Demon Blood (Vampire in the City Book 5) (2 page)

Chapter Two

For a few seconds, I stared after Alex as he left the room. It
occurred to me that as immortals, we could be dating for decades; I
should get used to his hasty exits.

A glance into the mirror told me that my hair and make-up needed to be
fixed once again, so I did that quickly. When I put the brush back
into my bag, I saw the envelope that Alex had given me. Curious as to
my “territory,” I pulled it out and removed the papers inside.

One sheet was a section of a map of Queens with an area highlighted in
yellow. I saw that the two bars that were nearest to my house were
indeed in my official territory. Since I was hungry anyway, it seemed
as good a time as ever to go out to one.

I started to fold the map back up when I noticed there was another
piece of paper behind it. Across the top of the page were the words,
“Open Court”, and underneath this was a number of dates and locations,
the locations all being nightclubs in Manhattan. One of the dates was
tomorrow.

Since I wasn’t sure what “Open Court” exactly meant, I put the envelope
back into my purse and left the bathroom. The vampire at the reception
desk nodded to me as I was on my way out, as did the vampire at the
desk downstairs in the lobby.

Both bars were relatively close to where Michael’s office was on
Queens Boulevard, so I simply picked the larger of the two.

Even on a Saturday night, bars in Queens can be somewhat empty. When I got there, however, I saw my worries were unfounded. Maybe it was the fact that many colleges were closed for spring break, but the place was pretty
full, to the point that there were even people milling around outside.

There could have even been a line, but of course, as a vampire, that
didn’t concern me. I walked right up to the bouncer, locked eyes with
him, and breezed in.

The
Sly Fox
was large enough a bar to also have tables and serve food,
s
o when I walked in, the smell of the patrons’ dinners filtered into
my nostrils. It was fairly unpleasant to my undead nose and made me stop in my tracks for a moment to compose myself. That may have been why it took a while for me to notice that I
was being waved at.

“Em! Over here!” Tammy yelled above the din of the crowd.

She was seated at a small table with her boyfriend, Gregor. There was
an extra chair, which she motioned toward.

As I sat down, the smell of their hot wings wafted up to my nostrils.
Unfortunately, I needed to take air into my lungs to speak.

“Hey guys,” I said.

The waitress immediately came over. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thanks,” I said, relieved that I didn’t have to pretend to eat or drink in front of my roommate and her boyfriend.

“So, what are you doing here?” Tammy asked.

“Just, you know....” I started to trail off, but then I thought of a
way to recover. “I’m looking for Ethan. I guess you guys haven’t seen
him?”

Tammy shook her head as she dipped a wing in blue cheese dressing. “No, we haven’t seen him,
but don’t you think it’s better off this way?”

“Better off what way?”

“Maybe he’s finally gotten over you, or whatever.” She wiped her hands
on a napkin. “Maybe you should just let him be so he can find someone
else.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” I mumbled, too low for her to hear.

Gregor was frowning at his cell phone. “Why aren’t you at home?” he
asked. I assumed he was talking to someone on the phone, until he
looked up at me and repeated the question.

“I wasn’t aware I had a curfew,” I said. “Other than the obvious
sunrise one, I mean.”

“We dropped Amy off at your house. She said she was spending the
evening with you.”

“Oh.” Amy was a teenage witch who was not actually Gregor’s biological
child, even though he seemed to feel some sense of parental responsibility
toward her. “I didn’t know she was going to be coming over.”

Gregor finished his beer in a gulp and looked at Tammy. “We should get
going then. I don’t want her to be alone for too long.”

“But we haven’t even finished eating dinner yet,” Tammy said. “And
she’s not really a child. I mean, I was staying at home by myself when I
was sixteen. Weren’t you, Em?”

I nodded, but didn’t really want to get in the middle of their
disagreement. “It’s fine. I can go home now.”

“Thanks a bunch, Em!” Tammy said to me, as I stood up, thankful to put
space between myself and their dinner.

