Crossed Page 2

  My vampiric speed kicked in and I ran out of the dressing room still zipping up my fly. My adopted daughter Greta, a six-foot blonde, met me at the chapel door. She was dressed as a flower girl in white, a basket of rose petals in her hand. I’d rescued Greta from a truly bad situation and adopted her as my own. She’d been human, only nine or ten years old, and though I’d turned her on her twenty-first birthday, sometimes when I look at her I still see that little girl, feel that need to protect her. Whatever was coming, it was not going to hurt my daughter. “I’ve never seen werewolves like this before, Dad,” she said.

  A Molotov cocktail burst through a stained-glass window, only to be deftly caught and flung out again by Ebon Winter, one of my guests. Imagine the most handsome man possible in all creation and you’ll be picturing Ebon Winter. He has that effect on people. Winter is a gambler and an artist. He sings, he owns a really upscale club called the Artiste Unknown, he designs his own clothes, and he’s one heck of an interior decorator. He’s high society, and his pathological need to bet on damn near everything, up to and including social interactions and how long it’ll take me to lose my temper, makes him a bit dangerous to hang out with, but otherwise not bad. I’d invited him even though he had told me he was betting against me in Paris . . . whatever the hell that meant.

  “Phil,” Winter called over his shoulder, “a little cloud cover for our combustible groom?”

  Lord Phillip effectively runs Void City, the slice of urban America I call home, along with who knows how much of the rest of the country. He’s short, fat, and balding, but he’s also the only vampire spell caster the Mage Guild hasn’t destroyed. He’s also in charge of the Veil of Scrythax, the magic what’s-it that helps conceal the existence of the supernatural from Void City’s more mundane inhabitants. Phil is rarely seen outside of the Highland Towers, preferring not to risk his unlife away from the ironclad protection of his mystic wards. My wedding was an exception.

  “If you insist.” He smiled and began to open an umbrella. “Tut, tut,” he quoted, like a grown-up Christopher Robin gone horribly wrong, “it looks like rain,” and suddenly, it did.

  Phillip’s clouds, black and rain-filled, rolled in so fast I scarcely made it out of the church in time to catch the last rays of vanishing sunlight and set myself on fire. Charbroiled and still sizzling, there was no way I’d have even a whiff of Rachel clinging to me. Not a drop of rain had fallen yet, but the werewolves were soaking wet, completely doused in water so holy I could smell the altar boys. They must have soaked themselves before the fight. Lovely.

  The rain arrived right on cue, extinguishing my flaming carcass, and I laughed out of habit as the water washed over me, leaving me just as wet as the werewolves.

  Werewolves usually look silly to me, but, even soaked to the skin, these guys were something special. Intricate patterns had been shaved into their fur like Celtic knotwork or henna tattoos. The flesh beneath had been inked in solid colors: black, blue, green, and red. I could tell which was the Alpha. I’d tangled with an Alpha werewolf not long before, the first truly impressive lycanthrope I’d ever seen, and the leader of these guys gave off the same vibe he had. I can take on normal werewolves in groups, but I’d never actually had to fight an Alpha, since the local Alpha, William, and I had worked out our differences at gunpoint. First time for everything.

  Most of these wolves had crosses etched or painted on their claws. The Alpha smiled at me with a mouth full of fangs that showed the same kind of detailing. His fur was black as midnight and he stared at me through angry eyes, one blue and one brown. I was still happy he’d showed up.

  2

  RACHEL:

  LITTLE SISTER

  Tabitha didn’t even leave her dressing room, the stupid cow. Standing in her white dress, she peered eagerly past me into the hall, but made no move to go help her husband-to-be.

  “What’s going on?” Tabitha whined.

  “Sorry, I’ve been ordered to wash up,” I snarked. “No vapid bimbo chat time left.”

  I slid the frilly pink dress off over my head while waiting for Tabitha to react. Instead, she peeked out the door into the hallway, trying to get a glimpse of the excitement out front. Mom’s imagined voice chattered inside my head, “Don’t tease your sister, Rae, this is her special day.” I slipped out of the light blue thong I’d been wearing and, as a second thought, wiped my crotch with it before following my master’s instructions to wash up.

