Blood Magic by Laken Cane

Chapter Seven

At two p.m. on the dot, Ash jumped up on the bed and woke me up by licking my face with all the joy and enthusiasm a pittie contained in his wiggly little body.

“Hey buddy,’’ I said thickly, then turned around and pulled the covers over my head. “Try again in an hour.”

But Lucy was ready for me to get up as well, and she was smart about it. She brought food. “Oh good, you’re awake,” she said.

I sighed, then gave up and pushed myself up in the bed. I could resist my dog’s face-licking. I could not resist Lucy’s cooking. “You’re too cheerful for the crack of dawn,” I muttered, staring hungrily at the tray of food on my lap.

She laughed and yanked my blackout curtains open. “It’s the afternoon, and you have your visit with your mother today.”

“Yes,” I said, “but late. I want to visit Long Shadow after my mom, and I can’t go to the graveyard until it’s dark.” The vampire wouldn’t appreciate being brought out of the ground while the sun was shining.

Max called when I was halfway through my breakfast. “I’ve decided I’ll go with you to dig up the vampire,” he declared.

“I’m driving out to Huntersburg today to see my mom,” I told him, dabbing at the last of the egg yolk with my bread.

“So I’ll go with you. We can take care of the vampire after.”

I wasn’t sure I’d really find a silver-wrapped vampire buried under a golden tree, but I wasn’t against having some company when I started digging. “I thought you were done with fieldwork.”

“So did I. What time do you want me at your place?”

“Max wants to go with me to my mother’s,” I told Lucy after I ended the call.

“I’ll come too,” she said. “We can bring Ash. I just love your mother.”

I shook my head and climbed from the bed. “We have to do some work afterward, Lucy. I don’t want you or Ash there. It could be dangerous.”

“Seriously, Kait.” She stared at me. “You’re fine with Max around danger, but not me?” She sat on the edge of my bed and crossed her arms. “Are vampires real, then?”

I paused on my way to my bathroom and turned back to face her. “What?”

She pursed her lips. “Demons are real. I’ve seen you talking to ghosts. I have dreams that show me things that are admittedly sometimes…wrong, but still. For the last few nights, I’ve dreamed of what I can only guess are vampires.”

My mouth dried up and my stomach tightened with sudden nerves. “What were the dreams?”

She shook her head. “Confusing and strange. The only reason I think the people in my dreams are vampires is because of a feeling. They don’t look different. They feel different.”

“What are they doing in the dreams?”

She dropped her gaze to her clasped hands. “I didn’t tell you because they don’t make sense. I didn’t feel afraid for you, exactly.”

“I was in the dreams with…vampires?”

She sighed. “I think so. The visions are wispy and unformed. But last night, I saw you in a naked man’s arms, and he was full of despair and vampire pain. You know, the kind you read about. Decades of horror.” She shuddered.

I wrinkled my nose, unsure. Maybe she’d simply seen me with Jared. “Was he dangerous?”

“Oh yes.” There was total conviction in her eyes. “Yes, he was. But I didn’t feel as though you were in trouble.” She shrugged, then rose and came to stand in front of me. “Are there vampires, Kait? Tell me the truth.”

I don’t know why I was reluctant to tell her. If she hung around me long enough, she was going to see a whole different reality than the one she was used to. But she’d handled the demon well, and she wasn’t like a regular human. So I nodded. “They are.”

She swallowed hard as she stared up at me. “My goodness,” she whispered. “And werewolves?”

“They’re real, as well,” I said, my voice emotionless.

“Wolves aren’t so scary,” she declared. “But the thought of vampires is terrifying.” She looked at me then, and there was something in her eyes.

“You know,” I murmured.

She took my hand, squeezing gently. “It’s my dreams, Kait. When I’m around someone long enough, I…absorb them, sort of. And everything I don’t see when I’m awake is there waiting for me when I go to sleep. Your mother, too?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wolf shifters,” she said. “That’s so…amazing.”

