Into the Woods: Tales From the Hollows and Beyond Page 12

  Still he smiled, his blue eyes catching the brightening light. “I don’t need to. I expect a man who raised a young lady with such fire in her would have only one answer. Do what your heart tells you.”

  A frown pressed my lips together. “I’m too weak,” I said, as if that was all there was to it. “Nothing is going to change. Nothing.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. My hands were cold, and I dropped the watch in my lap to put my mittens back on.

  “Hey!” Pierce said, seeing it. “That’s mine!”

  My mouth dropped open, but in a moment, I looked at him in understanding. “No wonder the charm didn’t work. It’s your watch?” I hesitated. “Before it was my dad’s? Maybe I can try again,” I said. But he was shaking his head, clearly wanting to touch it.

  “No,” he said. “You’re his daughter, and your blood that kindled the charm is a closer bond than a bit of metal and fancy. If he had been in a position to come, he would have.” An eager light was in his eyes, and, licking his lips, he asked, “May I?”

  Silently I handed it over.

  Pierce’s smile was so beautiful that it almost hurt to see it. “It’s mine,” he said, then quickly amended. “Pardon me. I meant that it once had been. I expect it was sold to pay for the stone they used to keep me from rising up to avenge my wrongful death. See here?” he said, pointing out a dent. “I did this falling into a post to avoid a nasty-tempered nag of a horse.”

  I leaned to look, finding a small comfort in his history.

  “I wonder if my sweetheart’s silhouette is still in it,” he said, turning it over. My eyebrows rose when he wedged a ragged fingernail into a tiny crack and whispered a word of Latin. The back hinged open, and a folded paper fluttered to the ground.

  “That’s not it,” he said with a sigh, and I picked it up, handing it to him.

  “What is it?” I asked, and he shrugged, handing me my dad’s watch to unfold the off-white scrap of paper. But then my heart seemed to stop when the scent of my dad’s pipe lifted through my memory, rising from the paper itself.

  Pierce didn’t see my expression, and he squinted at the words. “My little Firefly,” he said, and tears sprang into my eyes as I realized who had written them. “I write this on the evening of our day in the leaves as you sleep. You’re still a child, but today, I saw the woman-to-be in you—” Pierce’s words cut off, and he brought his gaze to my swimming eyes. “This is for you,” he said, extending it. His expression looked tragic as he shared my heartache.

  “Read it to me,” I said, catching a sob. “Please.”

  Pierce shifted awkwardly, then began again. “Today I saw the woman-to-be in you, and you are beautiful. My heart breaks that circumstance will probably keep me from seeing you reach your full strength, but I’m proud of your courage, and I stand in awe at the heights you will achieve when your strength builds to match your spirit.”

  I held my breath to keep from crying, but my head started to hurt and a hot tear slipped down.

  “Don’t be afraid to trust your abilities,” he said, voice softening. “You’re stronger than you think. Never forget how to live life fully and with courage, and never forget that I love you.” Pierce drew the paper from his nose and set it in my lap. “It’s signed ‘Dad’.”

  I sniffed, smiling up at Pierce as I wiped my eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Little Firefly?” he questioned, trying to distract me from my heartache.

  “It was the hair, I think,” I said, bringing the paper to my nose and breathing deeply the faded scent of pipe smoke. “Thank you, Pierce,” I said, giving his hand a soft squeeze. “I never would have found his note if it hadn’t been for you.”

  The young man smiled, running a hand over my hair to push it out of my eyes. “It isn’t anything I did a’purpose.”

  Maybe, I mused, smiling brokenly at him, the spell to bring my dad into existence had worked after all—the only way it could, his love bending the rules of nature and magic to bring me a message from beyond his grave. My dad was proud of me. He was proud of me and knew I could be strong. That was all I had ever wanted, and I took a gulp of air.

  I was going to start crying again, and, searching for a distraction, I turned to find my mom’s gift. “My mom signed my application,” I said, fumbling with the envelope beside me with a sudden resolve. “I’m going to do it, Pierce. My dad said to trust in my abilities, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to join the I.S.”

