Chilling Cadence

Sixteen

Lorelei was in the foulest of moods when they left the church. Her jaw was clenched and her face was twisted up as if she had smelled something sour. Cadence and Chau glanced at each other before they trailed behind the Vampire.

Cadence would have just assumed her bad mood was because they were still on consecrated ground, but even when the church was further behind them, her face still didn’t relax. The cold perfection of her face was made even colder by the look of simmering fury in her eyes.

Cadence couldn’t even enjoy the relief she felt at not being near the church anymore. She had been relieved to be away from the church because of the dizzying effects sacred ground had on her and because she was leaving behind the cold gaze of her mother. She still wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel for the woman. She didn’t want to see Jocelyn, but she had felt almost panicked when Lorelei had towered over her. The room had blocked out magic and Cadence was thankful for it. If there had been magic, she might have called on a word of power to shock Lorelei.

And, as pissed as Lorelei was at that time, she might have been signing her own death warrant if she did such a thing.

Lorelei led them into Bibliophile, whose sign had already been flipped to CLOSED. Ruth must have known they would be coming.

Cadence’s guess was proven correct when they entered the bookstore and Ruth was waiting alone at the counter. Her gaze was somber and when she met Lorelei’s gaze, she nodded once.

“Chau, would you be a dear and take this to your mother?” She held out a single manila folder, smiling warmly. “Take it to her quickly and bring back her response. It’s a pressing matter.”

“Oh, okay.” Chau took the folder, looking between the three of them suspiciously, before sighing and leaving the store.

“Have you seen anything out of the ordinary?” Lorelei asked as soon as Chau had left the store. She spoke so quickly, Cadence almost didn’t catch what she’d said.

“Corvina and Seth haven’t left Romania,” Ruth murmured.

Lorelei let out a relieved breath.

“But…”

Her eyes snapped back to Ruth, almost panicked. “But?”

“They sent someone else in their place. Envoys. They’ve already left. They should get here in the early hours of November first.”

“Envoys.” Lorelei spat the word as if it were a curse. “Of course they would send someone to scope out Glasskeep. They’ve wanted this place to themselves for centuries.”

“Excuse me.” Cadence waved a hand, trying to catch their attention. When she succeeded she asked, “Who the hell are Corvina and Seth?”

Ruth glanced over at Lorelei who had straightened up. Her hands had been splayed on the countertop and her head had been bowed, her black hair covering her face. Now, she looked at Cadence head-on, her gaze speculative suddenly.

“They’re our parents. Eleanor’s and mine.”

The skin on Cadence’s arms prickled and her heartbeat was a little quicker than before. Lorelei’s head tilted to one side, listening and watching Cadence’s reaction. She could see a little amusement there that hadn’t been before, and Cadence truly realized that Lorelei really seemed to like it when people were afraid of her. It really added to the creep factor.

“Vampires are supposed to be made, not born.”

Of course, Grimm had already told her Lorelei had been born through conventional means, but Lorelei didn’t know that. Cadence had a feeling that Lorelei wouldn’t be fond of Grimm giving Cadence the rundown of her past and as agitated as she was, Cadence didn’t want to step on her toes and anger her further. She needed Lorelei. When Hansel and Gretel found her, she would need her protection. Pissing her off would be counterintuitive.

“That’s how it’s supposed to be, yes.” Lorelei sighed, leaning back against the counter, her hands crossed over her chest. “My mother and father were put together to merge their covens. Such things—marriage for the personal gain of all parties involved—are common things for Vampires. My mother, a long time ago, did something that pleased a Witch who was something of a sage when it came to fertility spells. She was able to gift my mother with the power to get pregnant twice. First me, then Eleanor.”

Cadence was stunned. She had often heard stories of magic doing amazing, world-bending things. Hell, she was capable of quite a few of those world bending things herself. But she had no idea it was possible to use magic to aid a Vampire in pregnancy. Vampires experienced no s****l desire, and even if there was s****l desire, they would be unable to act on it; their bodies were dead, s*x would be uncomfortable for them.

Cadence focused on the matter at hand. She would head over to Ayami’s later on and purchase some books about fertility magic and study it more to come to her own conclusions. Right now, there were more pressing issues.

“You and your parents don’t get along.”

Lorelei’s face darkened. “You could say that. Put it this way, however cruel and callous you assume Vampires to be, my parents are crueler and more callous still.”

Cadence sucked in a deep breath, her mind sifting through all of the information.

“My parents can’t just leave Romania unless it’s for things of the utmost importance. The coven would never let them go for something so silly as feeling a little magical energy. That’s why they’re sending envoys in their stead. Once the envoys confirm that Glasskeep is as powerful as my parents think it is, they’ll come and try to take over.”

Cadence’s lips pursed as she thought about that. If Lorelei was so comfortable saying her parents were callous and cruel, Cadence couldn’t help but believe her. Either way, she didn’t want them anywhere around her. She had enough to deal with in the danger department with Hansel and Gretel, she didn’t want to add two Vampires cruel and callous enough for their own daughter to speak of them with disdain to the mix.

