Chapter complete!
Chapter 5
***
It was the ring that gave her the courage to do what had to come next. In the candlelight, the small blue gem took on an almost ethereal quality, a tangible, illuminated promise to give each other forever. And so she would give to him.
Since he'd known about her project, he hadn't objected to donating the blood she'd asked for. It was still fresh enough, she'd made sure of that. She'd drank some of it before he came, as much as she dared, diluted heavily to make sure it all stayed down. She'd done her research well, and the rest of it—pure, undiluted, the last bit of potency she needed—was already poured in crystal, waiting for her to drink.
She'd been planning this ever since she realized there was no way her original spell would work, not the way it was. It would take years, decades, centuries to get right, and she didn't have them . . . or didn't have them yet. But this way, so carefully planned, step by precise step, this would give her that time. Give them that time. And he wouldn't have to see her grow old and die beside him. At least the barrier matrix was useful; she wanted nothing more than privacy for this.
Tonight she'd pretended her anniversary gift to him was the blood, the pint and a half she'd kept on ice in a decanter of smooth glass. As he drank it, she could his blood in her begin to react to the ritual exchange, and she wet her lip in growing need for the rest of it. Just a little more, she told herself. Wait until he's drunk a little more, and then you can end it.
Seeing he had reached the last mouthful in his glass, she raised her own, giddy with expectation. “A toast! To . . . both of us.”
He grinned in reply, sharp canines almost hidden in the low light. “To us.”
They clinked glasses, and she downed hers in a long, convulsive gulp. She licked her lips clean and threw her arms around him and kissed him, tasting her blood on his mouth. God, he was so wonderful. “Happy anniversary, Brian,” she said and collapsed in his arms.
“Kris? Krissy?! Oh, God, Krissy, wake up!”
***
Shin'nen hadn't expected a call that day, not the day after Kristina's anniversary, and certainly not so early. The snow had begun again last night in what she guessed was winter's last ditch effort to make up for a nearly snowless December, clogging the roads with a heavy layer of wind-crusted powder. The St. Patrick's Day parade was most certainly off, and there was no chance of getting out into town, which meant both parents were home. As per snow day etiquette, Shin'nen was looking forward to sleeping well into the afternoon after a particularly late night of studying.
She almost received her wish, but at eleven-thirty the phone rang, waking her from her unusual light doze. “Shin'nen!” her mother's voice came from the stairway. “Phone's for you!”
“Okaaaay,” she replied groggily, hauling herself to her feet and fumbling for the phone hung outside her door. She hoped Brian had proposed; if he hadn't, she had no idea how she'd manage to console Kristina. “Hi, Shin'nen speaking.”
“Thank God, this is the right number,” came a voice that was definitely not Kristina. “I wasn't sure if it was the right one.”
“Rebekka?” She'd talked to the baker only briefly during Kristina's calls, but Bekka had never called her directly. Something in the woman's voice gave Shin'nen pause. “What's going on?”
There was a moment's worried pause as Bekka collected her thoughts. “The power's gone out again. Almost all over the city—it's been that way since late last night. Samiel hasn't show up when he said he would, though that doesn't surprise me, but neither has Kristina. I can't find her anywhere. I called her house, I called Brian's—I even called the Eidolon agency, but there wasn't any answer anywhere. And then I thought, it's because of the power outage—their phones need battery power. But I stopped by everywhere and everything was locked up, absolutely no one around.”
She spoke calmly, rationally, but there was an edge to her voice that somehow cut bone-deep. Shin'nen shivered. “Well, it was their anniversary yesterday, so she probably just slept in or something.”
“That's not it. It's St. Patrick's Day; she said she'd be in on time, and Kristina is never late. Never. Not without calling. And . . . something about the way she was talking yesterday. I'm afraid something's gone wrong. You've been working with her, haven't you? I didn't know who else to call.”
Had it been anyone else missing, anyone else been telling her than reasonable, grounded Rebekka, Shin'nen would have brushed it off as misplaced worry. But the way she was saying it had Shin'nen's worry suddenly rising to the level of Rebekka's. “I . . . I don't know where she might be. But I'll . . . figure out a way to find her. I'll get there and find her.”
'Lovely. And how do you intend to do that?' Grimalkin wondered from her bed as Shin'nen hung up the phone. She yawned widely, stretching in a long line as she roused herself from her own nap. Shin'nen had been putting off explaining the cat, too, in her entirety. Her parents had questioned the cat's arrival, but recognized her from their earlier neighborhood and could hardly complain about the dog's subdued nature around the cat.
