13
When I got to Jenny, she didn't look like she'd stepped off a runway. She looked like she'd just had the worst prom ever. She was sitting on the ground in her cute outfit, trying to hide the fact that she had been crying.
“Hey,” I said.
She didn't look at me. “Hey.”
I said a silent prayer of forgiveness to my dress and plopped down next to her. I didn't say anything. I just opened my arms for a hug. She plopped against me, a pile of human misery.
“You okay?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but I couldn't think of what else to say.
“Yeah...why wouldn't I be?” She tried to smile at me, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.
“Because your crush is totally going on a date with some dude tonight.”
She didn't say anything at first. She just sat there with her head pillowed on my shoulder as more tears ran down her cheeks. These ones she didn't bother to hide.
“I shouldn't care,” she finally said. “She's never given me any reason to think that she was into me. We've just been friends. I'm not some jackass who is only nice to girls so that they'll date me.”
“I know that,” I said.
“I shouldn't care,” she repeated.
“But you do.”
She sat back so suddenly the ground shifted beneath us. It was impressive since she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. Then again, we were sitting on concrete, which was a bunch of smashed up rock, and Jenny was all about the power of rocks. “I do. I do care, and it's stupid.”
“It's not stupid.”
She gave a snort that told me just how little she agreed with me. I gave her another hug and said again, “It's not stupid. You can't help who you like. It doesn't matter if they are everything you are sure you wouldn't like...stuff just seems to happen that way.”
I didn't know who I was talking to, her or me. I didn't want to dwell on it either, no matter how many times those thoughts popped into my head.
“What am I going to do?” she asked.
“Well, tonight, we are going to go back in there, we are going to dance, and when we can't feel our legs anymore, we are going to go stop at the shop and buy a zillion bags of goodies and go back to my grandmother's house and play video games, okay?”
“Why your grandmother's place?”
“Because I need some space from the guys.”
“What happened?”
We were breaking the ‘let’s not talk about Lorena’ rules for the countless time that night, but it was okay. Jenny was feeling heartbroken, and I hadn't told her the rules anyway. “Alan and I broke it off.”
“Oh,” she said, “so you’re with Dmitri?”
“Nope,” I said.
“I'm confused.”
I nodded. “So am I. It's why I need the space. But first...let's dance.”
She laughed, and I was grateful for it. I stood up, swiped off my dress, and offered her my hand. She took it and frowned. “Woman, what did you do?”
“We can talk about that when we get back to my grandmother's house.”
A moment later, the world exploded. Magic slammed so hard on me that I literally fell to the ground. Jenny was right next to me. I rolled over, and there my maybe-mother stood. Not just a flickering, bad-stream image of her, but the real one. She wasn't wearing the robe, but her dress was the same color gray that it had been.
Power flowed off of her in waves. Not just a little power, but wells of it. I could taste it like ozone on my teeth.
“It's time to talk.”
I shook my head. I had no desire to talk to someone who scared the daylights out of me. My finely-tuned sense of survival told me to run. I listened. I grabbed Jenny's hand, and we scrambled away. We got maybe five feet away before power slammed around us again. It hit me so hard that I bit my tongue. The taste of blood was thick in my mouth.
“I wanted to be gentle about this, Lorena, but tonight was too close. We are leaving.”
Well, even if she wasn't my mom, she totally had the mom voice down. Guess that meant I got to be the angsty teenager.
“No, thanks.”
Yeah...close enough.
I took Jenny's hand in mine again. I had every desire to run, but magic spilled over me with a strength that I could only call titanic. My head spun, and I made the smallest movement to get further away, but my body just wouldn't cooperate.
I stood up. Well, I didn't, but my body did. It was the strangest feeling. I wasn't telling my body to move, but it was doing it anyway. I dropped Jenny's hand, and I just started walking towards my mom. I should have looked weird, like some kind of ragdoll, but I didn't. I strutted...which was weird enough, because I didn't know how to strut, but that's what I did.
I moved with an effortless grace that I didn't have and followed my mom to a car I hadn't known before. I wanted to look back at Jenny to see why she wasn't calling after me, but my head wouldn't turn that way. All I did was get into a shiny black SUV and buckle in.
A moment later, my mom got into the driver's side and we were off.
I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but my mouth was acting the exact same as my body. I did not like this feeling. I felt...trapped...locked inside of my own skin. No, not even in my skin. That wasn't mine anymore. I was trapped in the very depths of my soul.
“Don't bother trying to move,” my mom said. “It won’t work. I have you.”
I didn't like the way she said that. It was creepy, beyond creepy. My eyes, fixed on the road in front of me, watched as the pseudo-metropolitan city of Blackburn, Virginia disappeared behind us. She navigated the SUV through the curving mountain roads with ease.
“A necromancer,” she scoffed. “Of all the things, my daughter could have been...she's a necromancer.”
I had played enough video games to know that a necromancer was a wizard with power over the dead. What that meant and why varied from one game to the next. I just didn't know what that had to do with me. Is that what had happened earlier? Had I drawn my power from Wei who, despite his mostly animated appearance, was a dead body? Is that why he had looked so sick?
My mom didn't sound happy with the idea. I didn't know why it bothered her, but it made me feel a little uncomfortable.