“So…” Cadence looked from Lorelei to Ruth and back again. “What are we supposed to do?”

Ruth’s expression was unfocused. Not so much unfocused, Cadence realized, as it was focused on something far away that only she could see. Lorelei tapped her fingernail against the counter, the sound too frantic to be rhythmic. It only made Cadence more anxious, if she was being honest.

“I’m not sure,” Ruth said finally. “I can’t see what the best course of action is. Everything’s blurry for some reason.”

“Blurry?” Cadence’s head tilted to one side, her eyes furrowed.

“It makes sense,” Ruth said. “The path we are on now is not one that is destined and therefore, everything can change at any given moment. Of course it’s blurry.”

At the mention of destined paths, Cadence’s mind unwittingly drifted to her own destined end. Although she couldn’t read into futures herself—at the most, she could use water or glass to scry into blurry, indistinct paths—she had enough of an understanding of futures from Diviners her Grandmother had called on to teach her when she was young.

Ordinary people didn’t have destinies. Their lives were decided by themselves and themselves alone. Of course, for some people, life might be harder than it was for others, but those struggles were not destiny. They were completely at random; those struggles were completely left up to circumstances rather than something chose by the gods. But there were other people whose entire lives were headed to one specific path, and no matter how they fought and struggled, their lives would turn out the same no matter what.

According to all the Diviners who had seen her, Cadence was one of those unfortunate people. She was not ordinary, and therefore, she could not decide her own fate. Everything she was doing to avoid that fate—abstaining from magic, fleeing her home, aligning herself with a Vampire—was all in vain.

It was futile. She knew it was.

But even so, how could she not try to fight it? How could she just accept a future where she was married to the Lord of Hel.

“That’s not our only problem, though,” Ruth continued.

Cadence’s thoughts immediately scattered, and she was grateful for it. If it wasn’t strange to do so, she would have kissed the old woman and waltzed around the shop with her.

Lorelei had turned her attention back to Ruth, her eyes narrowing to slits. Cadence pitied whoever was causing more trouble in Glasskeep. Especially now when Lorelei was in such a terrible mood.

Ruth opened her mouth to explain what she had seen right as the bell on top of the door chimed and Jaxon Cavanaugh came crashing in.

“Gran,” he called, his voice panicked.

Ruth sighed as Jaxon made his way to the counter. The look on Jaxon’s face reminded her of herself when she had arrived in Glasskeep just a few days ago; it was the look of someone who was running from something. To be more specific, it was the look of someone who had just encountered the thing they were running from.

“They’ve already made their move.” Ruth sighed a second time, looking over at Lorelei. “They came earlier than expected.”

Lorelei’s attention moved to Jaxon, whose chest was heaving and whose eyes had not lost their unbridled panic. But Lorelei seemed calmer with this, Cadence noticed, than she had been with the topic of her parents. She had seemed almost…afraid of them.

“Tell me what happened.”

That one demand from Lorelei opened a floodgate from Jaxon’s mouth. “I was helping Odell fix a car that had come in. We decided to work on it together to get it done quicker. They came in out of nowhere.” He looked over at his grandmother, his face anguished. “They’re asking for what we took when we left.”

Ruth nodded, her face grave. “I know.”

“Wait.” Cadence held up a hand. Jaxon looked over at her, blinking in surprise like he had just noticed her standing there. “Who exactly is ‘they’?” She found she was quite annoyed to have to ask that question for the second time tonight.

Jaxon’s eyes went to his grandmother who was looking at Lorelei.

“Tell her,” the Vampire said. “We may need her to counteract whatever they’re planning.”

Ruth gave a single nod, her face troubled. “The quick answer is that ‘they’ are a group of racists looking to destroy anything non-white.”

Cadence was surprised to hear that. Although, she knew she should have been quite so surprised. She had grown up in the forever moving throngs of New York, and although racism wasn’t as prevalent as it was in a small town in the middle of nowhere, she had encountered her fair share of micro-aggressions disguised as kindness. She was a black woman, after all, and no matter where she went in the world, micro-aggressive comments and racism was something that would follow her all her life.

But, even knowing racist groups existed, she had never had any encounters with them before. When she heard things of those groups coming together, it was always on the news and she would hear them happening in other places: Virginia or Arkansas, Tennessee or Georgia. It had never been so close to her before. And if racists did show up, a little curse—one using the smallest amount of magic; a spell so minor, even if it took a piece of her soul force, enough meditation could help her regain it—and those racists would be taken care of.

She didn’t like the idea of racists being in her own backyard, so to speak.

“And the long story?”

Ruth looked a little uncomfortable suddenly and wholly ashamed. “The long story,” she said, “is that they are our family. Jaxon’s and mine.”

“They’re not our family,” Jaxon cut in suddenly, his voice fierce. When Cadence looked over at him, the fierceness in his voice was in his face, too.

