“This is fabulous!” Rachon exclaimed with pleasure.
“Kill her and be done with it!” Prosper shouted.
Casting a dark look over her shoulder, she saw that her cousin had ripped the zombies to pieces. His fine Italian suit was flecked with shreds of flesh and drenched in blood. Grumbling, he furiously tossed the bodies into the grave.
Rachon stepped closer to the girl, who thrust both of her hands out at Rachon, fingers flexing as her lips trembled.
“You can't touch me, little girl. I know how to deal with your kind,” Rachon whispered. The fledgling was crazed. She needed more blood and soon, she was also powerful.
Rachon loved power.
With one quick stroke, Rachon sliced open her own wrist.
“Come on, little one. Time to eat,” she said, holding out her arm.
The girl's eyes faded to blue as they latched onto the blood welling out of the wound. With a hungry cry, the girl gripped Rachon’s wrist and clamped her lips over it. Sucking hard, the girl's eyes closed with pleasure.
Rachon slammed the dagger through the girl's back, piercing her heart. Instantly, her body tumbled over, blood still drizzling from her lips.
“She's not dead. Finish her.” Prosper grunted as he disposed of the dismembered bodies.
“No. I want her,” Rachon answered, a smile unfurling on her dark lips. “She's a necromancer just like him. Her power will be my power.”
“How will you control her?” Prosper frowned, his wide brow crinkled with concern.
Rachon lightly touched the gris-gris hanging around her neck. “Entombment and a steady diet of my blood. He may have made her, but she will belong to me. In a few months, she will do everything I ask of her.” Rachon crouched and rolled the girl onto her back. Pulling off the remains of the girl's dress, she saw the ugly cuts from the autopsy were already healed. The thick thread used to sew her up had been ejected from her flesh and clung to her damp skin. She was fully transformed now.
“Fill in the grave and we'll head back to Shreveport,” Rachon said in a soft voice as she gently stroked the girl's fine white-blond hair that was stained pink by blood.
“Fine. Anything to be out of Texas and out of this mess your Master made.” Prosper picked up a shovel that the boys had brought to dig up the grave. “Hope you're happy with your new toy.”
“Oh, I am,” Rachon said with a bright smile.
“What is her name again? They haven't put in her headstone yet.” Prosper started shoveling dirt back into the grave, covering the bodies he had stacked inside.
“Bianca Leduc,” Rachon responded, her fingers resting on the girl's soft cheek. “And she is mine.”
Four Months Later...
Part One
Friday Night
Chapter 1
“Fuck you!” Amaliya scowled, feet set apart, hands on her hips.
“Nice language,” Cian chided her, smirking as he perched like a bird on a leaning tombstone in the center of the cemetery.
“You call this a nice evening out?” Amaliya narrowed her eyes at him.
She had been lured out of their comfortable spacious apartment to the east side of Austin, Texas under false pretenses. Cian had promised her a nice night away from the hubbub of the downtown area. She had assumed they would be hanging out at one of the dive clubs, or maybe one of the small venues run by theater groups that were located east of I-35. Instead, they were standing in the middle of a very old cemetery at a little past midnight.
“We’re away from the hustle and bustle of downtown just like you wanted,” Cian said, grinning. His chestnut brown hair was ruffled by the wind. It was not as long as it had been for a while. He had chopped it off to a more manageable and stylish length, but it looked good on him. His keen hazel eyes, heavily fringed with dark lashes, clearly projected his amusement.
“I even dressed up!”
Well, technically, she really hadn’t. The jeans were clean, the black platform heels with lots of straps were not too scuffed up, and her black corset-top had actually been hanging in her closet and not strewn on the floor with the rest of her laundry.
“You look beautiful,” he said, flexing his hands. He held a dagger in each one.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Later.”
“Ugh!”
“If you don’t practice, you’ll regret it. You need to have control of your power.” Cian stood up on the crooked headstone, easily balancing.
“What if the neighbors see us?” Amaliya looked over both shoulders through the clusters of thick trees dotting the graveyard, then across the street at the darkened houses.
“They’re all asleep; the street lamps don’t even reach this far, but...if it will make you feel better...” Cian closed his eyes, concentrated, and exhaled.