“I wanted to come get to you before this. Hell, I'd tried a hundred times to find you, but oh no. Your dad just kept moving you around. As soon as I showed up in one town, I'd find out that you had left just a few days before.”
If I would have had control over my own body, I would have blinked. As it was, my eyes were drying out. It kind of hurt.
“He must still have one of Loretta's looking glasses,” she muttered to herself. “Damn that witch. Damn her.”
That seemed unfair. I didn't really know my grandmother, but everything that I had read and heard about her so far hadn't led me to think that she was a bad person.
“I should have run away the day I knew I was pregnant with you. Oh sure, everyone thinks your grandmother is the one who spoke the prophecy. Perfect Loretta Quinn, perfect little witch of the mountains. They all waited on her hand and foot.”
Who had waited on my grandmother, I wanted to ask, but my mouth was still clamped shut. The more I tried to move, the more rigid it felt.
“But I knew. I knew. I had the dream first. I saw you give birth to magic. I saw it!”
Okay...maybe my dad had taken me away because my mom was friggin’ nuts. Not like the “I need medication because my brain won’t let me feel happy” kind of nuts, not even the “I hear voices so I have to live in the special ward of the hospital” kind of nuts either. She was beginning to sound obsessive to the point of disquieting.
“I saw it first. I saw it all. But no. I was stupid. I thought I loved your father. I thought he loved me. I was stupid. Fucking stupid. He was just another boy. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
Okay, now I really wanted out of the car. My dad and I might not get along, but I didn't want him dead. Also, I totally believed she would do it.
“Stop struggling!” my mom said.
She snapped her fingers, and suddenly I had control of some of myself back. I could blink. I could breathe on my own, and I had autonomy over my own voice. Well, that was something.
“Where are we going!?” I demanded, trying not to let my voice be a terrified squeak. I almost succeeded.
“We are going to the temple.”
That sounded far more ominous than it should have. Temple should have sounded more like sanctuary and less like hell-prison. Then again, I was pretty sure that nothing coming out of my mom's mouth was going to be sounding like sanctuary.
“What is that?”
“It's where I live; we all live there.”
Okay, that wasn’t helping anything.
“What's a necromancer?” I demanded.
“My god, he really taught you nothing. He taught you absolutely nothing and then expected you to take part in his mother's version of this prophecy? That sounds just like him.”
That wasn't entirely accurate, but I got the feeling that letting her rant was the best possible thing that I could do. She sounded mad, and not just angry but the old definition of mad.
“A necromancer,” she spat the word like it was gross. “is someone who bonds with the undead. They can command them, control them, steal power from them, and give power to them. If they are talented enough, they can even rip the souls from living people.”
Oh. That sounded...well...intimidating.
“They are disgusting.”
Well, that was just rude. I wasn't disgusting. I also wasn't sure that I was a necromancer. Then again...maybe it wasn't so crazy. It would explain what happened with Wei. Maybe it also solved the 'how do I make a kid with the undead guy” question, too.
“What are you?” I asked.
She sat up in her seat. Her shoulders squared. She stuck her nose just a little in the air. “I'm an enchantress.”
Now that was a word I knew. It even had a whole section in my grandmother's famous book. An enchantress, or enchanter if you were a dude, was a witch who could use magic to manipulate a person, not just their mind, but their bodies, too. Huh, my mom thought someone who could take over a living person's head was totally cool, but a person who could bring dead stuff to life wasn't...that seemed a little weird, but okay.
“What do you mean my grandmother's version of the prophecy?”
Her lips curled into a sneer. If feelings could kill, I would have feared for my life right then.
“Your grandmother told this cute little story about you bringing magic back by making some love child with a vampire. But oh no, that's not what I saw; that is not what I saw at all.”
I was almost afraid to ask, but my mouth did it anyway. “What did you see?”
“You have a child, and that child unleashes magic on the whole world, but it's not some arcane utopia, Lorena. Magic isn't all faeries and rainbows and unicorns. Magic brings back all the things from our nightmares. It's an apocalypse.”
I hadn't really thought about it that way, but it made my stomach twist up in knots.
“Can you imagine what people would do, Lorena? Can you imagine what our government would do if they saw a dragon flying in the sky?”
I could imagine it. I wasn't stupid enough to think that people were just like me. In fact, I had been to enough schools around the country to know that while there were plenty of people who liked books, comics, and video games...not everyone got as involved with them as I did. They didn't connect with the story, with the characters. They just wanted to not think about life for a while. That was cool, there was no wrong way to have fun, but I wanted to live in those worlds. But I was the minority. Not everyone wanted magic, and certainly the resurgence of it would make some people afraid.
I knew exactly what people did when they were afraid.
My mother pulled into a long driveway complete with a wrought iron gate and fancy touch-screen access codes. It asked for her name, her palm print and some series of codes that I didn't hear. A moment later, she drove us towards a house that was more fortified and complex than anything else. There were a slew of people standing out front, maybe twenty or thirty, and all of them were wearing the gray robes that I was used to my mom wearing.
That wasn’t creepy at all.
When the car stopped, I just sat there. I might have had basic control over my eyes and mouth, but everything else was still under the dominion of my enchantress-mom. I was, by now, pretty sure that she was my mom. If she wasn't, she really believed that she was, and that was just as dangerous.
