THREE
“Yeah,” I said, putting my hands on a very attractive chest and pushed, “I'm going to tell you to put me down now. And if you aren't a complete jerk, you are going to listen.”
“As you request, ma chère.” He put me down, but he didn't exactly move. From my upright position, I could tell he wasn't tall, maybe all of five foot eight or something, but he was all slender lines and elegant features. His nose was a bit sharp and his lips a little thin, but he still would have looked right at home on one of those gothic metal CD covers.
“Personal space, buddy. I don't know you.” I gave him a look. I didn't have a mirror, but I was pretty sure it was a meaningful one.
He gave me an amused grin in response and took half a step back. “Oh, but we will, Cher, we will. We will make magic together.”
His grin blossomed into a full-on smile, and I saw that his teeth, while pearly white, were also sharp and pointed. Nope, definitely not an angel, I decided. I wasn't dumb. I knew vampire teeth when I saw them. These were either the real thing or the best prosthetics I had ever laid eyes on. Considering everything that had happened in the past five minutes, guess which ones I thought they were?
“Right. Apparently, you are supposed to father my prophecy baby.”
There were worse options. Okay, that might not be true. For all he was pretty, he could be a level ten mega-creep. But there were probably less attractive options. Wait? Were there options? Had the prophecy already picked a lover for me?
I whirled on the three women who were still coming out of whatever weird haze they had thrown themselves into. Their eyes were all still sort of...empty. Ms. Marquesa came out of it first. I wasn't surprised. She seemed to have the most strength. Did strength matter when it came to magic? Maybe. I didn't know. That was pretty much the theme of my life.
“Is he?” I demanded the moment her brown eyes filled with their normal warmth.
“Not...exactly.”
“Vague much? Like, dude, I dunno how to tell you this but I am pretty much done with vague. I'm done with just about everything until everyone tells me what the hell that was and who the hell he is and what the hell is going on.”
“That was a message,” Ms. Marquesa answered.
“Creepy message. Got it. And everything else?”
“We told you there is a prophecy,” Jenny answered. With limbs as loose as wet noodles after a five mile run, Jenny flopped into a chair and picked up her not quite finished piece of chicken. When I gave her a look, she gave me an unapologetic shrug. “Magic makes us hungry. It's why we got the good food back here.”
Connie gave a silent nod of agreement, but she grabbed a roll from a pile I hadn't noticed before. Apparently, she didn't like to say much.
Ms. Marquesa looked up at me. “The prophecy says that the father of the child will be a vampire from the line of Vlad himself.”
“Vlad?” I asked, “As in the Impaler?”
I like history. Sue me. My degree, if I had managed to finish it, would have been in anthropology with a minor in history. I like to study people. They fascinate me. So, when Ms. Marquesa brought up good ol' Vlad, the inspiration for the story of Dracula, I knew exactly who she was talking about. Vlad was a prince of Romania and a heck of a warrior. A lot of history books demonize him for being pretty mean to his enemies, but Romania heralds him as a hero beyond compare. It's all about who writes the story.
“Oui, the most brilliant and esteemed prince of blood.” Alan bowed his head in respect.
“So...he was really a vampire.”
I dragged a hand through my short mop of hair ruining any style that sleeping on it for two hours might have given me. “And Alan is one of his...line.”
Alan's lips curled into a smile. He lifted his chin and pushed his nose into the air another inch. “I am.”
I was both annoyed by him and amused. It's weird how some people can be both.
“He is but one of three.” Ms. Marquesa, who was looking a little gray around the lips, took the chair I had been sitting in. Since there were only two seats, I was left standing. I wasn't bothered. Not only was Ms. Marquesa older than me, this was her place and she had just done some magical stuff to...stop other magical stuff? I was a little unclear about that. “He and his two brothers are...viable applicants for the role.”
“Oh,” I said dumbly, “cool. Well, I'm not interested.”
“What?” All of them said it, in stereo.
“Considering the faces all of you are making, I think you all heard me. I'm not interested in being the oven to your bun of magic. I came here to find out about my grandma and figure some things out about my life. I came here to spend my six months in my grandma's house, get my inheritance and then hit the road. You can see how having a prophecy baby could throw a wrench into the clockwork of my program.”
“My, my. She is a snippy little coquette, isn't she?”
“Hey, buddy. I know what that word means, and I'm not cool with it. I'm not being a flirt or a tease. I'm laying down the law here. I'm not ready to be anyone's mommy.”
There was another series of looks, and I crossed my arms over my chest. They could look at each other all they wanted, but it didn't really matter. I knew what I was going to do.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Lorena, but Loretta was my friend and the stipulations for you receiving her inheritance were...specific.”
My world came to a screeching halt. “What?”
