Dark Surrender Read online

  She was halfway through her meal, alternating between the two plates of food in front of her, when she heard the scrape of a key and the groan of the backdoor opening. In through the pantry trotted her younger sister, Andy, her hair a shock of auburn curls, face adorably feminine, and her smile infectiously beautiful. She bounced into the kitchen, slinging a heavy bag of books onto the floating island Min was eating at. She had been humming the theme music to Looney-Toons when she abruptly stopped and took in the sight of her sister with apprehensive eyes. Her dark blue eyes had always made Min think of stars, as if they were begging for some great artist to paint them into their midnight blue canvas. She was wearing a tailored jacket and matching skirt, something you’d expect donned by a librarian. But no matter what she did with her hair, the unruly brown and red curls always countered that primness with an untamed air.

  “You’re not dressed yet?”

  Min nodded as she took a sip of her coffee. “Very observant of you.”

  “And you’re eating breakfast! This is very unusual for you.”

  Min glared at her. “I eat breakfast every day, Andy. Lunch and dinner too.”

  Andy gave her a glare of her own.

  “Okay, I might miss a dinner once in a while.”

  “Liar. I know you don’t do anything but scour the books after I leave every night.” Min knew she didn’t mean the Business logs, she meant the magic books she’d been reading nonstop for the last six months, eighteen…now nineteen days.

  How sad was it that she knew so readily how long it had been?

  “I see you’ve gotten into my private stash of goodies. How naughty of you.” Andy plucked the last hunk of the syrup covered waffle from Min’s plate. “Speaking of the shop, not going into the store today?”

  The shop. Min had forgotten all about it.

  She and Andy ran a small bookstore on Hagherty Blvd…well, a bookstore upfront, but a magic shop for those with enough mystical ability to see that the enchanted, beaded curtain at its back wall wasn’t really just a wall. The veil wasn’t too powerful, but it kept the non magical shoppers out of the mystical side of the fence.

  Usually both sisters worked the store, trading off which end they worked based on their moods. They did a brisk business. Close but not too close to both the local university, and to two separate covens. One located on campus, the other no more than five blocks away in a rundown Victorian that group was slowly refurbishing.

  The store had been their mother’s. They’d grown up cleaning shelves and learning the craft from her, and they both missed her more than they could say—so neither ever talked about it. They simply kept the store going, and Andy looked for old and forgotten text every weekend, while Min poured over them every night, looking for a cure.

  A cure. Guilt washed over Min as she looked at the bundle of books lying on the counter. She needed to ward off the house against the vampire she’d bedded last night. That was of vital importance. Without preparation, the vampire would most assuredly find a way through her protections, and then she’d be dead, or tortured or even worse. So she couldn’t just fall onto the books looking for what was never there. She would have to put them off.

  She needed to have her protections bolstered and in place before nightfall. As she got up and poured herself another cup of coffee, she told herself that she wasn’t up for another fight tonight. But as her sore body moved to sit down again her mind flashed upon what she’d been doing that had made her so achy. The feel of his cold, smooth flesh, his hard muscles and even harder sex, how he had ground himself against and into her.

  She shuddered and shook her head. When she looked up Andy was staring at her, a smile on her face.

  “What?” Min snapped laconically.

  “Nothing,” Andy taunted, leaning her elbows on the counter and getting that cloyingly romantic, moonstruck look on her face. “It just looks to me like you’re thinking scandalous thoughts this morning? Did you have a date last night?”

  Min almost lied to her. She felt so ashamed, and yes, utterly moronic. But then she smiled and admitted, “Kind of.”

  Andy perked up like a cartoon dog being offered a juicy steak. “Did he spend the night?”

  Now that would be something…

  Maybe a secret hidden compartment for daylight hours?

  “No,” her sister said, cutting her off as she tried to speak. “You’d have him leave as soon as you were—”

  “We’re through talking about this.” Min cut her off. She just couldn’t wrap her head around what she’d done, and talking about sex with her little sister wasn’t much less disturbing. “And you’ve got the store to run today.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah…take the fifth. But whatever you did—or with whom—you really, really should do it again.”

  Min stood up and shooed Andy out through the pantry to the backdoor, assuring her, “I have way too much work to do to—”

  “Plan any immoral liaisons?” Andy sang.

  “Goodbye!” Min shoved Andy through the door, pushed it shut and threw the deadbolt. She had to smile at her sister’s choice of words—immoral liaisons—and the rabid enthusiasm she had for Min’s love life.

  You really, really should do it again.

  Now that was a terrible, dangerous idea. Stupid in fact. But the thought stayed with Min and warmed her as she retrieved the family recipe book from behind the Oreos, snagging the bag and taking it with her as she started searching out protective charms and spells.

  The thought of doing it all again, and with the vampire, made her pulse race and her skin grow hot. She pushed the thought out of her mind. Not likely…well, almost completely unlikely. The hulking bag of books her sister had brought caught her eye. Andy had been gone over the weekend at a conference—actually a bacchanal—and had found them more books to work through. Min felt a pang of guilt as she reached out to take one and then pulled back. She needed to work on warding off the house. She needed more than just a few new tricks if she was going to keep a vampire—probably a royally pissed off vampire—at bay.