I stayed in the car while she approached the crowd. There was a guy among them. I was pretty sure he was in charge, because he was wearing this big necklace around his neck. I was hoping his name wasn't Jim Jones or anything. Whatever his name was, I wasn't going anywhere near the Kool-Aid. The pair of them embraced and I was sure, if nothing else, that he and my mom had the same Facebook status.
Gross.
A moment later, my body started moving again. I was beginning to hate this. Okay, I'd been hating it for a while now, but I was extra hating it now. I didn't like it when people decided things for me, and I wasn't even getting to choose if I wanted to put up a fight. This sucked.
“He didn't even train her...” my mother was telling the guy. She sounded like she was about to cry. That's okay. I was on my way there, too.
The guy she was clinging to was pretty average looking. He had brown hair, hazel eyes, and a tall and slender build. He wasn't attractive, but then again, after having been around the boys for the past month, who would I consider attractive anymore?
The rest of the group watched me like I was a freak. That was nice of them.
I knew a decent amount about cults. The joys of anthropology was that you learned a heck of a lot about subcultures and fringe groups since they were the really interesting parts of your very own culture. Cults were all about taking away your identity and making you a pawn in some manipulative dude's (and yeah, it was almost always a dude) personal fanatic daydreams.
“Shhh,” the man said, wrapping his arms around my mom. He gave me a look, and I felt an immediate need for the world's hottest shower. It was worthy of every creep in every subway that there had ever been. It was as if he looked past my skin to everything that lay beneath. “Welcome to The Homestead, Lorena.”
Yup. This was totally a cult. Neat. He said Homestead like it deserved capital letters, like there ought to be rituals held in a creepy basement. I wondered if he had multiple brides, or if he was just waiting for the right group of doe-eyed, not-quite-legals to show up for him to pick from. Well, he could keep his skeevy eyes to himself. I already had enough men in my life.
When I didn't say or do anything, he gave me another look, this one less creepy but no less invasive. “Flower? Is she under your control?”
Flower? Was that my mom's cult name? What were they going to try to name me? Cookie? Honey? Something else sweet and uber-feminine? No, thanks. I'd stick with Lorena.
“She tried to run,” my mom said. “She didn't want to come with me.”
He gave her a slight tsk and took her face between long fingered hands. “That's not how we do things here, Flower. You know that.” He gave her forehead a kiss I might have called tender and then reached a hand out towards me. A moment later, all of my muscles were mine again. He bowed his head. “Forgive your mother, Lorena, she was...overzealous.”
“She's a necromancer,” my mother whispered, but it was loud enough that I could hear it.
Everyone, save for creepy dude, took a step back from me. My mother even shuffled away. Nothing like feeling like the weirdo in a group of cultists.
He eyed me with interest. “Is that so?”
I shrugged. “Maybe? I dunno. I just heard about all of this, you know, right before I was kidnapped against my will.”
He waved his hand again. Now that I was all my own self, I could feel the sudden sweep of magic around me. I had begun to notice that everyone's magic felt a little different. Jenny's, who I was most familiar with, had a steady strength to it.
That made sense, because Jenny was pretty much the steadiest person I knew. Connie's magic felt a little...wilder. The guy? His magic felt...old. You know that feeling when you walk into a museum, or a massive forest? It was like that, ethereal and mystic. The car turned back on, the wrought iron fence swung open.
“You are welcome to leave, Lorena. No one will try to stop you. I swear it.”
I hesitated for just a second. “What's the catch?”
His chuckle was light and charming. His eyes twinkled. He went from average dude to kinda-cute, and I wondered if that was natural or magical. It didn't really matter; he still skeeved me. “No catch. I would, of course, ask you to hear us out.”
“About what?”
“About the prophecy,” my mother interrupted. Her eyes were bright with righteous indignation. “You've only heard one side of it! You could-”
The man placed a hand on my mom's shoulder, and she quieted. She turned her head towards him and started to whimper something under very sudden tears. I have to admit, I was a little freaked out. I wasn't one of those chicks who thought that women always had to be strong, that they were never allowed to turn to a friend or loved one and sob out their feelings, but I was always a little leery of the ones who clung to their lovers. A person, dude or chick, ought to be able to stand on their own from time to time. As far as I could tell, the only decision my mom had made so far that day was to kidnap me...and that wasn't really counting in her favor.
Even so, I found myself asking, “What about the prophecy?”
“Why don't we go inside?” he asked, patting my mother's hair as she continued to whimper. “You're mother needs rest.”
I frowned. I looked up at the house that looked more like a fortress than anything else. I glanced at the SUV, still humming, and the open gate. I could leave right now; at least, I thought I could. All I had to do was swing myself into the driver’s seat and navigate my butt back to familiar territory. Heck, I wanted to do just that. But...but what did he know about the prophecy? What hold did he have on my mother? What was going on?
I had always needed to understand the 'why' of things, even when it got me into trouble.
However, I wasn't completely stupid. I jumped in the SUV and took the keys out of the ignition. My little black dress, cute as it was, did not come with pockets. Curse women's clothing designers. I took off my tassel necklace and added the key to the chain. It ruined the look, but I no longer cared.
“Okay,” I said flatly. “Lead the way.”
The group, all of us, headed inside the great big scary building. I didn't know a whole lot about architecture, but it looked like a perfect gray box. There were slits of windows, equal in distance from one side of the building to the other. I didn't have a ruler, but I was ninety-five percent positive that the door was in the exact center of the first floor. OCD much?
