Ravenous tdf-1 Page 26

  Holly's eyes snapped open. She was standing upstairs on the same floor as the nursery, but was down the hall near the back bedrooms.

  How did I get here? Wait a minute.…

  The doors to the rooms were open, early evening sunshine slanting at a low angle through the dust motes. But it was afternoon a moment ago.

  A hamper stood in the hall, overflowing with laundry awaiting attention. Strains of teeny-bopper radio sugared the air. Automatically Holly picked up one of the shirts that had missed the hamper. Familiar pink-and-white cotton draped over her hand, limp with too many wearings. Years and years ago it had been her favorite.

  Fear flooded her mouth with a metallic tang. Those rooms had been shut up since she was a child That shirt had fallen apart and been cut up for rags. I'm in the past.

  This early summer evening, with the sun just like that, was one of the last things she remembered before the hole in her memory. Her hands began to shake. She stuffed the shirt in the hamper and crept into her old room. The sight of the baby-aspirin pink walls set the hair on her neck crawling with apprehension.

  I was here right before the terrible thing happened.

  It all looked so mundane. Magazines and more clothes littered the shaggy throw rug. Unicorn posters were taped to the closet doors. A math workbook was open on the faux-French provincial desk, the pages held open by a plush bear. Holly remembered, with a pang for her lost younger self, wishing Teddy knew how to do fractions. Problems had been simpler then.

  She found the source of the saccharine pop music—her old clock radio—and switched it off.

  "Holly? Hol?"

  Her hand froze on the radio button, her whole body clammy with dread.

  "Holly? C'mere."

  She tried to swallow, but the frantic beating of her heart interfered. "Ashe?" she said, but the reply was no louder than a whisper.

  This night, the one about to start. She had forgotten it, forced it away, buried it, but it was still there, etched deep inside like the serial number of her soul. Turning toward the door, she followed the sound of her sister's voice.

  "Ashe?" she said again, stronger this time. The sight line through her sister's doorway was blocked by a blue dresser piled with feminine detritus. There were posters of heavy metal bands on her ceiling—men writhing in explosions of artistically lit sweat.

  "I need your help," Ashe said in her pseudo-adult voice, the words confident and clipped.

  "It'll cost you ten bucks." Holly's words came out automatically. It was what she had said the first time this scene had unrolled.

  "Holllleeeee," Ashe wheedled, a momentary lapse into the little girl she had been a summer or two past. "Please. I'll give you five."

  "What do you want?" Holly rounded the corner of the dresser. Part of her already knew what Ashe would ask, but the details floated just outside her conscious grasp.

  Whatever it was, it was something to do with big-M magic.

  Ashe was kneeling on the floor, facing Holly. She had spread out a white cloth on the hardwood, as if setting out a picnic. Pretty china candlesticks sat in the center, their white tapers already lit. Feathers. Salt. Their mother's hairbrush. One of their father's ties. A dish of incense that smelled like the sweet, stale crumbs from the bottom of a chocolate box. She was planning a ritual. Ashe Carver was a talented worker of magic.

  She looked up, not seeming to notice Holly's grown-up body. At this moment in time Ashe was sixteen; Holly was eight.

  Girl-slim and long-legged, Ashe wore a sundress and mauve plastic sandals. Her hair was blonder than Holly's, ironed straight, with wispy bangs. She had too much makeup around her huge green eyes, a sure sign she was meeting her boyfriend later.

  "I need to go out, Hoi," she said, smoothing a corner of the cloth. "I just have to. Glen's got tickets to Blue Murder."

  Did something so small, so petty, cause everything that came after?

  Holly's reply came, sulky and petulant. "You can't leave. You're supposed to stay here with me until Mom and Dad get home." Grandma, she remembered, had been visiting family in Halifax.

  "This is more important." Ashe flicked some of the incense smoke around the room with a feather. "You're a big girl. You can manage."

  Holly felt a glob of nausea working its way up her throat. No, no, don't do this. The next line in the script left her tongue. "They'll kill you."