“The spell's nearly charged. If I really try, I think I can get enough into it to get it running.” Already she was pulling on clothes, digging out the suitcase she'd had packed for weeks in case the spell might somehow fully charge.
'Yes, and then find yourself utterly useless for the next day while you gain back your energy. Wonderful idea, that.'
“You got a better one?”
Grimalkin lashed her tail superiorly. 'Your ignorance never ceases to astound me, but I suppose you got a late start. Cats themselves are not without magic, you know. I'll power the spell, and you go off and save the world, or whatever it is you think you're going to do. Ignorance aside, you'd be more useful out there than I do, damn you humans and your opposable thumbs.'
Shin'nen paused, gathering the cat in her arms and hauling her suitcase toward the stairs. “Really? You'd do that?”
'No, I find it fun to suggest things and then refuse to follow through. Oh--' she added, turning her gaze toward the kitchen where Shin'nen's parents were enjoying a late breakfast. 'There is one thing you need to do.'
Biting her tongue, Shin'nen hissed out a sigh. “Do I have to?”
'If you want help, very yes.'
She sighed again, then drew in a breath, pulling her suitcase after her onto the flowered linoleum. “Mom, Dad? I don't have a lot of time, but I need to talk to you . . .”
***
They'd understood, of course they'd understood. She wasn't sure why it had been so hard to do, like when she'd gotten her first kiss and waited three weeks to tell her mother, as though a peck on the lips was something horrible and wrong. Like then, they'd understood. They were worried, they were fascinated, and most of all they were glad the gulf between them and their daughter had once again shrunk. She'd been afraid to seek their approval, she realized, afraid what their approval or disapproval might mean.
Maybe it was the mixture of feline and human magic, maybe it was Shin'nen's inexperienced designing, maybe it was just the nature of the act, but Shin'nen felt as though she could feel every single mile of distance as it ran, like a sudden attack of jetlag and car ride stiffness all at once. The two arrived in the apartment's living room in one piece, but hardly a happy piece, and Shin'nen immediately began questioning the prudence of using that sort of transportation.
“Let's . . . never do that again . . .” Shin'nen decided, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes to make the spots disappear from her vision. Grimalkin didn't answer, instead slinking off to the couch to curl up. “At least we got here, though, right?”
'After a fashion. Are you leaving yet?'
Now that she was here, Shin'nen realized she had no idea how to proceed. She could tell Asque wasn't in the building, like she had been able to tell the last morning she had been there. Asque would have known what to do. A snippet of memory reminded her she could track someone with something of them or that belonged to them, but Shin'nen had nothing like that of Kristina's. “I . . . don't know what to do,” she admitted, gnawing on her lower lip as her gaze scoured the room as if an answer might suddenly form itself in a cranny or shadow.
'Find the wizard,' Grimalkin said, irratably exhausted. 'He's bound to be in the middle of any mess. Use your bracelet. Now go away; you talk far too loud.'
Shin'nen obediently exited down the stairs, wondering what good her bracelet would do. Down at Asque's desk, she took it off and examined it, searching for some sort of . . . something that might give her a clue: a magic button or an address or some obscure relative's initials. But there was nothing. As an afterthought, she switched to her magesight and peered at it.
What she had originally taken to be a reflection of her own white glow of magic was instead, she realized, the white flames she had seen worked into the wards of the office, interlaced with the distinct emerald of Asque's magic. The chain links were imbued with the weaving of green and white light, and though she couldn't tell what they might mean, she felt suddenly safer in wearing the cool metal bracelet.
The searching spell was in one of the Asque-edited sections of the Book, and following his added suggestions she found the charm an easy task. After two minutes dangling the bracelet over increasingly concise maps, courtesy of Asque's oddly obliging desk drawer, she had an address, and, latching the bracelet securely back around her wrist, she set off into the midmorning streets.
***
She was sure she'd gotten the address when she tried to cross the lawn. Something in the way it was trimmed made her doubt her reasoning for coming here—there were a dozen other things she should be doing, of course, rather than trespassing on this unknown person's lawn. But gping past the first few feet of barely returning grass, she'd found herself walking into a familiar invisible wall, and she knew where the sensation of question had come from.
It was an elegant spell with a simple construction, she saw, magesight bringing the green and white threads into full view. Meant to keep away the average passerby, but not too complex as to exclude help from arriving. It took concentration to look at it, fighting the spell's nonchalant effect, but Shin'nen quickly recognized it as a similar spell to the one she'd walked into weeks earlier. In a reversal of her previous method, she let loose a strong line of her magic and let it weave into the spellwork. Immediately, the sensation vanished, and she strode toward the door.