  But when I turned back to him with my signed application, he was gone.

  My breath caught. Wide-eyed, I looked to the east to see the first flash of red-gold through the black branches. From across the city came the tolling of bells, celebrating the new day. The sun was up. He was gone.

  “Pierce?” I said softly as the paper in my grip slowly drooped. Not believing it, I stared at where he had been. His footprints were still there, and I could still smell coal dust and shoe polish, but I was alone.

  A gust of wind blew on the fire, and a wave of heat shifted my hair from my eyes. It was warm against me, comforting, like the touch of a hand against my cheek in farewell. He was gone, just like that.

  I looked at my dad’s watch and held it tight. I was going to get better. My stamina was going to improve. My mom believed in me. My dad did, too. Fingers shaking, I folded up the paper and snapped the watch shut around it, holding it tight until the metal warmed.

  Taking a deep breath, I sent my gaze deep into the purity of the morning sky. The solstice was over, but everything else? Everything else was just beginning.

  Undead in the Garden of Good and Evil

  When I first began writing the Hollows, there were very few strong female vampire characters making it into print, and when I realized how large a role Ivy was going to play, I decided I needed to develop the social structure of the Hollows vampires from the female point of view. The novella Undead in the Garden of Good and Evil was the perfect chance for me to try out a few of my ideas. I learned a lot, not only about the Hollows vampires—both living and dead—but also about Ivy. The depth of her mental abuse is touched upon here, and it is also here that it’s easiest to see why she stays with Rachel, who is both her crutch and her saving grace. Undead in the Garden of Good and Evil was first published in the anthology Dates from Hell.

  ONE

  Phone cradled between her shoulder and ear, Ivy Tamwood scooped another chunk of chili up with her fries, leaning over the patterned wax paper so it wouldn’t drip onto her desk. Kisten was bitching about something or other, and she wasn’t listening, knowing he could go on for half her lunch break before winding down. The guy was nice to wake up to in the afternoon, and a delight to play with before the sun came up, but he talked too much.

  Which is why I put up with him, she mused, running her tongue across the inside of her teeth before swallowing. Her world had gone too quickly from alive to silent on that flight back home from California. My God, was it seven years now? It had been unusual to foster a high-blood living vampire child into a sympathetic camarilla, taking her from home and family for her last two years of high school, but Piscary, the master vampire her family looked to, had become too intense in his interest in her before she developed the mental tools to deal with it, and her parents had intervened at some cost, probably saving her sanity.

  I could keep Freud in Havana cigars all by my lonesome, Ivy thought, taking another bite of carbs and protein. Twenty-three ought to be far enough away from that scared sixteen-year-old on the sun-drenched tarmac to forget, but even now, after multiple blood and bed partners, a six-year degree in social sciences, and landing an excellent job where she could use her degree, she found her confidence was still tied to the very things that screwed her up.

  She missed Skimmer and her reminder that life was more than waiting for it to end so she could get started living. And while Kisten was nothing like her high school roommate, he had filled the gap nicely these last few years.

  Smiling wickedly, Ivy gazed t
hrough the plate-glass wall that looked out on the floor of open offices. Weight shifting, she crossed her legs at her knees and leaned farther across her desk, imagining just what gap she’d like Kisten to fill next.

  “Damn vampire pheromones,” she breathed, and pulled herself straight, not liking where her thoughts took her when she spent too much time in the lower levels of the Inderland Security tower. Working the homicide division of the I.S. got her a real office instead of a desk in the middle of the floor with the peons, but there were too many vamps—both living and undead—down here for the air circulation to handle.

  Kisten’s tirade about prank phone calls ended abruptly. “What do vamp pheromones have to do with humans attacking my pizza delivery crew?” he asked in a lousy British accent. It was his newest preoccupation, and one she hoped he’d tire of soon.

  Rolling her chair closer to her desk, Ivy took a swig of her imported bottled water, eyes askance on the boss’s closed door across the large room. “Nothing. You want me to pick up anything on the way home? I might be able to wing out of here early. Art’s in the office, which means someone died and I have to go to work. Bet you first bite he’s going to want to cut my lunch short”—she took another sip—“and I’m going to take it off the end of my day.”