“Sure,” I said, waving at them before walking back out of the bar.

As I was leaving, I bumped into a man who was texting while walking.

“Hey!” he yelled, before looking up at me. We locked eyes, and his
instantly became blank as he fell under my mind control. I could have
given him any command then, and he would have done it without
question. Although the only one I was really interested in giving was
“let me suck your blood.”

I was about to ask him to follow me out into the alley for a quick
bite, when some men standing around a table by the door started
calling to him. Sighing at my would-be meal, I left and started to head home.

I thought about taking my chances going to the smaller bar, but it was
the opposite direction from my house, and Gregor might even be calling
Amy to check in on her. While I had about the same genetic
responsibility toward her as he did, Amy had actually saved my life
once, so I was understandably pretty fond of her.

When I got home, I found Amy sitting on the living room floor with
some books spread out around her in a semi-circle. Gypsy, my small
black and white cat, was lying across several of them and purring.

“Hi,” I called to her. “Doing homework?”

“Sort of,” she said, rubbing my cat’s belly. “In the sense that this
is a home and what I’m doing could be construed as work.”

I took the bait. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to write a spell that will summon my father.”

“Your father?” I asked, uncertainly.

“Yes, my father. You know, the male parent. The guy who thought it was
a good idea to sleep with my mom about seventeen years ago.”

“Maybe you should just ask your mother about him first before you
resort to summoning circles?”

“Yeah, right. Like that former witch would ever tell me anything
moderately useful.”

I remembered a few months ago, when Diana, Amy’s mother, had been the
leader of the witch coven that Tammy and Gregor were both in. Diana
had tried to use me and my blood to take control of all the vampires
in New York. Her plan had failed, and she had tried to kill me. The
only thing that had stopped her from killing me was Amy’s timely
intervention.

“Why wouldn’t she tell you who your father was?” I asked.

Amy slammed the book in front of her closed, causing Gypsy to head for
the hills, or at least the upstairs. “You are assuming that she
actually knows the answer to that question, which means you are
underestimating the depth of her probably lengthy slut phase.”

“Amy!” I yelled automatically, perhaps on behalf of mothers everywhere.

“What? I’m only telling the truth. Why do you think Gregor acts like he’s
my dad? They were doing it when I was only a few years old, and I
guess he still thinks of me as a little kid.”

“That doesn’t make your mom a slut, or mean she doesn’t know who your
father is.”

In case it couldn’t be assumed from the fact that she had tried to
kill me, I did in fact hate Diana. And I could also see how Amy may be
a bit scarred from having to grow up with a controlling, power-hungry
person as her primary caregiver. But Amy had also already somehow sucked
out all of her mother’s witch powers, which was why she didn’t live
with her anymore.

“That’s easy for you to say. Your parents were probably born in the
1600s or something, when nobody even got divorced, much less had a kid
without being married.”

Since I had told Amy my actual age at least a dozen times, I couldn’t
tell if she was just trying to get a rise out of me. I tried to keep
my voice calm. “I’m only twenty three years old. I was turned into a
vampire when I was twenty three in actual human years, and my birthday hasn’t come around
again since then.”

“But I’m probably right about the other thing, aren’t I?”

“Yes, my parents had a pretty happy marriage for almost thirty years,
until they died in a car accident.”

“See? Happily ever after,” she said, flipping open another book. This one was bound in
leather and had gold lettering on the cover that I couldn’t read.
“You’ve probably had no childhood trauma to speak about, so you don’t know what I’ve gone through.”

“No, I don’t,” I admitted.

She raised her eyes, which were an odd hazel color, to meet mine. “But
on the other hand, you do know what it’s like to not have any family now.
So that’s why I wanted to ask for your help in finding my dad.”

“You want me to help you? What can I possibly do?”

“I just need a second witch to help me do this ritual, and you’re the
only one I trust.”

“But I’m not really a witch,” I reminded her.

