Overworld Chronicles Books 1-2: Sweet Blood of Mine & Dark Light of Mine (28 page)

"Why didn't you go into hiding again?"

"Sorcerers have ways of finding people no matter where they go. This particular geographic location interferes with tracking spells and magic, according to your mother. In the end, they still found us."

"It doesn't make sense," I said, resisting the urge to put another crack in the kitchen table. "Why did she have to wait eleven years?"
And why didn't she take me with her?
I wondered. To protect me?

"Eleven is the age at which children start their arcane arts training."

"In other words, magic."

He nodded. "Your mother was one of the best teachers."

"And eleven years is plenty of time to brainwash a little girl. They probably figured I was too old for that."

Rage and sorrow warred for dominance on Dad's face as he nodded. His fists tightened, released, tightened, released, and he took several deep breaths as if he were performing a well-known ritual. As if he were exorcising his own demons.

I stood up as a sense of purpose roared into me. I would rescue my sister and my mom. Soul or not, I wanted my family united again. "I'm ready."

"For what?"

"To learn how to be a good demon. When do we start?"

"First thing tomorrow."

"No more drinking? No more secret meetings with private eyes?"

He shook his head. "It's time I became a real father."

I walked over to him and hugged him. "Thanks."

He patted my back and squeezed me to him. "I love you, son."

For once, I didn't feel icky for saying it. "I love you too, Dad."

We dumped every bottle of alcohol into big trash bags and put everything curbside then cleaned the house until the odor of sour beer hovered only faintly in the background, even to our enhanced senses. The clock read three in the morning when we finished and Dad told me to get some rest–we'd start practice during the day when it was safer for us to be out.

Despite how tired I was, it took a while to fall asleep.
I have a sister!
That meant I was a brother. A big brother at that. That gave me the right to beat the crap out of any guys who even looked at her, right? I was happy but nervous and full of dread all at the same time. What if she didn't like me once we met? The scene I had dreamt of when my grandfather had taken Ivy from my parents played through my mind, still blurry from Mom's attempts to block the painful memories from me, but vivid enough to fill me with rage. I wanted a sister to protect and to love, and I
would
get her back from those monsters no matter the cost.

But I had to face reality. I was in over my head until Dad showed me how to use my abilities and I learned more about the Overworld. All the times I'd been out at night prowling for girls, I'd never known a gang of people with fangs could kidnap me and use me as their own personal snack pack. I remembered the strange people who'd watched me practice football. Had they been vampires…or worse?

I dreamt of huge wolves morphing into humans and then into cats. Mom appeared in a black billow of smoke and shot lightning from her fingers. Dad morphed into a demonic creature and vanished. A dark figure in a top hat chased me through a black featureless wasteland.

I jerked awake and couldn't go back to sleep. The breaking dawn seemed surreal. Had the conversation with my dad actually happened? Was I really a demon with a sorceress for a mom? Did I really have a little sister?

A yummy smell interrupted my thoughts. Food before philosophy, I always say. Dad had made pancakes, bacon, and eggs. He smiled. "Set the table, would you?"

My real stomach growled as I grabbed the plates and silverware.

After breakfast, Dad explained a few basics to me, some of which I had already figured out on my own. When I used my superhuman abilities such as health restoration or strength, I used up energy from what he called my
psythus
, or a psychic well. The psythus is the equivalent of a psychic stomach that stores the energy leeched from others. When I leeched, I actually took parts of a human's soul and spirit from them. Dad explained the two were separate, that even soulless beings had spirit. His explanation about the two only confused me so I took his word for it. If I fed too much on one person, I could severely damage the person's soul to the point of no return and leave them in a coma.

This frightened me as I thought back to Victoria and the girls who I had come so close to ravishing. I told him my concerns but he assured me I would have to be near death to leech enough soul from someone to damage them.

He told me how to probe without "hooking" as he called the latching process. Apparently I could feed off any sort of emotion, but as with food, every incubus had a different taste preference.