  “No,” Kisten said. “Danny is doing the shopping today.”

  One of the perks of living atop a restaurant, she thought, as Kisten started in on a shopping list she didn’t care about. Pulling her plate of fries off her desk, she set them on her lap, being careful to not spill anything on her leather pants. The boss’s door opened, catching her eye when Art came out, shaking hands with Mrs. Pendleton. He’d been in there a full half hour. There was a stapled pack of paper in his hands, and Ivy’s pulse quickened. She’d been sitting on her ass going over Art’s unsolved homicides for too long. The man had no business being in homicide. Dead did not equal smart.

  Unless being smart was in manipulating us into giving the undead our blood. Ivy forced herself to keep eating, thinking the undead targeted their living vampire kin more out of jealousy than maintaining good human relations, as was claimed. Having been born with the vampire virus embedded into her genome, Ivy enjoyed a measure of the undeads’ strengths without the drawbacks of light fatality and pain from religious artifacts. Though not in line with Art’s abilities, her hearing and strength were beyond a human’s, and her sense of smell was tuned to the softer flavors of sweat and pheromones. The undeads’ need for blood had been muted from a biological necessity to a bloodlust that imparted a high like no other when sated . . . addictive when mixed with sex.

  Her gaze went unbidden to Art, and he smiled from across the wide floor as if knowing her thoughts, his steady advance never shifting and the packet of paper in his hand moving like a banner of intent. Appetite gone, she swiveled her chair to put her back to the room. “Hey, Kist,” she said, interrupting his comments about Danny’s recent poor choice of mushrooms, “change of plans. By the amount of paperwork, it’s one of Art’s cleanup runs. I won’t be home till sunup.”

  “Again?”

  “Again?” she mocked, fiddling with a colored pen until she realized it telegraphed her mood and set it down with a sharp tap. “God, Kisten. You make it sound like it’s every night.”

  Kisten sighed. “Leave the paperwork for tomorrow, love. I don’t know why you bust your ass so hard. You’re not moving up until you let Artie the Smarty go down on you.”

  “Is that so,” she said, feeling her face warm and the chili on her tongue go flat. Tossing her plate to her desk, she forced herself to remain reclining with her booted feet spread wide when what she wanted to do was hit someone. Martial arts meditation had kept her out of civil court until now; self-control was how she defined herself.

  “You knew the system when you hired in,” he coaxed, and Ivy tugged the sleeves to her skintight black pullover from her elbows to her wrists to hide her faint scars. She could feel Art crossing the room, and adrenaline tickled the pit of her stomach. It was a run, she told herself, but she knew Art was the reason for the stir in her, not the chance to get out of the office.

  “Why do you think I wanted to work with Piscary instead of the I.S.?” Kisten was saying, words she had heard too many times before. “Give him what he wants. I don’t care.” He laughed. “Hell, it might be nice having you come home wanting to watch a movie instead of ready to drain me.”

  Reaching to her desk, she finished her water, wiping the corner of her mouth with a careful pinky. She had known the politics—hell, she had grown up in them—but that didn’t mean she had to like the society she was forced to work within. She had watched it end her mother’s life, watched it now eat her father away, killing him little by little. It was the only path open to her. And she was good at it. Very good at it. That’s what bothered her the most.

  She stiffened when Art fixed his brown eyes to the back of her neck. Undead vamps had been looking at her since she had turned fourteen; she knew the feeling. “I thought you stuck with Piscary because of his dental plan,” she said sarcastically. “His dentals in your neck.”

  “Ha, ha. Very funny,” Kisten said, his good humor doing nothing to ease her agitation.

  “I like what I do,” she said, putting a hand up against the knock on her open door. She didn’t turn, smelling the stimulating, erotic scent of undead vampire in her doorway. “I’m damn good at it,” she added to remind Art she was the reason they had pulled his murder-solved ratio up the last six months. “At least I’m not delivering pizzas for a living.”

