Vampires and Sexy Romance (31 page)

He pulled in a long, uneven breath and then tried to clear his mind.  Though he could hardly wait for the three nights to pass, so he could go back to her and be hers alone…there was the chilling knowledge that she had plans for him.  And from the cold, steel like gleam in her eyes, it probably wasn’t going to be an enjoyable plan.

But he couldn’t even entertain the thought of not going back to her.  She was his, and he was hers. 

Three nights…three nights and then we will see.

Min sat in her kitchen, her silk robe tied at her waist, the tome with the passage about the vampire with a soul in her lap, the thrill and chill of the possible making her breathe too fast, her heart pound in her chest.  Could it be possible?  After all, she’d seen it with her own eyes.  When he’d been inside her, on the bed, she’d looked up into those beautiful jade green eyes and had seen it.  Shining like the light of a faint, distant star…the vampire’s soul.

It hadn’t been merely demonic fire, nor could it be glamour, for she had control over him and his powers once he passed her threshold.  It had indeed been his soul.  But how could a vampire have a soul?  It was impossible. 

She sat there perfectly still, but she was thinking furiously fast.  Questions echoed, answered by other questions, all bouncing off each other, forming a cacophony of thoughts and feelings in her head.  

However it had happened, it was exactly what she needed, just when she needed it. 
He
had come right to her. 

She needed time to think, time to research, and time to plan. 

Over the next three days min practically memorized every word the book had to say about using a vampire’s soul to pull another’s soul from the ether.  Even one lost to the spirit world.  The spell would find the soul, capture it and bring it back to her, to its host body. 

Between the magic shop and her own supplies at the house, Min had almost all the ingredients she needed.  She had to call in a few favors to find real Mongolian snap dragons.  But luckily one of her customers, a member of the coven on campus and a professor of botany, had recently traveled to Europe and had brought back a cutting.  It had flourished in her backyard, and had begun to bear fruit just that month.  Resilient to the cold weather…but again, a Georgia winter wasn’t that much different than a European summer.

So she had everything she needed to bring back her mother’s soul, to restore her to life.  She even had the impossible, a vampire with an honest to Hecate soul.  And he was coming to her of his own volition too. 

But there was a passage at the end of the spell that spoke to what would become of the vampire.  And as she read that the ritual would steal the immortal life from him, ending all that he had or would be—it stopped Min in her tracks.  This shouldn’t have bothered her.  She had slain so many of his kind in her life.  But then again, she had never taken one of his kind to her bed, or had such feeling for one…for any man, actually.  And then there was the little matter of him having a soul.  It was the entire reason for killing him, for using him in the spell, in the first place.  But it also made it too much like sacrificing a human being.  It was the divine spark that made us human. How could she just snuff it out?

But Min knew she had to.  There just wasn’t another way.  She’d been searching for months, her and her sister, and had found not a shred of information about what had happened to her mother.  No, she loved her mother more than she would love anything else in this world or the next.  She had to sacrifice him.  She had no choice.

The three days trudged by so slowly for Luca.  He was starved.  Since their second time together he couldn’t bear to even think of feeding off a human.  He was ruined. 
She
had ruined him.  And though his beast couldn’t cajole him into feeding on those delicious, succulent humans scurrying all around him, it was trying its best to tempt him with the witch’s blood.  Whispering in his ear how wondrous, how earth shatteringly delicious it would be to devour her the next time he had her in his arms.

His dreams, so shocking to finally dream after three hundred years, were of nothing but making love to Min.  And in each and every dream he felt the hunger for her so searing hot, and with each dream the anticipation was all the worse.  He knew what he was about to do, and loathed himself as much as he hungered for it.  Every dream ended with him feasting on her neck, sucking her life force out of her very veins until there was nothing left beneath him but a flaccid, cold corpse. 

The dreams scared him as much as they left him hungering for more.  He hated himself, but as the three days ticked away he found himself feeling that same anticipation in the waking world.  His beast was growing, its hunger almost overpowering his need for her.  Was it love he felt?  Could something like him even feel such a thing? 

Maybe he should just let the beast have her, if it could indeed break through her magicks.  At least then he could return to how he was before she came into his life.  He’d been so blissfully happy; now he was miserable.

Miserable or not, pulling against his two hungers—that for her flesh, and that for her blood—he found himself standing on the witch’s doorstep, on the appointed night, as he’d been told. 
I am her faithful lapdog.

The beast inside him roared for her blood.  It demanded vengeance for the witch possessing him so.  But Luca swallowed that hatred, for there was something inside him, something out shining the terrible burning of his bloodlust.  It was what it was, and though he couldn’t yet face it, he recognized the feeling.  And though he hadn’t felt it since those long ago days when he was human, it was indeed love.

When Min at long last opened that door to him, the tension and warring emotions inside him simply evaporated.  He gazed down upon her, utterly besotted by the sight of her, by the mere nearness of her proximity.  He knew then and there he was hers.  But even with this devoted feeling, the beast still called out to him, relentless, but seemingly farther away than was possible, like the distant howl of a wolf. 

