His remains were as yawn-inducing as he’d once been—just a greasy pile that looked like something Smokey the Bear would want you to kick sand over if you were on a camping trip, except for the misshapen silver blob capping the lead bullet in the middle of the ashes. The melted blob was attached to the one of the silver chains Tash and Kat and I had torn off our necks earlier this evening. They’d obviously ended up under the sofa when I’d grabbed the Sheraton table, and one of them had tangled around the barrel of Popsie’s revolver.
I was looking at a homemade silver bullet, I realized slowly, and somewhere under the sofa were the materials for two more. If Lance and Todd hadn’t sunk their fangs into my sisters’ necks yet, I might still save them.
Even as the wild hope ran through me, I dropped to my knees and began feeling under the sofa. I snagged one chain, scrabbled farther under the sofa to snag the other and leapt to my feet. The next moment I was racing to the kitchen, dropping the first chain and cross down the barrel of Popsie’s revolver as I ran.
“Nuh-uh.” The scornful tones of Tash came from halfway up the staircase. “Bullets don’t work. Neither does Mace, as I found out. You gotta use one of these, apparently.”
She held up a broken length of wood. From the pineapple carving that topped it, I recognized it as part of one of her canopy bed’s posts but I didn’t waste time with questions.
“Throw it here! I’ll use it to stake Lance—”
“Sorry, sweetie, I already took care of him.” Kat’s drawl sounded a little ragged around the edges and her Alexander McQueen bustier top was destined to join my ruined skirt in the garbage, but she mustered a weak smile as she brandished a broken wooden mixing spoon. “I thought you two might need backup, but it looks like all three of us did good on the vamp-slaying, no?” She made a little moue with her lips. “Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d ever say. I don’t know about you two, but I really need normal right now. Anyone up for a little drink—”
“Foolish!”
The thickly accented rumble came from the doorway. It says volumes for the Crosse triplets’ state of alertness that we simply stared at the figure who had delivered it instead of rushing at him with our weapons. Tash recovered first.
“We deny you entrance to our home’s threshold,” she said swiftly. She frowned. “And that means to our home, too, if you need it spelled out. Like, you can’t come in. You need our permission and we totally withhold it and deny it and—”
“Did you remove holy protections out of vanity? Did you think they were simple baubles?” As our unexpected visitor thundered across Tash’s babbling he stepped forward and entered the house. “I believed those who bore my blood would have more wisdom, but I was wrong. Your foolishness almost brought you death!”
Whoever he was, since he’d been able to enter without our permission, he wasn’t a vamp. He looked to be about Popsie’s age or maybe a little older, and his accent sounded Russian. A homespun cloak was flung over his shoulders and a heavy gold ring glinted on his left hand, but the most striking thing about him were his eyes. They were dark and piercing, and right now they were regarding us with less disapproval than when he’d entered.
“However, your courage and skill saved you, so I pray is still hope for you.” He swept off his cloak and inclined his head in an oddly formal gesture. “Forgive me, I have not properly presented myself. My name is Anton Dzarchertzyn…but if is easier, you may call me Grandfather Darkheart.”
Chapter 3
“And you can call me from hell when you get there, creep!”
“No, Tash! He’s not a vam—” Before I could finish my warning my youngest sister launched her pineapple post in an overhand throw. As I leaped toward the old man, hoping to push him out of the way, I saw the missile slice unerringly through the air at his chest.
Something huge and black blurred across my sight line. I heard a furious growl as the shape propelled itself upward, and then the hell beast was upon me, Tash’s post between its slavering jaws. I fell backward, my attention fully focused on the enormous dog standing over me, his teeth no longer clamped into part of Tash’s canopy bed but bared inches from my throat.
Wolflike golden eyes held mine. A wolflike silver-tipped ruff stood up around a snarling wolfish face and massively muscled wolflike front legs were planted on either side of me.
“Call off your damn wolf.” Kat’s voice was steady, but then, she wasn’t the one in danger of becoming a canine snack. “This gun might not be much use against vamps but I’m pretty sure it could blow White Fang there to kingdom come.”
“Mikhail, release!”
