House Of Vampires (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy Book 1) Page 2

  My dad had a talent for making my name into something to be feared. I didn't have that talent. When I use people’s full names, I just sound like an idiot.

  “Dad?” I asked, even though I knew exactly who it was.

  “Where are you?” he repeated.

  I could have lied to him. In fact, if I had been more awake, I probably would have. I was not above lying to my dad if it was going to make my life easier, but I needed more than a couple hours of sleep if I am going to do that.

  “I'm at Grandma's.” I said it defiantly, angrily even. Was I mad at him? Yeah, I really was. I don't know if I had been angry since I got the letter, or if it had started when I realized how alike my grandma and I were, but it had happened.

  He went silent, and that's when I knew I was in real trouble. I was nineteen years old. I should be above caring about whether or not I was in trouble with my dad, but it hadn't happened yet. Maybe if I had stayed in school and got that anthropology degree or something I'd feel more like an adult. Yeah. Sure.

  “What,” he asked, pausing ever so slightly between each word, “are you doing there?”

  “Inheriting.” I sat up in bed, tugging my feet beneath my body. One of my socks had slipped off while I slept and I decided to dig for it. A quick glance at my phone told me that I had only been out for two hours. “Grandma left her house to me, but I gotta stay here for six months.”

  “No,” he said, as if his word was final.

  For a moment, just a moment, I had to resist the urge to do what he told me. My whole life had been doing what my dad said. We had to move somewhere else for his new promotion? I went. He didn't think I should be spending so much time with that guy? I stopped. Plain and simple. I was suddenly really tired of that. Maybe it was the anger. . Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Probably it was both.

  “Yeah, so, here's the thing. I'm nineteen now, and if you want me to give up a house and money you are going to have to do better than that.”

  I was almost surprised. I couldn't remember the last time that I had talked back to my dad. At least not a time when it hadn't been purely in my head or under my breath while behind a closed door. I wasn't scared of my dad, not really. He'd never hit me or anything bad like that, but he had a way of making me feel bad for not following his orders.

  “Lorena, it is dangerous for you there. Please come home.”

  There it was. He sounded sincere. I wanted to believe him, but... “You kept her from me all these years, you even kept her death from me. I'm sorry, Dad, but I'm staying here for now.”

  “First of all-”

  “Sorry, Dad, I need to go. Love you. Bye.” I turned off the phone and then switched it to silent. Brave of me, I know, but I didn't need a point by point lecture on why I should be listening to him. He didn't call back right away. I laid back on the pile of pillows, hoping that I'd be able to go right back to sleep. No such luck. With a sigh, I rolled out of the bed, nearly tripped over my own shoes, and stumbled back into the kitchen, hoping for something to eat. No such luck. Whoever had cleaned out my grandma's kitchen had done a really good job.

  I pulled out my phone and brought up local late-night restaurants. No luck there either. The only thing anywhere nearby that was still open was a little gas station-convenience store combo. While the idea of prepackaged food wasn't my favorite, I was hungry enough not to care. I queued up my GPS and then got into my trusty powder blue Bug.

  The night was cool enough that I had the windows open while I drove through the unfamiliar town. There were all the necessities, all clustered into a trio of shopping centers, but they were outnumbered by a pretty incredible amount of churches. I drove past all of these and parked in the only lot that still had its lights on. A red hatchback took up another spot.

  I walked in, a bell chiming over my head, and the girl manning the counter looked up. I guessed that she was close to my age, with high cheekbones and skin in a shade of olive dark enough that I might have called it brown if it weren't for the harsh fluorescent lighting washing her out. Her braids, tipped with more stones, hung nearly to her hips. She wore a smear of blue eye shadow over her amber eyes and a t-shirt that said “Welcome to Night-Vale.” She took one look at me and her jaw dropped.

  “Grandma!” she called, her voice thick with Appalachia, “You betta come quick. That witch from the prophecy is here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  There are maybe three or four things that could have been said that might have surprised me more, but I couldn't seem to think of them right then.

  “What?” was about all I could manage as I took a single step back towards the door.

