Warlock Brothers of Havenbridge 01 - Spell Bound (24 page)

He nodded. “Correct. That could explain his unknown arrival. I’ve considered that. I’ve also taken into account that Drake’s family could represent one of the few shifter families who chose this world over the relative safety of Aeaea. Only a handful of them stayed behind, and if they never utilized their abilities, they’d never blip on the Conclave’s radar.”

“And could stay hidden forever,” I concluded.

“Correct.” Thad walked faster. He resembled a caged lion ready to leap to freedom. The cogs of his mind were gearing toward some useful revelation. “In terms of circumstantial evidence, it can fit. But it’s not right. It’s like we’re trying to force two pieces of a puzzle together that don’t belong. We’re missing something.”

“Like what?”

“That’s what I’m struggling to see.” Thad paused, leaned against the fireplace mantle, and then gazed at me over his shoulder. “Are you sure you’ve told us everything?”

There was no judgment in his words. It was a sincere question without the venom-dipped tone he typically spoke with. It was a refreshing change. “I’ve told you everything I know and suspect about Drake. And about the attack tonight.” And then I recalled Dad’s reaction to the possibility of Drake being a shifter. He’d mentioned it could be something else, and that meant he had some idea what else we might be dealing with.

“What is it?” Thad crossed over to me. “You’ve thought of something else, haven’t you?”

“Not about Drake,” I said. “About Dad.”

“Dad? What about him?”

“When you were inside taking care of Drake, he said that whatever might have attacked us tonight could be something else. Something that worried him. He didn’t say what it was, but I could tell he really hoped it was shifters we were dealing with. The alternative wasn’t something he wanted to think about.”

Thad once again scanned the floor. He’d gone back into thinking mode. “He’s keeping something from us. That’s not good. He only does that if he’s been ordered to or—”

“If he doesn’t want us to worry.”

He nodded. “Do you remember what you told him that made him think it might not be a corrupted shifter or a shadow weaver?”

“It was when I said whoever or whatever was in the house with us smelled like bleach and pancakes.”

His gaze locked onto mine. “What did you say?” he asked, grasping my shoulders. A look of panic I’d never seen before twisted his usually stoic expression. “What did you say it smelled like?”

Thad’s sudden change made me tremble. “Bleach and pancakes.”

“Fuck!” he said and ran back to the Grimoire. He threw open the book and flipped through the pages.

“What does that mean?”

Thad didn’t answer me. “Why am I just finding out about this now?”

“You were inside with Drake when I told Dad and Pierce.”

“What smelled like bleach and pancakes was here?” he asked. His eyes had practically gone mad. “And Dad knew?” He turned from the book to study the air in front of him. He’d evidently been thrown for a loop. “He should have said something, but he obviously didn’t want it to be true. He was trying to keep us safe.”

Thad wasn’t making sense, and his behavior was weirding me out. Thad was never flustered, but he could barely communicate. He regarded everything around him with suspicion, and anger smoldered on his normally pale cheeks.

He was giving me hysterics when what we needed were answers, so I crossed to Thad and shook him by the shoulders. “Will you get a grip already?”

He clutched my forearms and nodded. He took several deep breaths, and the crazed glimmer in his hazel eyes slowly subsided.

“Now tell me. What’s got you so freaked out?”

“It’s not a shifter,” Thad said. “At least not in the traditional sense.”

He returned to the Grimoire and found the page he’d been looking for. He turned the book around so I could see it.

The charcoal drawing on the parchment depicted a hideous monster with a long, forked tongue and a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth. Its long black hair flew wildly about its menacing form and descended down most of its thin length. Freakishly long limbs, which ended in protracted black claws, extended from its body.

It was perhaps the vilest thing I’d ever seen in my life, but I had no clue what it was. The Latin word
Succo
had been written at the top of the page. “What the fuck is that?” I asked.

“A vampyre.”

Fuck! Even I knew about them. They were the reason the
immortalitus
spell had been forbidden by the Conclave upon pain of death. It was the spell Bartram Kane had used to reanimate his son, Ebenezer, who was burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials. And Bartram’s son
had
come back to life, but not as a warlock.