The man who was trying to pass himself off as our dead grandfather gave the command sharply. The animal—I really wished Kat hadn’t used the W-word—let a low growl trickle from its throat. It slowly backed up until it was standing by its master and gave me a final burning glance before bounding out through the open front door into the night.
I got to my feet. I had a sliver in my butt, I’d ruined an outfit and I’d gotten way too up-close and personal with pointed white teeth in the past hour. Add in the fact that my fiancé had made a deal that included him getting turned into a vamp in return for killing me and you’ll understand why my party manners were a little the worse for wear as I turned to our visitor.
Doing a good impersonation of a marine drill instructor minus the flying spittle, I shoved my face close to his and pointed at the door. “Your scam’s not going to work. We happen to know that our Grandfather Darch…Grandfather Dzark…”
“He said we could call him Darkheart,” Tash supplied from the stairs.
I ignored her. “We know our mom’s father died years ago, so whoever you are and whatever you’re after, you screwed up! You’re lucky you happened to catch us in the middle of a situation that puts you near the bottom of our headache list for now, but if you and your highly illegal pet aren’t off this property in three seconds I’m calling the police!”
“And the dogcatcher,” Tash threatened. “Even if you can afford to bail Cujo out of the pound, they’re still going to make you pay for the snip-snip operation they give all strays. So if you don’t want—”
From the darkness outside came a growl. I cut Tash short. “One.” I folded my arms. “Two.” The old man stared steadily back at me and I felt my confidence begin to evaporate. He was obviously some kind of kook, dressed the way he was and with a semi-tame wolf as a sidekick. What if he refused to leave? I glanced sideways at Kat and saw from her frown that she was thinking along the same lines as I was.
The three of us had just whacked our fiancés. Granted, there weren’t any bodies lying around, but there was definite evidence something had happened here tonight. And although Dean’s no-show status at our wedding tomorrow might be chalked up to cold feet and Todd’s and Lance’s absence at the same function as solidarity with his sudden desire to stay a bachelor, eventually an investigation would be launched into their disappearances. Did I really want a report on file stating that the night before the ceremony, the home of the missing men’s future brides had resembled a war zone, with said brides looking suspiciously like the survivors of said zone?
“If we call the police we’ll have to file a complaint and we won’t get to bed for hours, Meg,” Kat said with elaborate casualness. “Since we weren’t taken in by our visitor’s con there’s really no harm done. I say we let him leave—”
“One will be striking talons of eagle!” the old man interrupted harshly. “One will warn of coming danger and third will fly into core of darkness! By blood of all slayers before you, including mother, is vital you believe. Battle has already begun and we have no time to waste!”
He didn’t know it, but he’d blown it. Halfway through his eagle rant I’d been one wide-eyed gasp away from throwing skepticism to the wind, even though I knew there was a possibility he’d been lurking outside the house and had heard Kat when she’d said those very same words. But by bringing our mother into his little scam he’d pushed the envelope too far.
Grammie and Popsie have always done their best to make Mom and Daddy real for us. But Kat and Tash and I have an unspoken agreement to leave the subject of our mother…well, unspoken between us. When the Russian made the mistake of trying to use her to convince us, my immediate reaction was fury.
And if behind the fury I felt an awakening dread, I didn’t bother to examine that, either.
I opened my mouth to tell him where he could shove his eagle, but he spoke first, his glare fading. “I should not blame you,” he said heavily. “You know nothing of duties that have been yours throughout all unlit—”
“‘Throughout all the unlit centuries of night.’” Kat’s face paled. “‘Without my presence the circle is dangerously open. I close it and form the three.’ Oh, God, it’s what I said just before everything went crazy, isn’t it? How could I have blanked something like that out so completely? And how you could you know those words unless—” she swallowed “—unless you really are our grandfather. What happened here tonight was connected in some way to our mother, wasn’t it?”
“Our mother the vampire killer. Yeah, right,” Tash said, her tone dripping sarcasm. “Don’t tell me you believe him, Kat. You’re probably still on edge from…” Her words trailed off. “From vamp-slaying,” she said hollowly. “Omigod…we’re hereditary slayers?”