The inside was just as perfect as the outside. It was nothing like the vampire mansion. Sure, they might have been as equally large, but that was where the similarities ended. The place that I had called home for the past month was all rich wood floors and pretty paintings and warmth. This house was...cold. The walls were stark white. The ground was covered in the same cheap gray carpet you saw in equally cheap apartments. There weren't many pictures on the walls, and what pictures there were would have made M. C. Escher fanboy. I was lead to a room with a big square table that had twenty seats equally distant around the edges.
Yeah, this house was a little...much.
Everyone moved like they were part of some play that I hadn't rehearsed for. They all took seats around the table, and one was left open. Belatedly, I plopped down.
“So...” I said, when the room remained quiet, “nice place you have here. Lots of...squares.”
“Magic needs rules, Lorena,” my mother said in her best mother-knows-best tone yet. I was impressed, or I would have been if she wasn't still holding on to Creepy Dude's shoulder.
I blinked. I was aware that magic had rules, but I wasn't entirely sure that it needed them. Those felt like two different things. “Oookay,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
“What your mother means is that there is a Law of Magic, and that you've been...breaking that.”
If he was hoping to win me over with this, he had another thing coming. “You wanna...explain that one to me?”
He smiled at me, and I felt an urge to punch him in the face. It wasn't a nice smile or even a welcoming one. It was the kind of smile a person gave a kid when they'd just said something adorably naive.
“You've been learning lesser magic,” he said softly. “The magic of mountain witches.”
He said 'witches' the way I said 'jerk'. I tried my best to be like Alan, keep my face neutral and politely interested, but I was beginning to feel defensive, maybe even upset. Getting kidnapped could do that to a person.
“Uh-huh,” I prompted.
“It is best to picture magic like a great grid work, a perfect pattern of lines equidistant from one another.” He placed his hand on the table, and magic swelled around the room. For a second, nothing happened, and then the rest of the group, me excluded, placed one of their hands on the table, palms flat, hands down. A globe blossomed in the middle of the table. It didn't look particularly magical, even though I could feel the magic coming off of it like a breeze. It looked sorta futuristic. “In the best of times, these lines were the same size, shape, and thickness across the world. They cross at exact intervals, and they allow magic to freely flow over the world.”
A perfect grid popped up over the globe they had conjured.
I looked around at all the perfectly geometric patterns in the room and was beginning to see a pattern of my own here. “Okay.”
It didn't match what I had seen. I had seen a weave of magic, kaleidoscopes of colors that ran through everything, but who was I to say that everyone had to experience the world exactly as I did? That seemed kinda crappy.
“Those who are more...frivolous...in their studies have disrupted that. Their unstable magic has caused the grid to swell in some places, or be completely nonexistent in others. It is what has caused the predicament that we are in.”
The lines on the globe moved, sliding from one place to another until the world looked more like a kid trying to draw straight, even lines without a ruler.
For a full twenty seconds, I thought this dude was messing with me. I thought he was going to break out in some big cheesy smile and tell me that he was just joking...but he continued to watch me with a level gaze that made me wish I was wearing the same gray robe to blend in with everyone else.
“The...low magic...predicament?” I said, because I couldn't think of anything else.
“Yes, which brings us to the prophecy.” He sighed and stood up. The globe remained in place, slowly revolving. “This idea that you will, by virtue of a child, bring magic back.”
“Lemme guess. You don't interpret it that way.”
His eyebrow darted up his forehead, his features all shifting to mild confusion.
I held up my hands. I was quickly approaching done. “Dude, let me tell you a thing. I've played this game. I've read this comic. Pretty sure there are like...a thousand movies with this in them. You've got a prophecy, and two or more groups who interpret it differently, and everyone is fighting to see that it turns out in the way that benefits them most, am I right?”
“I-”
I stood up. “Of course, I am. So why don't you tell me what you think I should be doing with myself? Because let me tell you, I looooove being told that. It's my favorite thing.”
I sent him a look I hoped was as full of the frustrated disgust I was currently feeling. Tonight was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be relaxing. Heck, it very nearly was until everyone got involved. Crap like this was why I stayed home on Friday nights.
“Well, that's just it. We don't want you to do anything.”
Okay, that one threw me. “What?”
“They want me to.”
I don't know what I expected, which had been the theme of my life recently, but it certainly wasn't to turn around and find Connie standing there. She was still wearing her jeans and a tank top. Her riot of hair curling around her freckled face. For a split second, I was absolutely ecstatic to see her. I thought, for some reason, that my buddy was here to rescue me. Then, the full weight of her words hit me like a Mac truck.
“Wait...what?” Then, it hit me. I knew her face had looked familiar. It looked a little like mine. “Holy crap.”
“Lorena, this is your sister, Connie. She's your twin,” my mother sounded so proud of herself, like she'd just made the perfect soufflé or something. “Well...half-sister.”
I blinked in confusion. Wait, was that even possible? Could a woman actually...you know what...why was I questioning that? Like, there was magic in the world; I was sure that there were a billion things that were possible regardless of what science said.
“You?” I asked dumbly.
“What?” she asked. “Did you think you were the only one?”