He’d returned as a vampyre, and not the sultry vampires most humans were obsessed with these days. They were monsters that had almost destroyed us all.

“D
AD
!” I
screamed as we ran into his study, where he was supposed to be talking to the Conclave. The room was empty. Thad sprinted to the closed bathroom door and threw it open. He shook his head to let me know he wasn’t in there. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Thad replied. His face had drained of all its blood. “But this isn’t good. We’re no match for a vampyre.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. They were perverted, more powerful versions of all magical species combined. They represented the corruption of the Gate and how its gift could not only bless and create life but damn and destroy it as well.

Three hundred years ago, it had taken the combined magic of the Conclave to defeat and destroy the vampyren created as a result of Ebenezer Kane’s mad rampage. That was why the
immortalitus
spell had been forbidden. The curse and the repercussions it carried tore through life itself.

Who had dared to cast that spell again? And how had it happened right underneath the Conclave’s nose?

“We have to find Dad,” I said. “And Pierce.”

The two of us ran down the stairs and out the back door.

“Pierce!” Thad screamed.

“Dad!”

Only the silence of a deceptively peaceful night answered our calls.

“We need the other protector covens,” Thad said. “It’s here. It has to be.”

“Fuck them!” I said. “We need the Conclave.”

Thad motioned toward the house. “Make the calls. Get everyone here.” He faced the darkness, which somehow grew thicker around us. “I’ll give you as much time as I can.”

“Thad, no.”

“Just do it, Mason,” he said. “We don’t have time to argue.”

He was right. If I wanted to save my family and Drake, I had to get to the house phone. My cell had died at the beach. I glanced one final time over my shoulder before I ran inside.

As I rocketed into the kitchen where the landline was, I heard a hiss outside, followed by a growl. Thad yelled a spell I didn’t recognize. Instead of the vampyre hiss that had followed the attack at Aunt Millie’s, Thad bellowed in pain.

I snapped around. I couldn’t let my brother face that thing by himself. I had to do what I could to help him. Summoning reinforcements had to wait.

I ran back outside and immediately stopped in my tracks. Thad held his right arm, which was bleeding freely, to his chest. With the other he gestured at the vampyre, which had to be at least seven feet tall and was dressed in what looked like shimmering darkness. Ice crystallized around the creature, holding it fast from the waist down, and it howled in anger.

Its talons sliced away at its prison, and lines of black saliva dripped from its open mouth, from which dangled a six-inch tongue that waved around like a rattlesnake’s tail. With each thundering strike of its nails against Thad’s formation, the ground shook.

Thad wouldn’t be able to hold it for long. I had to act before it freed itself and finished its midair leap toward my brother. I held my breath, concentrated, and then gestured at the crazy motherfucker before commanding it to stop with the word
desino
.

The vampyre’s long, deadly limbs immediately ceased their incessant barrage against the ice, and its mouth hung open in a silent cry of fury. I’d done it. I’d stopped the damn thing.

I dashed over to Thad, who collapsed on the ground. His breathing was ragged. I fell onto the dirt, and he winced when I pulled him into my lap. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“You’re such a dumbass,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “You were supposed to get help.”

“Be nice. I just saved your life.”

“Do you really think a simple holding spell is going to stop that thing longer than my ice?”

Well, yeah. But when I glanced back at the vampyre, its hands were inching forward once again. “I guess not.”

Even in pain and freely bleeding, Thad couldn’t stop his eyes from rolling. “Get help. Now. We don’t have much time.”

An exploding crackle filled the night, and a burst of white powder showered the area around us in flurries of falling ice. The vampyre was free, and it pulled its slithering tongue back into its mouth and snapped its rows of sharp teeth.

For once, Thad was wrong. We didn’t have
any
time left.

“A
SHADOW
weaver,” the vampyre whispered as its cold black eyes studied me. Was it talking about me? Obviously agitated, its tongue excitedly snaked in and out between its teeth. “How fortunate a find.” It danced the tips of its long fingernails almost seductively across its chalk-white flesh.

“Desino!” I once again commanded with a gesture.