Although I had been born with the somewhat rare natural potential to
be a witch, I found out about it too late, after I was already
technically dead. Unfortunately for me, it turns out there are no
vampire witches. There was only one way I could do any sort of magic,
and that was by drinking Amy’s blood.

And it did have to be specifically Amy’s blood that I was ingesting. For the sake of science and
zombie fighting, I had tried drinking the blood of other witches, but
it didn’t have the same effect. I wasn’t able to cast spells or use
mind control on non-humans with ordinary witch blood. Only Amy’s blood
seemed to have that special something in it that turned me, at least
for a few days, into a spell-casting super vampire witch.

So I don’t know why I was surprised when, in answer to my statement,
the teen rolled up her sleeve and offered her arm up to me.

By that point in the night, I was almost too hungry to pause, even if it
was just to say, “Are you sure?”

Amy nodded, and I sat down on the floor with her and bit her gently on
the inside of her elbow. Vampire bites don’t actually hurt due to the
anesthetic properties in our saliva. In fact, normal humans tend to
like them and get addicted to them fairly quickly, sometimes after
just one bite.

Witches, on the other hand, are immune to our mind control and, by
that extent, to becoming addicted to our bites. Thus it was safe to
say that Amy’s mind was not clouded when she asked me to bite her, and
as long as I didn’t do it more than about once a week, the bites
should have no ill effects on her. I carefully counted to five, which
was my technique for not taking too much blood, and then licked the two puncture marks to close them.

When I let go, she held her arm up and examined it. “Good thing you
don’t leave any marks. The other kids at school think I’m weird enough
already; I wouldn’t want them thinking that I’m some kind of junkie.”

“Why do they think you’re weird?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I guess the whole teen witch thing is cool in theory,
but when you’re in high school, it just makes you a freak. It’s not
even that much of a consolation that I could actually turn them all into
toads if I wanted to.”

Chapter Three

“Could you really turn someone into a toad?” I felt I had to ask.

“Sure, I don’t see why not,” Amy answered. “Anything is theoretically possible, right?”

I stopped to think about that for minute, during which time Amy stacked up the books she had been reading and walked out of the room with them, going upstairs. A few seconds later and she came back into the room, this time with a large backpack. She opened this and took out a large, black-handled knife, a witch’s athame, and placed it on the coffee table.

“Whose stuff is that?” I asked.

“Mine.” She took out a silver-colored chalice next.

“Where did you get it from?”

“I’ve been spending most nights in your spare room. I told Gregor that I’m allergic to his dog.”

“Wait, what do you mean, my spare room?”

“The middle room, where that guy you were eating used to stay.” She had started setting up an elaborate incense burner with charcoal.

I knew Ethan hadn’t been over in days, maybe even weeks, but I still felt bad that Amy was staying in his room without him knowing about it. “Maybe you should sleep on the couch until I clear it with him?”

“Then how are you and that werewolf going to watch
The Golden Girls
at 2 am?” Amy smirked. “Besides, what difference does it even make if he’s not there anyway?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I explained. “Like all his stuff is in there.”

“What stuff?” she asked, pulling out a silver disc inscribed with a pentagram.

I frowned at her and then ran upstairs to Ethan’s room. It was the smallest of three relatively small bedrooms, and only had room for a bed, a nightstand, and a set of drawers. 

On top of the dresser was a vast assortment of make-up and lotions. I pulled one of the drawers open, and saw what was obviously women’s underwear. The next one had brightly colored t-shirts. Then I opened the closet to reveal more women’s clothing in the form of dresses, blouses, and skirts. The nightstand held a copy of
Elementary Calculus and You!
and
The Catcher in the Rye
. There didn’t need to be a unicorn poster on the wall for me to see that it was the room of a high school girl.

Had I been so wrapped up in my own life that I didn’t notice that one of my roommates had moved out? True, I hadn’t seen him much, but I just assumed it was due to differences in our schedules.

Upset, I walked back downstairs to find Amy pouring salt straight from the Morton’s container onto the new hardwood floor. 

“What are you doing?” I asked, dismayed. 