  And why is that? Her guilt chided.

  “Because I can’t mind my own business.” She answered. She just had to save that vacuous blonde last night. And she just had to invite a vampire into the house…for sex—no, for oh-my-god-I–can’t-even-stand sex! And because of that, the spell books on the table would have to wait. She had to force herself not to rush as she poured over the recipe book. She couldn’t afford to slap up shoddy castings. Second rate magicks would just get her killed.

  The guilt welled up inside her again, threatening to drown her.

  For it meant Katarina, her mother, would have to wait, too.

  *****

  Chapter 8

  When Luca returned the next night he found the witch to be very resourceful. He’d expected maybe the same trick of having no windows or doors on the house, or maybe the chimney missing or ceiled shut. He’d even imagined that there would be a vacant lot where the house had been. But she’d out done his wildest dreams. There was neither a vacant lot or an entrance-less house on that corner…for there was no corner.

  He didn’t know if it was just a glamour that only he could see, or if she had made it so it bespelled everyone. The block she lived on no longer had a corner, and her house was gone. But it looked so real, and as he walked about it, he found even the payphone gone.

  Night after night Luca returned and stared, and stalked, and scented the night air, never once finding the merest whiff of her scent. Not a flicker that anything of her had ever been there. Even when he knocked on the door to the other houses on the block—all the other houses—he found nothing but real live human beings. Somehow, someway, she was eluding him completely.

  Vampires do not dream. Some say they have no souls, and thus no conscience to make them dream. But Luca knew he had a soul. It had punished him those first horrible months after the change; though no amount of guilt could keep the beast that prowled inside him from hunting, from cutting a sw
ath of murder and blood across a continent. He also knew that that soul, that conscience, had not stirred for most of his three hundred years as a vampire. No, one didn’t lose their soul when they you were made vampire. It just slowly withered from lack of use. Oh, maybe god—if there was a god—maybe he slowly extracted your soul for each and every murder you committed. That would explain it in a metaphysical, theological way. And it would explain how sometimes he saw the perfect lack of a soul, one to mirror his own, when he would come across a truly vile murderer for his supper.

  But now, every time he killed he felt worse and worse. Going out of his way just to hide the bodies, even when he was on the other side of the city from where the gypsy witch lived. And the worse he felt, the more the guilt welled up inside him, the more he thought he was losing his mind.

  Had he ever really been caught in the beautiful witch’s trap? Had she had her way with him? Had she existed at all?

  It was driving him mad.

  He even caught the silly blonde Min had saved from his clutches walking alone on the street mere days later. He’d rushed her and pulled her into an alley. So silly, so stupid, so pathetic. Min had told her to stay inside at night. He had heard her tell her to stay in for the next couple of weeks. And yet there she was, wandering the streets, unprotected. And yet from the hysterical fear he smelled rolling off of her, she hadn’t thought she would run into him again. She wasn’t suicidal, not out flaunting her neck cleavage sitting on a tombstone in a stinking cemetery. No, she had just been out, with another female friend, and she had the smell of French food and wine still on her.

  She was also tan. He could smell the sun on her skin as he leaned into her shivering, frightened body, and sank his fangs into her. He was so hungry, he always was anymore. And though he tried to force himself to feed every night, it wasn’t the two or three a night he had made his usual diet. He was feeling all the weaker for it. What he needed to do was to drain the witless blonde and then scare up another two…or more victims.

  But instead of languishing in the wonderful, terror spiced blood of the whimpering blonde, he began thinking of Min, and of how she had battled to save this one from him.

  He pulled his teeth from her neck and looked down at her. She was pale again, and her lips were slack. She wasn’t to the point of passing out yet, but she was getting close. What on earth did Min see in this creature? Why in blazes had she risked herself to save this?

  He moved away from her, suddenly unable to take her life, or anymore of her blood. The blood in his mouth actually turned sour on his tongue. He left her crying, though still on her feet, in that dank, stinking alley, and rushed off to haunt Min’s street again, wishing, hoping for a sign that she had existed at all.

  Now Luca stood exactly where he’d stood a week ago, staring where he knew the house should have been, except of course it wasn’t. He thought of the blonde who he hadn’t killed. He hadn’t even drunk enough from the woman to quench his thirst. He needed to get this whole thing out of his system before he starved to death, or went crazy from the hunger. He’d seen it before. Scared, crazed creatures, so starved they could no longer pass for human, even with vampire whiles. They were nothing more than mindless monsters.

  She’d called them revenants. His sire had shown them to him when he was young, when he was trying to live off the blood of animals, which no matter how much he drank left him just as hungry, and more crazed afterward. She’d shown them to him, being so very gentle—which was a thoroughly alien tact for her. And then she’d helped him find a victim, for he was utterly out of it, weakened and monstrous looking, unable to morph from the feral bumpy forehead and frothing fangs…and he was filthy! It had taken six feedings before his vampire face could be hidden again. He’d lost so much more control than he’d realized.

