Calling the Blood Read online

  He heard the shower turn off and moved quickly to the grocery bags on the bed. They'd bought pajamas and clothes before their pictures had hit the all the news shows and had gotten them on the opposite side of town where they'd decided to stay. She'd left them on the bed when she'd gone in to hover and poke at him and forgotten them when he'd pushed her towards the shower. Grabbing a set, he peeked in the bathroom, and handed them through.

  She was gorgeous. All soft curves over hard muscles, he didn't worry about hurting her when they played rough. Her long, brown hair drove him crazy when it slid across his body and her brown eyes always held a glint of humor. He loved her.

  "Thanks, Nathan," she said, taking the pajamas from him. "I'll be out in a minute."

  "Okay," he said, leaning against the door jam.

  "Did you want something?" she asked, an eyebrow arched.

  "Just one more glimpse of you before you cover that beautiful body of yours."

  She gave him a lopsided smile. "Oh yeah? Enjoying the view from over there?"

  Nathan bit his lip. "Always. Though if you wanted to turn around slowly and give a little shake, I wouldn't complain."

  Rolling her eyes, she did what he asked, stopping where she knew he wanted her to and giving a little shimmy. She turned back around to see the gleam of lust in his eyes.

  "Hmm," she licked her lips. "Maybe I should forget the pajamas tonight."

  "I would applaud this course of action."

  "And maybe we can manage to stay up a little later than we usually do and keep each other warm."

  "I'm willing to try if you are."

  Nathan pulled her into his arms and kissed her, his hands roaming all over her warm flesh. He hungered for her, needed her more than breath, and she answered each unspoken demand with the same. They made their way slowly to the bed, the lights already low, and he felt the tingle across his skin.

  The same thing had happened the first night they'd been there, both spattered with blood and riding high on adrenaline. Dark lightning flowed from her fingers and across his skin. Everywhere she touched felt more alive.

  When her fingers skimmed down his side, the hole in his side contracted with a sharp pain, as though he'd been stabbed again. Blood began to trickle from the wound and drop on her pale skin. The sight inflamed him and neither of them noticed that they started to glow.

  In the morning, the wound was almost entirely healed, a strangely shaped scar holding the sides of the hole together.

  Chapter 3

  Dan's fridge had stopped working again. He could smell the sour milk from his bedroom as soon as he woke up. With a groan, he pulled the pillow over his head until the reason he woke up prodded him out of bed and to the bathroom. He stretched long, skinny limbs, scratched at a flat, hairy belly, and made an attempt at controlling the shoulder-length curls that reminded him he needed a hair cut.

  That taken care of, he made his way to the kitchen, alternative thoughts about breakfast running through his mind as he opened the refrigerator door. He closed it before his mind had made sense of what he'd seen.

  The feeling that he'd seen this movie flitted through his mind. When he opened the door again, all that was there was the interior of his refrigerator, minus most of the groceries he'd bought a few days earlier.

  A note sat on the shelf next to the spoiled milk. He could read anything but the last couple lines.

  "Dear sober Dan, milk sucks. Buy more eggs and Hostess shit. Love, drunk Dan."

  "I did not drink enough to eat the entire contents of my fridge," he grumbled to himself. "Drunk Dan is a dick."

  He didn't remember drinking anything last night. Pulling the milk out of the fridge, he went to the sink to pour it down and noticed a glass pipe on his kitchen table. It wasn't his and he hadn't used one in years. At least, not since he'd moved to this apartment.

  Upending the milk carton into the drain, he turned the water on to let it rinse down and went to pick up the pipe. A little note was attached to it. "Magic smoke. Peace?"

  "Oh my god, what have I been smoking?" He looked around his kitchen but nothing else offered up any explanations. "I don't even remember smoking. Or drinking."

  Putting the pipe down, he went back to his sink and did his best to get rid of the foul smell of the milk. His mind was racing.

  He'd stopped doing drugs years ago. The day he'd woken up in his apartment with no memory of moving in, or where he'd been for the previous five years, he'd decided that it was time to stop doing whatever he'd been doing for himself.

  The apartment had more stuff in it than he knew most junkies kept. Instruments had filled the living room and a complicated setup for recording music. He'd found folders of songs he had no memory writing on his couch with notations made in writing he couldn't read.

  When he'd picked up the first instrument, the guitar with intricate patterns inlaid in what he assumed was gold, it had felt right. He took a few moments to tune it then started to play. It wasn't until he saw the drops falling on the instrument that he put a hand up to his face to find tears streaming down his cheeks.

  The music was right, it was perfect, and he couldn't remember how or why.

  Nothing, he'd told himself, was as important as that music. No high he could chase, no escape from reality could compare.

  He'd made a fresh start and hadn't slipped since.

  At least, he thought he hadn't. The note in the fridge and the glass pipe on the table said otherwise. What could he have done to so completely erase his memory of the night before? He didn't even remember starting to want to do something besides go to bed.

  Shaking his head, he went back to his fridge. The motor was still silent and he was certain it was warm inside but he opened the door again to see if there was anything else that needed to be thrown away.

