Min's Vampire (24 page)

She slowed down enough that she started
looking around her and behind, seeing if anyone or anything was
following her. She didn’t want to see them…to see Min nor Katarina,
but a new riff of paranoia was starting to speak up. What if this
wasn’t a dream? What if what they had said was indeed the
truth?

But that was impossible.

But so was magick…and vampires and
werewolves and…well, a million other things that she knew damned
well were absolutely, unalterably real.

She ran into something while she was
looking back over her shoulder. She jumped and cried out, pushing
against and trying to push through whoever or whatever it was. She
felt something cold and sharp cut into the palm of her hand, and
reflexively she wrenched herself away from it, staggering across
the sidewalk and backing up into a parked car.

The car’s alarm went off, wailing at a
deafening pitch. It made her jump again as she swung around to find
the black, high-end sedan blinking its lights at her, filling the
night with lights and sounds galore. She whirled back to what she
had run into, and found a wrought iron gate swinging in the night
breeze, topped by sharp looking fleur-de-lis. She looked to her
aching palm and found the flesh there torn and smudged with her
blood.

Is this really blood? If I’m
not real, then what is this stuff?

She looked from her bloodied palm, then
to her other, and realized with a start that she had somehow lost
the Shamlus stone. She turned round and round, looking over the
pavement beneath her feet, but saw nothing.

“
What the hell do you think
you’re doing?” It was an angry male voice, and it spun Andy on her
heel. He was leaning out the front door of the house she’d run into
the fence of, and he had a cell phone and a baseball bat in his
hand.

“
I’m sorry…” Andy tried to
say, but even she couldn’t hear her voice over the ruckus of the
car alarm. The baseball bat wielding man sighed, and reached into
the pocket of his robe, fumbling as he exchanged his cell phone for
the alarm controller. With a queer beep like a sneeze, the alarm
stopped, and she could hear the echo of it dissipate.

“
I’m sorry,” she repeated.
She pointed at his gate. “I accidentally ran into your gate, there,
and it scared me. So I jumped back and ran into your car
too.”

The man grumped and his shoulders
loosened. He was a big man, with huge shoulders, tousled brown
curling hair, and a five o’clock shadow you could use as a scouring
pad. He ambled out of his house and toward the gate.

“
You hurt?” he asked as he
shut the gate.

“
W-what?” Andy was
distracted. Whether it was just paranoia or not, she felt like
there were more than just human eyes watching her.

“
You’re holding your hand.
Did you get hurt?” The guy seemed genuinely concerned, which was at
odds with his bruiser exterior.

Andy worked up a smile to placate him.
“No. I just scared myself. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” And she
started walking away, leaving behind the Shamlus stone and any
protection it might have offered her.

Before she knew it, residential streets
grew to more granite and steel buildings. She was approaching
downtown, and even though it was late at night, there was a steady
stream of traffic moving in every direction. She didn’t feel any
safer though, until she began to run into pedestrians. People in
cars can always just shut you out when you scream for help. At
least with people out walking around, there was a one in ten chance
someone would stop and help. At the very least there would be two
out of ten that would be witness to your abduction, and one of
those people would probably actually talk to the police…if they got
to the scene before the witness got bored and left.

But why would they bother?

After all, wouldn’t they know, couldn’t
they all tell, that she wasn’t like them. Andy remembered her
mother swearing that she was indeed real. What was it she had said?
Oh, yes. That whatever in the hell she and the fae Queen had formed
her from, it had been naturally occurring in this universe. So that
was great, just great. Maybe she had been formed out of some
mystical mud…or maybe she had been a fae plant of some
kind.

Either way, why hadn’t a human noticed
this about her before?

Well, Min hadn’t noticed. And Min was
attuned to the flow and ebb of magical forces…wasn’t she? Well,
that was because Min had been affected by the spell that created
her.

Andy wondered if she now looked
different to Min? Maybe like an insect, or an alien, or whatever
the hell they’d made her out of.

Oh god…what if she really had been made
from some sort of magical bugs?

It made her flesh crawl.

Chapter 23

Min strode through the streets of
Augusta armed for battle. She had an iron sword at her hip, two
silver daggers, one strapped to each thigh, the Bellini shotgun
she’d used on the werewolves strapped to her back, and a small
arsenal of magical paraphernalia stuffed in a velvet sack, tied
onto the scabbard of the sword.

Luca had gotten back to the house a few
minutes after Andy’s grand escape, and they’d all three headed off
to search the city for her. Not that Min expected to visually find
her. She’d somehow taken the small, white and silver stone Min had
gotten in Scotland ten years ago and used it to make herself
disappear. Well, to turn invisible. So she was pretty sure that
tracking her would be a fairly silly thing. All she could hope was
that somehow she and Katarina would notice something out of place,
or pick up on a magical aura, or that Luca would be able to sniff
her out in the big, vast city.

Luca had gone east, and would swing up
north, and then down south of the city. Katarina and Min had gone
west and were going to mirror his search pattern.

They just had to find her. Andy wasn’t
a skilled practitioner or spell caster. How she’d managed the
disappearing act still had Min stumped. Maybe the stone was some
sort of magical conduit that Min had neglected to identify. Clearly
she needed to go through her personal belongings with a careful
eye. If they all survived the night, maybe she’d have Andy look
them over.

If they survived…

Min looked over to her
mother, and couldn’t help feeling a wave of happiness pass through
her. Their mother—her mother? No, she was
their
mother, and she was alive and
well, and with her, looking better and better every minute she was
awake. No matter what she’d withheld from them, it was still so
wondrous that she was present again, not just some lifeless body,
bereft of a soul and cold as marble to the touch.