"There are those who enjoy pain," he said. "The things they'll do to a person while they feed are horrific."

"What are kine?" I asked, remembering the strange term Stacey had used a few times.

"It's an old term that means cattle. That's how most leeches view humans."

"That's horrible."

"One entity's predator is another entity's cattle."

I shuddered to think of what Stacey might have done to me had Mom's charm not been in place. Come to think of it, a psychic energy battery meter would be really handy. Maybe on a watch or something so I could look at the time and tell whether the old supernatural batteries were running low.

"What happens if we go to church?" I asked.

"We would disintegrate into puddles of molten flesh."

I gave him a horrified look and leapt from my seat. "What if I'd gone to church with a friend? Holy crap, Dad!"

He laughed. "Just kidding. At worst you'd have to listen to a boring sermon."

"Oh." I sat down. "Well, that sounds like reason enough to avoid churches."

After a lecture taking up most of the morning, Dad took me to the Laundromat to practice my skills.

"Why a Laundromat?" I asked, looking around at the bored men and lethargic women reading magazines or watching
Saved by the Bell
reruns on an ancient nineteen-inch television. "Is this what you were doing when I followed you the other day?"

"Yes, I was feeding. People here are in a neutral state of mind. It's easier to practice probing without strong emotions getting in the way," he said.

I was just glad he hadn't been getting his jollies from watching old ladies. Nobody seemed to notice we weren't doing laundry as I practiced. It took a while, but I eventually got the hang of probing, dirty as the term sounded. While I could not read minds, as I had discovered long ago, I could sense emotional states. Most of the people in this place were practically comatose. No surprise there. One girl, however, was rather enjoying herself thanks to the erotic novel in her lap.

Another interesting tidbit—I could hook into a person's psyche without them immediately wanting to tear off my clothes. I had to attune to their emotional state before diving in.

"Isn't this like mind control?" I asked.

"It's dangerously close. If you can raise sexual impulses, then you can make a person do things they normally wouldn't do. As it is, we can either prevent them from responding to us by keeping our hooks attuned to their state, or we can attract them."

I was a little disappointed I couldn't telepathically make them do what I wanted. It didn't take me too long to figure out how to attune my state to people's auras so I could hook into them after Dad explained the process, although it took a lot of control and willpower to settle my mind into passivity.

"Once you've hooked, you can transfer the link to another person," he told me. "That's what happened to you with Cindy Mueller and that other boy."

"Does that mean they were feeding off each other?"

"No, humans can't feed. They don't have a psythus. By linking two people you can increase the flow of energy just as you did to the young couple at the football game. Much as it sounds like magic, there are some scientific principles to psychic energy generation and so forth."

"Cindy and Alan are dating now. Cool, huh?" Ever since my accident with those two in Calculus, they'd been inseparable.

His eyes hardened. "Don't toy with people's emotions, Justin. It's wrong for one thing, and for another, the feelings you think you're creating are illusion. You can't make someone like or love another person if true feelings don't already exist."

I gave him a shocked look. "I would never do that." I actually had planned on trying it, but I knew he was right.

"One derogatory term for our kind is
cherub
because of our ability to force emotional connections between people. It's a dangerous power."

"Anything is dangerous in the hands of a hormonal teenager," I said with a grin.

He chuckled. "No doubt."

I practiced hooking and unhooking for a while, seeing if I could leave the individual in question totally unaffected. They seemed to know something was afoot because most would glance around as though someone had just tapped them on the shoulder. So long as I maintained a calm emotional state, I could feed with hardly a reaction. The only problem with a neutral emotional state? The energy tasted like rice cakes—think Styrofoam—and it trickled rather than flowed.

After practice, we went to a hipster restaurant in downtown Decatur for some real food.

"Do dhampyrs hate us?" I asked Dad as we ate.

He pursed his lips. "I would imagine that each individual has his or her own opinion of our kind much as ordinary humans do. In general, though, spawn have earned their bad reputation."