  That night he’d pushed his conscience aside and never looked back for it.

  Something, some sound pulled him from his reverie. It was the missing payphone ringing once more from behind him. He looked behind himself. The pay phone was indeed back. When he turned back the house was back too, only one window showing light in it. It also had the witch staring out of it, phone in hand.

  Luca smiled. He wasn’t crazy…or at least he hadn’t imagined the witch, or the sex…he may still be crazy though. He moved toward the pay phone and snatched it from its cradle. “I thought you’d never show yourself again…”

  Nothing. Not even breathing sounds.

  “Tricky one you are.” Still nothing.

  He turned and looked to the window, finding the expression on the witch’s face intriguing. Not only was there primal need there still, but something surprising—loneliness. He knew that one well. He’d felt it so completely after she had left him, abandoning him without any explanation. He felt the urge to say something utterly humiliating, and it slid from his lips before he could stop it. “I missed you.”

  A smile crept over her lips, those luscious, red lips. And she laughed. “I really almost believe that, vampire.” He didn’t like her calling him that. She knew his name, she should use it. But he hadn’t used her name, and it was branded on his soul like it was burned there with a silver cross. “Min…please.”

  There was a look on the witch’s face, fleeting but definitely there. Surprise, and then something deeper…had she missed him too?

  Luca bit the inside of his cheek, the taste of his own blood not even enough to hold his attentions from her for long. Why was he feeling…anything? He was feeling such angst about what the witch thought…what Min thought, and about him. He shouldn’t be feeling like this. He should be feeling lust and hunger for her blood, and that was all. Actually, he should be angry still, ready to rip the woman’s throat out for having used him, holding him to her against his will. It was pathetic that one of his breed could’ve been so easily forced into servitude. But of course that service had been the best, most mind blowing sex he’d ever experienced. Would he let her bespell him again? Or could he find a way around it this time and take her as she needed to be taken, as he burned to take her, as his beast craved.

  “You may come in the front door this time, vampire.” The line went dead, and the window she had been in disappeared right before his eyes. Actually, all the windows, and the chimney faded away as if they had never existed. But the front door stood there, worn and sturdy, beckoning. She would no doubt have set her trap again over the threshold of that door. If he had any sense at all he would find another way in. If anything else, letting her have dominion over his body meant she could stake him at any time. He would have to be insane to let her bespell him again. But he walked carefully to the door, and without another thought in his head he reached for the door knob.

  *****

  Min had made good use of her week, reinforcing and expanding the wards around the house that same day, and using that night, and every free moment she had away from the shop since, to scour the tomes her sister had brought her. But no matter how engrossed she tried to be in the books—what was truly important—she still fantasized and day dreamed of the vampire, her Luca.

  Ha, her Luca! Maybe she was crazier than she’d thought. Having the vampire come into her home, and then to let him go after she’d had her way with him—now that was truly the work of a lunatic. Maybe all the pressure that was on her shoulders, suddenly being the head of the family, was too much?

  She’d been working so hard on learning all she could from the books, and working nearly as hard at trying not to think about Luca…no, the vampire! She had to stop thinking of him as a person. She had to think of him as what he truly was, a merciless, soulless killer. And then she read something in the Lydian grimoire that had to have been written by a deranged person, or at least a complete idiot.

  It was a vague reference to the souls of humans being restored by using—contorting—the soul of a vampire to snag it from the ether.

  She reread the passage, laughed—and the sound of it filled her with dread, it was the laugh of a mad woman. Vampires did
not have souls, of this she was certain. She had killed enough of them, and her family had splayed enough of them over the last millennia, to know that as a fact.

  She slammed the volume shut. Her shoulders had gone tight, a spill of curse words on the tip of her tongue. Her frustration was hot enough it felt like anger. And after she gave the old book a throw against the wall of the kitchen, that anger only doubled. She didn’t like it, but the anger felt much better than the frustration. She should throw things more often. What kind of idiot wrote such obvious fallacies? And what publisher, even back in ancient times, would have printed such garbage?

  Well, she had only to look to the rather small self-help section she’d grudgingly put up at the store. Most of those authors didn’t know jack about human emotions or the humans that had them. She considered the whole genre a cruel cosmic joke. She wondered what, if anything, the authors with alphabet soup behind their names had degrees in: applied greeting card design, or more probable, creative writing.

  Whichever it was, the fact that she’d wasted an entire night studying an obviously fraudulent book made her mad enough to scream. She wanted that long dead author there in front of her so she could shove that book straight up his ass!

  She took in a great breath and let it out slowly. She needed to get this out of her system. She had another three books to start in on, and she needed to squeeze in about a week’s worth of balancing the books. Andy was great with the customers, and she kept the stocking and special orders flowing like a well oiled machine. She just couldn’t stand or sit still long enough—and didn’t want to—to deal with long columns of ciphers all in a row. That had always been Min’s job, even when her mother had been there. Neither Andy nor Katarina had had the least bit of interest in the business side of the shop.