Ruth looked over at him kindly. “You know what I mean. They are our relatives. We are tied to those racists by blood, whether we like it or not.”

When Jaxon was quiet, she went on, “My great great grandfather was a member of the confederate army. He thought the Africans brought to America should remain slaves. The economy was booming with all the free labor and what was more, he didn’t see them as people. He saw them as lesser than. He taught it to his son, his son taught it to my grandfather, my grandfather taught it to his children, and my mother taught me those ways, too.

“For a long time, I believed in the things my mother said. I believed that white people were superior. That they were different than us.” A smile spread across Ruth’s face suddenly. “In the end, it was a friend who convinced me my way of thinking was wrong. Her parents had been brought to this country from Nigeria. She was never afraid to speak her mind, she didn’t bite her tongue, no matter who had wronged her.”

Ruth shook her head and closed her eyes, seeming to center herself. “It was twenty-five years ago when she and I met. At the time, Jaxon’s mother was carrying him. It was because of her that I realized how warped my ways were, how warped my family’s teachings had been. Those ways of hatred and bigotry had lived inside of me for forty-five years at that point.” She blew out a sigh. “It’s sad to think, I was only just realizing how wrong my ways were.

“When Jax was born, they began trying to instill those toxic beliefs into him. I didn’t want my grandson to live the life I had lived; one based on completely bigoted beliefs. My friend and I would teach Jax a different way behind their backs.” She smiled at her grandson tenderly. “I was so happy to watch the young man he grew up to be. He thought for himself, unlike me. When I was his age, I was brainwashed. I realize that now. But Jax was different.”

Even if Cadence wasn’t able to sense auras, she would have felt the heaviness in the room. The density of it pressed down on her chest as she watched Ruth gather her thoughts. Jaxon’s gaze was on the floor, his hands clenched into fists.

“Seven years ago, on Jax’s eighteenth birthday, his father decided his son needed to show he had become a man, and the best way to do that was to place a bomb inside of a black church and…”

Cadence sucked in a breath. Ruth hadn’t finished her sentence and she didn’t need to. Cadence got the picture well enough.

“Jax came to me, horrified. He didn’t want to do it, he had told his father as much but Rick wasn’t listening. He was forcing Jax to attend, to watch the church go up in flames. Rick, a long time ago, got his hands on a bunch of illegal weapons. Thousands of grenades, hundreds of guns, explosives. It’s an armory stash.

“The night before he planned to blow up the church, Jax, Diane, and I got together, broke into the warehouse where he kept all the weapons, and loaded them onto a huge truck. Diane went back home, and Jax and I came to Glasskeep. Lorelei offered her protection to us in exchange for the use of my gifts. And we’ve lived here peacefully ever since.”

The breath Cadence sucked in whistled through her teeth. “And your friend.”

Ruth smiled sadly. “She died of pancreatic cancer last year. I wanted to see her one last time, but she told me not to come. Our relatives were still looking for me and Jax after we stole their weapon stash.”

“I…understand now,” Cadence said.

“It doesn’t make sense how they were able to find you,” Lorelei murmured, more to herself, it seemed, than to anyone in the room. “I had a passing Witch put a spell on you that made it impossible for those with blood ties to find the two of you.”

“You mean the Extermination of Blood Ties, right?”

“You know it?”

Cadence nodded, thinking. “It’s not a spell that’s common among Witches. People usually don’t want to escape from relatives, but my Grandmother used it once so I was familiar with it. The only way to get around that spell is if someone who knows the person who received the spell’s protection tells the relative where that person is. After that, if the relative can find the person, the spell is broken.”

Lorelei’s eyes narrowed. “The Witch didn’t tell me that.”

“Of course she didn’t. She was a passing Witch. She probably did it in exchange for something else. She doesn’t feel like she owes you anything. She just did it and left.”

“So, now that they’ve found Jaxon, they can find both of us.”

“Not exactly.” Cadence rocked back and forth, trying to decide how to explain. “They haven’t found you yet, so you’re still under the spell’s protection. But since they’ve found Jaxon, the spell is broken for him.”

Ruth’s eyes went over to her grandson anxiously.

“Where are they now?” Lorelei wanted to know, tilting her head to one side. “Are they still in Glasskeep?”

“I… I don’t—”

Lorelei cut Jaxon off by placing her finger to her lips, her eyes far away as she listened. She looked a lot like a crow with her head tilted to the side like that. Crows were often associated with death, after all. Cadence couldn’t help but think being a crow suited her well. Either that or a vulture.

Lorelei smiled. “Our friends are still here.” She looked at Cadence. “You have something in mind, don’t you?”

Cadence spoke a word of power and listened. She could hear the sound of their footsteps echoing on the empty streets, the normally quiet night filled with sounds of loud, rambunctious laughter that was getting louder with each passing second.

Cadence couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face. She typically didn’t use magic, but using it on racists was something she could get behind.

“I can think of something,” she said.