Always the Vampire

Saber disconnected on a chuckle.

I snapped my cell closed, set it on the table, and sighed. I would have loved to take a nap, but once I’m up, I’m up for eighteen hours. Okay, with occasional exceptions. Most of those involving Saber. Maybe this would be one of those good lovin’ nights when he’d leave me boneless and sleepy.

Meantime, might as well be productive. I left the amulet on the table, grabbed my luggage, and unloaded the dirty clothes right into the washer. With the machine filling, I headed to the bedroom with the near-empty suitcase but stopped short in the doorway.

Snowball, her back arched, her tail fluffed to three times its normal volume, stood statue still at the closed closet doors. She didn’t so much as flick an ear at my entrance. What the heck?

Then I heard an echo of Pandora’s warning. She will sense the unseen and alert you to presences.

Oh, damn.

A thump drew my attention back to Snowball, who emitted a low, unholy growl. She swiped one paw then the other at the bottom of the door.

In a horror movie, the idiot heroine would march to the door and ease it open. This was no movie, and I was sure no heroine. But Snowball had cornered something, and I needed to know what. Pronto.

I opened my senses. Stared at the white wood door. Imagined it slowly, ever so slowly, becoming opaque glass. It did, and a shadow appeared.

Snowball went bonkers, launching herself at the shadow. Hissing and spitting and yowling as if she were in a cat fight to the death.

I blocked the noise and opened more. I visualized the opaque glass growing window clear. Willed the shadow to be identifiable.

I knew it wouldn’t be Starrack or the Void. I also knew that was no living being behind the door. It felt too old. Too dead. Too fragile and frightened.

Of a kitten.

The vision sharpened with an audible snap, and I gasped to see a tiny woman wearing an eighteenth-century court dress. The tiny human woman who had been King Normand’s mistreated mistress and main meal deal—and my personal maid. The tiny woman who had helped bind me in that cursed coffin and hours later had been slaughtered by the townspeople.

She’d been the closest thing I’d had to a friend in King Normand’s court.

“Isabella?” I said on a wave of relief.

She gave me a hesitant nod.

“What are you doing here?”

She pointed at the still-crazed Snowball.

“You’re frightened of the cat?” Well, of course she was. Isabella had jumped at her own shadow in the old days, and not without reason.

“I’ll take care of her. Snow,” I crooned, crossing to the kitten. “It’s okay. Calm down now. This is a friend.”

Snowball flicked an ear at my approach but stayed hunched by the door. When I spoke singsong assurances to her, gently petted her, she only growled louder. I glanced at Isabella. Was Snowball telling me the ghost was an enemy in a friend’s guise? My psychic senses said no. So maybe the cat just didn’t like spirits in her territory. Whatever her issue, mine was to talk to Isabella.

I scooped Snow up, only to have her squirm and dig her hind claws into my ribs. Before she could scratch her way up my chest or twist out of my grasp, I shut her in the bathroom.

When I turned back, I half expected Isabella to be out of the closet. She wasn’t, and the door still looked like glass. Did I need to let her out?

Not without a further question.

“Isabella, are you alone?”

Her brown eyes narrowed as she seemed to look past the door and into the distant yard. “I am alone for now.”

“Do you want to come out?”

She shook her head and shrank away.

“Okay, but why are you here?”

“There is little time, but I have come to warn you,” she whispered.

Oh, great. Another warning. Like I didn’t have enough on my plate. Still, I nodded.

“Go on.”

“Something is awakening the king and his court. Something evil. Something with a darker soul than even Marco.”

My breath hitched. Finding a darker soul than Marco’s would be a trick. He was the psychopath who’d courted me when he was human. When I rejected him, he voluntarily joined the vampires, rose to become Normand’s right-hand vamp, and then captured me so I could be Turned. Marco had counted on pairing up with me, but Normand wasn’t a vampire to be manipulated. He’d nixed Marco’s plan.

Did Isabella know Marco was dead?

Didn’t matter. The evil she spoke of had to be Starrack and the Void, but awakening the ghosts of vampires?

“What does the evil want with the king and his cronies?”

Isabella’s nearly solid shoulders lifted in a shrug. “The evil creates chaos. Fear. Vampires excel at both. This is all I know.”

“All right, but I’ve never felt their spirits on this property. Or yours, either, Isabella. Not even when I was still buried under the ruins.”

“After the massacre and fire, the vampires were dismembered and their pieces scattered. We humans, our remains were thrown into the river.”