  The hallway that appeared on the other side of the door was long and dark, carved from stone and illuminated in places by glowing blue plants.

  "What the hell?" he murmured. "I know I'm not on anything right now."

  "Dan!" A high-pitched voice called.

  Dan jumped back, letting go of the refrigerator door and stumbling against one of the chairs around his kitchen table. The door opened all the way then started to close again, only to be caught by a small creature.

  "I have been waiting for you forever!" It bounced through the opening and into his kitchen. "I know you said it might take a while to get used to your new life but this was really long!"

  "Um," Dan stammered. "Who- what- how do you know my name?"

  "Who doesn't know your name?" the creature chirped at him and laughed then stopped. He stood still, hands on his hips and looking up at Dan, his head tilted quizzically to the side. "And how come you don't know mine? I mean, I know I'm not Samireal but really, you'd think you'd remember your best friend."

  Dan sat hard on the floor. "Samireal?"

  "Oh, no," the creature said, its face falling. "Oh, no, she was right."

  "Who was right? About what?"

  "Samireal. She said you'd forget if you came back but we didn't believe her. How could you forget, Dan?"

  Dan looked at the sad little creature. It looked like a sharp-faced man-child, if that child had stopped growing at about two feet tall. Ears too big for it's head and a pointed nose made it almost cute. It was wearing beige tights and a green tunic and had pulled a floppy hat off of its head.

  It put a small hand against Dan's bony knee and he had a shock of realizing the creature was familiar. Dreams where he'd stood outside of himself, watching his tall, almost stork-like body walking side by side with the little...gnome?

  "You're a gnome?" Dan said, hesitantly.

  The creature shook its head sadly. "I thought you'd remember. I thought maybe you were having trouble adjusting and weren't calling home because you didn't want to be talked into coming back. That's why I left you the pipe."

  "The pipe?" Dan looked up at the table and remembered the note. "What does it do?"

  "It was y
our favorite," the creature looked mournful. "You had it made after explaining to Samireal why she was able to contact you. We couldn't get any of your weed but you said the ones that made the smoke in the mirrors worked just as well and Samireal figured out how to talk to you through it. We thought maybe it would work here."

  "How did you get here?" he asked, suddenly suspicious about ongoing issues with his refrigerator.

  "Well, um, I was supposed to keep an eye on you, in case you needed anything. That's hard to do when you're not communicating and sometimes your refrigerator didn't close all the way and that's how we'd agreed you'd contact us so, I, uh..."

  "So you let yourself in. What did you do with the rest of the refrigerator?"

  "It's still there, technically. Just not really connected to this realm."

  Dan thought about all the times he'd called out his landlord about the broken refrigerator just to have him show up and it was working just fine. He pulled his knees up and rested his forehead against them. Shaking, he straightened his back and started laughing. His brain felt light, as though his head was going to fly off on its own at any moment.

  "Dan? Are you okay?" The creature came to his side, its too adult face looking very concerned.

  "I'm not crazy," he said, wiping a tear from his eye. "There's just been a gnome sending the interior of my refrigerator to another dimension at least once a week for five years. A dimension I spent a great deal of time in that I can't remember and don't know how I got there in the first place. But I'm not crazy."

  "Did you think you were?"

  "My landlord thought I was. I bought so much milk and I didn't drink any of it. I thought I was eating the snack cakes in my sleep because I'd buy so many of them and would wake up to all of them gone and just an empty box."

  "Ah," the creature looked down, embarrassed. "Sorry about that part. They're just so good and you know my weakness for sweets."

  "Maybe I did," Dan said. "I don't actually like the stupid things but they struck me as a nice treat for someone I couldn't really identify."

  "They were a very nice treat," the creature agreed.

  "Well, Mister Gnome," Dan said, sitting cross legged again. "Since I don't remember you, maybe you can tell me your name and why we're both here."

  Chapter 4

  Christopher Chevalier, known to those supernatural creatures that prey on and torment humans as The White Knight, leaned back in his computer chair and sighed. While he'd gotten some information from the Fairy Queen, it wasn't nearly enough to help.

  Ominous warnings about blood and death aside, he'd really hoped she'd had some insight into who the two people in the video were. While he had some of the best facial recognition software in the world, it didn't work when he couldn't get a clear image of either of their faces. Watching the video, it wouldn't have seemed like it would be a problem. It was only when he tried to feed it through the software that he realized there was never a place where they looked up that wasn't obscured by random pixelization or static. They'd paid with cash and nobody was coming forward with pictures of them. He would have thought the waitress, at least, had taken a picture to send to her friends when she called them to come harass them.

  He was going to have to resort to magic. It had been coming easier to him and he was concerned about what that meant. What things would be woken by the surge in magic?

  Leaving the program to run, he made his way to his tower. His home was an old estate on the east coast, the original building started long before America was a country and upgraded multiple times over the centuries.

  His family had been part of the original settlers in that part of the country. They'd been willing to leave whatever was on this side of the Atlantic alone until something had snuck off one of the boats and started to run amok in London. It was entirely unlike anything they'd ever encountered before and took a great deal of luck to bring down.

