Dark Awakening

Ty pushed his thoughts back insistently.



“The Seer is my woman, and she’s far more than they’re counting on. But she needs our help. We’re stopping this. And I’m freeing you and the others. Jaden told me about the collars. It’s time to take a stand. This has gone on too long.”



“You’re mad,” came another inner voice, and a pair of Cait Sith padded out from the long shadows by the trees. One was Duncan, and a younger Cait whom Ty recognized, Jake, was with him.



“We’ll be cut down before we get ten feet into the ballroom,” Jake continued. “Did you not hear how many there are? And even if it were just the usual suspects of the inner court, we’d never manage it. They’d hunt us down like wolves. Free us? To send us to what kind of fate, Ty? There are, what, three of you?”



“Unfortunately,” Damien thought sullenly at no one in particular, which meant they all picked it up.



“Take me to the others,” Ty insisted, and gave a low, moaning growl to punctuate it. “We have reinforcements. There’ll be no reason to choose between the gutter and the Ptolemy after tonight.”



“Reinforcements?” Duncan and Jake sent out the thought in almost perfect unison, just in time for a scatter of bats to pass over them all in the darkness, heading for the lights of the manor house. They were invisible against the sky, the only hint of their presence the soft fluttering of many wings.



Duncan’s yellow eyes widened, then shifted to look at the silver mist heading in the same direction.



“Gods above, brother. What have you done?”



“The others,” Ty insisted, adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins. “I’ll explain as we go. But we will not be slaves after tonight.”



Lily stood on the platform with Arsinöe, feeling a thin rivulet of cold sweat trickle down between her breasts. She’d been unaware she had stage fright before tonight, since it wasn’t a position she’d ever put herself in, but apparently, she had a bad case.



At least, if her nausea and dizziness were any indication. But then, she’d also never had hundreds of hungry vampires staring at her.



Arsinöe’s hands were on her shoulders as she stood behind her, and all Lily could think of was that curved silver blade coming down across Lilith’s throat from a very similar position. Her mark continued to pulse and throb beneath her shirt, and her power, dark, unharnessed, without direction, was roiling ominously within her. She could feel it, threatening to spill out in some horrible way. And then she’d be set upon, torn to pieces by a furious crowd of Ptolemy.



“Tonight, we find the source of the Mulo!” Arsinöe cried, and the crowd erupted in a roar. “Tonight, we begin the war that will wipe our enemies from the face of the night and show all the dynasties that nothing, nothing, can dim the glory that is the Ptolemy, the most ancient, the most powerful, the most revered of all!”



Their faces swam before Lily, blending into one glowing-eyed, sharp-toothed monster. What the hell did they think she was going to do? Turn into a pillar of fire and lead them to Vlad Dracul’s doorstep? What if her vision didn’t make any sense?



What if she couldn’t even have a vision?



Her stomach cramped painfully.



Then the crowd stilled, going deathly quiet without even a word from their queen. It was as though they knew it was time. The air crackled with expectation. And Lily’s worst nightmare was coming true. She was alone, Ty was gone, and she had no idea what to do.



The queen’s voice was warm and soft in her ear.



“It’s time. Do you need my assistance?”



“Whatever you can do,” Lily said, perfectly honest. “I’ve never tried to do this before. You can help me?”



“Of course. I may not be able to See, but I have seen the process enough times to know how it’s done. Listen to my voice. I will guide you.”



“Okay,” Lily said. What could she say? It was this or certain annihilation. She wished for something, anything, to come on its own, but all she saw, all she could think of, was the one man she knew she should try to forget.



Ty’s face. Ty’s eyes. Ty’s voice.



“Relax.” Arsinöe’s voice was commanding but was as warm and smooth as rich cream.



It was surprisingly easy to fall under her sway once she let her guard down. Surprisingly easy to forget that it wasn’t only the two of them in the room.



“Focus on my voice. Let everything else go.”



The queen took her through the slow relaxation of each limb, the concentration on nothing but breaths. It was a little like what Lily knew of hypnosis, except that this was less about introspection and suggestion. At last, she drifted languidly in the space between waking and sleep, fully aware but utterly at peace, her busy mind quiet, waiting, it seemed, for instruction. Arsinöe gave it. And her voice rose so that the audience could hear her well.



“I seek the body that holds the curse of my people, the corpse from which the Mulo springs, commanded by another to destroy the great dynasty of Ptolemy. Open your Eye, Seer, and find where the Mulo rests.”



Incredibly, Lily felt something inside of her, something that seemed to be located between her eyes, open up like a flower. Her third eye. The gift and curse of the truly psychic.