There was something immediately off about the house itself. It appeared just as any of the other cookie-cutter fifties houses on the block: small and cozy and just a little ridiculous against the backdrop of similar structures. But underneath, something seemed to be draped over the building, hiding its inhabitants in a false image of domesticity.
In reaching out to touch the front door handle, Shin'nen found herself jolted off the front steps as though she'd touched a live circuit. Her whole arm throbbed, and she had to wiggle her fingers to be sure they all still worked.
Asque appeared around the corner of the building, subjecting her to a thorough investigative look that belied his irritation at the situation. “Your stuffed animal,” he finally said, “is in the apartment bedroom. Also, I would suggest you do not touch the building.”
Shin'nen rubbed at her arm, trying to return it to proper feeling. “Kinda late now. And I didn't come for Brave Heart.”
“Why, praytell then, are you here? I have work to do.”
“I . . . came to help.” Now that she said it out loud, out loud to him, who obviously knew what he was doing, unlike her who hadn't the faintest idea, it sounded so stupid. Yep, just crossed half the country to show up and zap myself on a door; okay, think I've done my part, time to go home.
“Really.”
She sighed. “I'm looking for my friend Kristina. Rebekka thought she was in trouble, so I came to try to help. Maybe . . . I can't do anything and maybe this was all a stupid idea, but if there is something I can do I don't want to do it.”
The wizard considered her a moment, shook his head slightly, and huffed a sighed. “I do believe this Kristina is inside, but the current dilemma is in how to join her in that state. You shall have to wait until I've determined how that might be possible.”
For a moment, Shin'nen peered at the house, catching flickers of pale rosy lace and dashes of lightning with her magesight. “She's using electricity,” she realized quietly, then louder, added, “It's a mixture of three spells she was working on: I—I have to remember, um—Grey's Impenetrable Cloak, Dana Thompson's Hidden Agenda, and . . . and—and Yvette's For My Diary. I think. Does that help?”
Asque stared at her for a second, then fixed his gaze on the house once more. Shin'nen could almost see the connections forming in his head as he dissected what he seemed to consider now horribly obvious spellwork. The unstableness of the conglomeration, the required power, the electricity, the magic in the lines, the power outage. After a minute of pondering, he blew into his hands and began swiping them across the face of the house in what seemed to Shin'nen like random movements. When he had circled the house, there was a crack as though of lightning, and the closest street lamp's bulb exploded in its socket. “Come on,” Asque directed, and pulled open the door, motioning Shin'nen after him.
The curtains were all drawn, casting the rooms into a horrible murky shadow broken only by the occasional stub of a flickering candle. As they drew past the kitchen and toward the living room, a frantic voice halted them in their steps. “D-don't come any closer! Just keep away!”
Illuminated by a single near-used candle, a man with dark hair crouched on the floor, his arms encircling the limp form of a small, pixie-like woman in a pale floral sun dress. It was hard to see in the low lighting, but she thought she could see fangs hidden in his attempt at a threatening snarl.
Asque stepped forward, frowning. “Do calm down, sir. This is most impractical.”
“I told you, don't come any closer!” The man sniffed, wiped at his nose and eyes, then glowered all the more at the intruders to his home.
“Brian? You're Brian, aren't you? I'm Shin'nen, Kristina's friend.” At the confused softening of Brian's look, she moved slowly toward the two. “What happened?”
“I—I don't know.” The distraught vampire, flashed a gaze from the newcomers to his fiancée, hands shaking as he held her. “We—we were done with dinner—and she proposed a toast—and then, she just collapsed. I—I think she's dead. Oh, God. Is she dead? She's not dead, is she?”
“She's still breathing,” Shin'nen knew immediately, though she felt as though somehow that didn't answer his question. Then again, she didn't feel quite as though he had answered hers. “What was she working on? Did . . . did she try the spell?”
“No, she—she said it was flawed, that it wouldn't work, that she was going to keep working on it. But . . .” He swallowed, licked dry lips. If she hadn't tried the spell, then what had happened? Why bother with the barrier spell?
“Y-you're a healer, right?” Brian recalled, clutching Kristina's body closer to his chest. “You can heal her?!”
“I . . . I don't know.” Nothing was tugging at her, demanding fixing like she remembered it doing before. But something was wrong, certainly, because try as she might she couldn't feel the beat of Kristina's pulse. “I . . . don't think there's anything to fix. Her heart--”
“She drank your blood,” Asque stated. He had been examining the woman's prone body during the verbal exchange. “She drank your blood after you drank hers, and she's in the turning coma. You'll want to have some blood on hand for when she wakes up.”
“She—what?” Brain said, and Shin'nen echoed the thought in her mind. But it made sense, didn't it, if she wanted to give him a gift. A ring sparkled on the small woman's finger. A forever for forever.