“Your grandma made me the executor of her last will and testament. I am in the way of knowin' what it is she said had to happen. Yeah, there is six months of you stayin' at her place. But those months are for you to meet the three brothers and choosing one of them to take as your husband or lover, or what have you.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, even though I had pretty much sorted it out of myself. I'm weird. I like to get confirmation that my whole world is about to blow up before I freak out about it.
“I'm saying that you won’t get the money until and unless you have a baby.”
The pin on the grenade of my future had just been pulled. I could hear it ticking. Did grenades tick? No. That was bombs. Whatever.
This had not been the plan. The plan had been simple. Six months here. Get money. Go make a life for myself. But no. That wasn't happening. Instead, a grandma I had never known was telling me what I needed to do with my life and how it needed to be done. I did not approve.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” Connie said, breaking her near silence, “she's serious.”
I dragged my hand through my hair again and tried my best not to just break down and cry. Maybe it had been the sixteen-hour non-stop car ride, maybe it was the shattering of all the dreams I'd had about the temporary house my Dad used to call home, maybe it was the lack of sleep or finding out that magic was very real and I was at the center of the prophecy. Who was I kidding? It was everything and then some. Tears filled my eyes, big and wet and hot.
Jenny gave me a look of compassionate understanding. She stood up and walked around the table. Her arms were warm as she wrapped them around me. “I'm going to get you home.”
“Jenny-”
“Grandma, I know a thing or two about life deciding things for ya, let me just...talk to her.”
“Wouldn't it be better if-” Alan started.
“No,” Jenny interrupted, “it wouldn't. You got some kinda stake in this? Hah, vampire pun. No seriously, you do got your own plan. Right? Right. So back off and give her a few hours to just...soak all of it in, okay fang-boy?”
I let her guide me out of the back room, leaving a trio of quiet people behind us. It felt nice to let her take the driver's seat. She grabbed a bunch of snack treats and candy and guided me out to the car. I let her drive. I wasn't feeling like being at the wheel right that moment. I wasn't even wanting to be in that town right then, maybe not even that state. But what was I going to do?
“Thanks,” I said after a couple of minutes of watching unfamiliar street signs pass by. The tears had gone back to whatever emotional pit that spawned them, but I knew they'd come back if I said too much.
“Naw, no worries. Grandma’s just excited is all. She sees you coming in and thinks...well...you know what she thinks. I know she might seem overbearing. But she's good. Took me in after mamma and daddy kicked me out for trying to take my girlfriend to prom.”
“Are you still dating her?” I asked.
“Naw,” Jenny shook her head. “She went off to some fancy college. That's all good. I'll get another girlfriend if I can get off this here damn mountain.”
“Not a lot of lesbians around here?” I asked, happy to be discussing a topic that wasn't about me.
“Pshaw, pretty sure Melody and me was the only ones. Tried one of those dating apps once? All the cute lesbians are in Richmond which is like...two hours away and ain't none of them wanna give a chance to some mountain hick.”
“That sucks,” I said. I meant it. I had dated a girl once. Okay, I had gone on a date with a girl once. It hadn't gone badly, but at the end of it, I realized that I had a preference for guys. Then again, if the right girl found her way into my life, it would not be completely outside the realm of possibility for me to date her. I'm open to options. Oh wait, all the options had been taken from me and narrowed down to three vampire dudes. “I'm sorry.”
She shrugged. But I could tell it bothered her. It had to be hard, I thought, to live in a rural town of Virginia if you were not only a lesbian, a black woman, and a witch. Jeez.
“I'll find someone. Even if I have to fashion her out of magic.”
“Well, if I can help, let me know.”
“You might, actually,” she said, giving me a sidelong glance, “I mean, ain't you Loretta's grandbaby? You got magic in you, too.”
I sighed. “See, I said this all right before...”
I thought back to the woman in the gray robe, the one with the voice like snakes. I wanted to ask about it, but it felt weird, like it was something I shouldn't be talking about at all. I frowned.
“Before the attack?”
“Yeah,” I answered, “what was all that about?”
“Psychic attack,” she said, turning onto my street, “probably from the Cult.”
She said the word Cult like it ought to be capitalized, like it was important. I pictured the woman in the long gray robes and decided if anyone in my life had ever looked like a cultist, it was her. “Cult, right. That makes perfect sense. Witches, vampires, prophecy. Why not a cult, too? Next thing I need is a brooding stranger and we would officially check off the list of a modern adventure fantasy.”
“You haven't met Dmitri yet.”
I didn't want to know, but I asked anyway. “Dmitri?”
“One of the other vampires in Vlad's line. Tall, dark and broody.” She smirked when she said it. Her eyes twinkling. “If I didn't like women I'd jump him.”
“That's a hell of a compliment.”
She pulled my car into my grandmother's driveway. “Wait, how are you getting home?” I asked suddenly.
