ever so lightly with a bar-b-que fork. A tiny trail of blood had leaked out of one; the other wasn't even deep enough to offer that.
Is that what he freaked out about? Blood? Seemed a little weird for a vampire to be anti-blood. Or maybe that was the issue. Maybe he was really pro-blood. I remembered that look of shame on his face. Crap, he was freaked out about biting me. What the heck was that about? Then again, maybe I was wrong. I was human; a witch, sure, but human nonetheless. I could be wrong. It happened.
I turned the water on full blast and, while it was heating up, I sent a message to Jenny.
“Hey,” the text read. “Have you ever had someone bail out on you right before getting to the good stuff?”
I hit send, stripped out of my pajamas and stepped under the spray. The hot water felt good on my muscles and pushed away the last bits of lust simmering under my skin. I needed a plan for the day, and part of that plan was to keep some distance between Wei and I because I just had no clue what to do about him.
In a flash of inspiration, I decided to switch from shower to bath. I wanted to soak, to think about everything. Not just about Wei, though the look on his face was going to be haunting the back of my mind for the next eternity or so. I added some of the multitude of bath salts to the water and watched the froth bubble up.
Two months ago, I'd never added expensive bath salts to the tub. Heck, in most of the super cheap apartments my dad had set us up in, there was rarely ever a tub involved in the first place. Cheap stand-up showers for everyone. Lounging in a bath had been a rare luxury.
Thinking of my dad chased away my worry about Wei. My dad hadn't called since our last conversation, the one where I had pretty much snapped at him. That worried me. He used to call every day. It used to be suffocating how much he had worried. But not hearing from him in three weeks? That was actually a little scary.
Great. Another thing to worry about. Maybe I should think about making a check list. Distant dad, weird mom, cult sister, prophecy baby, weird dreams, vampire boyfriend. While all of those might make for decent indie trash band names, they made for a daunting checklist. Add in learning magic and I was pretty sure that I was ready to pass everything off to someone else.
I slipped into the water, laying back my head, and asked myself the most important question any geeky girl could ask herself. What would Wonder Woman do?
My phone chimed, and I picked it up. Speaking of wonder woman...
The text from Jenny was short. “Sweetie, do you even know how many girls think they wanna smooch another girl until the shorts come off?”
She had a point. I wasn't a lesbian. I would probably never know what it was like to have someone I liked refuse my attentions because I had boobs. More often than not, I got attention because of my chest, not in spite of it. I sent a response along the lines of her deserving all the ladies in the world.
She said she'd settle for one.
“But it's not about me, prophecy girl; what happened? Who ran out on you? I need details.”
I wasn't ready to give details. Mostly because I didn't know what the heck was going on with me. What was that dream about? Did it have meaning? Or was it just my subconscious working out the huge frag-fest that was my current life?
My phone went off again. I assumed it was Jenny. But the sender was marked as Unknown. I frowned. There were maybe seven people who had my cell phone number, and most of them were currently living under the same roof as me. I opened the message and frowned. It looked like gibberish to me, as if someone used emojis that my phone didn't understand. I couldn't quite ignore the sense of uneasiness as I closed the message, assuming that someone had sent the wrong person a text.
Whatever…there was just too much going on for me to worry about that kind of thing. Besides, my hands were starting to get wrinkly. I sent a final text to Jenny telling her that I needed some best buddy time and went off to find something to occupy my mind until I could get a little more sleep.