Instead of stopping as it had before, it continued forward, letting loose a series of booming, doom-laden laughs that made my ears hurt. “If I could so easily stop your family, what makes you think your weak baby-warlock spells hold any power over me?”

I clenched my jaw till the muscles popped. “What did you do with my father and Pierce?”

A menacing smile split its ashen lips. “Here. Let me show you.” The dark clouds that bubbled like water around it gathered and popped. When they exploded, the rest of my family fell onto the grass at the monster’s feet.

“Dad! Pierce!”

The vampyre fell into hysterics as it mocked me by repeating my cries. “Dad! Pierce!”

“Fuck you, you undead piece of shit!”

Its smile slid into a sneer. It opened its mouth and vomited a black tar-like substance straight at me. I grabbed Thad and rolled to the left, like I had with Drake a few weeks ago, and managed to evade the disgusting attack.

“You’re fast. You’ve managed to escape me three times.” It suddenly stood in front of me. It tore Thad from my arms and tossed him over to where the rest of my family lay crumpled. It wrapped its slender, bony hands around my throat and lifted me off the ground. “You won’t do so again.”

Three times? I ran through the close encounters in my head—the construction site, the boys’ restroom, the woods, and Aunt Millie’s house. I’d been attacked four times. Had it forgotten, or had one of those times been something else?

I wasn’t going to get my answers at this moment. Right now I needed to get free.

Since the vampyre appeared thin and emaciated, I kicked it, hard. A physical attack might work where my magic had failed. But I might as well have been flailing against a petrified tree. Strong, steel-like muscles flexed beneath its deceptively fragile form. It responded to my attempt by laughing even more maniacally before gripping my neck with both hands. Its fingertips dug into my neck until warm lines of blood spilled forth.

That wasn’t good.

Its eyes grew wide at the smell and sight of my blood. Its tongue coiled toward me, reaching for the crimson drops that it longed to sample.

A streak of lightning flashed between us, severing the tip of the vampyre’s tongue. It howled, bringing its hand up to its wound and looking over its shoulder.

It was Pierce. He had awoken, and his grin told me he wasn’t out for the count yet. The shadowy chains that restrained him couldn’t prevent him from using his powers. “That’s just fucking gross, you bloodsucker.”

The vampyre bared its full set of teeth and dropped me to the ground, where I fell with a thud. It lunged for Pierce, but before it could touch him, my father rose from where he had been playing dead, turned his right fist into a chunk of solid rock, and slammed it into the vampyre’s jaw.

It flew through the sliding glass door and crashed inside the house.

I scrambled over to my father. Blood dripped out of the corner of his mouth, and a monstrous purplish bruise sprouted on his right cheekbone. “Are you okay?”

“I will be,” he muttered through clenched teeth, glancing over at Thad, who was licking his wounds. “When that fucking vamp is dead.”

“Fuck yeah!” Pierce grumbled. He rose on unsteady feet and faced the shattered door, waiting for the vampyre to resume its attack. Streaks of electricity danced around his hands, arcing in lines of blue flame from him to the ground.

“We need to get out of here.”

“I’m not running,” Dad said. His tone told me he’d hear no more on the subject. The warlock temper reared its ugly head as he rose to stand next to Pierce. “That son of a bitch is going to pay for what it’s done.” Thad had been right. We were our own worst enemies.

“No,” I said. I grabbed my dad by the shoulders and forced him to look at me. “That’s not smart. We can’t stand up against that thing without help.”

“What the fuck do you think we are?” Pierce asked. He focused on the door.

“We’re warlocks. Badass warlocks. But we’re no match for a vampyre. You both know that.”

Pierce took two steps toward the back door and snorted. “I sliced through that fucker’s tongue with one blast,” he said. “I’ll fry his nuts with the next one.”

“Will you two just listen for once?” It was Thad. He struggled to get up, but his legs didn’t have the strength. “We can’t beat it, but Mason can.”

That got everyone’s attention. I stared down at Thad, and even though he was in evident pain, a cautious smile lingered on his lips. It was one that told me he was proud of me and scared for me at the same time.