  Cold water ran out of the tap and echoing raindrops spattered against the clouded glass of the restroom’s single exterior window.

  “Too bad Mom couldn’t be here,” I called into the other room. “She probably thinks you’re still alive.”

  “I know,” Tabitha answered.

  “Want me to call her?” I teased. Mom had seen me buried. Before that, she’d watched the leukemia take its toll and break me until I was nothing more than a shell of myself, a pain-ridden harpy hurting everyone I’d ever loved because they got to live and I was a sick seventeen-year-old who was going to barely make it to eighteen and even that only if I was lucky. Tabitha could have saved me from the grave, from the sickness, from all of it. She’d been dating a vampire—Eric—even then, but as it was, I’d had to save myself, find my own way back to life.

  You don’t want to know what they do to little witch wannabes in hell. If you’re strong enough, and willing, devious, and smart enough to play your cards right, you can work a deal to come back. First, though, you have to impress them. God, do you have to impress them.

  “No!” Tabitha touched my back. “Don’t you dare!”

  “I think Mom and Lord Phillip would hit it off. With all the work she’s had done, she still looks pretty fuckable.”

  I pulled several brown paper towels free of the wall dispenser and smirked, thinking about Father Ike. I still didn’t understand how Eric had convinced a human priest to perform a marriage ceremony for vampires. When I asked Father Ike about it, the little old priest had laughed and cleared his throat. “I’ve been trying to save that wily old sinner since we served together in Korea. If he’s still walking and talking, then I believe there is hope. If I can get him into a church for any reason, so much the better.” Maybe if I’d met someone like Father Ike, back before I got sick, went to hell, came back . . . maybe it would have been different. Everybody ought to know a Father Ike.

  “Rachel, please don’t screw this up for me.”

  “Fine.” I held the paper towels under the now-warm water just enough to get it damp and wiped Eric’s scent off me. He was so paranoid. Tabitha’s senses were dulled when she played human, and playing human was the only way she could stay awake during daylight hours. She was still as hard to kill as a vampire, but her other attributes became utterly mundane. He should have just let it go. Now I had to make him sorry. “Look, you’re right,” I said, smiling. “This is your special day.”

  “A little special for you, too,” Tabitha said. She handed my dress back to me. “Who did you meet?”

  “Some guy,” I answered vaguely as I watched her reaction in the mirror, somehow disturbed by her ability. It takes insane levels of magic to fool a mirror. They reflect truth. “You don’t know him.”

  That was true, too. She’d never really know Eric. You have to see terrible things, feel real pain and despair, and get angry enough to crawl out of your grave before you can see things the way he does. “You know what Mom would be worried about, don’t you?”

  “The fight?”

  “Something old.” I patted myself down with several more paper towels.

  “Something new,” Tabitha interjected. I let her help zip up the back of my dress.

  “Something borrowed. Something blue,” we finished together.

  “I forgot all about that,” Tabitha fretted. Thunder cracked and lightning struck out in the street. Lord Phillip was having some fun.

  “Don’t worry, Tab.” Slut! “I can take care of everything.” Bitch! I picked up my thong and waggled it a
t her. “Something borrowed and something blue all in one package.” It was a pleasure to watch her recoil.

  “But you wore those; they smell like sex,” she whined, disgusted.

  “It’ll spice up the honeymoon too, the smell of me and you all mixed up together . . .”

  Uncertainty was pushed gradually aside by her desire to please Master. I wondered if she even knew that she thought about him in two different ways, the vampire part of her recognizing him as Master while the human part still conjured images of Eric, her one true love, her knight in shining goddamn armor.

  “Maybe.”

  Idiot. How he ever brought himself to turn you, much less propose to you I’ll never know, I thought. You can’t be that great a lay. “Or you and I could give him a three-way in the marriage bed. I guarantee you he’ll never forget it.”

  She snatched the panties away with a sigh.

  “No.” She sounded exasperated. “You promised me that you wouldn’t sleep with him.”

