CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SAY MY NAME (PART 2)

“HOW MANY FINGERS am I holding up?”

My head hurt. My whole body hurt. Someone had dropped a brick wall on me. Make that two or three brick walls. I couldn’t even see any fingers. I thought vaguely that I might know the voice. I groaned, the action piercing my throat like a sharp knife. I must have been trying to lean up a little because I collapsed flat onto the floor again. Nice floor. Soft floor.

“Tessa. Open your eyes.”

I couldn’t. Why didn’t they just go away and leave me alone? Broken yet comfortable. Did I still have two hands and two feet? I patted them on the surface under me. More of a convulsion, actually. A possible yes. The movement gave me a recoil of hurt, though.

“A world of hurt.” I think I mumbled that. I know I sure as hell thought it.

“Who am I?”

I opened my mouth, only to be rewarded with a drink of cool, soothing water, much needed. Except that I had been trying to do something even more basic, like breathing. I coughed, choked, and hacked. Then I curled a finger or two, asking silently for water again. This time I got it down my throat successfully.

“Doesn’t look good, guv.”

Second speaker sounded familiar, too. I thought about it for a very long while and realized I had lapsed back into unconsciousness where it felt much nicer to be. Not as painful or demanding.

A hand lifted my head up. The nice feeling fled abruptly. “Come on! What’s my name?”

“Wanna sleep.” Broken glass seemingly filled my throat and mouth as I tried to complain. I shut my mouth firmly, determined not to try that again.

“Hospital . . .”

“No. Not secure enough and we don’t need questions asked. Tessa. Listen to me. Who am I?”

My lips felt crusty and dry. I licked them. Salty. Very, very salty. Had someone tried to make a pretzel out of me? I felt all twisted up and overbaked. I squirmed a bit. More crunching beneath me. Sand? What the heck . . .

“Carter,” I got out. “What is this stuff?”

“Thank gods.”

He had come. Strong arms lifted me and half-pulled me into a lap. “That, Tessa, is salt. You’re drowning in it.”

I wrenched my eyes open and saw his face, his blurred face, looking down at me. “Salt?”

“A shitload of it.”

I turned my gaze, agony piercing my head and neck as I did, to see a bowler hat, snapping black eyes, apple cheeks, and a fashionably suited man also looking down at me. “Steptoe?”

“In the flesh! Now be quiet and have some more water before you dry up.”

Carter put a bottle of water to my mouth, and I gulped happily. Well, not too happily; everything still ached beyond measure. I managed to wiggle a few fingers. “Pup?”

“Out back, growling at shadows, but he’s fine. A slight limp. You got the brunt of it.”

I locked my unreliable sight on Carter’s face. “Tell me you got it. Tell me there’s nothing left but a greasy smear.” I knew now what that white flash had been . . . nothing less than Carter’s arrival and fury. My sun lion.

“We got him.”

“Good. Beyond good.” I felt woozy again. “Did you know the floor is really, really comfortable?” I drifted off again.

By the time I woke, dusk had fallen, I’d been moved to the sofa, and my dog had draped himself over my legs and feet. Carter, my mother, and Steptoe ate delicious smelling shortbread cookies while debating my general health. Mental and otherwise. I could hear their suppositions as they drifted out to the living room. I don’t know if I was insulted or just intrigued.

I pushed a hand out from one of Aunt April’s antique but welcome afghan blankets. “Leave any for me?” They came over to answer.

“A whole platter,” Simon said, looking a little peeved.

“I’ll share.”

“That’s the sport!”

I rolled an eye at my mother. “Does Mom know?”

She sat up, straight and indignant. “Of course I know. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I mean . . . everything.”

“I swept up a barrel of salt. I damn well know quite a bit.”

“Okay.” I didn’t want to mention anything Carter didn’t want her knowing. I settled for putting my left hand in front of my face, making sure my stone was still in place. I tapped it with my right pointer finger. “It came for this.”

“How did it get in?”

“No idea. I felt it arrive . . . this incredible pressure and then my ears popped . . . and I knew something was in the house.”

“But you didn’t let it in.”

“No way.” Someone had put tea into a bottle container for me. I sipped at it, feeling the cool soothing nectar of tea and sugar make its way into me. “Good thing you thought of the salt, Carter.”

“It was descending on you like a cloud when I got here. You conjured up that yourself.”

“I did? Did it work?”

“Kept the vampire busy until I could dispatch it. We might remember that for the future.”

“There had better not be a vampire in the future!” my mother snapped. Both men stepped back a little.

I cleared my throat hesitantly. It did not reward me with sharpness and agony as it had earlier. I might even be able to swallow a cookie. I had half of one nibbled down when something else occurred to me. I pointed at Scout. “It didn’t like Scout’s taste.”

Carter looked at my pup in surprise. “Oh? That’s . . . interesting.”

“Worth remembering.” Steptoe took a promised cookie from my platter and bit into it with a satisfied sigh. “Not just a dog, obviously.”

My mother sounded a tad unhappy. “He’s not?”

“Not entirely.”

“I thought he was a Labrador retriever.”

Carter smiled encouragingly. “Oh, he is. Also a bit of a mutt. We’re not quite sure what the other bloodline is. Elven hound, most likely.”

She set a cup and saucer down on the coffee table. “Good elf or bad elf?”

“Let’s just say there are no bad dogs if they’re raised right.” And I think Carter had the nerve to wink at her.

Something else struck me. “Oh! How are the tell-tales?”

“They can only take so much shock. I’ve pulled them for now,” Steptoe told me. “I’m going to swap them for a new, hardier bunch.”