And then she saw as she had never seen before, flying over trees and mountains, rocks and earth, soaring above all that was and had been and ever would be. Joy swelled in her chest at the sudden freedom, unlike anything she had ever known.



“Seek the Mulo, Seer. You do not fly this night for your own pleasure!”



The voice was a tight snap, pulling Lily’s thoughts back to the matter at hand. She drifted above the world, waiting for something that would tell her where to go, filling her mind with what Arsinöe had told her to look for. Instantly, something pulled at her, dragging her down through the night air, past tight clusters of homes, their lights glowing ghostly bright, through open fields that whispered with brisk wind, and finally, into a massive and aging relic of a house, a darkened husk without lights. She didn’t want to go in but knew she had to and allowed herself to be pulled inside. Lily got a fleeting glimpse of sheet-draped furniture, empty halls, before being pulled down, down into a hidden room in the moldering basement, so unlike the aging beauty of the rest of the house.



There, on a stone slab, was a decaying corpse. The putrid scent of it made bile rise in Lily’s throat. She gasped and gagged, the foul stench filling her lungs.



“Are you there? Do you see it?” Arsinöe’s voice was intense, urgent. Murmurs and gasps from the vampires, so far away now.



“Yes,” Lily heard herself choke out, though her voice sounded strangely distant. She wanted so badly to go, to fly from here, and yet, still she was pulled forward, compelled to look upon the fleshy ruin of a thing that housed the tormented soul the queen sought. Rotting flesh hung off of bone, lips peeled back over yellowed teeth. The eyes, likely glued shut, had sunken into their sockets.



Then the eyelids flew open, and Lily saw nothing but twin flames burning back at her. It saw her…. It hungered



Want you… eat you…



Something rose from the body, something like a black mist with vile red eyes, sometimes shaped like a man and sometimes a shapeless, roiling mass of hatred. It reached for her.



Lily’s eyes flew open as she gave a tortured scream. She scrambled backward, still trying to get away from the thing that had reached toward her, and sprawled gracelessly at the feet of the queen. Slowly, she realized where she was, but she made no move to get up. She only sat there on the floor, trembling. The incredible hunger she’d felt from that thing, the immense and terrible power, and she’d only just escaped it.



“You saw it!” Arsinöe cried.



Lily looked up to see the queen looming over her, those deep eyes no less hungry in their own way than what she’d just escaped. “Tell me what you saw, where it was! Tell me!”



Fingers dug into Lily’s arms, and she was lifted to her feet as though she weighed nothing. Then she stood, swaying slightly, before Arsinöe.



“It was so awful,” Lily murmured, clutching herself tightly. “It tried to get me.”



Arsinöe slapped her smartly across the face. “You stupid little bitch, I don’t care what it tried to do. Tell me what I need to know!”



The shock of it had tears springing to Lily’s eyes, but somehow she held it together. She would not be weak in front of this creature. She would not.



“There was a house,” Lily managed, hating the quaver she heard in her voice. It echoed around the room as the assembled crowd shifted and murmured, listening. “It was a big old Victorian in the country. Like an estate, but fallen into some disrepair. Deserted. The furniture was all covered in sheets. The corpse… it was on a slab. In the basement. A hidden room.”



“And? That’s all?”



Lily didn’t want to say it, much less think it, but she had to finish what she had seen.



“It… looked at me. It came out of its body,” Lily said, beginning to shake again. “It said it wanted me. It was hungry…. ”



The doors at the far end of the ballroom slammed open with such force that for a moment, Lily was sure it was the Mulo, come to find the woman who had disturbed its rest. And the initial shrieks and cries of the vampires at first registered as fear.



Then she realized it was outrage.



“What is the meaning of this? Get this gutterblood out of here!”



Until that moment, Lily hadn’t realized what people meant when they said their hearts soared. Without even seeing him, she knew: Ty had come for her. She started forward, unthinking, her first instinct being to go to him. But Arsinöe’s hand caught her arm.



“I don’t think so,” she said smoothly, though when Lily turned to look at the queen, she saw raw fury burning in those dark eyes.



“Arsinöe, queen of the Ptolemy! Vlad, leader of the Dracul, demands an audience! Immediately!”



There were shouts and curses at the demand, delivered in a full and throaty voice that was clipped and cool, British but with a hint of his Romanian homeland. It wasn’t Ty, Lily realized, and her heart plummeted as quickly as it had risen. Still, it was something unexpected, and she couldn’t contain her curiosity. It was a wonderful distraction from abject terror.