“I'll chill here until Connie gets off of work. She'll pick me up.”
I shrugged. “So, we are just going to hang out until then?” I asked.
“If you want. I mean, it's kinda rude to leave the girl who drove you home sitting on ya doorstep, but if that's how you wanna be...”
I rolled my eyes, but smiled anyway. I liked Jenny. Years of moving from one place to another had given me a finely-honed sense of knowing right off who I wanted to hang out with and who I didn't. Jenny fell into the former category. “Come in.”
It should have been awkward having someone I didn't know over to a house that wasn't really mine, but like I said, my family moved around a lot. I had become an expert at making friends on the fly. We walked in, unpacked every single packaged and processed food she had taken from the store, and we plopped down in front of my computer to watch cartoons. Because at nineteen, you rediscovered that cartoons were pretty much the best thing ever. Then again, if you are like me, you never forgot in the first place.
“So,” she asked, sometime around two in the morning after we had eaten two bags of chips and more Little Debbie snack cakes than I had ever known existed, “tell me what you want to do with your life.”
I shrugged. It was hard to think about. “Well, before tonight, my plan consisted of chilling out here for six months and then maybe looking into going back to school in a year or two...you know...after a cruise or a vacation or something.”
“Back to school?” She folded her long legs under her and popped open the chip bag that we had promised was going to stay closed forever.
“Yeah, I dropped out earlier this year. I kinda gave up.”
“Why?”
I could have lied, but I didn't. “I don't know. I wish I had some great excuse for what I did. I wish I could tell you that I broke under the stress or something...but I didn't. My grades weren't terrible. They weren't fantastic either, but I was managing. The truth, though? I just didn't want to be there anymore. I didn't want to write another paper about the advancement of humans as understood by some random old dude. I didn't want to prove that I know the square root of whatever when I'd been doing that for years already. I thought college was supposed to be different, but as far as I could tell, it was just high school version two-point-oh.”
“I wanted to go to college, but we couldn't afford it. An' a'fore you go on and tell me all about the joys of student loans...don't.”
I thought back to the couple of thousand that I owed without any degree to show for it. “Not going to happen, I promise. What did you want to study?”
“Geology. I'm good with stones.”
“Really?” I asked. I thought back to the psychic attack and remembered the stones glowing around Jenny's throat.
“Yeah, I am. Always have been. Most witches have something they are good with. Well, most have several somethings, but we all have something that we are like...a natural with. The first thing that really bonded with us. I am good with stones, Grandma is good with herbs and kitchen witchery. Connie is good with animals. All of us draw from things. Your Grandma? She was good with metals and the wind.”
‘Well,’ I thought, hearing the tinkle of wind chimes in the distance, ‘that made sense.’ If I really was a witch, and I wasn't holding out hope on that front, what would I be good with? I didn't know. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to find out.
“Who are the vampires?” I asked.
“Well, you met Alan. He's hot.”
“And he knows it,” I said with a roll of my eyes.
“Oh, ain't that the truth. Yeah, he's nice, but he likes to pretend he ain't. He wears his pretty the way Connie wears her silence.”
There was something about the way she said the name that made me look at her. “Do you have a crush on Connie?”
Jenny shrugged her shoulders and looked away. It was clear she didn't want to talk about it. If I had been a best friend, or even a friend for more than two hours, I might have pushed. I didn't though.
“Okay,” I said, “you said the other one is named Dmitri?”
“Yeah, he's from Russia, or a place that used to be its own country but is now part of Russia, I dunno. Like I said, he's broody. Tends to act first and think later.”
I formed a sketchy picture of him in my head. He ended up looking like that dude who played Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies.
“There are three, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah, three. The last one is Wei. I don't know him very well. He's quiet. Really quiet and... intense.”
She frowned when she said it, and I frowned right along with her. I could handle quiet guys, and I could handle intense ones, but the guys who were both usually ended up being serial killers. Then again, they were all vampires...
“Do I have to do this?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Naw, you don't have to. But I warn you that prophecy has a way of wanting to be done, even if you don't want it.”
“Well I don't. I mean, don't get me wrong. I think it would be cool for magic to be in the world again. Really cool. But...I don't think I want to be the one to do it.”
“Well, spend your six months here, do what you gotta do. Maybe get a job and save up. It's all up to you. I'll help out.”
She meant it. I could hear it in her voice. It made me smile. “You tryin' to be my friend?”
“There ain't a lot of lesbians on this mountain, but there are even fewer friends.”
We shared a quiet moment of complete understanding, the kind between two people who knew exactly what it was like to have a hundred acquaintances and no friends. In that moment, I decided that I'd stick around, if just for Jenny.
There was a knock on the door, and Jenny popped up faster than I could. “That's probably Connie.”