She didn’t smile.  She didn’t look up into his eyes with her usual flirtatious manner.  Her expression was so very careful, nearly blank, but for some telltale grave lines.  She was hiding something.  Luca knew he should be weary.  It wasn’t safe to enter, and yet he moved forward when she invited him, and again, he felt the magicks that guarded the door, like electric sparks on his flesh.

She was dressed not in the silky robe, or a thin, wispy gown, as he had shredded the last time.  But in funeral black: slacks and a blouse, and black leather boots.  Her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight bun. 

With a wave of her hand Min beckoned him to follow her.  Walking straight to the stairs, min didn’t even look back at him.  Her shoulders where tight, and she smelled of fear and something else, something tangy, not as sweet as fear, something more complex…guilt maybe.  The upstairs was dark except for the light from one burning candle.  She led him right past her bedroom, its door closed, to the end of the hall and stopped at that doorway, resting her hand against its dark stained wood. 

“Forgive me…” she whispered, “I have no choice.”

Luca felt something cold rolling out from under that door, something supremely evil.  He didn’t want to go into that room.  Every muscle in his body tensed, and he tried to turn and walk away.  But Min had not told him he could leave her, so he stood and waited for her to open that door. 

She walked into the room as if she couldn’t feel the pulsing, freezing evil contained within.  She was a witch of light, and yet she couldn’t feel the malevolent presence in her own home.  Had he been wrong?  Was she indeed a dark sorceress, and communing with demons? If so, he was in grave trouble.  A dark witch, a black one, lived to control things, to play with the living and the dead with gruesome results.  

Min whispered a sibilant chant, and candles lit all over the room.  A bedroom.  An old woman was lying on the bed, the covers drawn up to her chest.  Her face was so pale, and her hair so utterly white, he thought for a moment she was a statue.  Her eyes were open and staring up at the ceiling. 

“She is dead,” he said. 

Min hissed.  “No she’s not!”  She moved over to the bed and sat alongside the pale woman.  “She’s asleep…”  She placed her hand over her mother’s frigid hand.

Luca gasped, grasping at his hand, staring down at it as if it were a snake.  “She’s cold…colder than any ice…I think she is no longer in there.”  He raised his eyes to meet Min’s.

She dropped her eyes from his gaze.  When she spoke again, her voice shook frightfully.  “You’re right.  Her spirit is not inside her body.  Something sucked the soul right out of her a little over six months ago.  Put her in some kind of suspended animation.  I’ve been hunting for a cure ever since.”

Luca saw a hard look overtake Min’s face.  She stared at him with cold eyes, much like her sleeping mother’s.  “But then a few days ago I found a spell, in the pages of an ancient tome.  At first I thought it was just some crazy speculation.”  She laughed, and she sounded quite mad—
like Elaina sounded
—but then she sobbed and just sounded scared and desperate. 

“I mean, a vampire with a soul…”  She turned away from him.  “It’s just ridiculous!” 

Luca felt his entire body stiffen. 
No.  It can’t be.  She can’t mean me.  The little trifling spark in me?  It couldn’t be counted as an actual soul.
 

“And then I saw it.”  She whirled back around, her glistening eyes wide and frightened.  “I saw a divine spark in your eyes.  A besouled vampire—I knew it had to be fate.” 

No, not fate.  A fucking tragedy
.  Yes, of course his soul was still there.  It was making him weaker and weaker by the day.  But if Min was pinning her obviously deceased mother’s resurrection on his puny, weak little soul, then her prayers were doomed. 

He opened his mouth to tell her just that, but she told him, “Don’t say a word, and stay where you are.”  He stood there, mutely cursing to himself.  It was going to be worse than he had ever imagined. 

He looked about the room and saw a pentacle drawn in multicolored chalk on the gleaming hardwood floor, and a line of dried herbs and other ingredients, all gathered by a marble bowl, and a medicinal crusher sitting right beside.  Beside that lay a cruelly sharp, long dagger, shining silver.  He wanted out of that room, but she had told him to stay where he was.  It would end badly, whatever she was planning to do to him.  He knew it would hurt, physically and metaphysically.  And then it would hurt because he’d fail her.  His puny soul wouldn’t be enough to work what magic she needed, and she would fall apart when it failed to revive her mother. 

But then again, maybe it would work.  If the magicks only needed but a spark, then maybe his soul might be sufficient.  Maybe it was exactly what he needed.  To finally be done with this needling, niggling spark.  Yes, to finally be free of it, free to kill and feed without feeling anything but the hellish hunger inside him being sated once more. 

He knew then and there, that the moment his soul was removed, he would try with all his strength to break the bonds the witch had put on him.  He would kill her first.  He would kill Min.  And that thought made him sick.  He wanted to rush to her and beg her not to do it.  The mere thought of taking her life was too unimaginably terrible.

