CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Everything happened so fast. It was like a being trapped, lost, and helpless inside a nightmare carnival of horrors.
“Get the hell off me!” I yelled, bucking and kicking uselessly against my aggressor. When I saw I was doing nothing to stop him from dragging me out of the room, I turned my head up to look for Jared. I screamed for him, but my voice was cut short by what was unfolding in front of my eyes.
Someone was on top of Jared; a woman was straddling him. She had her face buried in his neck, and her back was heaving up and down, up and down, as she sucked the blood right out of his jugular. I called out to him in vain as I was dragged, unceremoniously, through the house and into the ballroom.
The lights were on, and my eyes hadn’t fully adjusted to the brightness yet, but I didn’t need to see to know exactly who it was standing before me now. Tamara. She looked pale, tired, and old, but she had somehow succeeded in not only waking herself up, but also in punching a hole through my magickal wards large enough for her to let herself and her friends in.
I fought to stand, but a boot came crashing down on my back, sending me chest-first into the floor. “You bitch,” I said, through gritted teeth, “If you hurt Jared, I’ll kill you!”
“Oh, we’ve hurt him,” came a voice from behind. Jared then fell beside me with a thud. His face was pale, his eyes were shut, but his chest was moving—if only weakly.
“What have you done to him?” I yelled.
A woman came into view, one I had only met once before but thought I had known my whole life. She was clad in black, wearing thigh-high leather boots, black leggings, and a cropped leather jacket over a tank top. She knelt before me, her blond hair tied back into a tight bun, and she grinned at me, displaying her sharp canines. “Don’t worry,” Marie said, “I only bit him a little.”
I struggled to get free, to conjure my magick, but nothing was working; it was just like before, right down to the bloody nose. I could see the droplets dripping on the hardwood floor underneath me. “I thought we settled this,” I said.
“We settled nothing, child,” Tamara said, though her voice gave away her tiredness, her lack of energy. “We entered into a duel, I said some words, and your friend called it off. That does not a victor make.”
“If you’re such a victor, why is your friend pinning me to the ground with his boot? Why can’t I use my magick? Are you afraid I’ll kill you this time?”
“Precisely. This time I’m not taking any chances. Remy clearly taught you way more than he should have. You gave me quite the shock. But now I know what you can do, and I know what he can do. There will be no more surprises here.”
“You have no idea what I can do,” I said, “Neither of you do.”
The pressure on my back released, and I was able to force myself to my feet. The man who had dragged and kicked me circled around me, now. It was the vampire with only one eye. He snarled at me as he walked into view.
“Look,” he said, propping his wounded eye open with his fingers. Deep, orange light emanated from within the slit of mangled flesh. “I’ll be good as new in no time.”
I turned my hand into a fist and ignored him. He was only there to distract me from the people I really needed to keep my attention focused on. “What do you want?” I asked.
Marie turned her head and raised an eyebrow to Tamara. “I want this house,” Tamara said. “It’s mine, and Remy had no right signing it over to you.”
“I can’t help you with that.”
“You can; all you have to do is sign the papers over to me.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t,” Marie said, “Then I’ll kill your boyfriend in front of you. And then we’ll get your friend Nicole, and we’ll kill her, and we’ll keep killing friends every hour until you do as Tamara wants.”
I swallowed hard. The sternness in this woman’s face told me she was the kind of person who would follow through with a threat like that. She was older than Jean Luc, and she hadn’t been asleep for the last two hundred years. Tamara, even weakened, was a formidable witch. She had, after all, found a way to breach my magickal wards, despite the fact she’d been paralyzed only hours before.
I was outmatched.
The truth was, I was probably going to die anyway. Jared was probably going to die, too. What reason would they have to keep me alive after I signed the papers over to Tamara? The only thing I had going for me was that, for some reasons, Tamara wanted me to sign the house over to her. This meant I had leverage—thin leverage, but leverage nonetheless.
“What do you get out of this, Marie Boucher?” I asked. “What I’d like to know is why you, a vampire with so many centuries under her belt, are playing lapdog to a has-been witch who couldn’t even beat me in a duel she cheated in.”
“Watch your mouth!” Tamara yelled.
“What I get in this arrangement has nothing to do with you,” Marie said, ignoring Tamara’s outrage. “But I suggest you do as she says. Otherwise, things aren’t going to go very well for you or for him.”
“I have a counter offer. Let him go, and then I’ll sign.”
Marie chuckled. “You’re outnumbered, and without your magick you’re just a simple little human whose bones break easily. You’re not in a position to ask for anything.”