  “Ivy, that’s not fair.”

  It was a low blow, but Art was watching her, and that would unnerve anyone. After six months of working with her, he had picked up on all her idiosyncrasies, learning by reading her pulse and breathing patterns exactly what would set her rush flowing. He had been using the information to his advantage lately, making her life hell. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive—God, they all were—but he had been working the same desk for over thirty years. His lack of ambition didn’t make her eager to jump his jugular, and being coaxed into something by way of her instincts when her thoughts said no left a bad taste in her mouth.

  Even worse, she had realized after the first time she had come home hungering for blood and finding Piscary waiting for her that the master vampire had probably arranged the partnership knowing she’d resist—and Art would insist—the end result being she’d be hungry for a little decompression when she got home. The sad thing was she wasn’t sure if she was resisting Art because she didn’t like him or because she got off on the anticipation of not knowing if it would be Piscary, Kisten, or both that she’d be calming herself with.

  But her weakness was no reason to bark at Kisten. “Sorry,” she said into the hurt silence.

  Kisten’s voice was soft, forgiving, since he knew Art was playing hard on her. “You gotta go, love?” he asked in that lame accent. Who was he trying to be, anyway?

  “Yeah.” Kisten was silent, and she added, “See you tonight,” that curious tightening in her throat and the need to physically touch someone settling more firmly inside her. It was the first stage of a full-blown bloodlust, and whether it stemmed from Kisten or Art didn’t matter. Art would be the one trying to capitalize on it.

  “Bye,” Kisten replied tightly, and the phone clicked off. He said it didn’t bother him, but he was alive as she was, with the same emotions and jealousy they all had. That he was so understanding of the choices she had to make made it even worse. She often felt they were like children in a warped family where love had been perverted by sex, and the easiest way to survive was to submit. Her invisible manacles had been created by her very cells and hardened by manipulation. And she didn’t know if she would remove them if she could.

  Ivy watched her pale fingers as she set the phone down. Not a tremor showed. Not a hint of her rising agitation. That was how she kept them away—placid, quiet, no emotion—a skill learned while working summers at Pizza Piscary’s. She h
ad learned it so well that only Skimmer knew who she really wanted to be, though she loved Kisten enough to show him glimpses.

  Carefully removing all emotion from her face, she swiveled her chair, boot tips trailing along the faded carpet. Art was standing to take up half her doorway, with a packet of stapled paper in his long fingers. Clearly they had a run. By the amount of paperwork, it couldn’t be pressing. Probably cleanup from before she became his partner and started following behind him with her dust broom and pan.

  “I’m eating,” she said, as if it wasn’t obvious. “Can it wait a friggin’ ten minutes?”

  The dead vampire—at least fifty years her senior on paper, her contemporary by appearances—inclined his head in a practiced motion to convey a sly sophistication mixed with a healthy dose of sex appeal. Soft black curls fell to frame his brown eyes, holding her attention. His small, boyish features and his tight ass made him look like a member of a boy band. He had the same amount of personality, too, unless he made an effort. But God, he smelled good, his aroma mixing with hers to set in play a series of chemical reactions that whipped her blood and sexual libido high. “I’ll wait,” he said, smiling.

  Oh joy. He’d wait. Art’s practiced voice sent a trail of anticipation down her back to settle at the base of her spine. Damn it all to hell, he was hungry. Or maybe he was bored. He’d wait. He’d been waiting six months, learning the best way to manipulate her. And she knew she’d more than enjoy herself if she let him.

  Bloodlust in living vampires was tied to their sex drive, an evolutionary adaptation helping ensure an undead vampire would have a willing blood supply to keep him or her sane. Being “bidden for blood” imparted a sexual high; the older and more experienced the vampire, the better the rush, the ultimate, of course, being blood-bidden by a powerful undead undead.

  Art had been dead for four decades, having passed the tricky thirty-year ceiling where most undead vampires failed to keep themselves mentally intact and walked into the sun. Why Art was still working was a mystery. He must need the money since he certainly wasn’t good at his job.