“We’re hereditary normal American girls, is what we are,” I said tightly. “You said it yourself, Kat—Boris here’s a con man, using a few scraps of information he somehow gathered about our grandfather to pull a scam on us. We’re vamp slayers? Mom was a slayer?” The illogical dread I hadn’t acknowledged a moment earlier was suddenly as impossible to ignore as a grenade with its pin pulled. Desperately I tried to defuse it. “I’ll admit Dean and Lance and Todd behaved like total pigs when they showed up here tonight, and even that we had to fight them off. The rest just couldn’t have happened the way we remember.” In my mind I saw Dean crumbling to dust, but I thrust the vision aside and grabbed at the only acceptable explanation. “It’s more likely that the appletinis we knocked back are making us recall things a little foggily.”
“That you try to deny is no surprise to me.” The Russian shook his head, watching me closely. “But in your heart you know the truth, granddaughter. You must face it.”
“Megan’s the Queen of Denial, Grandpa Darkheart,” Tash broke in impatiently. She turned to me. “There’s a big ol’ pile of greasy dust upstairs that used to be my boyfriend, another in front of the sofa over there, and I’m betting there’s a third dust pile in the kitchen. I know it sounds crazy, sis, but since we now have proof that vamps exist, isn’t it kind of reassuring to find out we’re genetically equipped to handle them?” She frowned thoughtfully. “When I snapped off that bedpost and staked Todd, I was like Yes! You go, Tash! And I totally didn’t understand where that was coming from because I’m so against violence usually, but now that I know I’ve got slaying in my blood, it makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Kat contradicted. “But given that nothing else that’s happened in the past hour does, either, I agree with Tash, Megan. If Grandfather Darkheart’s correct and some kind of battle’s already begun, you’d better start believing in this triplet slayer business pretty fast, sweetie.”
The old Russian’s steel-gray eyebrows pulled together. “Nyet. Only one of you is true Daughter of Lilith—a slayer, as they say in your American televideniye shows. The other two may kill vampyrs, but through luck and determination, not because they inherit title from mother.”
Something inside me snapped. “Nyet to all of it, Boris! Our mom wasn’t a slayer, she was a part-time translator at the New York firm where our father worked after graduating from Harvard Law. Two weeks after she and Dad met, they got married,” I said, my voice shaking, “and Grammie’s told me a million times how happy Mom was in the role of a wife and mother—so happy that it was only at the urging of my father that she agreed to a trip back to her home country. Not as imaginative as your scenario of her being a cut-rate Buffy, perhaps, but that’s the way it was.”
“She did not want to make journey home?” I had to admit it, the old fraud was good. The rawness in his voice seemed almost real. “She still had not forgiven me,” he said in an undertone. “If she had never forgiven, tragedy might not have come so soon.”
His fake pain was the last straw. “My parents’ deaths are none of your business,” I said tightly. “It was a tragedy that their car went off a cliff during their visit home, but if you think you can use that tragedy to bolster whatever false claim you’re—”
“They did not die from car going over cliff.” He gave a firm shake of his head. “That is what everyone was supposed to believe, but—”
“But nothing!” I yelled. “She was killed in an accident, not by a vampire, and she was an ordinary woman, not a Daughter of Lilith or whatever you want to call it!” I rounded on Kat and Tashya, but they were a blur, because sometime in the last second my eyes had flooded with tears. “Don’t you understand, we have to keep believing that! In his version our nightmares were real!”
The words were out there and there was no way to call them back. My gaze sought Kat’s, hoping for her particular brand of languid reassurance, but it was Tash who broke the silence.
“But in my nightmares Mom died trying to save—” Her eyes widened and a shutter fell behind her gaze. “You’re right, Megan, they just can’t be real,” she said huskily. “They were just nightmares that I can blame on cheese or my imagination or watching a scary movie before bed. That’s the only way I can handle them.”
“Same here.” Kat’s fingers went to her neck, as if she expected to feel the familiar silver chain and cross around it and her other hand tightened on the revolver. “I think I’ll go with my sister’s version, Grandfath—” She caught herself and her voice hardened. “I dumped too much vodka into the mix tonight. You’re a fake. There’s no such thing as vampires, we’re not Daughters of Lilith, and the nightmares we used to have when we were kids were just that—nightmares. Now get out of our house before I’m forced to use this gun.”
