Consecrated ground, p.14
Consecrated Ground, page 14
Not that it would make Joan care about Leigh any less.
Joan sighed, and her shoulders sank with the effort. Leigh had kept her clothes on the night before—did she not trust Joan?
“Why are you hiding yourself from me?”
Leigh swallowed with a gulp. “I’m—I’m not. I just—”
Enough. “That fucking vampire wants you tonight and I need to stop him, Leigh. What is so precious that you have to keep lying to me?”
Anger flashed in Leigh’s eyes. “I’m not lying to you.”
“You’re not telling me everything.” The headache spiked again, the hum ringing in Joan’s ears and pissing her off more. “This is just like that summer. You were always keeping secrets.”
“Oh, the summer you talked about nothing but how much you couldn’t wait to get out of here?” Leigh shook her head, disdain contorting her face. “What does it matter? You’re going to be gone again soon anyway, right? What do you even care when you’re going to leave me again?”
Joan was taken aback, since now her truths were in the spotlight. She bit her lip but pressed on. Something important was happening, and she wouldn’t back down now, even if she was stunned by the power of Leigh’s response. Time was moving too fast, like she had a countdown ticking while she tried to keep two trains from colliding.
“You have to tell me. The truth. All of it.”
Anger, fear, and finally loss moved over Leigh’s face and through her body. “It’ll wear off around noon.” She looked at the floor and wouldn’t meet Joan’s eyes.
Joan wanted to say something then, something to bridge the chasm that had once again formed between them, but she didn’t get the chance.
“Maybe you should just leave me alone until then,” Leigh said.
She walked away, and it was a long time before Joan moved. To have gone from the night they’d shared to this . . . it stung.
Her cold forgotten breakfast and lost appetite were the least of her concerns.
• • •
In the wake of Leigh’s exit, the only other thing Joan could do meant tackling the one task she’d been putting off.
If the boundary was receding, someone somewhere knew it was possible. Which meant someone somewhere had written something down about it. If anything involved witchcraft and lived in a book, her father would have a copy in his study. The one room in the house she’d been trying to forget existed.
Set on the first floor at the end of the long hall, Trevon’s study was dark and cool. The air was stale, like nothing had moved in there in days, suggesting no one had been in this room since his death.
If her own room had been like walking into her past, this room was a testament to a future denied. The one her father had insisted was her birthright.
The small room held only a large walnut desk, an ancient grandfather clock, and two chairs—one a leather office chair with armrests, worn by age and use, and the other a full recliner set near a narrow fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves dominated the walls, every available space filled with books and journals and files and stacks of loose paper.
Joan took a deep breath to soothe her nerves and instantly regretted it. The room smelled like her father’s pomade, and the memories that came with that scent almost drove her right back into the hall.
Here was where she and her father would retreat when he needed to check a spell’s reference. Where he’d taught her the Latin for her binding spells, and drilled her on the uses of every herb and plant on the family plot.
When she committed some infraction, here was where her father had summoned her.
If he wasn’t in the fields, he’d been here. She had idolized her father when she was a child, back before her mother got sick. Joan hadn’t been as close to her brother Marcus, though his death had spawned her need to become a war witch. Each individual loss squeezed at something inside her, the pain doubling in on itself.
Across from the desk three large portraits, watercolor on hard-to-obtain gesso board, were framed above the fireplace. Her mother’s was top center, ageless eyes in a forever youthful face. Below her, Marcus and Joan, both from the year Joan started high school. They’d all been painted from various photos, because Joan had helped provide them to Leigh. Leigh, whose work had been masterful for one as young as she’d been at the time.
Ashes long cold lay in the fireplace. The farther she got from the desk, the more dust covered everything. The worn carpet could use a vacuuming and the whole room needed airing out.
Or she could close the door once she found what she needed, and leave all this history behind her.
Could she, though? Turn her back on so much of what made her who she was?
The scratch of a branch drew her attention to one of the windows. The tree outside was full of crows, not squawking now but flitting from branch to branch. They were probably foreboding something she didn’t want to know about, one more hassle she’d have to deal with. They didn’t feel malevolent, but that didn’t mean they weren’t.
Joan forced herself to task. When she sat in her father’s desk chair, the damned hum rumbled low in her bones and in her ears.
Trevon’s desk was covered with the work that had filled his final days—a manual about spells to aid natural pesticides, herb stock lists with a plan for next year’s planting, a book on vampire lore opened to a chapter about bloodlings, maps of farms in the area and their rotation schedules, all with inserted notes in Trevon’s looping scrawl.
The bookshelf directly behind the desk was filled with rows of large leather-bound journals, each from a binding witch who had lived in this house on this land. Where would she begin to look for what she needed?
The full moon ritual. Perhaps by starting with the one spell designed to protect the town she would figure out what Victor was doing to the boundary and stop him.
The large forest green leather-bound volume her father had used time and again held all the details of the ritual. Though she searched back and forth throughout the journal several times, she found no indication of what to do for a receding boundary, or any reference to the possibility itself.