Well, yes, but I didn't say that out loud. No one had ever told me that I had a sister. No one had ever even insinuated that could have been a thing. I didn't know if I was lied to or if no one knew.
“Okay, back up. What?”
“The prophecy that Loretta gave said that my daughter would give birth to the child of magic. That the child would be born of the blood of a son of Vlad.”
I didn't like that phrasing...that sounded bad. “What?”
Connie barely even glanced my direction as she walked around the table and stood next to Creepy Dude, who still hadn't bothered to tell me his name. “You said you didn't want to have the child. I do. I know magic better than you. I've been training for this all my life.”
Yeah, okay. That might be true. There was even a part of me that was totally down for passing the pressure of having the magic-baby off to someone else, but, to quote the king of all nerd movies, I had a bad feeling about this.
“I really hate to repeat myself, but what's the catch?”
“Don't worry about it,” Connie told me.
The very fact that those were the first words out of her mouth had me worrying triple time. But what was I supposed to say – “don’t tell me what to do? I'll worry if I want.” Somehow, that lacked gumption. “So...you want to have the child?”
She shrugged one freckled shoulder. In her typical non-vocal way, she was answering me.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Go back to your father,” my mother said.
Something about this made no sense. My mom had tried really, really hard to get me here. There had been kidnapping involved. Why were they so willing to just let me leave? My spider-sense was totally tingling.
“After Connie gives birth,” the Creepy Dude amended.
Ahh, there it was. They weren't willing to leave everything in the hands of fickle fate, were they? Nope. They wanted to lock me up in their citadel of doom for the next nine months. “Is she pregnant?”
“Not yet.”
Make that a year. I mean, she had to get one of the vampire guys to fall for her. Maybe that wouldn't take too long. I was pretty picky. Then again, maybe she didn't care if they liked her. They wanted magic in the world, too. Right?
“Great,” I said. “Imprisoned again. This time without hot dudes.”
“Lorena,” my mother started. I held up a hand.
“Don't. Like...just don't. It's pretty much bad enough that you weren't in my life, but to find out you've been pretty active in the life of the sister I didn't know I had is enough for a Maury Povich-Dr. Phil crossover show that I really don't need. And you know what? I can't leave if you don't really want me to, even if Creepy Dude over there promises that I can.”
“Who? Oh, Markus.” My mom offered him a smile.
“Sure, whatever.” I shook my head and sighed. “With the ability to take over my body...I know I'm stuck here, so why doesn't one of you gray-clad freaks show me to my room-slash-prison so I can get the hell out of these shoes before this becomes an episode of Jerry Springer?”
My humor, apparently, was lost on them. It was my mother who came over eventually and led me out of the room. I followed her, because I knew that trying to run away was stupid, and it might ruin my plans for later.
Instead, I worked on memorizing the layout as best as I could. It was both easy and difficult. Most houses had different-sized rooms to use up the space in a way that was useful as well as pretty. This one seemed to have a whole other purpose in mind. Every room I saw was pretty much the same size as the room with the table. The bathrooms were more like the showers for gym or something, stalls and such.
“Why is everything so perfect?” I asked.
“Because that is the way of magic,” she answered.
“That's not what I've learned.”
“You are wrong.”
Yeah, I thought, definitely a mom. Showed favoritism towards one of her kids and pretended like the other was absolutely screwed.
“So what kind of witch are you?” I asked.
She whirled on me suddenly, her robes becoming a swirl of gray. “I am not a witch. I'm a wizard.”
I blinked. Maybe it was the Harry Potter talking, but were witches girls and wizards dudes? Wait...no, that wasn't right. Someone had already told me that witch meant both boy and girl and anything in between. So... what the heck was a wizard?
“I'm sorry,” I said, trying to sound a lot more apologetic than I felt. “I don't understand.”
She softened instantly. She reached a hand out and touched my cheek. “No, of course you don't. Maybe you can still learn. They haven't ruined you completely. Witches are...wild...chaotic. They just use the magic of the things around them. Their rituals are spontaneous, doing whatever feels right. They have no rules at all.”
I didn't think that was completely fair. Witchcraft had plenty of rules, but yeah, a lot of it had to do with intuition. I'd been sort of fumbling with that, but it seemed to be working for others. “But wizardry is different?”
“Oh, yes,” her face lit up with the fanaticism that could only be matched by a Cumberbatch fangirl. “Magic ritual, Lorena, is rules and meaning.”
I nodded. I mean, I wasn't completely disinterested. I hadn't actually been doing all that great with the intuitive magic...at least, until tonight I hadn't. “Will you show me?”
She gave me a funny look, like she didn't quite believe me. I wasn't lying, not totally. “Why?”
I shrugged. “I mean, I want to know about magic. I want to learn, to understand.”
She put a hand on my cheek. “Of course, you do. But not tonight, it's late.”
Well, that much was true. I was tired, my feet hurt, and if everything went the way I wanted it to, it was going to be a very long night. I nodded. “Alright.”
She turned around and continued to lead me. At the end of the hall was a room. I could tell that ten people could have lived in there, it had enough bunk beds for it, but there were no robes or anything personal hung about. The shelves between the beds were empty. I was guessing there weren't many little wizards to join up.
I plopped down on a bed.
“I know it doesn't seem like it right now, Lorena, but this is for the best.”
I wondered if my mom knew how much she sounded like every villain ever drawn. Probably not. “Yeah.”