I took a deep breath, trying to calm the emotions swirling inside me. I’d admitted to a human that I was a wolf. From birth, it was drilled into a shifter’s head what a forbidden thing that was to do.

And then there was the shame. I’d grown up knowing that we hid what we were because it was such a shameful thing to be. Why else would we be forced to hide it? When I’d matured, I’d understood that it wasn’t really about being a shameful creature who was inferior to humans. It was about keeping safe. If the humans found out about us, there would be only chaos, and the world would change. But that deep-seated shame remained.

I grabbed my clothes and headed for the bathroom, unsettled. I’d seen pack members severely punished because they’d been accused of sharing our secret. A person didn’t just get over shit like that.

“So can I come with you guys?” Lucy asked.

“You can. Ash can’t.”

“Thanks, Kait.” There was a little concern in her voice. She wasn’t sure if I was mad, upset, hurt, or what. I understood, but I couldn’t reassure her right then.

I spent the next three hours playing with my dog, catching up on laundry, watching TV, eating whatever Lucy set before me, and doing some online shopping. Normal things. Relaxing things.

But when five p.m. finally rolled around, I was more than ready to go. I figured we’d head to Long Shadow around eight, because it had to be dark before we could dig up the vampire, and that’d give me a couple of hours to spend with my mother.

Half an hour later we were on our way to Huntersville. Lucy rode shotgun and Max, with many complaints and much eye-rolling, ended up in the back seat. “Just so you know,” he said, “I do not do well out of the city.”

“You’re not a country boy?” I asked. “I never would’ve guessed.”

Lucy snickered.

My mother was going to love Max Pepper.

Once we got out of the car, Max stood with his hand pressed against his stomach, eyeing the various “wild animals” as he called them—the barn cats, the hens, and the hound dogs that came out of the house to sprawl in the dirt.

My mother rushed off the porch, arms open. “My babies,” she called, though I was her only “baby.” Lucy ran to meet her and giggled as my mother pulled her into a bear hug. Then she came at me and Max with the same enthusiasm, and I leaned down to hug her as Max shrank away, uncertain.

“Okay, then,” he said, as Mom ignored him and yanked him into her embrace. He held his arms in the air and looked at me with an expression that bordered on panic, and I’m sure he wondered if she were quite sane.

I could only laugh.

"It's a farm," Max said, when he finally extricated himself.

"It's not a farm. She has a couple of chickens and some tomato plants in the summer."

"I gathered fresh eggs this morning," my mother said cheerfully. "I'll make egg salad sandwiches for lunch. Come in," she urged, then linked arms with Lucy.

They hurried away and Max watched them go with a worried frown.

"What?" I asked.

"It's just...I mean, look at those chickens."

I lifted my eyebrows. "Yes?"

"They're in their little house, all happy and innocent, then they lay their eggs and some giant…monster invades their home, steals their babies, and then cooks and eats them. I don't know." He shook his head. "It just seems wrong."

"You eat eggs all the time, Max. And chickens."

"It's different buying them from the supermarket. I wouldn't go into the chicken's house and steal its children and eat them."

I stared at him, aghast. I was pretty sure I saw the sheen of actual tears in his eyes. "You're fucked up," I informed him. “They’re not children. My mother doesn’t even have roosters.”

He glared, then stomped away, angry and sad at the same time. All I could do was follow, unsure whether to laugh or kick him in the head.

Just before I reached the porch, I saw a spirit. I sighed, but I wasn’t really upset. I’d had enough of peace and quiet. I thrived on stress, apparently.

The dead person was a woman who’d been in her mid-twenties when she’d died, which, from the look of her clothes, had been recently. It was only when I drew closer and she turned her head that I saw the side of her throat had been torn out.

“Ouch,” I said, walking up to her. “What happened to you?”

Her eyes widened, and then, when she realized I could see her, she screamed. I heard her scream—and I rarely heard vocalizations from the dead people. It was one of the things that made it so difficult to help them. But she screamed. It was short, piercing, and full of grief and despair.