She hadn’t expected an easy solution, but such an astounding dead end was a surprise.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. When she answered, Dayton didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“Both the coven and the watch received anonymous messages an hour ago.”
Nothing good came from messages no one would claim. Shit—she’d hoped for more time before she’d have to talk to the coven.
“Victor is looking for someone who sounds a lot like Leigh Phan, and don’t tell me you didn’t know about it.” He sounded pissed. It was less of an accusation than it was cold confirmation, but she wasn’t going to cave to him or anyone else.
“I’m not giving her up.”
“I get it. Really, I do, but you may not have a choice.”
“I’ve still got a few hours—“
“They said we have until sundown, but the coven has already voted.”
Fuck. No time at all, then. Of course Gretchen would give Leigh over to the vampires.
But until Leigh told her the whole story, Joan was stuck. “Two hours. That’s all I’m asking.” It was better than none.
“Joan,” he said, and she paused in the action of hanging up. “Don’t leave me out of the loop again. I can’t help with what I don’t know.”
He couldn’t see her nod, but she disconnected the call without another word.
• • •
Maybe Leigh’s pending revelation would give Joan something to work with, like giving back whatever Leigh had taken from Nathaniel.
At noon, Joan found Leigh in the garden, standing at the end of one of the raised beds, staring at the herbs flourishing in the weak sunlight. Leigh stroked a blossom on the passionflower planted on a trellis at the end of the bed, though it was late in the year for any to still be alive.
Something about the way Leigh stood, the way she didn’t raise her eyes in greeting made it clear Joan should keep her distance, so she stopped several steps away. Oddly, Joan felt exposed back here, as if a threat awaited her in this garden she knew like the back of her hand.
“Does what you’re hiding from me have to do with whatever you took from—from them?”
“I’ve taken nothing.” Leigh wore no jacket despite the cold and she warmed her arms with her hands, though it didn’t look like it made her feel any better. Joan flashed back to the moment she’d molded her hands to Leigh’s hips, the perfect fit of them together.
Would they ever be that close again?
“Nathaniel says otherwise.” Joan tried not to make it sound like an accusation. Just a statement of fact. “He says you have something that belongs to him.”
“He means me.”
Joan scoffed. Then he could wait forever. “Like hell. I don’t care what that monster thinks—”
“I’m not worth all this, Joan.” Leigh’s breath hitched.
Joan didn’t know how to ask, but Leigh didn’t wait.
“My last day in captivity . . . it was after midnight, but still hours before dawn. One of the human thralls came to pull me from the donor rotation in the—the basement.”
Leigh stared across the unseasonably robust plants, her voice a distant monotone. “I was taken upstairs to a bathroom on the main floor. It was the first time I’d been clean in weeks. I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time, but I tried to appreciate it for what it was—a brief respite from feeling like a fucking animal.”
Joan itched to move closer but stood still, afraid she’d pull Leigh’s attention from what she had to say.
“They fed me real food—not gruel, but an actual burger and fries. I tried not to wolf it down, but . . .”
She took a long, slow, deep breath, and exhaled just as slowly as she turned her face towards the sunlight. “I found out I’d been given to a visiting vampire.”
The more she spoke, the more matter of fact she sounded.
“For a vampire, she was rather compassionate. She said she was older than Victor but had no house of her own. I guess she was moving here to avoid some guild entanglements back where she’d come from. Honestly, I didn’t care. I was too afraid I was about to die.
“She told me she wouldn’t kill me. She had not so nice things to say about Victor, but I got the impression she didn’t have a choice about being there either. What she did want from me was more than I wanted to provide, but she made me an offer. She had a fetish for—for sex with humans, she said, and in exchange for my willing compliance, she’d help me escape if only to irritate Victor. She thought him pretentious, and she took pity on me being in his clutches.
“It was a simple choice. Had it been one of the other vampires—Nathaniel, for instance—I might have put up more of a fight, but I—I didn’t want to die—at least, not then—and freedom was too good a dream to pass up, even if it meant . . .”
Joan’s guts seized. This wasn’t about scars at all, or disfigurement or whatever else she’d imagined.
Leigh opened tear-filled eyes.
“I didn’t know what it would do . . . to me. I didn’t know the price of . . .” Her body shook as if she were containing sobs. “I didn’t know what I would become.”
The muscles in Joan’s shoulders tightened, as if her body recognized a truth she didn’t yet understand. Leigh was suggesting she’d had . . . relations with a vampire, but . . .
“When I was free,” Leigh said. “I didn’t know where else to go or what to do. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to the same old places where I’d gotten high. I went to Trevon to see if he could—could help me.“
Her voice cracked. “I wanted him to help me die, but he wouldn’t do it. Instead, he took me in.”
Joan wanted to interrupt, to ask why, but stayed silent. She dreaded whatever came next, but she was frozen.
“Trevon treated me like a human being. For all I did to drive you away, he saved my life and helped me with the glamour to keep me safe.”
Leigh scrubbed the tears from one side of her face, but they were quickly replaced. “He knew the truth—that I don’t want to be—that I’ll die before I hurt anyone.”