"Elyssa's mom is a hair stylist," I said. "A hair stylist! I would never think someone like her was a dhampyr."

"Like anyone else, they've got to earn a living."

He made it sound so mundane. How many people could say their hairstylist was a half-human vampire? I sighed. "So there's probably no chance of Elyssa and I getting back together."

"Ah, to be young and foolish," Dad said. "I hate to say it, son, but it sounds like she has some prejudiced feelings that will be hard to overcome."

I tried not to hang my head, but the weight of his words hit me like a hammer, even if Elyssa had already told me in no uncertain terms how she felt about what I was. But there was nothing I could do about it. Just like I couldn't change my skin color or where I was born. Then again, dating demon spawn was probably more extreme than most people wanted to deal with.

We left the restaurant and walked down an alley formed by the restaurant and a neighboring pub. Shattered glass littered the pavement and crunched underfoot. A stray dog trotted past us, something hanging from its mouth. We reached the junction of a service entrance where four buildings backed up to each other. Dumpsters lined the paved strip. Steam escaped the sewage covers in the middle of the service alley. I wrinkled my nose at the unwelcome odor pervading an otherwise crisp autumn evening.

A crackle and a low hum filled my ears. I stopped and looked around, half expecting a power transformer to explode. Dad took a couple of steps forward. He bounced back as if he'd hit a wall.

"Oh crap." He lunged forward and rebounded again. He pressed against the air like a mime touching an invisible wall.

"What is it?"

"We've got a problem."

I still wasn't sure what the hell was going on. "What are you doing? There's nothing there."

"It's a confinement circle."

A young man, probably in his twenties, came from around the corner and gave us a triumphant look. "Well that was easy."

"What do you want?" Dad asked.

"The bounty, of course," replied the man. He strutted over like he was the cock of the walk and studied me. "You must be the little monster everyone's so worked up about." He looked at my dad. "You, on the other hand, are wanted by the Conroys. I guess it's for the best if I turn you in with your 'son'." He flashed air quotes to demonstrate exactly what he thought about our family relations. "I'll let the authorities sort it all out." I hadn't known this guy for thirty seconds and I already hated him.

Dad clenched his fists. "The Conroys put a bounty on me? Who put a bounty on my son?"

The man shrugged. "I don't know. I just turn the monsters in to the Conclave and let them sort it out." He rubbed his hands together. "Now, if you'll just cooperate, I promise things will go smoothly."

I was getting really tired of this dude's insinuations that my dad and I were nothing more than monsters for him to ship off.

I stepped forward. Dad stopped me. "You can't break through it, son. It's a circle."

"A circle?"

"It's what sorcerers use to trap demon spawn." He pointed to a chalk outline on the ground.

"A chalk circle?" I pshawed. "That's stupid. Who in the world came up with that rule?"

The man listened to us with an amused expression on his face then lifted a large rune-covered staff and waved it around in a way that probably wasn't good for our near future.

I knew something horrible was about to happen to Dad. Before I could think, I blurred forward and snatched the staff from the man. I snapped it into four pieces. Threw the pieces to the ground. I grabbed the man by the neck. He squealed like a pig—probably just like Coach Wise preferred—as I chucked him at the dumpster. He bounced off the open lid and landed inside with a metallic clang. I blurred over to him and looked inside. He was out cold.

I approached the oh-so-dangerous chalk circle and rubbed out a section with my shoe. Dad stepped across, staring at me with amazement.

"How did you do that?" he asked.

"I, uh, just walked across it," I said. "I felt a little static in the air, but that was it."

"You know what this means?" he said.

"That I can step across a chalk line?"

He shook his head. "You
are
part human."

"So I'm not a demon spawn after all?"

He grinned. "Oh, you're definitely demon spawn, but you have a human side too." He whistled. "And they thought half-breeds were impossible."

"The Conroys must have known something if they took Ivy."

"Maybe. Or perhaps they're just evil people."