  It wasn't until they'd seen a member of the Fae sneaking onto the next boat leaving for the new world that they realized it might get ugly. If the local supernatural troublemakers were heading over to seek revenge or an alliance, it could only mean bad things for humans.

  The original house had been built of logs and had a dirt floor. It had stayed that way long after the other colonists had started fixing their homes to be more accommodating. His long dead ancestor hadn't planned on staying in the new world and had held on to the dream of returning long after it had become apparent he was going to be needed there.

  When he finally gave in, he'd simply upgraded the dwelling, adding a second room, wooden floors and a better roof. Then he had a wife and children and the upgrades continued.

  There were treasures to be had in the new world, and he'd come armed with some from the old, and the family's coffers increased faster than they could judiciously spend the money. When the neighbors began to sell and move to other areas, joining a town or moving to better land, they'd started buying the land.

  Finally, one of his grandchildren, Christopher's several-times-great grandfather decided they needed something they could fortify beyond what they'd already managed with spells and stockades. He designed a castle and there was finally the people to build it.

  The original house was still part of the castle, buried deep in the maze that was the first floor, locked against intrusions and used for only the most dangerous spells.

  Christopher's tower had been his since he'd started practicing magic on his own. There were long traditions in the family that had dictated where he would practice but the most important was that he felt the most comfortable in the circular room with windows that could open in the different directions.

  Walking up the stairs, he considered once again putting in an elevator but he reminded himself just what kind of effects magic tended to have on machinery and that it just wasn't worth getting randomly stuck in the elevator to save having to go up and down the winding staircase.

  Unlocking the door, he walked inside and felt something inside him snap back into place. His ritual robe floated to his hand and he pulled it around with the ease of long practice. It wasn't until the case with his chalk landed against his palm that he realized what he was doing.

  "Oh, that can't be good," he said to himself. As he was walking to the bookshelf on the other side of the room, he watched the grimoire he was looking for pull itself out and float to him, the pages flipping gently to the spell he'd vaguely remembered from his studies.

  It settled on the book stand he kept near his circle, opened to exactly the spell he'd been thinking of.

  "Did I do that or did you do that?" he asked it, not expecting a reply. Instead, a bookmark appeared with the spell and the book flipped slowly to something that looked more like a diary entry.

  Which, essentially, it was. A grimoire could contain a lot of spells but it also had the notes about the research that went into the spells it contained and why certain parts of them worked and why they were written the way they were.

  When he was first learning his craft, Christopher had created his own spellbook, full of things he'd learned from studying others and a handful of very basic spells. There wasn't much new in his personal book, the same spells and theories could be found in more than a dozen books in his library, but it had helped solidify the information in his brain.

  The spell he'd been thinking of was one of the more obscure ones, developed just as photography was becoming more widespread. Magic tended to wreak havoc on electronics but that was only a more recent manifestation of some of the problems it could cause with technology. One of his ancestors, a several times great uncle if he remembered right, had attempted a spell to work around the issue. The resulting pictures were crystal clear, something that wouldn't be repeatable for another hundred or so years, and obviously too nice to be real.

  Now, Christopher was hoping he could use the same theory to make the pictures from the security cameras better. He started reading, becoming absorbed in the history and theory that was discussed before the actual
spell, when an empty notebook and pen drifted over to him and sat unobtrusively next to the spellbook. He didn't notice when he reached for the pen to start making his own notes.

  Chapter 5

  Looking around the clearing in the forest, Dan rubbed his sweaty palms against his jeans and gulped. He knew this place but he couldn't remember why he knew it. If Civig was to be believed, it's where he'd first met with Samireal, a beautiful fairy princess who'd fallen in love with his music.

  The trail to get out there was one he'd walked by a dozen times when he was younger and looking for a place to get high. Not that there was any shortage of places around Boulder to toke up but he'd had a real fondness for being in nature when he partook of his favorite vice.

  He didn't remember taking the trail and couldn't think of why he had that day but the aspen grove where it ended had haunted his dreams.

  The aspen grew in a perfect circle with a flat stone in the center. If they had been mushrooms with red caps and little white spots, he would have had no trouble believe it was a fairy circle. Of course, what he knew about fairy circles was next to nothing, so he wasn't surprised he hadn't recognized it.

  He had his guitar with him and a small whistle in his bag. With a deep breath, he sat on the center of the stone in the center of the circle. When nothing appeared, he pulled his guitar in front of him and started lightly picking out a tune.

  A breeze brushed his curly hair against his cheeks to tickle his lips and he stopped playing to pull his hair back in a pony tail before resuming. The song he was playing didn't have any lyrics and it was a favorite one to pick at when he was trying to come up with new music.

  Nothing happened. No strange apparitions, no maiden suddenly appearing out of the trees, nothing.

  So he picked another song. This was a folk song and it was traditionally sung in a language he didn't speak, had never spoken in fact, but he found he knew the words. He sang of love and loss. His next song was one of regret, the next one full of yearning for a chance glimpsed maid.