The three of us were standing shoulder to shoulder. The old man’s hooded gaze swept from Tashya to Kat before coming to rest on me, but when he spoke it was obvious his words were directed more at himself.
“There is no strength in blindness, and without strength they will not live through another night. I must do what I had hoped not to do.” Before he finished speaking I took a step toward him, but as I took a second step I froze. “It is time, Mikhail.” The Russian didn’t look down at the wolf that had silently materialized from the darkness outside. “Show them!”
Like its master, the beast stared straight at me, but unlike the man’s gaze, the animal’s glowed with hatred. “Kat, get ready to shoot,” I said tensely, not looking away from the wolf. “I think Cujo’s about to—”
Watch!
The one-word command exploded in my head. I looked at the Russian, but his eyes were closed and his mouth was set in an anguished line. My glance darted from Kat on one side of me to Tash on the other, and the chill in me intensified. They were both staring straight ahead, and as I watched I saw tears glaze the china-blue of Tash’s gaze. From her parted lips came a low moan of terror. I broke through the paralysis gripping me.
“Stop it!” I tugged the revolver from Kat’s limp fingers. Turning back to the wolf, I jammed the barrel between his eyes, my hands shaking so badly that the gun knocked against his skull. His glare on me didn’t waver. I thumbed back the revolver’s hammer. “Whatever you’re doing to my sisters, stop it right now or I’ll blast you to—”
My throat slammed shut in midsentence. A giant hand seemed to squeeze painfully around my heart. As if I were in a speeding train rushing toward a tunnel, blackness suddenly blotted out everything but the hypnotically glowing gaze in front of me. From a long distance away I heard the gun hitting the floor, and at the sound I made a last attempt to struggle free from whatever was about to envelop me.
But I was already enveloped, not by darkness, because my vision was slowly returning, but by a thick, homespun…cape?
Instinctively I began to pull the heavy fabric from my shoulders. Then the same moan of terror I’d heard Tash make rose in my own throat. I thrust my hand out in disbelief.
It wasn’t mine. It was a man’s right hand—an older man’s, judging from the veining beneath the work-worn skin. That wasn’t all; the shoulders over which the cape was flung were broad and solid, like the rest of the body I seemed to be trapped in, and even my mind didn’t feel entirely my own anymore. When I tried to scream, the voice that came out of my mouth wasn’t mine, and although I had no trouble understanding the words, they were in a language I’d never spoken.
“Pridyl slishkom pozdno.” I have arrived too late. My—his—mutter was shot through with anguish. His—my?—feet stumbled on a rough path that led to a Hansel-and-Gretel cottage before carrying us up the stone steps to the cottage’s half-open door.
As I saw the heavy gold ring on the middle finger of the left hand that pushed the door fully open, any last doubts I had vanished and pure terror sluiced through me.
I was back in the nightmare that had haunted me as a child. But this time I was experiencing it as my grandfather had experienced it…
He was too late.
Bursting through the front door, Anton Dzarchertzyn almost fell over the body of the son-in-law he’d never met. He swept his travel-stained cloak aside and crouched quickly, his fingers seeking a wound he prayed not to find. He rose, relieved that his prayer had been answered, and pushed through the door at the end of the hall.
From the still-smoking spots on the floor, it was evident the young blond woman had killed two of them already. As he moved to her side she smashed a wooden chair against the wall and was left grasping a splintered leg that still had a partial rung attached. Quickly he held out the object he’d taken from under his cloak in the hall.
“Use this!”
If his daughter felt any surprise at seeing the father she’d once angrily thrust from her life standing beside her now, she showed no sign. She spun toward him and snatched the stake from his grasp, turned again to confront the thing rushing at her, and plunged the sharpened yew-wood into its chest.
The vampyr was a young woman with short black hair curving onto her cheekbones. Her paleness was an indication she hadn’t fed recently, Anton knew, and now she never would again. He turned away. A moment later he heard the rattle of wood striking wood and he turned back.
