Inescapable (Eternelles: The Beginning, Book 1) (20 page)

“What?” Sera asked, more confounded than ever.

And just like that, right before her,
Willow’s form changed. From lanky brunette with dark, sunken eyes to blonde bombshell. She was…Fiona, in the flesh!

“Oh my God.” If there had been any cause to feel fear, this was the right time for it. The hair on her neck rose and tingled through her pores.

Willow’s grip tightened painfully around her as Sera vied for an escape. That unexpectedly strong vise and pure shock kept her rooted to the spot.

“Or perhaps I can be…Adrasteia Dionysios.”
Willow threw her head back and cackled. She really was enjoying this game.

And when she straightened, there Sera’s mother was, in all her sultry beauty, but in Willow’s hoodie and skinny jeans—not an outfit Adri would ever be seen in alive, if one knew the woman well.

Willow, a shapeshifter? How could it be? And nobody ever noticed, not even Mom?

Sera expelled a moan, but the sound morphed into a half-baked whimper when arms snaked around her torso. Willow—now back to herself in the blink of an eye—never released her, but a second pair of hands held her more securely. A man’s hands. An accomplice who’d sneaked up from behind while she was going nuts at the sight of
Willow’s transformations.

“You…you,” she mumbled, still so stunned, nothing coherent could come out.

“I have some skills.” Willow smiled, not a pleasant smile as it never reached her eyes.

Only those horrible creatures could change shapes—soul stealers Mom called them—but I saw him go from mist to human. Willow hadn’t appeared as mist, just taken different human forms.

Could soul stealers take different forms, too, or just the one they stuck by?

So many questions…. If only Mom were here to answer them.

Willow’s face got serious. “I think you have some cool skills, too. Perhaps you can show us.”

“Us?”

Willow said nothing but gave a nod, then moved her gaze to a spot behind Sera’s head.

“Go on, do it,” she said to the man whose breath singed Sera’s temple, so tightly he held her to him.

He wore thick clothes though, so Sera couldn’t make out a specific form, and with the dampness in the air being so pronounced, not even a scent she could cling to.

“Let’s get this party started,” he said with elation. Raspy…deep…vaguely familiar, but it seemed muffled. She sounded that way when she spoke through a scarf draped across her face and nose in the coldest December and January weather.

That voice….
Where have I heard it?

Clearly, the man had taken precautions not to be recognized, because it wasn’t so cold to warrant more than a warm coat, even though it usually got nippiest at this time.

While she rummaged in her mental drawers for a connection, a fiber of knowledge, something, the man placed a cloth over her mouth and nose. The pungent smell seeped so quickly into her, all she could do before blackness came over her was ask herself why she’d been so stupid as to let herself get into this mess.

My pendant. If I were wearing it, would I be stronger?

Sera Dionysios, part phoenix, part vampyre, allowed herself to be overpowered by a tiny witch and a—stranger?—on a lonely country road in Shadow Bridge, the town where nothing bad, ever, could happen to her.

Destiny—always inescapable, ever ironic. When shit had to happen, it bloody did.

*****

Come on, Sera. Show yourself.

Adri closed her eyes tight and tried once again to locate her daughter. Nothing but pitch black met her query. Anger swelled up inside her. Channeling the vile emotion, she grabbed the first thing she saw within arm’s reach—an antique Ming vase—and flung it to the floor. The crash of the porcelain jolted her out of her fury-filled stupor.

Quelle espèce de petite sotte
. What had that girl of hers done to ward herself off from her mother’s searching? She wouldn’t put it past Sera to have gone into hiding. Didn’t a young Sera love to lose herself in the mews of their Hertfordshire mansion when she was barely past toddler age?

Two could play this game. Adri had ways to find her.

She reached for a heavy silk and brocade robe flung over the elaborate screen that divided the room in two. Her bare feet crunched over shards of the broken vase as she shrugged into the garment on her way out of the bedroom. Her soles slipped a little on the escaping blood, but three steps later and the wound had closed. On the edge of the dwelling, she stepped into the high heels she had abandoned there, and threw the door open to barge through the night.

A wisp of rain hung on the wind. She unwittingly took a deep breath and the moisture coursed its way inside her. In her mind’s eye, the blackness surrounding Sera sharpened to a dull grey, before the oblivion won again.

Et puis, merde!

Adri charged into the castle and headed for the turret in the far south corner. No light glimmered inside these wings, but she didn’t need anything to illuminate her path. A century of walking those corridors had her as acquainted with the layout as a resident ghost would know every nook and cranny.

Ghosts. They didn’t have any in the castle. How strange. Maybe Veronica had the place spelled to keep supernatural creatures at bay? Adri had merely enhanced the protections when she settled here.

An avenue to look into....

One more thing—every supernatural creature could be summoned. Some required more complex spells, but any and all of them could be brought here should she choose to do so.

And to summon something implied one would know what came through. A way to figure out what Des was?

She shook her head. She shouldn’t be thinking of him. But try as she might, she couldn’t prevent her thoughts from veering back to him. In her mind, she could clearly see a luxurious room in which he stood. Adri snorted; she’d lived long enough in that city, and watched one too many episodes of
Gossip Girl
, to know that the view outside the window was that of Central Park from the top floors of an Upper East Side residential building. Dawn broke over New York, peeling the layers of darkness from the canopy of greenery in the centre of the Big Apple.

Des was there in that gilded room, and her heart clenched, breath knocked out of her lungs, when he closed his arms around a petite blonde who didn’t look a day over sixteen.

