The Vampire Legacy; The New Queen Rises (7 page)

"You never told me how I was."

"Oh, Michael," I said, crawling over to sat
on his lap facing him. I took his face in my hands and kissed him
on the nose. "You were the best I've ever had."

With that response, I climbed off and ran
into the kitchen. The situation blew over and life returned to
normal. Michael, though, went along with the tale I had told
whenever he, Lauren and I were together. Lauren was still baffled
by the two of us.

One day, after many months of being together,
something that Jack and I had wanted very badly finally came about.
On this night, Michael and I watched the news quietly. I couldn't
tell him, couldn't find the words.

"Are you all right, Ash?" He asked me. I
looked at him and smiled, then nodded. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing."

"That's not true and you know it." He smiled
at me.

"Okay, but you have to promise not to get
mad," I replied to him. He smirked and gave me a look that told me
everything. "I'm pregnant."

"What?" He said and sat forward, his smile
faded, for a moment. He turned and looked at me then took my hand.
"Are you going to tell Julian?"

"No, how could I?" I asked him. "What would I
say? Jules, I love you but I'm pregnant with my husband's baby. I
really don't think that would work."

"Can I tell him?" He questioned.

"Yes, if you want. If he asks, just tell him
I couldn't bring myself to hurt him like that," I replied. "I love
Jack, I want to have this child, Mike."

"I know you do, Ash. It's nothing to be
afraid of." He smiled at me. I nodded and sighed. That went better
than I thought.

Michael was called away shortly after I gave
him my good news, so again I was alone, without my vampires.

All my life I had premonitions, of my friends
becoming pregnant, of what they might have, of little sorts of
problems that people I knew might have, but when I was three months
pregnant I had a dream of Julian. One that seemed to make all the
sense in the world to me, about my past and of my future.

I was in a large civic center building,
almost like the mall where you could see all floors from wherever
you stood, but this place was full of people, all dressed in black,
all vampires. I walked into this strange place and made my way
through the spiraling crowd of people. I finally reached the
bottom, and stepped out into the light, with a group of seven
people behind me, people that I knew, that I trusted.

There in front of me, in the middle of the
room, on a platform, was Julian, standing in all his glory, the
suave prince that he was. He held out his hand for me and I took
it. He pulled me out of the darkness and onto the platform beside
him. He opened his arms for me, looked out into the crowd, and in a
booming voice, he spoke to them. When he spoke, silence filled the
room.

"Behold," he said with open arms, walking
around me in a circle, facing the crowd. "For here amongst us this
very day is our Queen. She has finally come back to us, to bring us
together, to unite us all. She carries within her, a child, our
prince, and this prince will be a great King. He will bring peace
with us and with the mortals. We will all live as one."

He reached over and touched my stomach. I
could feel the baby in me respond to his touch, as if they were
linked. He looked up at me, Julian did, staring deep into my eyes
and smiled at me.

"Michael told me," he said softly. I knew
that it was just my subconscious telling me that this was right,
but I couldn't help but reach out and embrace him. He felt real to
me and, all the feelings of the last seven years, which I had held
deep inside of me for him, raged to the surface. "You're very
beautiful."

With those sweet words, I woke up and watched
as a shadow moved toward the stairway. I stood up and walked out
into the hallway, but the shadow had gone and the darkness
remained.

Life had a strange way of bringing the
impossible back into my reality. The rest of my pregnancy went by
without incident and the baby, a boy, was born in the middle of
August. Jack and I named him Jackson Daniel Wolf, and he had the
most amazing blue eyes I had ever seen on a child so small. They
were full of intelligence, as if he were aware of a world that
existed outside the normal realm, and the prophetic dream haunted
me once more.

When JD, as we called him, turned two months
old, tragedy struck. The police came to my door, late one Sunday
night. They told me that they had found Jack's car, not two miles
from our home, faced in the direction of our house, but that Jack
has vanished into thin air. There was blood in the car, on the dash
and the passenger side seat, but neither matched my husband.

