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Almost nine. Kit knew Fain would be back in a few hours. She surveyed her prison. The room had an ornate metal bed, a dresser, and plywood she couldn’t remove without tools. It had one chair in it, one of those metal bistro chairs where the wires formed a heart which hurt almost as much as the splintery wooden seat. The dresser held nothing, and the drawers didn’t come out, not that she could figure out what to do with them. What did she have? What assets? Tight cargo pants with a ripped inside pocket, a somewhat-clean tee shirt, her favorite kind of bra, a cup size larger than she wore when not pregnant. She fumbled around for a light switch, turning on a fan and a heat lamp, and then finally retina-burning hundred-watt spotlights. The bathroom had a giant tub with jets in the side, two of which appeared to be occupied by spiders. She optimistically opened the cupboards under the sink, hoping for some TNT or maybe a skeleton key. Well, that was no luck. The cabinet held only a roll of toilet paper and half a box of tampons. Plan, plan, she needed a plan. She also needed to pee, of course. Damn pregnancy.
When she washed her hands, Kit saw her face in the mirror and did a doubletake.
“Damn, I’m pretty,” Kit said in surprise. She never took her bindi off. She kept it on her face pretty much all the time, and if the adhesive dried out and it fell off (which rarely happened, as it weighed less than a squash seed) she put more adhesive on and stuck it right back on. It was like the saint’s medals her grandfather had worn on a gold chain around his neck until the day he died.
Without her bindi, her own glamour stared back at her. She had a glamour. She forgot sometimes. It was a souvenir from going to the Realm of the Faerie. So far, the only way she knew of to get rid of one, once you got one, was to get turned into a vampire like Sorrow had. If you were a faerie, it made you look human. If you were human, it just hung there, an identical transparent layer over your own face. Unless you tinkered with it.
She’d forgotten she had tinkered with her glamour. It had been years ago, back when she was first being tutored in magic by John Hamilton, before she had outgrown what few things he knew and turned to other teachers. See if you can tinker with it, he’d said, and she had. A little vanity. Just make the features a little more symmetrical, her eyes a little brighter, lashes a little longer. It took months.
She didn’t have months. She had maybe hours. An hour. Less than an hour if the first part of her plan didn’t work.
She had a plan. She could do it. She had to do it.
Kit closed her eyes, uttered a little prayer, to God, to Yseulta, so far away, to Uncle Fred, to anyone who might help. She didn’t know when Fain would come. What time was it? Ten fifteen. Seven and a half hours until sunrise.
Kit sat on the bed and mentally prepared herself. It seemed like forever. She was tempted to go to the mirror and fuss with her glamour, but it was too soon. She sat with her feet on the floor, trying to breathe slowly to calm herself, planning what she was going to say to him, practicing her spells in her mind, walking through the steps over and over again, like a kata performance which would determine the rest of her life.
He came around midnight. When she heard the door handle turn, Kit felt a surge of adrenaline, heart fluttering like a bird trying to escape. She stood and backed away.
Fain closed the door behind himself. He was carrying a white dress in a drycleaner bag, and he hung it on a hook on the back of the door. She checked him out as if seeing him for the first time. He was taller than her, broader shouldered, but his features looked enough like hers that everyone commented on it. Her lucky break, she hoped. Was this going to work? It had to work. Please, God, let it work.
“So, Kit, have you made your peace with finally joining the winning team yet?” Fain set down a sterile needle and bag and tubes held fastened with a rubber band.
“I don’t want to be a vampire.” Kit stood up. “I’ll miscarry.”
“I’m honestly sorry about that, but I will not get another chance if I let you slip away,” Fain said, as gently as Fenwick did when he told Jade she couldn’t watch another episode because it was time for bed. “Sorrow is right, you know. This is quite a gift I’m offering you. You should be grateful.”
“I’m not ready,” Kit protested. Fain came towards her and she backed away from him. It wasn’t until she saw his eyes unfocus that she realized she’d reflexively turned herself invisible. She started to creep towards the door, but with Fain sitting there, she wouldn’t get very far.
“We can do this the hard way, or we can do this the easy way.” Fain got flinty. He pulled a chair close to the door and sat in it. “You’re not leaving this room as a human. I have guards outside. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”
“Did Joyce hurt you when she turned you? Did she ask first? Did you go into it with gratitude for the gift?”