  Ashe gave Holly a look of green-eyed contempt. "Not if they don't find out. I just need to delay them until the concert's over."

  "They'll be home long before that. You'll be toast," Holly said with gory, kid-sister satisfaction.

  "Not if they have a flat tire."

  She turned and picked up a white shoe box. Blithely she pulled off the lid. "Remember these?"

  Sweet Hecate. Holly remembered everything.

  A wave of heat seared through her, followed instantly by cold sweat. Holly scrambled out of Ashe's room and down the hall to the bathroom. Barely making it, she threw up in of the old pedestal sink. She vomited over and over until her ribs ached with it and nothing came up but scalding bile.

  Last time Ashe had opened the box, Holly's soul was innocent. She had known no terrors. Now she saw it all with adult eyes. After a long moment she washed out her mouth, her skin taut with drying perspiration. Outside the open window, a robin chirruped in the apple tree.

  Ashe stood in the doorway. "Are you okay?" Her face held a mix of concern, both for her sister and for the disruption of her plans. "You got the flu?"

  Holly dried her face with a towel that smelled like kids' toothpaste. "You're making a terrible mistake."

  Ashe's eyebrows drew together. "You're afraid. What for? We do this stuff all the time."

  "I know what's going to happen."

  Ashe fixed Holly with dizzying peridot eyes, their depths full of youth's desire for freedom and rebellion. As a girl Holly had adored her. Ashe was older, sophisticated, wise in the ways of the adult world.

  "You're going to help me make that car trouble happen," she said. "The spell takes two. I need you. I'll be in your debt."

  Holly met her fiery gaze for a long, difficult moment. "Damn you. I'm not going to let you seduce me for five bucks. Not last time. Not this time."

  "What are you talking about?" Her lip curled in contempt and just a twinge of fear.

  Holly flung herself out of the bathroom and stormed back down the hall. In Ashe's room the shoe box sat on the floor, open on the edge of the ritual cloth. It was filled with plastic animals, junk jewelry, and toy cars. Kid stuff. Ashe had taken the box from Holly's closet.

  Ashe came up behind Holly. Just as Ashe had years before, she pulled out a miniature blue sedan, perfect in every die cast detail. It looked just like their parents' car. "What's going to happen? What do you see?" Ashe asked, her manner now more that of an equal than a big sister.

  Holly turned her eyes from the blue toy car, the sight of it filling her with fresh nausea. "You're going to perform the ritual, but I'm going to help, even though you offer me five dollars. You'll go out with Glen and see the concert."

  "So what's bad about that?" She turned the car over in her hand.

  Holly's answer was cold and perfectly level. It was that or hysteria. "You're doing two-person magic by yourself. The spell won't go as expected. The car will go off the road by the golf course and over the railing. Mom and Dad will burn to death on the beach, just feet from the ocean."

  Ashe said nothing, but twin tears slid with slow delicacy over her cheeks. "So I killed them."

  "If I had helped, maybe it would have worked right. Maybe they would have lived."

  Ashe looked at the car with the same horror Holly felt, and set it gingerly in the white box. Finally she said what Holly had needed her to say all these years: "It was my ritual. My magic. You were wiser, even though you were just a kid. It wasn't your fault."

  Holly thought of what misery lay in Ashe's future, and in her own, and began to quake with tears. She had never wanted to face this. S
he felt so angry, and hurt, and guilty.

  And there was the answer to so much. She had buried both the memory and the larger part of her magic from view, punishing herself with pain whenever she tried to use it.

  "Stop hurting yourself. It was up to me to look out for you, not the other way around." Ashe put her hands on Holly's shoulders, one of her favorite gestures. Ashe suddenly looked small and very young, not at all the omnipotent goddess Holly's child-self had perceived. Tears washed over her huge green eyes.

  Holly put a hand over hers, feeling warmth toward her sister for the first time since she was a child. "How can I change the past?"

  Ashe shook her head. "You can't, Holly. You just have to go on and fight. Forgive yourself for refusing to help me do something that was wrong."

  Holly squeezed her sister's fingers. "What about you?"

