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I didn’t…I begin. But I did call for someone and someone could be anyone. I shouldn’t be choosy.
“You called for your father,” he adds.
My eyes nearly fall out of my head. “What?” I manage to say, and then I’m coughing again and holy shit. My father? This isn’t my father.
“But I am,” he says. “And if you had only asked for me earlier, you could have avoided this whole mess. You need to conserve all the energy you have if you want to survive.” He waves his arm at the beast and suddenly the beast just drops to the floor with a solid thunk that shakes the whole room, lying there in a heap like he’s dead.
“No!” I scream before I’m choking again. Stop! Solon is in there!
The man gives me a tepid look. “He is just sleeping for now. You should be thanking me that I’m letting it live. I wanted to destroy this vampire a long time ago.”
I’m not thanking him for anything yet. You know Solon?
He gives me a tight smile, his lips changing from fat to thin to old to young and back again. “I know everyone. And everyone knows me. Except, apparently, you. I am Jeremias. And I am your real father, Lenore.”
I stare at him in disbelief, then the image of him gets blurry. The whole room gets blurry. This is my father? The evil black magic warlock witch who just flew inside my bedroom, made the beast pass out with a wave of his hands, and whose face keeps changing every five seconds?
“There isn’t any time to have a proper introduction, I’m afraid,” he goes on, bending down to get a better look at me. I can only stare into his beady black eyes, everything else makes my brain feel like it’s melting. He looks over my wounds. “Those won’t close up. If I didn’t show up, you would have died.”
“But I’m a vampire,” I manage to say.
His lip curls in disdain at that. “You are only half a vampire. And even if you weren’t, this wound would take you out. Lovely little gift that Skarde gave his first child, isn’t it? The ability to maim and kill other vampires with a swipe of his claws, leaving mortal wounds in the immortal.”
God, does Solon even know that? I think.
“Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t,” Jeremias says, tilting his head as he looks at me. “That’s the least of your concerns right now. I can fix you, if you give me a chance.”
How?
He gives me a cold smile. “You’ll have to come with me.”
Where?
“Nowhere in particular,” he says, walking around the broken bed, past the sleeping form of the beast, and into the washroom. When he comes back out, he’s got a black silk robe in his hands, Solon’s, and once again I realize I’m totally naked here in front of a man that’s a total stranger, even if he is my father.
He crouches down and puts the over-sized robe around my shoulders in a rather tender way, covering me up. Then he peers at me closer. “I know we’ve only just met, dear daughter, but I don’t want to lose you. You need me, and dare I say, I need you.”
I swallow down the blood.
I know I don’t have much time left.
I don’t have a choice.
I nod slowly, unable to keep the fear out of my heart.
“Good girl,” Jeremias says to me. Then he waves his hand in front of my face. “Now, sleep.”
And everything goes black.
7
Lenore
I can’t breathe.
I wake up, eyes flying open, and see an endless night sky of stars above, and yet I know Yanik is with me, that he has me, I can feel the unmistakable strength of his evil, endless darkness and utter madness.
He’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me.
“Calm down, Lenore,” a voice says, cutting through the darkness. “You’re having a panic attack.”
The voice is familiar, but it’s not Yanik.
It doesn’t belong to a vampire.
But the evil, the darkness, it remains like it runs in black veins under the ground, permeating the world from the inside out.
“Lenore,” the voice says again, and suddenly the stars in the sky seem to disappear, as if covered by a black cloak. “You’re all right. You’ve lost a lot of blood. Just stay still and wake up slowly.”
Blood?
And then it all comes rushing back into my head.
Solon.
The beast.
The empty red eyes.
The feeling of five curved, knife-sized claws shredding through my chest, from my collarbone to my sternum, scraping through muscle, fat, cartilage and bone.
I gasp again for air and sit up and look down at my chest.
I’m wearing Solon’s black silk robe, naked underneath, and my chest is one big gaping wound full of carnage. Pain, terror, abject horror runs through me, making my blood turn cold and fizzy and I’m close to passing out, because how can I still be alive with my body nearly ripped in two? This wound is deep and fatal, and awful, so awful.