“What will happen to these?”

“They’ll return to their beds. Grow a bit. Recover. They did the best they could.”

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” I told him.

“Too right.”

“If no one let the creature in, I think we have to consider the possibility that the threshold may have been breached before you even moved in here.”

“Before—” I paused. “My father?”

“Seems likely. I don’t know if a welcome wears off or resets, although frankly I would think the professor had circumvented that, but it seems he didn’t.”

I scrunched around on the sofa to have a better look at my mother. She wore a silk shirt and jeans, her light blonde hair held back with a colorful headband, her eyes a bit shadowed. “Did you have a visitor the other night? Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich night?”

“I did, but—” she paled. “That couldn’t have been that . . . that . . . thing.”

“Not the vampire who came here today, but it could have been a Master.”

She shook her head in denial. “We met at the university coffee bar. After the classes for online teaching, and he’d just come from the bookshop, putting in his semester order for textbooks. We’ve met up several times. He’s new to the campus and Virginia. It seemed a neighborly thing to do. I didn’t . . . you don’t think . . .”

“We don’t know what to think,” offered Carter. “Any chance we could meet him? Name?”

She paused, looking thoughtful.

“Mom. We would like to know.”

“I just hate to rope anyone in on this. It can be very complicated.” She met my gaze steadily.

“Don’t I know it. But Carter can probably check him out without his even suspecting.” I snagged another cookie while deftly moving the plate out of Simon’s reach. One of the cookies slid off and fell on Scout who, to his credit, took a thoughtful sniff before devouring it.

“He has his doctorate but doesn’t go by it. Meyer Gregory.”

“American?”

“Maybe. He has a very slight accent, maybe Germanic. Something. Definitely not a Southerner. Please be as discreet as you can. He seems well-spoken.” She stood up. “And now I’m going to clean the kitchen up, and I suggest Tessa gets some more rest.”

She hardly needed to suggest it. After my third cookie, my eyelids started sagging to the point where I either couldn’t see straight or saw three of everyone. I yawned. Carter leaned down, gently peeling Scout off my legs, and sat me up.

“Can you walk?”

I was not too tired to blush. “Of course, I can walk.” I stood up and proceeded to sashay toward the stairs in three different directions before I got my inner compass straightened out. Common sense prevailed, so I leaned on him heavily as we made our way up the front stairs. I pointed across the house. “I heard it in the kitchen area,” I told him. “And came down the back stairs to surprise it. Would have made it, too, but Scout sneezed at the bottom.”

“Sneezed?”

“The thing stank. Blood and mold and dusty—and Altoids. Really strong peppermint. Like all the Christmas candy in the world, laid end to end.”

“Huh.”

“Curled its lip and got to the dog. If it looked human enough to pass and was trying to hide its breath, I could see it, but it didn’t, and it wasn’t.”

“Interesting.” We’d reached my bedroom door, and he nudged it open with his shoe, guiding me inside.

“I had to call for you,” I said.

“And it was a good thing you did. Salt slowed it down but wouldn’t have stopped it. It had orders and a certain desperation about it.”

“You did kill it.”

Carter sat me down on the edge of my bed and carefully took my shoes off before fluffing my pillow. “I did.”

“Damn thing healed every strike I got on it. Spooky.”

“They can do that, I hear—but know this. It couldn’t have taken much more. You damaged it almost to the point where it couldn’t regenerate anymore. You almost drove it back into the ground.”

“I did?”

“You did.”

“It outlasted me.”

“Yes. You might have tried a fireball or two.”

I blinked. “I didn’t think of it! I had trouble thinking at all.”

“Part of a vampire’s glamour. Steptoe had that vampiric dust analyzed, he told me. I got a touch of the remains. We’ll see if it’s the same creature.”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it, as great, dizzying waves rose up to greet me. “I don’t think so.”

“It would explain how it breached your door. Part of it was already inside.”

“Oooh. Maybe we should burn that box.”

Carter squeezed my shoulder, his hand warm and strong. “We’ve already removed it and put a warding around it in the garage. I also put new runes on all the doorways and window frames. Even the chimneys and the plumbing vents.”

“Boy, ain’t nothing getting in here now.”

He grinned. “Not unless you give it an invitation.”

I made a cross over my heart. “Not this gal.”

Leaning over, he kissed my forehead. I wrinkled my nose. “Call that a kiss?”

“For now, yes.” Then he added in a whisper, “I’m very thankful you’re okay.”

“Tell me that when I’m able to walk straight again.”

He laughed. “Deal.”

And then he closed the door after him, leaving me alone with my throbbing head, lips that still tasted faintly of salted pretzels, and a body that hurt all over.

Scout snuffled from the hallway. I got out of bed to get him, settling for crawling along the floor. He crawled along after me as if I’d invented some new game, and we both got back in bed. The house felt a bit chilled, so his sprawled body warmed mine as I huddled under the comforter, thinking too many thoughts.

And no one but me seemed to have noticed the two fang marks on the inside of my left elbow while I wondered how much blood had been taken and if I might be poisoned. Was that even a thing? I should ask, but it would mean more questions back at me, and I really didn’t feel up to it.

The last thing that drifted across my mind was the look on my mother’s face when she talked about Dr. Meyer Gregory. Was he a deceiving Master or had she just been impressed by a nice guy? Had she betrayed us unwittingly—and if she had, and Carter or I found out, how do we stop her from doing it again? And how could she even think about moving on, with my father stuck in limbo? But if betraying ran in the family . . .

What if I had the stuff in my veins (or missing from my veins) to be the traitor myself?