The search went on for two weeks, groups of
men and women searched the woods and river that flowed through the
city but his body was gone. There was no trace of him, no clue as
to what might have happened, until they decided to check the car
again. There they found a note, in between the seats.

The detective handed me the note, written in
red ink. I unfolded it as my Mother took JD from my arms. It said,
‘We have him. He has come home to be with us. It is his own fault
and he brought this on himself.’

It didn't make any sense to me, not anymore
now than it did back then.

It never occurred to me just who he went
with; why it was his own fault and just what kind of turn of events
that this would create. I wasn’t prepared for what came next in
life, on any angle. There were forces controlling my life that left
me with a shaking feeling that nothing would ever be the same
again.

After much heartbreak and worry, I decided
that I wanted to raise my son on my own. However, the fates weren’t
through with dealing out life altering changes and tragedy struck
again. An event that would direct the tides and bring back the
past, making me realize there was never really any escape from what
I was to become.

One dark night, when JD turned six months
old, I woke to a sudden cry in the night. It had ripped me out of a
deep sleep and I raced to Jack's room. The door wouldn't open. It
was locked from the inside. I banged and yelled and pushed and
pulled, but to no avail. While looking for an ax to break it in
with I called the police who finally hacked through the door.

I screamed when I found out that Jack wasn't
in his crib, that he had been taken out of a secured room, and I
fainted when they found the note in his crib. It was just like his
Father’s, written in the same red ink. It bluntly said, ‘We have
taken him. He is where he belongs. With his own kind.’

Instantly I knew who ‘they’ were and there
was only one thought running through my mind.

I had to get to Julian, no matter what.

5

The sun was just about to set to the west,
over the ocean, when I arrived at the mansion still dressed in the
shorts and T-shirt that I had woken up in that morning. I rushed
out of the house soon after I had realized what my life really
meant. I was the Queen of a race that I never really understood,
and my son was the heir to the throne. What was worse, the prophecy
made by Julian when I was three months pregnant, about Jack
bringing peace to the land seemed truer than life now. Some
wouldn't like that and if the prince wasn’t alive, it wouldn't come
true.

I raced through the double front doors, which
were amazingly unlocked, and stood in the middle of the parlor,
just underneath the hanging chandeliers. I looked up to the second
floor, then around to the empty rooms that surrounded me and I
clenched my fists.

"
JULIAN
!” I yelled at the top of
lungs, as I started to cry. "They took my baby, Julian." I hollered
again, dropping to the floor. On my hands and knees I repeated my
cry, in between the ragged breaths I was trying to catch. "They
took my baby."

I ended up curled up on the floor, sobbing to
myself, feeling as if my cries had gone unanswered. Until I
realized, as the dark, blurred figure of a man stood over me and
scooped me up into his arms, that I had indeed been heard, but
wasn't quite sure by whom.

When I awoke, the sun was shining in through
the light drapes that hung over the open window. I stared at the
window for a while, before realizing that I was in the bedroom that
I had spent the night in the last time I was here. With that
realization came the feeling that I also wasn't alone. I turned
over in the bed and looked at the man standing by the fireplace. He
was tall and his dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and, at
first, I mistook him for Julian, but then I realized how different
he felt to me.

"Quinn?" I asked aloud and watched him turn
to look at me. His eyes were full of sadness and he walked over to
sit near me. "Where is everyone?"

"Gone, but they will be returning home now,"
he told me.

"Quinn, they took my son. The other vampires
took my baby," I told him softly, as if he hadn't heard me when I
screamed it the night before.

"I know Precious," he said and touched my
cheek, giving me the same gentle sensation of calm that he had when
Julian was gone all those summers ago. I could almost hear his
quiet whispering in my mind. "I felt it the night he
disappeared."

"Where's Julian?" I asked him. He shook his
head.

"He hardly comes out anymore, never during
the day, and barely at night. He knows you're near and he knows
about your son being taken," he said softly, touching my forehead.
"Your eyes are different from before."