Fain paused for so long that Kit wondered if he didn’t understand her question. It was a guess, a stab in the dark based on what she knew of Joyce Albers’ manipulation and Fain’s comment about Mercedes Varga having a “period of resentment to get over.”
“It was for the best,” he said.
“But you didn’t think so at the time.”
“It’s a long story,” Fain said, and his jaw clenched.
“Where did it happen? I mean, it must have been just after the war, right?” Kit gingerly sat on the bed and let herself become visible.
“Quite a few years after,” Fain said.
“How old were you? You don’t look more than thirty-something.”
“I was only 32.”
“Were you still a soldier? Where was this?”
“I’d gone back to being a farrier. I was living in Philadelphia and I was doing quite well for myself. I’d been married but my wife had died of childbed fever, so I found myself single again. All the ladies loved courting me, including Joyce. She fell in love with me.”
“Women seem to do that,” Kit said, thinking of Medina making eyes at him whenever Fain was in the same room as her. “Such a burden you have.”
Fain smirked, giving a half laugh at the flattery. “I thought she was this country mouse. Joke. That’s what she called herself, short for Johanna. People laughed at her name, but she acted as though she was too innocent to understand. Just came over from Holland, she said, helping her brother keep house while he tended his import business. A naïve sheltered girl. She implied she was a widow hunting for a husband.
“All of that was a lie except the hunting part. She had been travelling with a pack of rogues. They’d stay in a city for a week or so, then clear out after they were done with their victim to stay ahead of the law. Only this time when they left, she stayed behind. Because of me.”
“She saw you and fell in love with you?” Kit had never heard any of this, not in the whole time they’d dated.
“We were at a dance hall. I’d seen her often enough to know she’d set her cap for me. She asked me to come outside for some air, and I thought we’d kiss, so I did. Then she confessed her love for me. I thought I was so worldly. I was already a widower. I’d been to war, and here was this little Dutch girl with her heart out in the open like that. I thought I could do better. I was after a dowry, connections. She seemed like trouble brewing, and I wanted her away from me before she started showing and fingered me as the father.” Fain leaned back just far enough to realize, as Kit had, that the bistro chair was terribly uncomfortable.
“So, you let her down easy,” Kit said, guessing. “The whole, ‘You’re a nice girl, but I think we should just be friends’ talk?”
Fain looked embarrassed. “Well, no. I figured she was already pregnant, or she wouldn’t be acting so bold, so I asked if she wanted to come with me to a place I knew for a tumble.”
“You rake,” Kit said, shaking her head. “You’re such a naughty man.”
“She said she knew a place and took me to a hayloft a couple of miles outside of town. We had our fun, and I was going to put my clothes on and make my excuses when she bit me.”
“Is that part of it?” Kit had gotten caught up in the story. She needed to press him for details. “Biting? Do you have to bite someone to turn them?”
“No, but it’s hard to fight back when someone has chugged their fill from your veins.”
“Didn’t your heavy coat stop her teeth? I’m trying to picture it.”
“It was summer.”
“And Joyce Albers is leaning over you, her teeth in your neck, wearing a bustle and crinoline.”
“Uh, not my neck. She went for the wrist. And she’d been wearing this simple dress with an apron tied over it. She didn’t even have any underclothes. I thought that was racy. Honestly, I thought she might be a whore, or at the very least a fallen woman.”
“You’re lying on your back in the hay, on a sweltering night, when this loose woman you meant to take advantage of suddenly bites you in the wrist and starts draining you,” Kit said. “It must have been terrifying.”
“I was angry more than anything. I thought it was a setup, that she had some cutpurse accomplice waiting to cosh me. I grabbed her by the hair to yank her off of me and she reached up and broke my wrist.”
“Dang, she’s hardcore. Did she give you the blood kiss?”
“Yes. I remember that much. She bit my mouth and our blood mingled and then I died. I woke up three days later in a cellar, with a thirst greater than anything I’ve ever felt since then,” Fain said.
“Like, on the dirt floor? With a cesspool? Or was it like a root cellar with turnips?”