“I’m about to cast the circle, obviously.”

“That salt is bad for the hardwood. Can’t you use something else?”

“Chalk?” she asked.

I shook my head, feeling that didn’t deserve an answer.

“Well, I’ll sweep it up as soon as we’re done. Go get your athame.”

“Should I change?” I asked. In my limited experience with witchcraft rituals, everyone had worn black robes.

“Nah, I don’t care if you wear pajamas or one of your old band t-shirts from high school.”

I looked down and confirmed that I was wearing neither of those things, before running upstairs to get my ritual knife. It wasn’t actually used to cut anything. From what I had seen so far, witches mostly used their athames to do things like cast the circle and draw magical symbols in the air. 

When Amy saw that I had returned, she pulled out a lighter and set a small charcoal bricket on fire before placing it in her incense burner. 

“So what are we doing, exactly?” I asked. 

“Remember that time my mom almost cut off your head?”

“Yes, and I’m totally against anything like that happening again,” I said quickly.

“No, this time it will be me doing the bleeding.”

I looked at her, surprised. “Wouldn’t decapitation be counterproductive?”

The teen rolled her eyes at me. “They just did that with you because vampires aren’t very good at bleeding. And besides, you wouldn’t stop yelling. With me, just a little trickle of blood should do.”

As she was talking, I started to remember the ritual that the coven had done on me. Diana, Amy’s mother and former coven leader, had a plan to take control of all the vampires in New York City. This plan involved using me, a vampire with witch potential, as a link between their coven and the other vampires. Specifically, it called my sire, the person I had originally gotten my vampire blood from.

Diana had mistakenly assumed that my sire was the Prince of the city, and Alex showed up instead of Michael. But she hadn’t had time to realize her mistake, because I had magically called Amy and woken her up from her spell-induced sleep. Amy had somehow stopped time and gotten me out of the binding circle, and we had both freed Alex.

The memory made me think of something. “Shouldn’t there be another circle?”

“You mean the containment circle? Normally, yes. But in this case the person we are calling is my dad, and I don’t want to be rude right away the first time I meet him. Also, he could live in like Alaska or something, so it may take him a while to get here.”

“It won’t make him just teleport here?” Amy, Tammy, and Gregor had once used a teleportation spell on me, to get me from Manhattan to Queens. While it was the quickest anyone had even gotten from Central Park East to Astoria, Queens, it wasn’t instantaneous.

“I thought about doing it that way, but you wanted to be teleported. If someone isn’t expecting it to happen, it can be upsetting.”

Her explanation made sense, so I compliantly stood in the circle and waited for her to finish setting up for the ritual. Then something occurred to me. “We don’t have to stay in the circle until he shows up, do we? I mean, if he is actually in Alaska or whatever, it could take him awhile to get a plane ticket and whatnot.”

“No, of course not.” Amy seemed to be getting exasperated from having to explain basic magic to someone older than her, despite the fact that she had been studying it since she was a toddler, and I had only started learning a few months ago. “That’s why there’s no second circle.”

But I was still somewhat struggling to understand. “But if there’s no second circle, what is calling him here?”

“Blood, duh. As in my blood, since we are tied to each other by being related. I’ve altered this spell my mom used so it’s more just like a gentle persuasion—sort of a blood calling to blood thing.”

“Oh, right. Okay.” Something still seemed slightly off to me, but noticing Amy’s irritation and impatience to get started, I decided to drop it for the time being.

Without further ado, Amy sprinkled some incense on the bricket, and then took her witch knife and began tracing around the salt circle with it. When she had gone all the way around and closed the magic circle, I felt the usual pop in my inner ear that signaled we were in magical space. Then the teen witch turned and placed her left hand, palm up, on my coffee table, which happened to be serving as the altar. 

For a few moments she sat motionless with her right hand, the one with the knife in it, above her left. Eventually, she slowly brought the knife down to her palm, but it just rested there.

I had assumed, incorrectly, that this was all a part of the ritual, until she looked up at me and scowled. “I don’t suppose you could help me out here?”