Bastard. He was also a cradle snatcher.
Merde!
She had the knack to get herself into the sourest of pickles, didn’t she?

Adri reached her destination, and she shook the disturbing image from her perception. She’d break her neck if she attempted to negotiate those stairs with an overwrought mind. So the image of Des—the only lover she had ever desired with every fiber of her being—intimately holding another woman got squashed to a corner of her brain, to the bottom-most reaches of her heart.

Abysmal heart, as Dionysos had once termed it. She frowned at the memory of that encounter with her biological father. In all this time, he’d done nothing except try to knock her off her feet.
My heart beats in you.
She’d yearned to tell him she would drop dead the day that happened, but how much could she evade this taunt that had chased her for millennia?

She went down the steep, winding staircase and emerged into the dark library. Her head reeled, and she paused to gather her bearings.

A furry head butted against her hand, and she turned to find Oscar at her side. Good boy—he’d come check on the intruder. She rubbed his mane and let the contact soothe her.

“What’s wrong?” Thandi barged into the library, dressed in a haphazardly tied dressing gown.

“I need the crystal.”

Thandi blinked. “What for? Has something happened?”

“I sure hope not.” Adri brushed past her and snuck into the small room behind the stairs. From there, she unearthed the intricate box that held the scrying crystal. A thick layer of dust covered the top, and she blew on it to reveal the lock.

No one but she could open this small chest and use its content. In 500BC, the strongest white witch of the time had gifted her with this accessory that could locate any living creature on a map.

She’d never had to use it. Until now. A shiver coursed through her.

Would Sera be revealed by this crystal? She didn’t have much hope beyond that....

No, she refused to think this way. She would find her daughter, come Hell or high water.

With the box in her grasp, she exited the room, and stopped in her tracks when an image assaulted her consciousness.

Des murmured soft words in the young girl’s ear, before he kissed her forehead. She begged him not to leave, and he shook his head.

The lout. Not only had he left Adri high and dry, he also played the same game with another woman. Toyed with their hearts. Played them for fools.

Her spine stiffened. He had another think coming, the bloody prick. He’d pay for this.

A creature summoned can be made to bend to the will of the one who called it forth.

“Thandi, find me all the summoning spells from the old
grimoires
.”

The African woman frowned. “What for?”

“Just do as I say,” she snapped as she carried the chest to the big table in the library’s main room.

“Can I at least get a cup of tea inside me before I answer your bidding?”

Adri waved the cutting remark and focused on the map of Shadow Bridge she kept in the drawer of the table. Thandi would get over it; she always did.

She unfolded the thick parchment and removed the heavy crystal from the box. Wrapping the silk tie around her fingers, she pictured her daughter in her mind and murmured the conjuring spell that would activate the prism.

Shards of light reflected from the large gem, painting the bookcases and walls with twinkling lights like those of a disco ball. Oscar groaned next to her, and she reached out and patted his head. What she yielded here was strong magic, and the lion familiar was wary of the potency of that power. She should be, too, but these times called for desperate measures.

She had to find Sera, full stop.

Adri searched and searched, spun the scrying crystal in increasing circles over the map, but the clear rock never landed on any point to indicate where the girl could be.

A gust of wind blew the French window open, and on it came the whiff of rain. The image inside Adri’s head once again faded from black to dull grey.

The water. That was what worked to enhance her power.

She risked a glance at the open doorway. Wind danced in the trees and ferns of the interior garden. Drops of water fell as pellets at first, before the skies opened and a veritable downpour surged down toward the Earth.

Water and power and the pull of Dionysos. He was out there, perhaps even beyond those walls. Every beat of her heart told her so, the water in her blood heeding his presence and sending pinpricks of awareness throughout her cells.

Adri took a deep breath, and tried to find Sera once again. Her query to the crystal remained unanswered.

She risked a glance at the courtyard. The deluge called to her. Her perception would sharpen if she used the water’s power. The black could fade to clarity if she pulled from that primal essence.

She was doing this for her daughter. The one person she loved above any other in the whole wide world. Her baby girl.

The heart of a mother would never hesitate in the face of any threat or any danger to protect her child.

Adri grabbed the map and crystal and walked out of the library.

“You’ll catch your death in this rain,” Thandi called out.

She ignored the plea. Rain water hit her skin like shards of ice ripping through a delicate barrier. Pain ran throughout her system, and she gasped at the cold that filled her. A wicked snicker echoed in her mind.

Dionysos. He was behind that flash flood. He’d sought her out with his power, knowing she begged for enhanced capabilities right then to aid her quest.

The blood in her veins solidified, and agony tore through her, moving from the tips of her feet up toward her heart as her father increased his dominion on her and held her captive.

Could she die if he froze her heart? Did Dionysos have the power to kill her?

That thought burst through her mind on a surge of awareness.

No!
She had to find Sera. She could die afterward. Pulling on the last remaining scraps of sanity, Adri grasped the strings of her maker’s power and strummed them with her own.

Light burst inside her head. In the blink of an eye, she caught sight of Sera’s listless body being carried like a sack of potatoes over a hulking man’s shoulder.

A man she’d seen somewhere.... But where?

A rasp of pain tore from her throat as Dionysos’ torture settled around her heart and closed in. As if in slow motion, her heart slowed its beating.
Thump, thump...thump...thum—

Her daughter was in danger; Sera had been kidnapped. She was a relic hunter, after all, and a damn good one. What was the difference between that and locating a missing person? She had to find her, had to move away from here, close the door on the rain.