And god help that treacherous faerie
bitch if Min ever got her hands on her. Queen or not, Min was going
to strangle her with her bare hands…or set her on fire and have
herself a fae barbeque.

Suddenly her mother stopped and
shuddered. Min thought for a moment maybe she sensed something,
some clue as to where Andy had gone off to, but when Min came over
to her, she saw her mother had broken down in tears.

Min gathered her mother in her arms and
made the same sounds of comfort her mother had always made to
soothe her and her sister. Stroking her long silver streaked
hair.

“
I’m so scared, Min. What if
something happens to her? What if the Winter Queen’s forces have
already seized her?”

“
No, no…don’t even think
that,” Min said, though those thoughts had already passed through
her own mind. “If there had been any fae around the house, Luca
would have smelled them when he was there. She’s probably just
walking around, thinking. And with that invisibility spell of hers,
she’s in absolutely no danger.”

But no spell is perfect. Min didn’t
want to start thinking about what could be happening to her sister
this very moment. Logically her mind told her that Andy really
wasn’t her sister, no matter what false memories her mother and the
fae had dumped into her mind. She remembered the real, Andy-free
history of her family as well as the alternate reality of having a
sister.

A memory of Min once telling her sister
that she’d wished on a shooting star that she would have been an
only child. Andy had been only seven, and had burst into livid
tears. Guilt welled up red hot and sticky, and Min had to force
herself to breathe.

“
Luca will find her,” Min
said, her voice sounding far surer than she felt.
Please, by the goddess, let him find
her.

~*~

Luca swept through the city, letting
his nose lead him rather than his eyes. Min had already told him
that her sister had gone all invisible, so looking for her with his
peepers would be of no use. So he let her mild, clean scent lead
him from Min’s house out into the night. She seemed to be headed
toward downtown—but that was quite a stretch for a human on
foot—but if she’d been running, and afraid, maybe not.

Thankfully Min’s little sister didn’t
wear any kind of fancy, obtrusive perfume. So, even with her scent
being so mild, he wasn’t having too hard a time following it. That
was until that scent led him into a small, upscale neighborhood
that seemed to appear like an oasis among all the midsized office
buildings that were announcing he was getting closer to downtown
and skyscrapers.

That’s where a cacophony of scents
nearly made Luca lose her trail. It wasn’t just the inundation of
human scents, because there were certainly too many in this small
parcel of homes for him to weed out. No, there were other scents
that practically screamed out to him. First was the redolent of
musk of wild fae. They were not part of either the Winter or Summer
Courts. But they still served the Courts to a point. There had been
three, and their aromas were as far from humankind as he could
imagine.

The other scent was pure Sidhe…and
fucking familiar. It was the same scent he’d gotten a nose full of
when Min had tried that spell on him, to try and bring her mother
back to life. It was the thing that had come into Min’s very home,
merely in shade form, and had kicked Min to the side like she was
nothing.

The Winter Queen.

Well shit.
As if things weren’t bad enough, now the big bad
Min and her mother were trying to keep Andy from was already in
town.

If she was physically in this realm—and
by the overwhelmingly heady scent of her, she most certainly
was—then he needed to find Andy, and now. There was absolutely no
time to waste. If the Winter Queen was there, the only place on the
planet she might be safe was in her family’s home.

That home’s threshold was strong with
only Min’s magick to buffer it. But it hadn’t been able to hold the
Queen back before. But Katarina had lit some rather odd shaped
candles—that smelled like they were made out of belly fat of the
Creature from the Black Lagoon—and had told he and Min that they
were gifts from the Summer Queen. Reinforcements to her own rather
powerful wards. They were to be used for exactly a time like
this.

The flames had been green, purple and
blue, and he could feel the energy they threw off like the heat
from a fire. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he was hoping
they’d be strong enough to stop anything that was going to attack
the house.

But that was before he knew the Winter
Queen herself was coming to the party.

Of course, what good was a threshold
when Andy was running all over town, her only defense invisibility.
For as surely as he’d tracked her scent, so too could the wild fae,
and the Queen.

He was about to leave the area, try to
extricate himself from all the olfactory sensations, then try
circling the area until he picked up her scent again—hopefully they
hadn’t already caught her, for the Queen could have simply just
opened a doorway back to her realm and taken Andy with her—when a
breeze brought an odor so strong he could almost taste
it.

Blood.

Before he could even tell himself to,
he was across the street and touching the sharp point of a cast
iron fleur-de-lis that stood sentinel atop a yard’s iron gate. He
touched that point, and the blood was still fresh enough to be
sticky. He brought it to his nose and took a long whiff. Andy, most
assuredly. But it certainly wasn’t her naturally mild scent. Her
blood was just full of power. Power that made the tiny patch of
flesh he’d touched it with start to sizzle.

He wiped his finger against the iron
gate, letting the nighttime moisture of dew help take the trace of
blood from his burning flesh. Min had said Andy wasn’t human…and
she hadn’t been kidding.

But that was a good thing, for now he
could follow a scent that was far more redolent, one that literally
burned the smell of fae right out of his nose.

Chapter 24

Andy was exhausted as she rounded a
corner in downtown Augusta and found herself across the street from
a small all-night diner. The place was the only light coming from
the entire city block, and that illumination seemed to make the
night warmer, softer. As if it weren’t the middle of
winter.