I smiled to myself. Yeah, there was definitely something there. I'd ask about it sometime. She swung open the door, and I knew that it wasn't Connie, because I heard her ask, “What the hell are y'all doing here?”
“I have informed my brothers of the attack tonight, and we have decided that the vessel of prophecy would be safer at our home than...here.”
I recognized Alan's voice. It wasn't just the whisper of a French accent, it was the arrogance in his words. I popped up and stomped over, staring over Jenny's shoulder and right into that perfectly carved face. “Hey, buddy, what did I say about this prophecy thing?”
“I believe you said you were not interested,” he said. He was still pretty, and still dressed to the nines in his aristocratic French getup. I had to admit it looked good. Not many guys could pull off that much lace and still look manly. Maybe it was the teeth.
“Y'all need to give her a break. She just got here.”
“And already the Cult attacks,” a man of maybe twenty or so years old said. He had rich brown hair that curled in natural ringlets around a broad face. His nose was short and hooked, but his lips were soft and looked like they would give excellent kisses. He was also, and I mean this emphatically, buff. Oh, he tried to hide it under loose clothes, so you might not notice at first, but I bet beneath that black shirt and blacker jacket he was built like Mr. Universe.
That had to be Dmitri.
“Well, maybe someone ought to tell them I'm not going to be having any prophecy babies.”
Alan gave me a look that said I was being ridiculous. “You will give up your entire inheritance because you do not want to take me as a lover?”
“One of us,” Dmitri amended, his voice gruff.
“I'd give up a lot of things to have the freedom that the average woman ought to have, not the least of which is decide when she wants to have a kid,” I snapped back.
Alan's lips curled into a smirk. “An independent woman, I see. How...modern.”
I rolled my eyes. “Listen, dude, I'm not into this whole alpha male thing. You can take your arrogance and shove it up your pretty-”
“You think I'm pretty?”
If I hadn't already been rolling my eyes, I would have done it again.
“It was just once,” Jenny cut in, “They only called to her once. It means nothing. Besides, they attacked at the station. Everyone knows Grandma works her magic outta there. This place is protected. They won’t attack her here.”
“Yeah,” I thought to myself, “Jenny was definitely going to be my friend.”
“Is that true?” Dmitri demanded.
I opened my mouth to say that it was, but then I remembered the voice I heard when I was just about to drift off. The voice that I had promised myself was nothing.
Jenny turned towards me when my hesitation lasted longer than a second. “Right?”
“Well...”
“She comes with us,” a third man said, and all eyes turned towards him. I'd lied. Alan was definitely not the most attractive guy I had ever seen.
Wei, because who the heck else could it be, looked like a modern-day warrior, prepared for battle. A straight-edged blade hung along his back, a tassel hanging off the end. He wore the high neck and straight-sleeved shirt that I associated with Chinese history, but the pants were modern day slacks, loose ones, comfortable enough to move in. The clothes were good, the man in them was devastating. His skin was just a shade or two shy of being gold, with eyes as dark as obsidian. His lips were set into a grim and determined line. He didn't have Alan's elegance or Dmitri's brute strength, but there was something about the way he held himself that told me that this guy took no crap from anyone.
I ignored that completely. “The hell I am.”
Jenny gave me a look. “Lorena, maybe you ought to-”
“I don't want to have their children.”
I was on the verge of hysterics. I could feel it like a spider crawling up my throat. I shook my head. I knew that if I went with them, I'd be completing some step in this stupid prophecy, and I didn't want that. I wanted to go back to sleep. Better yet, I wanted to not be so stubborn that I quit a job I hated to come looking for a new life.
“Do not be foolish,” Wei said, taking a step forward. Everyone moved out of his way, everyone but me. “I have no interest in playing the stud to your brood mare, but you will be safer at our house.”
I snorted. “Who the hell called you a stud?”
Jenny made a choking sound that sounded like she was holding back a laugh, Alan's lips spread enough that I could see the tips of his pointed teeth, and Dmitri looked like I had come from a whole other planet. I got the feeling a lot of people didn't stand up to Wei, the Grumpy. Please, I had dealt with Sunday Morning Soccer Moms. No one lays into you like those ladies.
“It was a metaphor.”
I shrugged and crossed my arms across my chest. “Nice metaphor since I get to be the brood mare.”
His lips made an even tighter line. I put my hand on the door, intending to close it. I don't know what I would have done, because that sense of pressure started to build again.
“Oh no!” Jenny called. She stumbled away from me.
The pressure was hard and fast enough that my ears popped. I knew better than to try and cover my ears, but I did it anyway. Human instinct is stupid that way. The pressure hit me in waves, and I realized it wasn't affecting anyone else, just me. My vision started to go blurry. The men were shouting things to one another, and Wei's arms went around me. I had just enough time to tell him not to get any ideas before I passed out entirely.