“Sure. What exactly are you trying to do?”

“I just want to make a little cut in my hand so that the blood will drip out a bit, but not so much of a cut as to sever one of my fingers.”

“You want me to take the knife and cut your hand open?” I confirmed. Vampires had to be certain when it came to blood, and even though I had just eaten, there was always somewhat of a temptation to go overboard. Let’s just say that we creatures of the night are not known for our restraint.

“Yes, and hurry up.” She deliberately turned away as I took my own knife and quickly brought it across her palm, making a shallow cut about an inch long. Immediately, her blood welled up to the surface and spilled out over her hand. 

Amy cursed loudly. 

 “Sorry,” I said.

“I never feel a thing when you bite me, so I wasn’t expecting that to hurt so much.”

“I guess I could have licked it first, but then it may not have bled as much as you need it to.” Vampire saliva has two unique properties—it’s an anesthetic for before biting, and helps close the wound after biting.

“Whatever.” Amy kept her hand very still on the altar and it seemed like she was deliberately not looking at it. “Let’s just make with the chanting.”

She started to chant in a foreign language, reading off a piece of loose-leaf paper that she held up so I could see it as well. It seemed vaguely familiar, and I guessed it was probably the same or similar to what Diana had used in her spell on me. 

In any case, our voices quickly fell into a rhythm, and soon I was able to repeat the words without even looking at the paper. The teen witch had closed her eyes, seemingly in concentration. I wondered idly how I would know when to stop chanting. But as our voices droned on, I started to think less about that, and eventually ceased to have any conscious thoughts at all. 

A few minutes later, both of us abruptly stopped chanting. Nothing in particular had signaled this shift—it had just seemed to happen naturally. As the last echoes of our voices dissipated, I was left with an odd feeling, as if I was empty.

Amy was staring at the front door with a faraway look in her eye, as if her father would magically appear there despite what she had said.

I waited a few moments in silence, but the teen remained still, so I finally cleared my throat and asked, “Isn’t there any way to find out where he is?”

“Brilliant,” she sighed, finally coming out of her daze. “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

For a moment I thought she was serious, until she followed up with, “I’ve spent so much time with a map and a pendulum this week that my hand is permanently cramped. But I wasn’t able to find him.”

“It didn’t work?” I asked.

Amy reached under the altar and pulled out a notebook, retrieving a folded up map of the world from it. She spread it out in front of us, and then held up a large, clear, pointed crystal that was attached to a silk cord.

“Where is my mother?” she asked out loud. The crystal spun wide for a moment, before centering in over New York.

Feeling the need to state the obvious, I said, “Yeah, but you know where she is.”

“Where is Johnny Depp?” she asked then.

The crystal spun around, this time finally centering on Melbourne, Australia.

“I guess we could check that,” I said.

“Google it and see if it’s right.”

“But we can’t use phones in the circle,” I answered. Amy rolled her eyes at me, and I added, “According to Max and Nina.”

“Fine, check it later. Meanwhile, my next question is, where is Emma’s mother?”

I watched with interest as the crystal spun around in a large circle, not settling on anywhere. As my mother had died a few years ago, it was understandably confused. Her remains were in the cemetery behind my house, but it was obviously looking for some more ephemeral essence.

The pendulum probably would have continued, but Amy grabbed it, and then asked “Where is my father?”

Immediately the crystal started spinning in a circle, but instead of a slow, controlled movement, it was flying at odd angles, and at times, almost seemed to be pointing upward.

Amy struggled a bit, but eventually caught the rock. “It does that every time.”

“Does it do that for anyone else?” I asked. “Like what about me? Maybe it goes crazy for the undead.”

“Interesting thought,” Amy admitted, and posed the question to the crystal. But it was back to behaving normally, and quickly pointed to New York.

For a few minutes, we both stared at the map, not speaking. “Do you think he’s alive then?” I asked.

Amy continued to look at the map. “I hope we’ll find out soon.”