First she lit a dried stick of sage, and walked around the room.  The redolent smoke the herb gave off as it burned would cleanse the air of all bad and evil spirits and magicks.  Unfortunately, it didn’t even touch the cold evil that permeated the room, the power Min could not sense.

When she’d finished the ritual cleansing, Min started the ceremony, obviously having memorized the spell beforehand.  No reading from a book, not even any stuttered phrasing.  Min knew exactly what she was doing.  She pulverized the ingredients she added to the bowl, mixing drizzled oil that stank of cloves and blood.  And finally she struck a match.  The flame of which was queer black tipped with an eerie blue light.  The bowl lit up inside, and dark, ominous black smoke began to spread through the room.  Everything in Luca told him he needed to get out of that room.  Even his beast knew nothing good was going to come of all this.  Nothing but pain.  Maybe blood, probably and unfortunately his.  And just as he thought it, she reached for the knife and turned toward him. 

“Give me your arm…” 

He could tell she was about to say something else.  He wished he knew what it was.  He wished that she was about to call him by his name, but thought better of it.  But then again, she might’ve just been about to call him vampire…and likewise had thought better of it.  Either way, it was a kindness she didn’t say it, whatever it was.  But part of him still desperately wanted to know. 

As if he had absolutely no control over his body’s movements, he held out his arm to her.  She unbuttoned the cuff of his silk shirt and pushed it up until his arm was bare and gleaming in the candlelight.  And then she cut him, a long, shallow cut, letting the blood smear over the silver blade.  Silver hurt, for a cut made with it healed only human fast.  And it seared and burned every agonizing moment of that time.  She took the blade and walked back to the burning bowl of ingredients.  Chanting, she dripped his blood into the bowl and the black and blue flames turned green.  The very green of his eyes.  The smoke turned a dusty, rusted orange color, and the scent of his burning blood filled the room. 

He hadn’t heard Latin being spoken since his sire had stolen him away from his church, from his life.  He hadn’t dared to enter a house of god since.  Though she had tried to get him too, it had been finally just too much for Elaina to ask of him.  She could devise no torture so great that Luca would dare cross the threshold of any church.  And he had never touched one of god’s people.  No priests, no nuns, no monks, not even a vicar.       

But now the gypsy witch, his min, was reciting something in his long forgotten Latin.  But it wasn’t all Latin.  Many of the words he knew were nothing he had ever heard before.  But when she spoke the word for soul, he felt something deep within him tug and burn.  He called out as he hit his knees.  The spark inside him couldn’t get out, but it wanted to, as if she were the pied piper and it a lowly rat.  It was excruciating.  He growled and howled as Min chanted with more and more force, calling his soul out to save her mother.  Suddenly he knew every word she spoke, and with it he knew that she would get what she wanted, at least in part.  She would get his soul, no doubt about it. 

But then he felt a gust of winter cold wind.  It was blowing in, cold and strong as any arctic wind, up under the bedroom door.  And there was darkness in it.  It muted out the orange smoke it came in contact with, it ate the candlelight, and it crawled across the floor, encroaching on Min.  She didn’t see it coming, and Luca couldn’t even breathe, for he was now covered in the darkness, wet, freezing darkness, sticking to him, pulling him even further to the floor. 

Then it finally struck out at her.  She fell to the floor as well, and then her mother sat up and turned to look upon her.  There was something, someone looking out through those frosted blue eyes, predatory and evil.  The smile that stretched across that face wasn’t human; it was as cold and calculating as any demon’s.  And then he smelled it, full and strong and so very, very sweet.  And what he smelled both excited him and sent the most horrible chill up and down his spine.  It was a faerie.  A sidhe, from the smell of her.  And it was a she…and she was monstrously powerful, to take him and the witch, and so easily take possession of the dormant mother, and all from a distance.  They were being attacked by something high up in the Winter Court. 

Unseelie. 

She spoke, and the voice was bitter with frost, yet as smooth as silk.  “Silly, arrogant gypsy…you could never fathom my power.” 

That power struck out at Min, slamming her into the wall of the bedroom. 

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate it.”  Her mother’s corpse held up a hand and black light, if there was such a thing, burst from her palm and filled the room. 

Min cried out as the blazing darkness engulfed her.  It didn’t seem to be burning her, but she writhed and whaled as if it were eating the very flesh from her bones.  The Sidhe’s voice laughed with fiendish delight as Min’s mother’s eyes glowed like blue moons in her skull.  The room was so cold, and so full of Min’s cries for help, that Luca couldn’t stand it.  He was frozen to the spot, helpless to defend her, his hands in fists, his fingernails cutting deep into the flesh of his palms.

But when Min finally fell to the floor, unconscious, the flames flickered and died, and the darkness seeped from the room in a quiet, orderly flow.  The room was still cold, and the candles were snuffed out.  And just as the sweet smell of sidhe faded, Luca felt Min’s magical control over him evaporate.  The cold, cruel voice of the faerie whispered in his ear. 
Now
it’s your turn to play, vampire.