“Well, no, it was a normal cellar with a dirt floor, but there was an army cot. She did love me. It’s just that everything else she told me was a lie.”
“Not everything,” Kit said. “She is a widow, and she was once Dutch.”
Kit wanted to know more. She wanted to know what it smelled like in the hayloft. Smell could be a great trigger. How hot was it? Early summer when the night air still smelled like blossoms or one of those sweltering nights where you felt as though you were drowning? She wanted to know what he was wearing, how the hay felt. Was he standing in front of her or lying on his back when Albers pinned him?
“I’m through talking,” Fain said, and as quick as a striking cobra, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her close to him. “We can do this easy or hard. You choose.”
Kit slumped as if admitting defeat. “Will it hurt?”
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Fain said, touching the side of her face. And then he did what she’d been waiting for. He met her eyes.
She slid inside his mind. The spell she had been mentally rehearsing over and over and over again in her head spilled out of her like a breathless kata whose pattern she had done until it was as natural as walking, until she couldn’t not do the next step. She didn’t feel any resistance, and the good part of her worried about having her ex-lover’s defenseless mind laid slippery and bare underneath her spell felt a pang of guilt, but then she was past rational thought into the zone of performance.
“You will be my sire. I will be yours.”
Her voice and her mind spoke as one, low and insistent, like a bass note that shakes every atom in your body. Her spell combined the now with the past, with Kit becoming Fain and Fain becoming Albers, resonating with his memory of his own wake. Summer night. Hayloft. The smell of sex, the feel of hay poking through clothes. Usually she liked to use as light a touch as possible. Use too much force and you risked damaging the subject’s mind, like poor Stephanie.
She did not pull her punch. Kit pulled her ki from deep within herself and blasted Fain with a cloud of befuddlement.
“You will bite me and I will lie like death until the third day. Don’t leave me. You will lie there. You will stay by my side. You will lie as dead on the bed, as you did when she sired you. You will protect me. You won’t leave. You won’t let anyone come in.”
And in the same cadence, the same low insistence, she changed the direction. This was not the subtle pep-talk that Jay got, or the gentle wheedling she’d done on the guy at the shipping warehouse. She had flung open sluicegates of power and was washing his foundation out from under himself with the force of her will.
“You will lie as dead. You are already feeling like the wake is upon you. The summer air is so heavy. You are so heavy. Your limbs are like stone. You will lie on the cot for two days, lie as dead. It is the wake. You will lie as lifeless as hay until the wake. You will lie as dead. It is the wake. You will wake in three days and be new born. She bit you. She drank from you and you are weak. Your human life is over.”
Fain had no resistance. He had no latent talent, no skill at magic, honed or otherwise. He was the leaf; she was the wind. She pulled her arm and led him to the bed.
He’d underestimated her. Sorrow had underestimated her. They saw her as merely a human. Fuck them all, fucking arrogant vampires.
“Your sire gave you the blood kiss. She is watching over you. You will wake in three days and never see the sun again. You will wake in three days and be new born. It is time to lie as dead. Rest now. Rest in your death. Rest now. The wake is upon you. She bit you and you are dying and will rise in three days.”
She eased him down onto the bed, his eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. She closed them gently, eased his mouth shut. If this worked, he would be in a coma for three days, convinced that it was his wake.
Then she sprinted to the bathroom, shut the door and turned all the lights on. It was easier without her bindi. The face in the mirror was like a photoshop image, sliding and malleable under her psyche. Whatever part of her did spellwork was feeling exhausted from the charm spell she did on Fain. Damn, she’d pummeled him with it. She glanced over her shoulder. He looked like a corpse.
Kit began to manipulate her glamour. She made her chin wider. Too wide. Too narrow. Better. Eyebrows thicker. Straighter? His nose was different. How was it different? She ran back to the bed, using Fain as a reference. They had the same eye shape, which was good, as that was easy to mess up. Just widen her own face, make it look more masculine. But what did that even mean? She knew it when she saw it. Her face molded and melted like a horrible self-portrait. How much time did she have? This was worse than frosting a warm cake. Kit looked like a bad art school painting. This is why people didn’t alter their glamours. Could she start over? Could she get rid of it and just use her own face and some make up? She didn’t have any make up.
