A Spell of Death

CHAPTER FOUR-3

A SCREAM ECHOED IN her ears and lightning flashed across her eyelids. She tried to open them to find the source, but her leaden lids refused to lift, leaving her trapped in darkness. She had no qualms with the darkness; it was the nothingness she hated. And she needed the souls that thrived in sunlight to feed her power. As chaotic visions played in her mind, she struggled to remember the time before now, but it was lost in searing red pain and impenetrable gloom. She had a vague memory of a tuneless melody and a hushed conversation, followed by words whispered in a warm, rich voice to an empty room. But she hadn't been able to pick out the sense of them, and she'd soon fallen asleep, or passed out. The effect was the same: frustrating lapses of memory and annoying gaps in her knowledge of events swirling around her.

But even though she still couldn't see, she knew she was being watched. The shape of the man formed a silhouette in her mind's eye. Is he guarding or surveilling? she wondered as she crept her senses outward. She lay on a bed too lumpy, her head on a pillow too flat. A heavy blanket weighed down her enervated limbs. She struggled to breathe the stale air, feeling like she was drowning, though her body barely moved. What little air she drew in was laced with tantalizingly familiar odours, but only one stood out.

Blood. Her sense of death told her this was a man with blood on his hands. I can use that, she thought with a smile, but her frozen lips refused to move. What did you do, Angelos? A scream welled up in her chest, but it died into a silent snarl, and the other being — the soft and seductive consciousness that still lurked at the edges of her senses — quelled and scurried back into the abyss.

Tamping down her frustration, she refocused on her watcher. The man spoke soft words and she swore her ears tweaked in response, even though she couldn't make any part of this body move as she commanded. The rhythm and cadence of his voice, pitched slightly lower than normal, told her he was reading her a story. But the words were foreign, gibberish. Every once in a while, the beat slowed, and his head nodded, but he would jerk awake in that second before true sleep. Then he would return to watching her again, resuming the litany he'd kept up with barely a pause, despite her lack of response. He'd been there since that other woman had left. The woman who left her warm with love and hot with anger in equal measure. The vampire. Everything about the woman — the voice, the scent, the warmth of her touch — was like a memory just out of reach. In her mind, she saw flashes of colour, black hair, red lips. When she grasped at the image, she felt her finger twitch. She honed all her focus on that digit, infusing it with all her will. Move. Any movement was a step out of this prison of darkness.

Nothing. If she could scream, she would have. Then the man paused, and she strained her ears, trying to learn why, not wanting to go back to the cage of silence. Something clinked against something else, then the man started speaking again. The ebb and flow of his voice as he read his story was like a lullaby, threatening to drag her into sleep again. Into that impenetrable darkness. She breathed deeply, fighting the lethargy, and sighed out the sleep from behind her eyes. The eyes that refused to obey, that wouldn't open to look upon this world.

She coaxed the finger to twitch, to draw him closer, but the body still refused to comply, and he stayed where he was. Unable to move, unable to see, she reached out again with her other senses. Underneath the staleness and blood, there was a faint aroma of rosemary and lavender, with an undertone of vanilla. The latter she identified as coming from the man beside her. His breathing was deep and slow, and heat radiated from him, pulsing with his heartbeat...a beat that was slightly off. The chair he sat in creaked every now and then as he shifted. Beyond that were trills and beeps and bangs of a chaotic world outside the darkness that shrouded her.

She tried to speak, her frustration so strong her thumb almost moved as she visualized clenching her hands into fists, but the sound came out as a rasping of breath. But that breath tore at her ragged throat.

The man's words slowed, stuttered and then stopped. And then silence fell. She hated the silence, but it gave her a question to hold on to: why had he gone quiet. Even out beyond the walls was quiet. Although she couldn't see, she knew the sun had set and night blanketed the city. Her night.

She was brought back by a clapping sound that almost caused her to jump...if she were able to move. The book snapping shut. Loose wood creaked against loose wood and she sensed a shift in the air as the man stood up.

A shuffle of fabric over carpet, then she sensed his presence, a silhouette of grey against the darkness in her mind's eye. He leaned over her. A hand, warm and dry, came to rest on her forehead. It stroked a strand of hair away.

"She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes; / Thus mellowed to that tender light / Which heaven to gaudy day denies."

Poetry, she realized. How quaint.

The man paused in his recital. "I can never remember the rest." Then a thumb trailed down her cheek. "I wish you'd wake up. Mina's sick with worry." Her stomach clenched as the man took a step back, leaving a void in the warmth. The light filtering through her eyelids became painfully bright with his shadow gone. She squeezed those eyelids tight against the burning light, willing him to come back, and swore her finger twitched again.

Again, she focused her will on opening one eyelid at a time, but neither of them listened to her. Instead they were even heavier, dragging her back again into the dark abyss of unconsciousness.

No, not again. She managed to finish the thought before the darkness claimed her once more.