The stake lay on the floor. A few ashes clung to it, but as he looked they sifted into nothingness, leaving a third charred spot. His daughter grabbed up the stake and faced him.
“I told myself that if I was careful, my family would be safe,” she said, her voice ragged. “I let David convince me that even though you didn’t approve of our marriage, you had the right to meet your granddaughters at least once. If I hadn’t come back here, he’d still be alive, damn you!”
Anton shook his head, understanding that her anger at him stemmed from intolerable grief. “Eventually the one who calls herself a queen would have found you and yours, my daughter. While you grieve for your husband, console yourself with the knowledge that you fulfilled your destiny when you sent her to hell.” Revulsion swept through him. “God grant that the fiery hair she was so proud of is now truly alight for all eternity.”
His daughter’s face blanched. “I killed this one and two males. What do you mean, a queen vampyr with fiery red—” From a room upstairs came a faint mewling cry, swiftly cut off. Anton read the truth in her terror-flooded gaze a split second before her words confirmed it. “The triplets! She’s with my babies!”
She pushed violently by him, racing through the hall to the flight of stairs he’d seen as he’d entered the house. He sped after her, his heart a stone in his chest.
Red hair rippled down the back of the queen vampyr’s garnet velvet gown as she bent over one of the three cribs lined against the wall of the nursery. That much Anton glimpsed before his daughter pulled her from the crib and the stake in her hand sank into the vampyr’s breast. Blood, ancient and black, spilled over the velvet bodice, filling the air in the room with the stench of a charnel-house. Letting the stake fall from her hand, his daughter turned to the cribs.
The Queen of Darkness fell upon her.
“Nyet!” Anton grabbed up the stake. Even as his fingers closed around it his daughter fell backward into him, released from the vampyr’s grasp. Instinctively he caught her…and then instinctively he recoiled.
“Yes, staryj vrag.” The mocking whisper sounded like burning bells on a hell-steed’s bridle. Lifting his stricken gaze from the twin trails of blood running down his daughter’s neck, Anton Dzarchertzyn saw a smile curve the red lips of the thing standing in the doorway. “I have tasted her, as you see. When the Daughter of Lilith is one of my creatures I will insist her attacks be more on target, but this time her rash aim was to my advantage. Before another night passes she will be hunting with me, not against me.” A pale finger touched the already congealing blood high on her breast and was raised to parted red lips. A pointed red tip of a tongue flicked out and the blood disappeared. “Unless, of course, you do what you must to prevent her from becoming mine. I will be waiting to see if she comes to me, old man.”
A soft rustle of velvet and she was out of sight. A harsher rustle, like stiff wings unfolding, seemed to come from halfway down the stairs. Anton heard the front door slam shut.
Slowly he lowered his daughter to the floor. As he cradled her to him her eyes, blue and unfocused, met his.
“I missed her heart. I failed, Father!” The admission escaped her in a whisper. “I tried to forget who and what I was, and my skills grew rusty. I have shamed my heritage…but thank God I stopped her before she harmed my daughters.”
The trembling of her hand was a sign that the poison was traveling through her and unconsciously his gaze moved to the stake on the floor. He looked back to see her watching him.
“Now I ask you to keep me from further harm, too, Father, and protect me in the only way possible. But first give me your word that my daughters will be safe.”
“It shall be done. A home will be found for the little ones here in their mother’s country—”
“No!” Blue eyes blazed at him. “They will have the life I once thought I could have—an ordinary life far from the shadows and ancient blood-obligations of the old country! I want my daughters to have the opportunity to live without realizing such evil exists in this world…to live without ever knowing the burden of being Daughters of Lilith! Besides, the queen will anticipate you will keep them here. If you truly care for your granddaughters, deliver them to my husband’s parents and stay out of their lives!”
In her agitation she gripped his arm, her clutch upon him weak. Suddenly Anton felt faint strength flowing into her fingers, and from the fear that crossed his daughter’s face he knew she understood as well as he did what that growing strength meant. She released him.
“It is beginning,” she said flatly. “Do what you must, and do it quickly.”