Almost immediately a thick mist billowed up from the ground, slithering around the old graves, and floating up to form a protective curtain around them.
“Show off.” Amaliya dug her heel into the ground, flexing her foot slightly. She was agitated by the whole night. She had wanted a nice evening out with Cian, pretending they were actually a couple, and just not the only two vampires in the cabal of Austin that were under constant threat by outside forces. Ever since her arrival in Cian’s city, she had been trouble for him. She knew it, he knew it, but they had fallen hard for one another. In a weird way, they were family because The Summoner had created both of them. Incestuous family, she supposed, since they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Unless she was mad at him. Then she just wanted to punch him.
“You need to practice, Amal. If we’re attacked, I need you to be able to protect yourself.”
“I killed The Summoner! That has to count for something!”
Cian stared at the daggers at his hands. “Well, it does. But there are greater monsters in the world.”
Amaliya barely saw him move, his action was so swift. She ducked, but the blade nicked her as it passed. Blood trickled from her wounded arm as she crouched in the mist, ready for his next move.
“You hit my tattoo!”
“It’ll heal.” Studying the tip of the remaining dagger, Cian said, “But the point is, I hit you.”
“Grazed me. It’s just a flesh wound.” The blood sluiced down her arm and dripped from her fingers.
“You should be faster than that.” Cian’s Irish brogue was seeping through his words. He wasn’t happy with her.
Amaliya felt like ripping off her shoes and hurling them at him before stomping home. She never asked to be a vampire. She never asked to be a necromancer. Hell, she had never asked to fall in love with him and shack up in Austin. She hated that she was trapped in the city since she had killed The Summoner. Other vampire cabals had a keen interest in her power. With the threat of The Summoner removed, the other powerful vampires were not very happy with the idea of his progeny remaining alive.
“I am fast,” Amaliya protested. “I just don’t want to be-”
The blade glinted for a second in the moonlight and she flung her hand up before her. The ground around her gave way as a corpse exploded out of the unmarked grave on which she was crouched. The dagger slammed into its chest and the very old, decayed body shuddered.
Amaliya reached out and touched the zombie with her bloodied fingers. The mildewed fabric and desiccated form beneath her fingers didn’t disgust her as it once would have. She felt an affinity to the dead now. She felt a kinship with them, compassion, almost a sense of belonging. As her blood touched its flesh, the corpse took on a more human appearance. It was an elderly black man. Inclining his head toward her, the zombie awaited her next command.
Standing, Amaliya gripped the dagger and yanked it out of the zombie’s chest. “Sorry. Instinct. Didn’t mean to awaken you.”
The dried orbs that were once eyes, were slowly taking on color. The longer she touched the zombie, the more he would resemble the living. Her blood was life to a zombie. It was the basis of her necromantic power. The Summoner hadn’t needed to shed blood to raise the dead, but she did.
“Sleep,” she whispered.
The zombie closed its eyes and the grave swallowed him.
Staring at the dagger in her hand, Amaliya felt both sickened and enthralled with her power.
“You could raise the graveyard,” Cian said stepping next to her.
“I don’t want to pull a Night of the Living Dead,” Amaliya said in a sad voice.
Tangling his fingers in her long black hair, Cian lifted his chin and pressed a kiss to her forehead. He was an old vampire and at five foot seven they were almost the same height. In heels, she loomed over him.
“You can control them. Don’t ever fear you’ll end up making flesh-eating zombies. Those only live in movies,” Cian assured her.
“But they’ll rip someone apart if I command them.” Amaliya distinctly remembered commanding the dead to do that several times before.
“You can control the dead. It’s your power. No other vampire has such an ability,” Cian reminded her. “You must learn to harness it.”
Amaliya frowned at his words, the old urge to run away playing havoc with her nerves. When things got too rough in the past, she had always run. That’s how she had found Cian after she was made into a vampire. She had fled to Austin and accidentally found him. In many ways, it was the smartest and best thing she had ever done in her life. Yet, at times, she still felt the urge to bolt when reminded of the enormity of her new position in the world of the vampires. She was the inheritor of The Summoner’s terrible necromantic power and the right-hand to the Master of Austin.