  "Me?" That intense gaze searched Holly's face. "I'm only your memory. The real Ashe has to find her own way here."

  Holly wanted to embrace her, but the world went dark.

  Her first thought was that she had fainted, but then she saw a field of stars on all sides. Ashe, or Holly's memory of her, was gone.

  Chapter 26

  Holly awoke and leaped out of bed in one ungainly maneuver. She staggered, grabbed her robe, and looked around. Alessandro was gone, the sheets on the bed a tangled mass.

  Where is he? Violent need smashed through her until her conscious mind overrode the venom. No, no, calm, calm, calm.

  She shivered as she put on the robe, cool air caressing her sweat-dampened skin. Switching on the bedside lamp, she listened. Splashing came from the bathroom down the hall, the sound of the shower. Alessandro was up, but he hadn't left.

  He wouldn't do that. Her nerves jittered. Would he?

  Holly glanced at the bedside clock. It was eight at night. I slept through the day, just like a vampire. She was sore, aching, hungry, and bewildered. It felt as though Alessandro were a million miles away. She needed him by her side.

  That's ridiculous. He's right down the hall. She sat down on the edge of the bed, fumbling on the floor for her slippers. She found one of his socks instead. Goddess, what a night.

  A dozen thoughts clamored for attention, some making her body heat, others freezing her with misgivings. One stood out, different from the rest. The vision of Ashe was still with her, lost memories in place. Unblocked power rushed like fresh air through her system. Mixed with power, sex—especially sex like she'd just had—possessed magic of its own. That last bout of lovemaking had opened a door inside her, and the space and freedom of her magic suddenly belonged to her once more.

  Experimentally she flicked all the candles in the room alight, then extinguished them. On. Off. On. Off. She could do that before, but now it came easily, like breathing. This is what it felt like when I was little. Before all that happened. Back when I wasn't afraid.

  So much had been lost because of that single spell. Holly had mourned her parents, grieved for them for years, but their deaths had been only part of the tragedy. She'd lost Ashe, too.

  And she'd grown afraid of her own power. If a spell could kill her parents, what other tragedies could magic cause? She was afraid of herself, and felt guilty because she hadn't known what to do to stop Ashe. With a child's sense of absolute justice, she had crippled her power to keep herself and everyone around her safe. She had even erased the memory of the spell and the months surrounding it.

  That tragedy was finally drawing to a close. Holly touched her neck, shivering at the brush of her fingertips on Alessandro's bite. Just in time to make room for my future as a venom slave.

  I can't live like this. Half of magic depended on the practitioner's clarity of will. She couldn't regain her memories and her magic just to lose them again, have to fight the mark, grab what I can of my life and hold on. Holly went downstairs to take a shower. Routine, her routine, untouched by another's will, was suddenly vital.

  When she returned to the bedroom Alessandro was there, half-dressed. The bed lay rumpled and inviting behind him. Holly stopped in the doorway, her arms hugging her robe around her. The sight of him spiked her to the floor.

  Need, desire, attraction, belonging. They were all good emotions—but not in this insane intensity. All Holly wanted to do was to pick up where they'd left off the night before, naked and writhing. A tiny whimper escaped her as she forced herself to stay put. I want him. I want him, Iwanthim.

  He stopped what he was doing, his shirt in one hand. He studied her, amber eyes filled with concern. "How are you feeling?"

  How can he even ask? Holly looked at the floor, not sure where to start. "If you don't cover up, I won't speak for my self-control."

  There was a soft rustle of silk. When she looked up he had the shirt on but the buttons were undone, leaving a stripe of chest exposed. Not helpful She rubbed a hand over her face. "You're really good, you know. Hall of Sex Fame material. Whatever you did unblocked my magic."

  His brows drew together. "I don't understand."

  She told him about the dream.

  "So that means your magic won't be painful anymore?" he asked.

  "An interesting trade-off, isn't it?"

  He drew closer, his fingers brushing the place on her neck where he had marked her. She flinched, more from his touch than from the wound. It was electric. Power still coursed between them, a continuous circuit pulling them together.