My jaw clenched. I tried to glance at the grandfather clock in the other room, to try and figure out how many hours there were until sunup, but I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. If I was going to stall, I had no idea how long I would have to stall for. And without magick, how was I supposed to stall, anyway?
“Even if I agreed,” I said, “How are we supposed to do this?”
“It’s simple,” she said, “I conjure a document signing everything over to me, and you sign it. Once you do, the contract will be made valid, and I will get what I want.”
“But why do you even need me? If you can just pull a contract out of the air, why not just kill me and then take what you want?”
Her face darkened. “Because my ex-husband was a bastard who safeguarded his assets against just such an eventuality by using magick even I can’t overcome without great effort and investment of time. Maybe, if he hadn’t signed the thing over to you, I would have an easier time of acquiring it. But now that it’s yours, well, it makes things simpler in a way; I can just ask you to sign it over to me, and then you can be on your way.”
“You really expect me to believe you’ll just let me walk after I sign your contract?”
My upper lip suddenly felt cold and wet, and when I drew my hand across it, my hand came back red.
“Looks like you’re bleeding,” Marie said, grinning and flashing her fangs like a hungry wolf.
My nose wasn’t just bleeding, it was like a faucet that had sprung a leak. Blood dribbled onto my tank top and against the floor, and the other vampires in the room started to get nervous. But I didn’t feel dizzy, or drained, or queasy—I felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. Invigorated. Energized. My mind was clearing, as if a light were being shined directly onto the surface of my brain, allowing me to more effectively organize my thoughts, my strategies—my way out of this.
“Alright,” I said, “Show me the documents.”
Tamara smiled, satisfied to hear me acquiesce, and clicked her fingers. A stack of papers suddenly appeared in her hand, materialized from a puff of purple smoke. In her other hand, a pen followed, also manifesting in a similar fashion. She looked at the first page of the documents in her hand and nodded approvingly, then walked over to me.
From where I was standing I could see the first page, and damn if that didn’t look like a wall of text. Lines and lines of it, entire paragraphs detailing God only knew what. The document also had tabs stuck to the side of it, presumably pinpointing specific sections of the document where I would have to sign.
This was starting to feel a lot like making a deal with the devil, and in those cases, the signatory always lost.
Tamara handed the pen over, and I snatched it out of her hand. “Careful,” she said, “When you make sudden moves like that it makes my friends jumpy, and the last thing I want is to spill more of your blood; not before you’ve signed, at any rate.”
She handed the documents over, and flipped it to the very last page where a large box waited for my signature.
“All you have to do is sign,” she said, “And then this is all over.”
“Let Jared go first,” I said, “Let him go, and swear you won’t hurt Nicole or any of the other witches in New Orleans.”
“No.”
“Then you aren’t getting this house.”
She didn’t have to turn her head, gesture, or even speak. Marie, like a good lapdog, approached Jared’s unconscious body and planted one of her heels at the base of his neck. “All I have to do is push my foot down,” she said, “I wouldn’t even have to push that hard, and he would die in an instant.”
My heart was pounding against my chest, palms sweating. I stared at the heel, then at the pen, and then at the document.
“Turn around,” I said to Tamara.
She eyed me up suspiciously. The ballroom was still clear of tables and flat surfaces from the night of the party, so there was nowhere to put the documents down. Realizing that, she handed the contract to me. “No funny business,” she said.
“I have no magick,” I said, “All I have is a pen.”
“And if that pen does anything other than sign on the dotted line, you’ll be worse off than our one-eyed friend over there.”
I nodded, and Tamara turned around. When she did, I placed the contract against her back and stared at the paper, but my eyes trailed up to the soft, fleshy patch at the base of her neck. All I needed was an instant, and I could drive the pen into it. The pen was mightier than the sword, wasn’t it? But then Jared would die, and I would die only a couple of seconds after that.
Dammit.
I brought the pen down to the dotted line. Droplets of blood fell onto the page. I swallowed, then went to sign, but stopped. I thought I heard something. A voice, maybe, but no one had spoken. My eyes returned to the page. I could tell Tamara was getting impatient, and every second I wasted was another second that brought Jared and I closer to death.
I went to sign again, but this time I heard it clearly.
Don’t sign it
It had been so long since I had heard that delicate whisper, I had all but given up on ever hearing Eliza again, thinking she had left the night Jean Luc left Lumiere. But now that I heard it again, I didn’t need her to repeat herself. I let the pen fall to the floor, then grabbed the document with both hands and tore it in half. Tamara jerked around, awestruck by what I had done. The vampires around the room all flinched nervously, while Marie scowled from where she stood with the heel of her boot still pressed against Jared’s neck.
“That was the biggest mistake you’ve made tonight,” Marie said.