Cora's Secret: A Vampire Ménage Urban Fantasy Romance (6 page)

“A friend?” Aithan asked, when Rhys sat behind the wheel.

“None of your business.”

“The harder you fight this,” Aithan said, his voice mellow, “the harder it will get.”

Rhys caught his gaze in the rear-view mirror, startled into looking at him. Aithan stared back at him with a calm that seemed almost resigned. But behind the resignation was a weariness that Rhys had only ever seen in the eyes of very old men—a draining of the soul that took away any joy in life.

He started the car, wrenching the key around in the slot and actually felt the hard plastic casing bend under his fingers. “I don’t have time to drop you off at the station, so be a wise guy and shut up. If you piss me off too much, I will go out of my way to have you booked with every charge I can think of, starting with vagrancy.”

“Whatever you say, Sheriff.”

His answer didn’t make Rhys any happier.

You have no idea what is happening here, do you
?

Rhys was starting to feel that perhaps he really was out of his depth.

The fire tower was at the top of a low-sloped hill, the highest part of the island that made up Presque Isle State Park, which was with this one exception a flat, almost featureless island. Lindal reached it just before noon and stood at the foot of the tower to look around. The tower had been out of commission for more than a decade and there were heavy chains and warning signs everywhere, forbidding anyone from climbing the tower.

But Ginny Jacobs had assured him the view was spectacular even from the base of the tower and well worth the hike. Lindal had believed her. Ginny was what Beth liked to call ‘good people’.

He turned slowly, looking out over the tops of the trees, trying to ignore the spurt of guilt thinking about Beth created. He shifted the backpack over his shoulders into a more comfortable position, flexing his shoulders to shift the straps and heard the thermos inside gurgle.

The view really was magnificent, especially to the north, where Lake Erie twinkled like blue cloth right up to the horizon. The city of Erie was to the south, with more blue water between the park and the mainland. The city was a brown smudge on the shore.

Most of the trees were evergreens, making a green carpet down the long sloping hill to the lake. When the tower had been in commission, the park wardens had kept a fifty yard radius around the base clear of flammable growth. Now the trees were creeping back and weeds and grasses and small bushes grew right up to the iron struts. There was a bald section to the south that once had probably been a small parking lot. The compacted earth wouldn’t let anything grow. Time would fix that, though. Eventually the green, growing things would have their way.

It was very peaceful here. The early morning breeze had disappeared, so now not even the air whispered through branches and tree tops. Overnight frost had killed off mosquitoes and the bears were already slumbering. Silence seemed to grip the clearing.

Lindal walked a slow circle around the base of the tower, stopping to study the landscape spread out below, when something caught his interest. He had nearly finished the full circuit when he decided that he wasn’t imagining it—he wasn’t alone anymore.

He finished the circuit, giving whoever it was time to study him and see that he was harmless. Then he turned to look toward the trees where he thought they were hiding. “Why don’t you come out and say hello?”

Silence.

Then the trees moved as if they were swaying in a breeze, except that there wasn’t one. A figure stepped out from between them. One cautious step. Then another.

Lindal looked them over. Tall and very slender, like saplings. Male or female…it was hard to tell. But their clothing was mottled greenish brown and their flesh was brown. Their hair was silvery green, a short crop at the top of their heads.

Lindal pulled in a breath, then let it out. “Come here,” he said, keeping his voice low and free of tension. “I can’t talk to you from there. You did want to talk to me, didn’t you?”

The dryad nodded. Lindal decided it was a ‘he’. He crept closer, almost sidling like a wild creature…which he was. Lindal had never met a tree dryad before. They were creatures of Earth only. There were none on his home world because the trees there belonged to the Elves.

The dryad moved between the rough undergrowth built up around the tower, until he was three feet away, then his courage seemed to desert him. He stopped, half-turned so that one foot was pointing back toward the trees. It was a flight position. He was ready to bolt.

Lindal gave him a small smile. “You’re very brave. Something must be badly wrong if you risk exposure like this.”

The dryad nodded, his eyes on Lindal’s.

“Can you speak?”

Again, the nod.

Lindal waited.

“You are Elvish,” the dryad said, forcing Lindal to reassess her gender. Her voice was light, almost bodiless. Like the wind in the trees.

“I am Elvish.”

“I do not know any Elves.”

“You’re a first for me, too.”

“You speak as human.”

“I have lived among humans—I have lived
as
human—for several years.”

“You have not been discovered?”

“I have friends who protect me.”

“From the Grimoré.”

Lindal drew in a sharp breath. “Yes,” he agreed, letting it out, but his heart was running heavily. “They’re here, aren’t they?”

The dryad shifted on her toes, as if even contemplating the Grimoré was more than she could bear. “Their whelps are here.”

“The Vampeen?”

She nodded. “They grow here.”

“They’re born here?” Lindal was startled.

“They grow here. They only grow.”

The dryad could speak English, but her vocabulary was limited. “Grow like trees,” Lindal interpreted. “They thrive here?”

Again, the nod. “While their masters are elsewhere, they grow stronger and bigger.”

“The Grimoré farm them out here to feed and grow stronger,” Lindal guessed.

“Yes, feed.
Feed
.” She repeated the word fiercely, like it was
exactly
what she meant. Then distress seemed to erupt from her like radiation. Lindal could feel it and his heart lurched.

“They feed on your kind?”

“They feed…on all.” She looked at him, her expression sad. “You have the mark. You know them. You stop them.”

“You can see a mark?”

“Is here.” She touched her chest. “Here.” She patted her cheek and Lindal guessed she meant in his head. His heart and head had a mark that others could see. Others who were sensitive to their world. Well, that wasn’t a big surprise. Whatever forces had foreseen the coming of the Grimoré and orchestrated the prophecies had anticipated almost every need.