“Rest, we will talk more tomorrow.”
I tugged off my heels and flopped over, and proceeded to count to one hundred. The moment I did, I jumped up and went right to the door. I was going to do the simplest escape ever. Just walk right out the front door and drive the SUV through that wrought iron fence.
I put my hand on the doorknob and tugged. Nothing happened. I tugged again...and again...and again. All of the time had about the same effect. This wasn't the normal tugging on a locked door. This was more like pulling on a brick wall. Nothing moved. Great.
It didn't take a genius to realize that I had been magically imprisoned. Frick. Double frick. What was I supposed to do now? My super simple escape plan had been thwarted by a door. I began to look around the room, trying to find all the normal escapes. A vent big enough for a chubby girl to squirm through. A ceiling tile that would let me up. Nothing. I was beginning to touch every available surface, looking for the secret door switch, when I heard a whisper of movement in the hallway. A moment later, the door opened and a girl peeked her head in.
I didn't recognize her from the group that met me at the front door. I had assumed that they had been the entire cult. Apparently, I was wrong. She was a pretty girl. She had deep olive skin and eyes the color of honey. Her black hair was pulled into a long braid. She wore the same gray robe as everyone else, but it didn't seem to fit her right. The size was okay, but it didn't suit her.
“Are you the girl from the prophecy?”
Well, that wasn't as easy to answer as it had been half an hour ago. But I said yes anyway.
“Follow me.”
It was tempting to just shut up and do what she said...but I had never been one for just doing what I was told. “Who are you?”
“My name is Reika. I'm here to rescue you.”
“My very own Stormtrooper.”
She gave me a funny look. “What?”
“Never mind...why?”
She sighed. “Do you really want to know that right now?”
“Well...yes. Sorry, but it's been a weird night.”
“Because I want to get out of this place, and you are how I can do it.”
Ah, see, that I understood. She wasn't in this just to be nice and rescue the girl she didn't know; she wanted to get away from the creepy gray robed cult, too. That I believed. “Alright, let's go.”
She handed me a gray robe, and I tugged it on. I didn't like it. It was itchy. We pulled up the hoods, and she tugged me until I was standing right next to her. I followed in her footsteps, trying to be as quiet as possible. She was looking down at the floor, so I did, too.
“Keep your eyes on your feet; try to look normal,” Reika told me.
I had not, in my entire life, looked normal. Typical or able-bodied, sure, but not normal. “Okay.”
I was trying really, really hard to be absolutely normal when I felt something. It was hard to describe. It was like something was tugging at my mind or my spirit, or maybe a little of both. I turned my head and looked down the hallway that I was almost sure the sensation was coming from. I wanted to ignore it. I knew that it would be smarter to, but the moment that I felt it, I knew that I had to go find out what was happening.
I was walking down the hallway before I even realized I had fully made the decision. Reika grabbed my arm and tried to tug me back. “Where are you going?”
“This way...I have to.”
I swear it made perfect sense to me at the time. When Reika started to hiss that I was being an idiot, I knew she was right, but I knew that I couldn't ignore it either.
“Seriously, I have to,” I said.
She frowned at me. “You are going to ruin my chance for escape.”
“Go on, then. I'll meet you at the door.”
She didn't believe me. To be fair, I didn't believe me either. I was pretty sure that I was about to walk into the trappiest trap that ever trapped, but what was I supposed to do? Ignoring it just didn't seem to be an option. I walked, and Reika followed.
“We aren't supposed to be down here,” she whispered at me. I was getting the feeling that my rescuer was also a bit of a worrywart.
“We aren't supposed to be breaking out of here either, but that doesn't seem to be bothering you.”
She smiled. See, at least someone in this complex thought I was funny.
I ignored all the doors along the hall until we got to the very last one. Of course, it was. It couldn't be something normal like the first door on the right. It had to be all the way at the end of this place that was so boringly white and geometric that it was almost impossible to navigate.
“What's in there?” she asked.
“I don't know...but I need to find it.”
I tugged on the door. It didn't open. She pushed me aside. I let her. Hey, she knew more about this place than I did. She tugged out a container made of dark wood. She unscrewed it, and the scent of chalk filled the air. It was blue and stood out on her fingers as she began to draw a perfect circle on the door. She bisected it with lines so perfect I'd have needed a ruler and a prayer to accomplish them. Then, she added symbols that I didn't understand. The next thing I knew, magic surged out and the door opened.
“What the heck was that?” I wanted to know.
She shot me a look. “Wizardry.”
Right. Of course. What had I been thinking?
The room was as boringly decorated as the rest of the place, but that wasn't what caught my attention. In the very middle of the room was a bed, and in that bed was a man. He was tall and brown-skinned. His head was perfectly shaved, and a series of tattoos were imprinted on the flesh. There was an attractiveness to his features, high strong cheekbones and good form, but it was all muted by the fact that he looked like he had been bled dry...which wasn't too far from the truth.
A strange apparatus was hooked up to him. It had needles sticking into his skin and there were like...six jars sitting at six equal points inside of a circle that was made of what I could only assume was blood.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Reika tugged on my arm. “We need to go.”
“I'm not leaving someone like that!” I said, all full of righteous indignation.
“He's already dead.”
I blinked. How could she say that? I could feel that he was alive I could... “He's a vampire...oh my god...that's Zane.”
