“I understand totally,” Loki said. “A man who can cross the ocean with his lover on his back is no ordinary man. So tell me about that spell.”
“Looking like my father meant that I’d inherit the features he‘d been described as having when he escaped from Transylvania to meet her in Styria. Remember the descriptions he was famous for, the ravens and everything black Night had sent after him?”
Loki nodded.
“The ravens and panthers he’d fed upon were black, the trails of blood were red, and the snow he struggled through was white,” she elaborated. “In my mother’s attempt to honor my father’s courage, she cast a spell and wished that it would grant her a daughter with lips red as the blood of the ravens he fed on, skin as white as the snow he walked on, and hair as black as the long nights she had to wait through for him to return to her.”
“That explains it,” Loki said, looking at her tenderly. He thought he wouldn’t have liked her if she’d look any different.
“Now, prepare yourself for a horrifying sequence of events. What you’re going to witness now is of such importance I can’t describe it.”
Loki heard a rumble outside the room. He thought it was the sound of horses, which was illogical.
“Are you ready for the next ride?” Snow White walked to the closed door and gripped the doorknob.
“No Wind of Change this time?” Loki followed her as she opened the door.
“No,” she said, and opened the door, snowflakes entering the room. This time, the door didn’t lead to a hallway, but to a cold forest where snow was falling late at night.
“I wish I had that kind of shortcut from my Cadillac’s door to the bathroom,” Loki said, stepping out into the Black Forest.
The night outside was black, white, and blue, with golden glittering stars up in the sky. There were red glinting eyes flickering in the dark beyond the thick trees. Loki saw a calash, pulled by two unicorns, racing through the night. It was driven by Angel, whipping at the unicorns and demanding speed.
Loki and Snow White stepped outside where the calash was approaching. One of the unicorns tripped on a fallen tree branch and twisted its legs, disrupting the balance. The calash came crashing down on its side. Angel took a flight into the night sky like a loose cannon and landed on his feet in the snow. The man’s strength was unimaginable. One of the unicorns stood up then ran away into the night, fearing the red eyes.
Angel headed back to the calash, calling out for Carmilla. He opened the door and she fell out into his arms as he knelt in the snow.
“That’s how I was born, in the Black Forest,” Snow White explained. “See how beautiful my mother looked although she was about to give birth?”
She was right about Carmilla. Her beauty was ageless. She would easily be the beauty queen of the Ordinary World. No amount of surgeries or health tips could have produced such a natural beauty—Loki couldn’t help but think it was enhanced by Angel’s vampire saliva.
Angel begged Carmilla to stay strong. He told her that another calash full of servants should be bright behind them, and that they should wait for it. Carmilla was breathing rapidly. It showed that she was going to bring her daughter into the world, no matter what, even if the price was her life.
The red eyes in the dark got bigger and closer, accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing and growling. A slant of moonlight exposed their forms as they approached. They were black panthers, probably sent by Night Sorrow.
The panthers approached Angel and Carmilla, showing their wickedly sharp teeth with saliva drooling from their mouths. Angel, suddenly aware that the servant’s calash was doomed, stared back at the panthers with slit eyes, holding Carmilla in his arms while on his knees.
“The panthers didn’t scare Angel,” Snow White said. “He knew they were sent by his father, and he had killed them before and was going to kill them again. He was only worried for my mother’s safety.”
Loki saw Angel growling in a low drone, disturbing the steady flow of snowflakes hanging in the air. Then he snarled back at them in a way that scared Loki. The darkness that Angel had inherited from his ancestors surfaced, but he used it to protect his family—Loki remembered when Charmwill had told him about the darkness he’d possessed inside him, too.
Angel was fighting fire with fire, and he’d become so strong that he was able to kill many of them.
“I need your father to teach me how to be badass,” Loki said.
Snow White turned and looked at him when he said that. It was an undecipherable look, again, as if she wanted to tell him something but couldn’t.
Why is she looking at me like that? Do I have something in common with her father?