Kristina stirred in her fiancé's arms, mouth opening convulsively to reveal faintly elongated canines. “Thirsty,” she said, voice dry and rasping. “So thirsty.”
Asque had gone to the refrigerator in search of blood. Brian brushed back Kristina's hair, expression horrified. “Krissy—Krissy, why'd you do it?”
“I know you,” she realized and smiled slowly. She sounded like a child. “Briaaan. You're so sweet. Did you bring me a drink?”
A glass of red was shoved into his hand, and Brian held it for her to gulp from. Blood spilled down her front, spoiling the top of her dress. She licked her lips, then her hands where the liquid had fallen on them.
“Why'd you do it, Krissy?” he demanded again. “I didn't mean for you do to this . . .”
“Of course you didn't.” Her voice still sounded breathy, lightheaded, but she seemed to be gaining lucidity. “But I did. I love you, silly. I want to spend the rest of your life with you, and now I can.” She nuzzed up against his chest contentedly.
“Krissy--”
“I have the wedding all planned.” She yawned, and quickly fell into a healthy doze in his arms.
Asque sighed as though this happened everyday and was hardly worth his time to have come. “I expect you'll keep a close eye on her. She may have forgotten some things, but they should come back shortly.” Brian nodded numbly and Asque turned for the door, motioning Shin'nen to follow. “Come on. I have paperwork to file.”
***
Returning to the Eidolon office, Shin'nen found herself unable to form an opinion on the day's events. She was somehow at once horrified and relieved at Kristina's fate, as though that had been the solution they'd been seeking all the past few weeks, imperfect though it was. She was torn between being happy and sad for her friend, and had to settle for ambivalence. But Kristina was happy, or happy enough, and that should be enough.
Once in the office, Asque immediately took to his desk and retrieved a stack of forms to record the incident. Shin'nen found it odd that an act of love and death should be so immediately boiled down to checkmarks and lines on a record, but she supposed that's how it went in the nonmagical world, too. All governments need their paperwork bureaucracy, even supernatural ones.
She got Asque to explain how to call out from upstairs, intending to call her parents from the relative privacy of the apartment and reassure them that she hadn't been mauled by trolls or anything of the like. Still distracted by earlier events, she trudged her way up the stairs. “Well,” she informed the cat still curled on the couch, “I don't know if we won or not. Kristina's a vampire, but I guess she did that on purpose, so I guess that's good? I'm really not sure.”
Grimalkin made no reply, and Shin'nen got the sense that the cat was ignoring her. “What, are you mad at me? I know the transportation spell was a little shaky, but I swear I checked everything a dozen and a half times, and I know you did, too, so you can't just go blaming it on me. Come on, wake up,” she said, and reached out to prod the cat.
The cat didn't move at her touch—in fact, didn't move at all, not even to breathe, and Shin'nen suddenly realized the flesh she'd touched had been cool and pulseless. “Oh, God. Oh, God, no.” She rocked back on her heels, recoiling from the body and clutching the offending hand tightly with the other. “Asque. Asque!”
The wizard appeared in the doorway, expression unreadable. He glanced from girl to cat and back again.
“She's dead, Asque, she's dead, and I know it's my fault and I shouldn't have asked and she should have stayed home--”
Asque's lips drew into a tight line, and he left, vanishing into the bedroom. Reemerging, he held out her Brave Heart Lion. “I'm sorry,” he said, and the simple pointlessness of the sentiment made her appreciate it all the more. She took the stuffed animal, sat on the floor, and, clutching it to her chest, let herself cry.
***
They'd put Grimalkin's ashes in a carved box in the apartment. Once the initial shock of the discovery had warn off, Shin'nen wasn't sure how to feel about the cat's death. After all, though she'd played with the cat in her childhood, she'd never really known her; only after Grimalkin's death did Shin'nen bother looking up the name the cat had given. “The witch's cat in Shakespeare's Macbeth”, she discovered, or “a mangy or old female cat”, and with that she realized she'd never really understood the creature past her existence.
Immediately afterward Shin'nen had begun looking for the successor kitten of Grimalkin's soul, afraid if she didn't find it quickly it might be snatched away or killed before she could claim it. She'd been surprised to discover the Book entry detailing the process included Asque's disparaging critiques, but it quickly yielded results, and she found the kitten, and its stray mother, huddled in the crumbled brickwork of a building seven blocks away.
The kitten, barely a week old, had outlived its littermates by sheer tenacity. Though the mother was a scrawny orange tabby, the kitten was pure white, and Shin'nen could tell her name the moment she saw her. “Eureka!” she knew, like Dorothy's found kitten, and, confusedly excited by the word, the kitten squealed, 'Eureka!' back.
