“Can I just say,” Row adds as we sit around the wooden table in the darkened expanse of mine and Lucian’s room at the King and Grove hotel. “that this is a terrible idea?”

Marius’s back downstairs with Abe. The king is awake now that the sun has set, and the best thing Marius can do is take him hunting, make sure he stays fed and as lucid as possible. Besides, everything with Marius…that connection between us…it only confuses me. If I’m going to pull this séance idea off, then I need full concentration. That leaves me, Reina (this is her kind of thing anyway), Rowland, and Lucian seated around the table and holding hands.

Well, mostly.

I’ve got my phone out as I’m about to dial Mama Lisette for advice on how to make it all work. Last thing I need is doubters because I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do this. Annoyed, I look up from my cell and glare at Row. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Reina bites her lower lip. “It confuses me too.”

“Actually, it’s pretty simple. If I can use my visions to see the future, then why can’t I see backwards in time? Obviously, I have to trigger something different, but if I can see one way in time, then why not the other way.”

Lucian nods, considering my words. “It makes sense, to be honest. If time’s a river like certain physicists say, then Aura should be able to enter the stream anywhere she likes with a gift like hers.”

“Read the great physicists much?” Row jokes.

Lucian smirks. “I have a lot of time on my hands at night and don’t sleep much. I’ve reviewed some theorems here or there, read A Brief History of Time more than once.”

Despite everything, I smirk knowingly back at Lucian. I knew he had a Star Trek streak, who knew my sexy vampire consort was a huge nerd. “See, then this will work.”

“I didn’t exactly say that,” Lucian replies.

“Oh, yee of little faith,” Reina says, shaking her hand and then grabbing Row’s again when I scowl at her.

I finish dialing my phone and wait with baited breath for Mama Lisette to pick up all the way in New Orleans. “No one break the circle now. I’m going to need to draw on all the energy I can get.”

The phone rings through a few times and just before I’m convinced it’ll go to voicemail, Mama Lisette’s voice is on the phone. “Aura, did you find out who made the ring yet?”

“We did, Mama Lisette,” I reply. “It was originally charmed by Rochelle Montclair.”

“Fuck. She’s been dead---”

“For over one hundred and fifty years. Believe us, we know,” Reina chimes in.

“But I can see the future, and I think if you guide me right through the séance, then I can go back and talk to Rochelle, figure out what she knows and how to break the protecting Morana’s ring offers,” I say.

“You could do that, but I have to warn you that going through time that way can be dangerous. The past draws people in, might make you stay. Future is just a glimpse of things not yet written but people can get rooted forever in the past,” Mama Lisette says.

Both Lucian and Reina grab my hands more tightly. When isn’t what we do a risk? It’s always scary, but I’m a bad-ass Dria vampire, and I’m going to figure out how to destroy the ring and save my consort. Compared to resurrecting the king of all vampires, just taking a trip through time is no big deal.

And, yeah, my life has gotten so effing weird.

“All right, just so you’re aware of the risk,” Mama Lisette answers. “Okay, I’ll start the chant and everyone but Aura join in with me. Aura, you’ll need to close your eyes and concentrate on the beat of the words around you, the rhythm of the chant but not its meaning. It’s meant to get you into a mindful flow with the rest of the world around you, to help you feel time itself. Can you do that?”

Swallowing hard, I nod, then feel like an idiot since she’s not exactly on FaceTime. “Yes, I gotcha.”

The chant starts, something low and slow in French. It trips well off of Mama Lisette, Row, and Lucian’s tongues. They probably have all grown up speaking it forever. Reina trips over the pronunciation a little, but soon, their chant becomes a steady beat, a pulsating, vibrant presence in the room. Closing my eyes, I will myself to feel the tattoo, to let that rhythm move me deeper into my trance. The longer I listen, the more weightless I feel.

Until it’s like my soul’s snapped from my body, like a broken rubber band has set me loose. Or maybe like Peter Pan losing his shadow. Either way, I’m falling from my body, from the scene above me into a dark ether below. Part of me wants to scream. Needs to stop. Even Lisette mentioned that I might never come back if I fall. Then again, a life without Carver is no life at all. If I don’t go forward with this, I’ll never stop Morana.

Damn it.