“You need my help with the vampeen that move among your trees?” he asked.

“We are faster.” She smiled in a way that seemed to be full of mischief. “Silent like trees.”

The dryads out-ran the vampeen, who probably clomped through the trees like wild boar on a scent trail, ramming down anything that got in their way.

She stepped closer, this time turning her body to face him and looked up at him. She wasn’t much shorter than him, but three of her could fit into the same space he was taking up. Her eyes were the same brown as her skin. “You. Me.” Her hand moved between them, the long fingers pointing to each of them in turn. “Together?”

Lindal puzzled it out. “Friends?”

“Together,” she repeated. Then her fingers shaped a circle. “Grove.”

Together. Grove. A group of trees. “We’re on the same side,” Lindal told her. “I will help you if you tell me what you need.”

“My friend. Go with you.”

“A dryad?”

She shook her head.

“Someone not as fast as you?”

A nod.

“Someone the vampeen can reach?”

Another nod, this one more vigorous. She held up her hand, above her head, the wrist bent so that her hand was flat, facing the sky. Then she called out something. Lindal couldn’t say for sure it was even a language. It didn’t seem to have any syllables.

Then she smiled.

A tiny creature appeared on her hand, settling onto the platform with a glitter of gossamer wings.

Lindal stayed very still in case he startled it, his mind racing. The little lady walked to the edge of the dryad’s fingers and bent over from the waist to examine Lindal with big eyes. She was a human woman in perfect miniature, except for the wings that stirred on her back. Her long loose hair lifted at the movement of the wings. So did the very fine robe she wore, the hem fluttering. She was standing perfectly still, but she seemed to be in constant motion. She was barely two and a half inches high.

“What is she?” Lindal spoke softly.

“Ailill.”

Lindal recognized the name. It was very old and very Irish.
Ailill
were elf-kind, except that no Irish clans had ever had contact with elves. So the word
actually
meant… “Pixie,” Lindal interpreted. “The vampeen hunt them? What for? They aren’t even a bite’s worth.”

The pixie gave a soft shriek and disappeared and the dryad took a step back, her arm lowering.

“What did I say?” Lindal asked. He studied the dryad. “What do they do to the pixies?”

The dryad’s eyes filled with tears. “Play,” she whispered.

Sport
, Lindal interpreted. The vampeen hunted them for sport.

The dryad turned on her toes and for the first time he noticed that she wore no shoes. She pointed to her back. Then she turned to look at him and held up a hand, one long finger pointing up into the sky. With her other hand, she made a plucking motion toward her upheld finger.

Linda’s heart gave another sickening shift. The vampeen caught the pixies in some way that defeated their ability to teleport, which is what he guessed the dryad’s friend had done a moment ago. Then they plucked their wings off.

“Tell her to come back. I’ll take her with me. I’ll protect her.” He had no idea how he could do that when he lived in New York. He couldn’t walk down Fifth Avenue with a real pixie in his hand. But he would worry about it later.

The dryad looked up at the sky. Lindal looked, too.

The pixie appeared in the air just above him, her wings beating fast as she hovered. She looked at the dryad, who made some more of the odd sounds she had used to call her in the first place. Then the pixie turned in mid-air to study Lindal.

Curiosity touch him. Pleasure that he was friend to Clídna and wanted to help. But Ferr was sad because she had to leave her friends behind…

Lindal gasped.
You are telepathic?
He made the words form in his mind.

Happy excitement reached him. The pixie, Ferr, dropped down so that she was at eye level. Her head tilted as she looked at him with her big eyes.
I like talking.

To Ferr, who didn’t speak any other way than mentally, this would be talking.

With the same breath-robbing abruptness as before, Ferr gave a soft cry and disappeared. Clídna, the dryad, took off with the suddenness of a startled deer, racing across the open ground with vision-blurring speed to disappear between the trees.

Then Lindal heard the sound that had alarmed them. It was a vehicle engine, working hard, in low gear. It revved and died off, the sound muffled by the trees, but clear enough for him to guess it was a heavy engine with six or eight cylinders. Something powerful.

There was a break in the trees almost directly opposite the bald patch in the growth around the tower. That would be what was left of the road.

Lindal considered disappearing himself. But he didn’t know if Ferr would be able to find him again if he moved. Unlike Dryads, pixies were as much a myth to elves as to humans. He didn’t know anything about them. But their fate at the hands of the vampeen infuriated him.

Even as he was deciding, the car appeared between the trees, a plume of dust rising behind it. It was the Sheriff’s cruiser, the gold in the badge on the side of the car flashing in the morning sunlight.

That decided the matter. Lindal stayed where he was and watched the car slide and swerve as it made fresh tracks in the knee-high grasses, bumping over hidden holes and mounds in the rocky dirt. He couldn’t see through the windshield clearly because the sun was bouncing off it, but he thought there might be two people in the car.

Sheriff Wisherd had pricked his curiosity, last night. He had asked questions that made Lindal wonder if he had been able to hear his thoughts. Law enforcement types were generally not sensitive. They couldn’t afford to be. Blake, the trinities’ solitary NYPD representative, seemed to be a rare exception although he couldn’t read thoughts—not directly. He could read his trinity’s emotions through their shared bond, but not actual thoughts.

So Wisherd was a mental question mark and now here he was. At least, Lindal assumed it was Wisherd. It was unlikely to be one of his deputies.

The car came to a skidding halt on the hardpan, dust billowing in front of it. Lindal waved his hand, trying to not to breathe any of it in.