“Who?”
I knew it had to be. It had to be the last of the four sons of Vlad. He was a vampire. That's why I knew he was alive. Check one in the pro column for necromancy. “We have to get him out of here.”
“Why?”
“Because if we don't, then Connie gets to have the prophecy baby.”
She gave me another funny look. “You don't want her to? I heard-”
“Listen, I've got a lot of mixed feelings. Sue me. But one thing I am not cool with is tying up a person in your bedroom and sucking them dry. Like...I don't know a lot about magic...but killing something to make yours happen doesn't seem like a great idea.”
“You don't know they are killing him. It's a vampire.”
“Yeah, I do.”
I knew. I did. I knew it in a way I couldn't entirely explain. Call it witchcraft, call it intuition. But I was absolutely one hundred percent sure that this was hurting him. I was sure what I felt was his undead soul calling out for me. I surged forward just as Reika said “Wait!”
The magic surged towards me and then through me, tossing me back against the far wall with so much force I was left breathless. It did not feel good. Not even a little bit.
The vampire turned his head in my direction. “Help.”
“Working on it,” I gasped out. I charged forward, my ribs aching. “I need to get into this circle thing.”
“We should go. Someone will have heard that.” She was looking down the hall, as if waiting for people to suddenly appear. I hadn't heard anything, but the pulse of magic was strong enough that other people might have felt something. Was that the same thing? Maybe Reika actually heard magic when I just felt it. I didn't know. Magic was weird.
I took a deep breath, deep enough that it hurt my already tender body. I looked at the guy laid out and half dead...re-dead...more dead? I didn't know. I just knew that I absolutely could not leave him like that. “Please?”
She frowned, but she began drawing symbols in the bloody circle, her lips twisted in dislike.
The magic shuddered as she added her own to it, and I waited. I let my eyes gloss over until I could see the lines of the Weave as they worked in this room. The lines were...well, they were certainly more orderly here. They followed perfect paths regardless of what they were moving through. When I had seen them before, they seemed to follow the lines of nature and carpentry. Here, it was like everything had been built around them. It made me vaguely uncomfortable.
Several of the lines were focused into the circle, pushing into the vampire that I was assuming was Zane. They didn't look like normal magic lines...they looked spiky, like they were supposed to hurt. Lines were pouring out of him too, filling up the six jars. This all felt strange and wrong and I didn't like it at all.
“They are coming!” Reika hissed.
I didn't ask who. I could guess.
“Hurry!” I told her.
The magic broke, and I surged forward, plucking out the tubes from his body. He gasped, but not because he needed to breathe. It just hurt. A moment later, my mother and Connie and several of the gray-robed wizards were all pouring into the room. Oh, this wasn't good. They radiated magic. Their hands linked, and that power built and focused around me. I could tell they were trying to hold me still. It wasn't working as well as it had before, and I wasn't sure why.
“What's going on here?” my mother wanted to know.
“Gee,” I snapped out. “I was pretty sure that was my question. What are you doing to him?”
Connie gave me the biggest sneer that I had ever seen. “How else do you make a baby with blood?”
Okay. Ew. Not cool. I didn't want to know any more. “We are leaving.”
My mother shook her head. “No, you aren't.”
I wanted to say something cool, like “try and stop me,” but that was when I heard a great big commotion going on downstairs. Their heads turned, and I shouted, “Run!”
Zane couldn't run, not on his own. He was too weak and drained. He tried though, bless him. His long legs struggled to try to get under him. I put one arm around him, but I wasn't tall enough or strong enough to be of much help.
“Help him!” Reika shouted over her shoulder, trying to dart through the doorway.
“Trying!”
“Some necromancer you are,” Connie sneered.
That, quite possibly, was the most helpful thing that anyone had ever said to me. I'd played enough video games to know that necromancers were all about the undead. Sure, the flavor of that connection differed from one thing to the next, but undead were totally their jam. I remembered the power pouring into the jars, and I focused on it.
The power jumped to me, rushed into me. I felt like I'd exercised every day of my life and had just gotten done with my most recent world tour of martial arts. I was strong, fast, powerful...but I knew the power wasn't mine. With nothing but my force of will, I shoved all that power into Zane, and he damn near jumped.
This was why their magic wasn't working as well, I realized. It didn't matter that their lines of magic were all perfectly laid out. Blood was on the ground, and that was the essence of life energy. That was necromancy, and it was all mine. Well, okay, it was Zane's...but still.
One moment he was leaning on me, the next he was moving. I had Wei to compare him to, and Dmitri for that matter. I knew that vampires could be fast. I just didn't expect the blur of motion that left three wizards on the ground and me scooped up in a pair of slender arms. The next thing I knew, we were downstairs, and Reika was on our tail. The front door was open.
“Wow,” she whispered to herself. I was feeling pretty much the same. I had expected an epic boss battle, lots of magic being flung this way and that. Instead, all I had gotten was a blur of commotion. I'd complain about it later.
I was just about to walk out the front door when I heard the last thing that I expected.
“Lorena!”
“Wei!” I cried out, completely shocked.
The room where the cult and I had gone about our little conversation was a wreck. Markus stood in the center of it. His entire body glowed with circles of magic, tattooed into the skin, which had been covered by his gray robe earlier. Circles upon circles of interconnected glyphs glimmered against his skin. The power that rolled off of him was so much that my ribs, already tender, screamed with painful indignation.