And then the effects of the glamour abruptly faded. For a moment, Leigh appeared to be a shimmering blur, her shoulders rising and falling as Leigh gathered herself and faced Joan.
It wasn’t any one feature that changed before Joan’s eyes. Leigh was still Leigh, but the youthful fullness faded, and she aged years in seconds. Her cheekbones became more pronounced, her curves hardened ever so slightly, her skin lost some of its luster. She was still beautiful, still stirring—and yet she was a new woman altogether.
Leigh was a leaner, harder version of herself. Scars marked her arms from the inside of her elbow to her wrists—from needles, yes, but also the faint marks of teeth and two wicked parallel scars from a blade.
The irises of her eyes glinted gold, and on her neck, over her carotid artery, were two scarred-over puncture wounds.
Joan gasped and stepped back. She knew logically Leigh would not hurt her, but she itched for the weapons she’d left in the house.
The truth changed what she’d experienced when they’d made love. The strength in Leigh’s grip that had held her in place, Leigh refusing to remove any of her clothes. All the facts rearranged themselves, leading Joan to only one conclusion.
Leigh was a bloodling.
“I want to live what little life I have left in peace, because I know someday soon, someone will figure it out and—”
She looked at Joan with a resigned finality. “I am not a monster, and no matter what happens now, I won’t let them try to make me one.”
Shock kept Joan from moving. She had to get away, but she couldn’t leave Leigh—despite her horror at all Leigh had endured, had become.
Her phone rang. Joan couldn’t look away from Leigh’s newly exposed appearance, but she reached for her phone as Leigh’s expression changed to one of sad resolution.
Dayton again—and before the two hours she’d asked for. Joan couldn’t handle any more bad news, but that’s all she seemed to be getting.
“Dayton.” No more words came. What was she going to do? How could she protect Leigh now?
At the sound of Dayton’s name, Leigh gasped and bolted towards the house.
Dayton sounded rushed. “Joan, I’m across the road. You’ve got to come quick. Gretchen Wilson is dead.”
CHAPTER 14
Leigh smoothed the quilt over the guest bed with trembling hands. She wouldn’t sleep here again.
Once the truth had been revealed, the look on Joan’s face had broken something irreparable inside Leigh. Whether it had been disgust or pity wasn’t clear, but it didn’t matter.
Joan had been horrified. After everything that had happened the night before, Joan thought Leigh was one of the monsters.
The creaking of floorboards warned her that Joan was back in the house, but the sound didn’t approach the guest room. When Joan opened and shut the back door behind her, the reverberations vibrated through the house. She’d left without saying goodbye.
Leigh wiped the last of her tears away. She needed to be gone before Joan returned.
She’d never understood how she’d captured Joan’s attention. The Matthews family was legendary, and a local celebrity like Joan could have had any lover in town, but she’d picked the quiet granddaughter of the chatty neighbor. For all Joan’s faults, including her tendency to lash out when hurt, she also had a way of looking at the world that inspired Leigh to wonder along with her.
Joan had always excelled at everything she set her mind to, and that hadn’t changed. Now, she thought she could hold off a vampire lord, his court and his thralls just by willing herself against them, all to protect the people of this town.
It was crazy-making. Victor didn’t care about Leigh. She’d never seen him. The one who cared was Nathaniel, and that was only to make an example out of her because she’d escaped.
Escape should have been impossible.
Leigh was only supposed to be a donor to the vampire Sylvia, but donors died all the time when vampires decided to take their fill. The aid Sylvia had offered in exchange for one night in her bed had turned out to be significantly less than advertised. Leigh might have gained a bloodling’s strength and speed, but Sylvia had done nothing else to assist her.
The word “regret” wasn’t big enough to encapsulate Leigh’s shame.
Yet it was bloodling senses that helped her escape, so Sylvia had fulfilled her end of the bargain. Soon after their tryst, Leigh’s hearing had allowed her to sense the proximity and location of the guards. Her improved eyesight and sense of smell had guided her through the vineyard. She hadn’t grown faster or stronger until days later, but the other improvements had allowed her to free herself.
She wondered what had happened to Sylvia once Leigh’s absence was discovered, then decided it didn’t matter.
Leigh passed a hand over her face. She’d wasted more time staring into nothing but the past, with no change whatsoever to the outcome. She donned her jacket, zipped her backpack closed and strung one strap over her shoulder.
She slipped out the back of the house, cutting through the garden to the back road behind the property. The Matthews plot of land stretched into the woods but had never been developed past the road.
Leigh forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, to not collapse under the weight of all that had happened. That last eyeful of Joan might have to last her forever, and leaving that house hurt as much as when she’d left her grandmother’s home that last time.
Would her life ever be anything but grief?
The wind dried her new tears, and she shoved her hands in her jacket’s pockets more from habit than from the cold. She was never cold anymore, not with her new ill-gotten senses. Nothing affected the emptiness inside, but if she walked around in the autumn chill without a coat, people would talk. She drew the hood over her head to hide herself.