"My eyes?" I asked him, and then I got up
from the bed and walked over to the mirror. He was right, my eyes
seemed to glow silver, but I shook my head as if it were nothing.
"It must be the lighting."

"Michael and David should be back soon,"
Quinn said and got up suddenly. He walked to the door and barely
looked at me when he opened it slowly. "I'll be downstairs. Dinner
should be ready shortly."

As he left, thoughts ran through my mind.
What had happened since I had last seen them? Quinn was quiet, not
himself, and Julian not coming out in the day struck me as strange
because he told me that he loved the sunlight.

I was sitting on the bed when I felt Michael
enter the house, and then he was at my door. He stood in the
doorway and we looked at each other. Slowly, I got up and walked
over to him, he held out his arms and I hugged him tightly.

"He'll be home soon, Ash. He's on his way,"
Michael said softly. I shook my head. "He doesn't know you're here.
We weren't sure you wanted him to know."

"Well, he'll find out when he gets here,
won't he?" I laughed and looked up at him."I don't even know if
he's still alive, Mike." My eyes started to water and I pushed away
from him. "I can't feel my son, anymore. It's like he doesn't even
exist."

"He's fine, Ash. You can't feel him because
they don't want you too. They want you to think the worst." He
sighed, then took my hand and held it. "Ask Quinn about the witch.
Tell him that you need to see her. Tell him you need reassurance
that little Jack is okay. He'll help you."

Later that night, I followed Quinn through
the underground tunnels until he disappeared from me. I closed my
eyes, standing in the darkness, and thought about how I was going
to get back to the beginning, when I felt him close to me. I opened
my eyes and looked into the bright red eyes of Julian's younger
brother, who stood less than a foot away from me, staring me down,
with a little annoyance in his eyes.

"You should know better than this, Wolf," he
said to me in a low voice, using my married name. I stood up
straight and faced him. "You could get hurt."

"You wouldn't dare," I told him and smiled.
He smirked back at me and at my defiance.

"Try me," he replied, then turned and started
to walk into the darkness.

"Tell me about the witch," I firmly told him,
barely seeing him stop and turn back to me.

"Why would you want to know about her?" He
questioned me.

"Michael told me that she could help me feel
my son," I replied to him. "If she can do that, Quinn, I need to
know how. I need to see her."

"She won't help you," he replied flatly.

"Why not?" I asked him. He laughed softly,
and then stepped closer.

"Because, you’re a vampire, Ash. She hates
us," he told me. I shook my head, as if I didn't believe him. He
moved at me and grabbed a handful of my hair, pulling my head back
to look up at him. He wasn't hurting me, but trying to make a
point. He caressed the skin on my neck, just to the neckline of my
shirt. His fingers left a trail of tingling sensations wherever he
moved them. I put my hands on his chest where I felt the heat from
his body, a soft pulsating feeling, and smiled at him.

"So, why has she helped you?" Looking deep
into those red eyes, suddenly images flew at me. "You saved her
life," I told him, before I had a chance to think about my words.
The grip on my hair loosened, but he didn't release me, and his
fingers stayed on my skin as he looked at me in shock. "She was
dying of a wound that someone had inflicted on her, someone who
hated witches. You gave her some of your blood to help heal her
wound."

He totally released me and stepped back, the
feeling ceased as soon as he let me go. "How could you know that?
I've never shared that with anyone."

"I'm a vampire Quinn. Remember? You said it
yourself," I told him. "She was young, wasn't she?"

"Fourteen," he said softly, turning away from
me. "The man who hurt her was her Grandfather, and he hated that
her family had gotten into that religion."

"It was a long time ago, wasn't it?” He
nodded. "Will you take me to see her?"

"We'll leave in the morning." He looked at me
and sighed, thinking about whether to leave me or not. Then he took
my hand, and looked at me as if he suddenly felt the same thing
that I was feeling, but he looked away quickly and began to lead me
out of the tunnels. "Never follow me again, Ash," he said sternly,
without looking at me, but his grip on my hand never lessened until
he left me safely at the back door.