  “And I’ve kept that promise.” Also true; we weren’t sleeping. “But it doesn’t hurt to offer. You know it’s what he wants. Of course he might settle for permission to fuck me every once in a while.”

  “Shut up! Shut your filthy mouth!” The slap caught me by surprise, sharp and painful against my jaw. Anger had brought out a little of Tabitha’s vampire strength, spinning me around so that I bounced off the sink and then to the floor, pink taffeta bunched up around my feet. That was the line she shouldn’t have crossed. Eric could slap me if he wanted. As long as he got off on it I wouldn’t care, because my magic would make it feel as good to me as it felt to him, but Tabitha? No fucking way did she get to bat me around. I think that’s when I made my decision. How do you make a guy who doesn’t care what you do to him sorry? How do you punish a good-for-nothing piece of shit big sister for knocking you around? Same way.

  “God!” Tabitha moaned. “Why do you have to say things like that? Shit! I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  For the briefest of moments, I considered using some of the power I’d leeched from Eric and going toe-to-toe with her in my own minor version of Eric’s uber vamp form. Killing her with his own power—power I wouldn’t even have possessed if he’d been able to keep out of my pants—would have been epic in a Fatal Attraction sort of way, but I only managed to get a little bit of power each time Eric and I fucked, and to be honest, it was too precious to waste on her. No. She deserved a little trip on the Tantra Train. That way I could bat her around in my own special way while simultaneously gaining a tool to make Eric feel guilty as hell. Perfect. Frickin’ elegant even.

  All aboard.

  I don’t use Tantra the way others might. Brahma, Shiva, Kali Ma, all that is for humans. What I use is older. It’s what a succubus might teach you in a Hadean back alley if she took a liking to you. Most forms of Tantra are about opening up to the energy that flows through us, tapping the creative force present in all life. Mine is about sex through power, for power, and of power—an unholy union. When I still had a demonic patron, I could tap into other branches of magic, like pyromancy—that sort of thing. Tabitha was going to wish that I had done just that: simply set her on fire.

  I lay on the floor, unmoving. Tabitha stepped forward, the folds of her wide floor-length gown cascading over my arm. “I’m”—my hand went under her dress, touching Tabitha’s Muladhara, the chakra between her anus and vagina; it controls survival instinct—”fine.” You have nothing to fear. I forced a sense of safety less into her mind than into her being, her essence. I’m your sister. I won’t hurt you. She would be surprised by the things I know about people. For example, Tabitha was never supposed to be a Vlad. She should have been a Soldier at best. Maybe she had enough hidden depths to be a Master vampire, but I doubt it.

  When an Emperor vampire—like Eric—turns a human woman, that person is elevated to Vlad status whether she deserves it or not. Any members of the same sex an Emperor turns become Drones—it’s why Kyle, Eric’s son, was “born” an idiot while Greta, Eric’s daughter, got to be a Vlad. It’s un-nature’s way of letting them keep friends around, but preventing those friends from becoming threats. The point is that Vlads usually get to be Vlads because they are incredibly strong willed and unique, which makes it harder for me to do my thing. Harder, but not impossible, and since Tabitha isn’t a normal Vlad . . .

  “Safe,” she murmured.

  Touching her through her gown was gonna work just fine. One chakra at a time, I manipulated the inner Tabitha: Swadhisthana over the groin to make my intrusion pleasurable, Manipura over the solar plexus to make what I was doing satisfy her hunger, Anahata over her heart to awake familial love and put her further at ease, Vishuddha at the throat so that I could still her tongue or guide her words. When I got to Ajna, the third eye, she was shaking violently, her spirit trying to fight me, shake off my control. Your spirit self knows things your brain doesn’t, and hers knew that this was bad mojo.

  My lips touched her forehead and I could sense her deepest desires. She wanted to taste. Her body could pretend to be alive in every respect but one: her taste buds still reacted only to blood. I gave her taste, filling her mouth with the cinnamon flavor of my magic. The pleasure built as I placed my hands on either side of her head and kissed the final chakra.