The last time I’d heard a spirit speak had been when my ex-alpha’s dead mate had come to me when I was a child. I believed that was when Adam Thorne began to hate me—and it had only gone downhill from there.

The dead woman began to sob. She wanted to hold me, to make sure I didn’t get away, to feel the touch of someone who could see her, but her arms went right through me. I could only imagine her state of mind.

“It’s okay,” I said, gently. “I’m going to help you. Tell me what happened to you.”

She tried, but her voice went in and out and I only got a few words. Still, it was better than nothing, and I wondered if I was getting stronger and more tuned in to the spirit world.

What I did understand was that her name was Sara, and I believed she’d been attacked by vampires. I got about ten words from her—and six of them were vampire.

I did not know why she was stuck here.

My mother came out to see what was keeping me, and when she saw me talking to…nothing, she turned around and marched right back inside. My abilities made her nervous. I think she’d rather have gone on thinking I was insane than to know I saw dead people.

I wondered if Lucy’s recent spate of vampire dreams had something to do with this woman and her attack. I didn’t want to pull her away from the lunch table or draw attention to myself—not everyone who lived in my mother’s house was a nonhuman or aware of nonhuman business.

Sara talked to me for ten more minutes before she disappeared. Sometimes that happened, and they seemed not to be in control of it when it did. They just…blinked out.

As I got up from the porch step to go inside, though, she reappeared across the yard. After a confused look around, she spotted me and charged toward me, running exactly like a living person would.

And this time, her words didn’t skip. I heard every one of them.

“Vampires didn’t kill me,” she said. “But they caused a woman to. She did not know what she was doing. She wasn’t in her head.” Once again she tried—and failed—to grasp my arms. “You must go to my brother. Tell him what has happened.” She looked around wildly, cocking her head as though she were hearing something I couldn’t hear. “When he doesn’t believe you, tell him…tell him I told you about Paul and the bayou in Louisiana. Tell him the fucking vampires got me, and then you show him where they’ve put me.”

I leaned closer. “Where, Sara? Where did they put you?”

“Hurry,” she said, running toward the woods. And this time she didn’t run like a human would. She skipped in and out, appearing much farther away than she would have had she been alive.

I followed her.

When I entered the woods, I couldn’t help but flash back to when I was last in these woods, being attacked by my ex-alpha—who’d forcibly taken my mother—and then shifting and trying to kill my new alpha.

But now I understood why the spirit was haunting the area around my mother’s house. And I believed I knew why Sara was still here. Unfinished business. It’d fuck a spirit up every time. She needed me to find her body and tell her brother what had happened to her.

And that wasn’t all.

The next time she blinked out, she reappeared beneath a huge old Oak tree, and she was pointing at the ground. I wasn’t surprised that the vampires had buried her beneath a tree—same as how they’d buried the vampire in Long Shadow. Vampires believed their souls lived in trees, and that eventually, by feeding the trees blood sacrifices, they could retrieve their souls. They were terrified beyond anything else of dying.

Vampires were immortal—but if they were forced from this world, they went on to live in the world of a thousand suns.

Hell.

And there they would live forever, burning for eternity.

That was their faith. That was what they believed. And it terrified them like nothing else. But the vampire girl had told me that her maker would help me because he didn’t care if he died—and that was just strange.

“Mark it well,” Sara told me. “Bring my brother. Tell him to find peace, because I can’t rest until he is no longer full of grief and hatred. Tell him.” She was growing dim and weak, and her words, once again, were intermittent and somewhat fuzzy. It didn’t matter. I understood them all—even the ones she hadn’t actually said.

“I’ll tell him, Sara.”

She rattled off a series of numbers, and I put them into my cell phone. I’d ask Max to find any women named Sara who’d disappeared from the area recently and would call Detective Moreno to let him know where she was buried. Then I’d contact her brother so he could get some closure.

I brought up an app and got the coordinates I’d need to give to the detective.

When I looked up from my phone, Sara was gone.