It’s like Reina is always telling me. I’m a Kresova. I’m more than that. I’m a fucking Dria, and I will do this. I’ve asked my consorts and my friends for far too much not to give my all into this as well.

The darkness overwhelms me, suffocating me until its all I can see. All I can feel. All I am. When madness threatens to creep over me, I’m brought to reality again. This time, I’m on a busy street in Brooklyn as it must have been one-hundred and fifty years ago. I see the bridge in the background, smell the stench of urine and poorly funneled sewage in the summer heat, and here the shouts of the horse-drawn buggies. It’s a loud, smelly, churning mess, even more real in some ways that New Orleans.

An even bigger mess.

As I watch, a poor Irish woman huddles on the corner. She’s selling charms from a small, woven basket. The charm currently is just a silver disc, one made of three intersecting spirals. When I first drew the ring’s center for Lucian, he told me it was called a triskelion, the melding of three Celtic spirals. It symbolizes the cycle of everything and can be a powerful talisman without added enchantments against evil.

Even standing her, seeing a shadow of how the ring started a hundred some odd years ago, I can feel the power rippling from it. God, if you added in Rochelle Montclair’s enchantment and Morana’s own fiendish power….the ring as it is today might be one of the most powerful talismans on earth.

Perfect.

Not like fate wanted to make things too easy on me or anything.

As I continue to watch, a slight woman with curly dark hair and skin the color of dark wood stops at by the Irish woman. Her thick brogue makes the Irish woman almost impossible to understand but Rochelle Montclair manages. She hands the woman a wad of bills and, I’m not expert on old timey money, but based on the redheaded woman’s expression, Rochelle overpaid. Or, well, the Irish woman didn’t know the kind of power she actually had on her was more likely.

Rochelle looks over her shoulder, her motions furtive and then hurries down the street. I follow her, slinking easily between the humans, my vampiric grace still part of me even here. When she turns down a dark alley, I pursue. I don’t expect the blown dried herbs to land in my eyes or send me into coughing fits.

What the eff?

“So, vampire, you have one minute before I call on the power of the sun to melt you to nothing.”

“I’m a fledgling. The sun clearly isn’t hurting me,” I say, still choking on her damn powder. Lisette didn’t mention that anything would hurt. “Besides, I’m…”

Rochelle narrowed her eyes at me and then looked down to the talisman. “You’re not from now, are you?”

Nodding, I rub at my watering eyes. “I just need to know how to remove your spell from that trinket there.”

“Didn’t you just ask me? Well, older me,” she asks, the creole French strong in her accent.

“I can’t.” I shrug. “I won’t tell you when I’m from, just that it’s over a century from now.”

Rochelle relaxes some. What I’ve said isn’t exactly a lie, but it’s not the whole truth either. Soon, Morana will come for her and then leave her defenseless from Marie Laveau, but there’s no reason to leave that sword dangling over her. It’ll be all Rochelle thinks about. It’d be cruel. Besides, I can’t risk this vision fucking up history either.

“All right, well, I’m going to do a basic spell to ask EgUnGun to bless this talisman. It already has had Fae from the old lands spell cast over it. That much I can feel on it. It’s powerful, adding the blessing from my ancestors will make it almost unstoppable.”

“I believe that,” I say, rubbing my arm. Morana throws quite a wallop and maybe part of that is her ring as well. “So, to stop it, I pray to EgUnGun?”

“You must bless a mirror first. Get an antique one with silver backing, spread rock salt along it’s bottom, and then say the incantation for the mirror realm.” She rattles off the chant a few times, and I wish I had my phone to just record it, but that’d be asking too much of mystical time travel. As she chants, I repeat the words after her and she nods. “Those are the words and that is the ritual. If you do that, you can pass through the mirror into the mirror realm. You must prove to EgUnGun that you are worthy to have this request granted. If you can please him, then the power of the ring will be broken. Fail…”

“And I die?”

“You catch on fast, vampire.”

“Great, so do I click my heels or?”

“You’re still very young, fledgling,” she says. Then, she presses a hand to my forehead and the world spins.