  The crown chakra is called Sahasrara; it controls everything else. It’s basically the doorway to consciousness. I took it last, stealing her mind. Normally when I do that to people I give them the most mind-blowing orgasm they’ll ever experience in exchange, but not Tabitha. She didn’t deserve it, so she got all the buildup without the release. Nice.

  “Put on the panties,” I told her. “It’ll turn him on. Best not to think about why. He’s a man. They get off on weird stuff.”

  “Okay,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Why not?”

  “I mean, if he can’t get kinky with his wife”—I straightened her dress, began to repair the damage I’d done to her makeup—”then he might want to stray.”

  “You’re such a good sister,” she said. One bloody tear welled within her eye and I dabbed it away with the paper towels I’d used to dry myself. She was still seeming human, so the tear should have been a normal tear, not a vampire’s. I leaned in close, watched her eyes. I still had her in my power, and it wasn’t like she was strong enough to put up any real resistance . . . or I didn’t think she was, but it was almost as if I’d underestimated her, like she had hidden depths and was fighting my power. . . . Odd.

  “No one else in the world has a sister like you,” she said with a smile.

  “You have no idea.”

  3

  ERIC:

  THE HAIRY BIKER REVIVAL

  This isn’t going exactly as I’d planned,” I coughed between gouts of flame. Note to self: next time you wind up fighting one of the increasing number of werewolf zealots in the United States, and an ally of yours is nice enough to summon up a storm so you won’t spend the whole melee on fire, don’t let the werewolves bless the rain and force your mouth open. It sucks.

  Not that the fight itself was going well. Based on the combat chatter, the lead werewolf’s name seemed to be Deacon. He perched on my chest, hind claws cutting into my stomach, actively trying to rip my head from my shoulders. At least I could close my mouth.

  “I’m coming to help you, Dad!” Greta’s scream bit through the rain and storm.

  “No!” I shouted back. “Even the rain is blessed. You’ll be destroyed!” Greta’s tough, but any holy wounds she receives don’t heal unless I bleed on them. Of course, the way things were going, she’d be able to find my blood just about anywhere on the street.

  My vampire speed just wouldn’t kick back in, and strength alone wasn’t cutting it. In short, my powers had picked a bad time to act finicky. Between the time I died and came back as a vampire, I’d been embalmed. Usually, that stops the turning process and you die for real, but not for me. I’d always thought that surviving my burial prep is what had scre
wed up my powers. Turns out I’d only been half right. Like everything with me, it was complicated.

  The embalming didn’t kill me because I didn’t become a vampire in the traditional way at all. Like any other member of the Courtney family line who dies and is found “unworthy” of the big happily ever afterlife, I came back. Gotta love those family curses! As if that wasn’t enough, I’d also been enchanted by Lord Phillip—magic elixir in the embalming fluid or something—supposedly to slow the development of my powers and to hide me from my sire, who apparently would eventually show up to kill me, not just for shits and giggles, but because I turned out to be an Emperor-level vamp, like her, and Phil didn’t want that to happen too early for his Machiavellian plans, whatever they might actually be, to come to fruition.

  Crazy, huh? Things got a little better recently, though. An Emperor’s powers don’t function properly until they create a memento mori: a repository for the more id-based portion of their power. Of course they can’t die until they create one either, so if something happens which might normally kill the vampire portion of an Emperor (in my case, getting explodicated with shaped charges of blessed C-4), you create one when your body reforms. My abilities had become more reliable since then, but the further I am from my memento mori, the screwier they get. And they’re screwy in the falling-out-of-the-sky Greatest American Hero sort of way.

  Most Emperors use something small for a memento mori, the repository of their darkness—a ring or a necklace, something they can keep with them, something intensely personal—but since I’d created mine without knowing what I was doing and since it happened to be the closest of my personal effects that hadn’t joined me in reduced-to-less-than-ashes land, I’d used my 1964 ½ Mustang convertible. It answers to “Fang.” It feeds on roadkill. And since it is now, in effect, vampiric (with a few zombie-like tendencies), I try to keep it out of the sun—which is why I’d parked it a few blocks away on a covered deck. Parking closer might have been a good idea.