Kit closed her eyes. Think of Fain. Think of Leo Fain’s face. Think of what he would look like, standing in the mirror. She could do this. She had to do this. If she couldn’t do this, she had bespelled him, she had maybe damaged him, and for what? Was it worth it? Was she a horrible person for enchanting her ex-boyfriend? She had to. She had to escape. She had to get free. He wouldn’t let her leave.
She molded it with her eyes closed, picturing his face in her mind’s eye. She pictured him when he took her to the bar to get the faerie knuckle she needed to save Fenwick from that spell. She pictured him on the day when she came back from the Realm of the Faerie, making her breakfast in his kitchen with barely contained sexual tension. She remembered the way he looked when they planned the heist, top of his game, El Patron of Red Rock.
She opened her eyes and Leonard Fain’s stunt double looked back at her. Close. If only she had a phone.
Fain had a phone.
She went to his prone body. He lay still as if dead. Gently she freed his phone from his back pocket, using his thumb to unlock it. She went into settings and changed the passcode so she could get in when she needed to, then took a photo of his face with the camera. Taking the phone back to the bathroom, she used the photo, fine tuning the glamour to match. It had to be perfect. People who knew him, people who loved him would be looking at this face.
When it was good enough that she decided it would have to do, she looked down at the phone and realized that hours had passed. It was after three in the morning. Her neck hurt, her eyes hurt, and she felt bone-weary. She had to leave with ample time before dawn or people would get suspicious.
She sighed. Step two down. Now for step three. Kit took the needle and hooked it up to the tubing, then inserted the end of the needle gently into a vein on his arm. It took several tries, but eventually a line of dark blood crept down the tubing. She tried not to vomit.
She didn’t need much, just enough for verisimilitude. She found a cotton ball and some tape and slid the needle out as she pressed it over his vein. Then she pinched the end of the tube and swung the bag so that it went down as far as possible, kneading it so it looked like it had been filled with blood. They would know immediately if they opened the door and didn’t smell blood. When she unpinched the end of the tube, she got blood on her hands and carefully daubed some near her mouth before washing the rest off.
Fain didn’t budge as she stripped him of his clothing. His pants fit her poorly in the hips and waist, but he had a belt which she was able to use to keep them on. He wasn’t a sloppy guy, but maybe they’d attribute the untucked shirt to the passion of their privacy. She even took his shoes, stuffing toilet paper in the toes so they didn’t slip off. It was the little details that made a difference. She left her own clothes scattered on the floor. The smell of them would throw people off. She hoped he hadn’t showered in a while, that his own smell lingering on the clothes would be enough to let her pass.
The confidence. Act like you had a right to be there. She’d practiced. She knew his ticks. In the bathroom, one more time, she did his open-handed wrist pivot, the “why not?” gesture. She did the other gesture, the raising the eyebrows while tipping her chin down, the “don’t bullshit me” look.
“I am Leonard Fain,” she said, making her voice lower and rougher. She steepled her fingers. “I am El Patron of the Guild of Red Rock. Please let me ...” No. don’t say please. That’s what a woman would say. “Stand aside.”
Take up space. Use your limbs as if you own the room. Look people in the eye if you have to. And don’t speak unless you have to. She turned the bathroom light off. Damn it was dark. That might give her away as human if she wasn’t careful. Kit took a breath and exhaled it quickly. Showtime.
The door was only locked from the inside this time. No one would dare lock El Patron in. She glanced over at him on the bed, her doppelganger. Reaching into her pocket, she found his wallet and keys. Fain had a lot of cash in his wallet. Thank God. That would help.
Kit sauntered out the door.
Jay looked up.
“Guard her,” she said, making her voice as low as she dared without sounding ridiculous. “Don’t let anyone in.”
Jay nodded as crisply as a salute.
Kit walked away. No one stopped her. She walked down the hallway where she had killed Crispin. Kaltenbach and the other Harris boy were chatting in the foyer, so Kit detoured to the basement stairs where she had followed the tech, and out the basement door to the back yard, then around the side of the house where she had parked her rental car. The key was still in the console, and it started on the first try. No one stopped her. No one had blocked her in. She resisted the urge to grin and programmed in the address of the airport. Olly olly oxen free.