My stomach churns and pain rockets through me. Opening my eyes, I expect to be sitting back at the table with my friends and with Lucian. Instead, I know where I am instantly. It’s that same dank dungeon I saw when I first glimpsed Carver. I can’t smell anything this time, but I can see far too much. Carver’s strung up against a wall. Thick manacles encircle his wrists. He screams as Morana rakes her nails down his chest. She stops just before his cock, but make sure she tears his chest and hips to ribbons. Rivulets of blood flow down him and his skin is torn in chunks. If he ever escapes, even with Kresova healing, he’ll be scarred for eternity,

Morana’s eyes are even madder than usual. Maybe the blast has blown out whatever sanity she had left. Petite as always yet frightening, she leans up on tip toe to whisper in Carver’s ear. “Tell me where your whore is Carver? Do you think I don’t suspect what she is? She’ll never win. I have Abehartach hidden well. I’ve killed all the Daks.” Her grin turns feral. Vicious. Stepping back, she points to the cage that contains Jolie.

His sister is snarling like the beast she’s become. Her hair is hopelessly knotted and tangled, and her eyes aren’t focused. Maybe they can’t. She rushes for the strong, silver bars of her cage and knocks her head so hard that the blood vessels in her eyes burst. She screams and collapses in a heap on the cage floor

“My pet did that.”

“No! You bitch!”

Morana shakes her head and her nails close around his balls like a fucking vice. “No, Lord of Pleasure, you don’t get to command me. You’ve forgotten, mon assassin, I’m your queen---your only queen---and soon that pretender Aurora Hedvidge will be dead. They’ll all be nothing but dust after I tear their fucking heads off. Now, where is she?”

Carver screams as she claws in deeper, and then, she stops. Instead, she wraps a leg around his waist and then kisses his lips. In the cage, Jolie stirs again and circle the perimeter. Drool falls from her lips, and her teeth are yellow and jagged in a way no vampire’s have ever been before. Jesus Christ, it’s like looking at the gullet of a shark.

But even under all of this---the humiliation, the anger for his sister, his own fear---I can feel my consort. I can feel Carver. He has hope. God, he has such hope in me, and I won’t give up. No matter what, I will save him.

And that bitch will bleed.

Morana strokes Carver’s bleeding cock and, despite everything, it engorges and grows hard. “You used to love me, mon assassin, used to do anything for me. You knew every way to pleasure me. Did you really throw it all away for some ugly, American whore?”

“You’re the whore. And the monster.”

Morana backs away from him and then backhands his cheeks. Her ring, the ring that was once Rochelle’s pendant, tears the skin from his cheek. “Oh, we know this already. The great Marceau family. Part of the royal court once upon a time, now just the Lord of Pleasure, the vampire queen’s rent boy prostitute, and his monster of a sister, that ravening beast, Jolie!”

The beast in the cage…no Carver’s sister raises her head up and howls and then starts to claw at her body, picking at the skin of her naked breasts until it bleeds.

Carver looks away, the sadness rolling off him in thick, palpable waves. “Morana?”

His voice is soft, and for a moment, I’m afraid she’s broken him.

Morana must have thought the same thing because she perks up and leans inches from his lips. “What, my favorite Tiruer? Are you ready to serve me again?”

Carver brings his head back and slams it into her forehead. The smack of skulls rings through the dungeon and blood blossoms across Morana’s face. “Go to hell, bitch.”

She wipes at her forehead and practically growls at him. “One day, I will, but you, Carvell Marceau, are already there!”

Morana strides out and leaves the broken brother and sister alone in the mess and blood of their confinements. Carver’s pain was so raw that it almost bowled me over and forced me to my knees through our bond. I stumble even as I start to hear Mama Lisette’s voice calling for me, summoning me back fully to New York now that I’m at least in the present.

I’m not sure how I can reach out to Carver, but I will as much love and strength as I can to him. To my surprise, he turns his head and smiles directly at me. “I know you’ll come, Aurora. Ma belle, I know you’ll come.”

Mama Lisette chants again and I snap back to my chair in one of the most luxurious hotels in Brooklyn, thousands of miles and a universe away from the horror Carver is living through. Tears are streaming down my face, and I can’t fight them. Lucian’s swept me up in his embrace and is rocking me. He must think I don’t know how to break the enchantment on the ring.

I do.

But I know now, having seen Jolie up close once again, oh how I know.

There’s nothing we can do to save her. She’s just the beast Morana wanted after centuries of experiments, just the perfect weapon.

We can’t save her, but we can’t let Morana have her.

Jolie must be put out of her misery, and Carver will never forgive me for it.