It had been Asque's idea to bring both mother and kitten into the apartment, and for a few weeks Shin'nen's life revolved around the two. The mother seemed to have lived in a home once, for she quickly took to the litterbox Shin'nen set out for her, but she was cautious, nearly feral when it came to her diminished brood, and Shin'nen was careful to give her space. Unwilling to disturb the cats with a change of environment, she avoided unpacking the belongings her parents had sent, living out of her suitcase while the two prowled about. To her relief, neither seemed to possess Grimalkin's uncanny ability to exit and enter the building unaided.
The kitten's first action of power was to overturn the tiny chest of Grimalkin's ashes. 'Eureka!' she exclaimed in wonder as the soot spilled across the carpet, then flicked her perfectly straight tail in an all-too familiar gesture. 'I'm right here,' it seemed to say. 'Stop keeping me in that box.' The resulting stain proved impossible to remove, and Shin'nen found the discoloration both disturbing and somehow comforting. It made the carpet seem more tangible and the apartment less than perfect.
Kristina stopped by sometimes in the evenings, speaking even softer now than before in a self-conscious attempt to hide her teeth. Death looked good on her, though; the short strolls she took, shaded properly from the sun, had left her with a tan just verging on sunburn on most days. Love, though, looked better, and the tiny sapphire on her right hand somehow seemed to encase her in her own personal heaven. The wedding would be next December, on the solstice, to make the most of the night. Shin'nen had seen the church and already begun working on the weather charm to make sure the moon and stars could shine uninhibited.
After a few visits, she'd convinced Kristina to take in the mother cat once Eureka was ready to be on her own. The two had immediately struck it off, the mother allowing the new vampire to scratch her ears while Shin'nen was still barred from touching her. She didn't seem to be talking yet, but Shin'nen had hope, and even if she never did, Shin'nen hoped a cat's attitude would help her friend come to better terms with her newfound eternity.
She was just now getting around to unpacking the Rubbermaid containers again, and though she hadn't brought much more than on her last attempt, this time their contents seemed to fill out the freshly painted rooms. It had taken her the better part of a week to decide on the colors: a rich blue for the bedroom, tomato for the bath, a fragrant pine for the open space of the living room/kitchen. Now that it was done, she was fairly certain she'd never become an interior decorator, but it now marked the rooms as hers: her choices, her work, her less than sophisticated sense of color. Even Asque hadn't disapproved of the subject, and she took his stern reminder to get not one drop of paint on the carpet as approval.
She'd taken a few liberties, of course. She doubted Asque would have approved of the holes she was putting in the walls for her pet net, nor the technician she had scheduled to come in tomorrow and install DSL and a wireless router, but he'd get over it. Probably. For now, she was satisfied that the space felt like it was hers—well, hers and the cats, for the two had certainly left their own mark on the apartment.
After one last glance around the apartment, Shin'nen gathered up Eureka and tramped downstairs. “Hey, Asque,” she announced, opening the door to the office proper, “I remembered something else I need to ask you. What's up with Elvis?”
The wizard straightened his newspaper with a shake. “I expected you down three hours ago.”
“Sure you did. You'd have bugged me earlier if you really did.” She grinned and swung into her chair. “But, no, really, I mean, is he on Mars, or New Mexico—Area 51 and all that? Or—oh! Maybe, it's like, he was really an elf, you know like El-vehs, like the Shoemaker and the Elvises that the Muppets did once, and he got tired of putting on makeup to look old and just went home.”
“Elvis died in 1977.”
“Yep, that's what they want you to think.” 'Eureka!' the kitten agreed with a squeal. Shin'nen leaned over in her chair—her chair, because that pathetic excuse for seating just had to go—and tried to peer at what Asque was reading. “So, your latest tree carcass collection telling you anything interesting?”
Grimacing, he turned the page. “Not . . . as yet.”
“Well,” she said, adopting a Disney Beauty and the Beast Cogsworth voice, “if it does, we'll be ready for them! Who's with me?”
“That would be the idea.”
“We'll fight 'em both together,” she added, switching to Cowardly-Lion gruff, standing to punch at the air theatrically. Eureka mewed vehemently from the desktop. “We'll fight 'em with one paw tied behind our backs! We'll fight 'em on one foot! We'll fight 'em with our eyes closed!”
Opening one eye, she saw Asque leveling a gaze at her across the top of his his newspaper. She dropped her arms. “Okay, I'm done.”
“Thankfully.”
“Now, Asque, about this office . . .”
THE END! =D
No comments:
Post a Comment