  "Did I cause you pain?" he murmured, kissing her lips lightly. The lamplight turned his hair a silvery gold, bright against the dark fabric of his shirt.

  "Some. The first time, yes. Fangs versus flesh." She closed the few inches between them, resting her hand against the bare skin of his chest. He was warm, full of her life. Desire dampened her sex. "Am I always going to want you so much?"

  "Yes," he said, one hand stroking her hair. "I'm sorry." He said it with ineffable melancholy.

  Holly gave an uncomfortable laugh. She couldn't stop stroking his smooth, strong muscles. Petting him. Reveling in his presence. "Isn't having a love slave supposed to be a good thing?"

  The bedroom light was dim, the corners of the room in shadow. Holly felt as though her whole world were in that circle of lamplight, what fell outside it lost in the realms of myth. Alessandro pulled Holly to him, resting her head on his shoulder. It felt wonderful. Safe. Connected. Cherished.

  His voice was deep, resonating in his chest. "A large part of me rejoices at binding you to me, but there is a cost. You're dear to me. I love you. I don't want to hurt you, ever, and I'm afraid I have."

  Now that he had said the words, Holly could feel his control. It was part of that circuit, that binding of their energies that tied them together. The effect was an ultimate veto on her every thought or action. She walked and talked only because he let her. He hadn't compelled her yet, but that could change in a blink.

  "Give me back my will."

  "I would if I could. I don't know how."

  Suddenly what had happened was cold and real. With the mark came an imperative to touch him. To pleasure him. To feed him. To ultimately be consumed by him until there was nothing left. This is how vampires survive.

  A solemn feeling came over her, stilling every function of her body. She couldn't quite encompass the realization of what had happened. I can't do this. I can't be this way.

  "I did it to save you."

  Her gaze dragged up to Alessandro's face. "You're a predator."

  "Maybe, but I lost something, too. You could have Chosen me. If I'd won your heart, you could have freed me from the blood hunger. I had hoped"—he said the word strangely, as if it were unfamiliar—"that we had a different future. One my curse couldn't touch."

  His words wrenched her heart. "You never told me any of this."

  He blinked, obviously fighting his own wash of emotion. "How could I? Not without blackmailing you. Not without admitting it to myself. Not without risking that you didn't love me, even when I adored you."

  Holly's mouth was parched. She
hurt for him. She hurt for herself. "I did love you."

  "But not anymore." The words were barely there. "It doesn't matter; the Chosen is only a legend."

  "I can't tell what's real anymore." Her eyes stung, but she was past tears. A heavy weight hung in her chest, dragging on her every breath. Through the circuit of their energy she knew Alessandro felt it, too.

  They wanted to be together, but not like this.

  Like an alien invader, the phone rang. It took a moment for Holly to register what the sound meant. At the same time Alessandro's cell phone pinged Beethoven's Fifth. They released each other, at once reluctant and relieved. They stood, holding hands, not quite ready to break the contact of skin to skin.

  "I'll get the one in the office," Holly said.

  "No, don't go," he said, the casual phrase of someone reluctant to release his lover.

  And then it happened. The sound of the phones drifted away, meaningless. Holly snuggled back onto his chest, only dimly remembering there was something she had meant to do.

  Alessandro's eyes grew wide. Holly saw the horror, but didn't understand it at first.

  "What?" she asked.

  His face twisted with self-loathing. "You were going to answer the phone. Go do it." His voice charred her with its bitter regret.

  Sweet Hecate. She felt herself turn, helpless as a doll. Helpless as Mac being tossed into the garden. Holly stumbled to the den, disbelief numbing her limbs.

  Kibs was sitting on the desk, staring at the phone. With a wave of guilt she wondered when she'd last filled his food bowl. He butted her hand as she picked up the receiver.

  "Hey, kid," said Grandma. "I've got some info for you."

  "Good. I could use answers about now." Holly sank down on the desk chair, sick with shock. What the hell just happened there? Was that a demonstration of his vampire power? It was far, far stronger than she would have guessed. I am in such trouble.