Wei had his sword in hand, still wearing the jeans and the t-shirt that he had been wearing at the club, but both were soaked with blood. I hadn't even known that vampires could bleed. Wounds were visible on his flesh, but I didn't know what had made them. To one side was Alan, gripping his stomach, leaning heavily against the wall, and to the other was Dmitri…or at least, I thought it was Dmitri. He looked...well, he looked more like a massive man-bear than the boy I had grown to care about. Wei was bloodied, and his eyes were a shock of red.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Rescuing you.”
“No!” Markus shouted, and the word was filled with arcane power. The room seemed to shake with it. I had never felt anything like it, even from Marquesa. “You will go nowhere. I will not have magic running rampant through the world. I will not have it!”
That sounded...weird. What else was magic supposed to do?
“Let us go!”
He shook his head and raised his hands in the air. I knew that he was going to do something terrible, so I did the only thing I could do. I stole magic. I stole it from Alan, from Dmitri, from Zane. I stole parts of that essence that made them what they were, and I shoved it into Wei. Wei, who I knew could be so strong. Wei, who I knew to be the most powerful of the sons of Vlad. I poured it into him like water into a cup. I filled him with everything that I could, and when he couldn't take any more, the magic flashed back into me. Oops.
For a moment, I couldn't see what happened; instead, all I could see was my face. It wasn't like looking in the mirror; it was softer than what I saw. It was my smile, my rolling eyes, the way my jeans hugged my legs. It was me trying my best at martial arts and me practicing magic. Visions of me reading quietly in the library, or me chatting amiably with Peter.
An image of me, lounging at the club, with my black dress stretched across the thickness of my thighs. My lips, smothered in red. There were a lot of other images of me, too, things I knew that Wei had never seen, lusty things...hungry ones. It was me the way Wei saw me, and it was so full of love and lust that I was struck breathless by it.
Then again, maybe that was the cracked ribs.
When my vision finally cleared, I was struck dumb again, but for a completely other reason. The room, which had already been a mess, was a complete wreck. The table was in pieces, shattered as if it had exploded from the inside out. Alan had Dmitri's head in his lap, whispering something soothing in French. A large piece of wood was sticking out of Dmitri's shoulder. Alan jerked as a piece of wood as long as my arm struck him in the back.
It was then that I realized Markus was trying to stake my vampires. Hey. Not cool. Not cool at all. I glanced around and saw Zane, still exhausted and gray around the eyes, leaning heavily against the door frame, doing his best not to be a target.
My eyes landed on Wei. He was bloody again, but his body was moving so fast I could barely see it. His blade was a glimmer of silver as it lashed and struck. Markus, somehow, was keeping up. The blade in his hands was made of magic, invisible until Wei's blade made contact with it, then it would shine.
Markus slammed his hand outward, and Wei went flying across the room. I really hated that trick; it had happened to me too often tonight.
“Hey!” I shouted. Markus' head jerked in my direction. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You are!” he shouted. I don't think I'd ever heard anything so bitter.
“What the heck did I ever do to you?”
His eyes lit up with long swallowed anger. “You were born.” He came after me then. He moved fast, almost vampire fast, which was a lot quicker than I was able to. I stumbled back, and his magic blade cut into the wall to my left. “Everything would have been fine. Connie would have already birthed the child were it not for you.”
I had no idea what he meant by that. As far as I knew, I had done absolutely nothing to disrupt any of that. I hadn't even known it was going on. That was fine though. He could think that. If he kept his attention on me, Wei could make the final strike. I didn't dare look, but I knew it was coming. Wei loved me...he would keep me safe.
“You're nuts.”
“You're worthless!” he spat back.
As far as comebacks go, that one lacked oomph. “Try again.”
“The ritual was almost ready,” he snarled, swinging the blade again. It was a wild swing, and I jumped back, but I wasn't quite fast enough. The invisible blade caught me across the chest, cutting from my hip to my belly button. It did not feel good. It was like the world’s worst razor slicing through my skin. Fire-hot pain ripped through me.
“Hey!” I shouted out. “That's my dress!”
Yeah, that was my biggest thought right then. My priorities are not perfect. He was a little shocked, too. He went totally still with confusion, and that moment was all Wei needed. His blade struck out like a blur of silver and buried itself in Markus' side. He jerked the blade out and slammed it in again. Wei's face was contorted with anger.
“No!” My mother's scream was shrill and unexpected, but not as unexpected as the wave of energy that rolled off of Markus.
“Wei, get Alan!” I yelled. I turned my attention to Dmitri. I did something I hated. I manipulated his body the same way my mom had manipulated mine. If Dmitri hadn't been a vampire, it wouldn't have worked...but I managed to get all of us out of there and into the SUV. I didn't even feel my cut.
I didn't think about anything else, not what the power spilling behind me like a typhoon meant, or where Jenny was, or anything. I just shoved the key still dangling around my neck into the ignition. My necklace broke, and I didn't care. The engine roared to life, and I slammed my bare foot to the gas and shot us out of there.
When I looked into the mirror, my mother was standing on the porch, Markus sagging against her left, Connie, the sister I never knew I had, on her right. I knew this wasn't over. Not by a long shot.