  The girl behind the counter smiled a billion dollar smile at me. She leaned down and rested her elbows on the countertop so that she could palm her chin between her hands. She had a slew of rings on, all in various precious metals, and a range of stones so wide I couldn't even name but one or two. A necklace slid out of her top, a chunk of clear crystal that reminded me of the collection back at my grandmother's house. “You ain't as scrawny as I thought you'd be.”

  “Huh?” I looked down at myself. She was right. I wasn't scrawny. I wouldn't call myself fat either, but what did that have to do with anything? Why did she think I'd be anything at all? “What?”

  “Might be kinda stupid though.”

  “Hey!”

  “Jenny? What's all this yellin' about?” Another woman stepped out of the backroom. She was older, plump and pleasant to look at. Her hair was every shade of silver and brown and formed a large semi-circle around a face that had the look and texture of carved mahogany. Her shoulders made a perfect line beneath a floral button down shirt. Her dark eyes fell on me and I felt like she could see everything I had ever done. I hoped not, because some of that was embarrassing. “Well now,” she said, “what have we here?”

  I swallowed hard and put my hand on the door, wishing that my legs would move. The glass was cool beneath my fingers, but I couldn't bring myself to push on it.

  “You Ms. Loretta's grandbaby?” the younger girl wanted to know. She brought her hand to the top of her head and patted at the roots of the many braids her dark hair was coiled into.

  “No,” I said instinctively, remembering only a second later that Loretta was my estranged and now deceased grandmother's name. “Yes. I mean...I think so.”

  “Well,” the girl asked, looking at me like I had grown a set of limbs from an awkward location, “which is it?”

  “Hush, Jenny,” the older woman admonished. She came around the counter, moving with the kind of speed and grace that you only got if you were really fit. “Come on, then. Let's get a look at you.”

  She took my chin between two warm fingers that smelled of herbs I couldn't name. Her eyes were big and brown and warm. I couldn't seem to look away, even if I wanted to. Her face had a kindness to it that you could just see, like you could tell her every terrible thing you had ever done and she'd tell you that it was okay. I didn't feel like running anymore, but I was still very confused.

  “Yeah,” she finally said, turning the single word into twice as many syllables as I would have given it. She dropped her hand from my chin and nodded. “That's her. You look a whole lot like your grandma, you know that?”

  I thought back to the pictures I had gone through. I nodded back. “Yes, ma'am.”

  My father had taught me to say “Ma’am” and “Sir ” when the occasion called for it. Four years in customer service had done nothing to help that. She smiled at me, and I knew that her and the girl behind the counter; Jenny, the woman had called her; were definitely related. Both of them had incredible smiles.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, realizing I could think again, “I don't think you've got the right girl.”

  “Pshaw,” said Jenny, rolling her eyes. Hers weren't brown so much as they were gold, and even from this distance I could see they had a sparkle. “If you Loretta's girl, then you the one from the prophecy, plain and simple.”

  “Hush, Jenny,” the
woman said again. She put an arm around my shoulders and guided me deeper into the convenience store. “You gonna scare the girl. Now then, let's try this one again. My name is Marquesa. Most call me Ms. Marquesa or Momma Marquesa; and this is Jenny, my granddaughter.”

  I did not think the woman was old enough to have a granddaughter, much less one who was old enough to have gone to school with me. I looked between the two of them. The family resemblance was undeniable.

  “Hey,” Jenny said, her voice thick with the slow speech of Appalachia.

  “I'm Lorena,” I said, as if they hadn't already figured that one out, “and I am really confused.”

  “I'm the one that sent you the letter,” Ms. Marquesa told me, “I was real good friends with your grandma. We was in the same circle.”

  “Circle?” I asked.

  “Witches,” Jenny offered. She made it sound like it was no big deal. Like they had been in the same sewing circle or softball team.

  “Oh.” I remembered all the crystals and books in my grandmother's house. I had already come to the conclusion that she was into all that new-age stuff. Why I didn't think that she was also in some kind of coven, I don't know.

  “I see you gone and figured that much out for your own self,” Ms. Marquesa said, “I think that's alright, but you don't know much about the rest, do you?”

  I shook my head. “I don't know what you are talking about.”

  “Well, that's alright. We can fix that up. You hungry?”

  I was going to say no out of politeness, but my stomach picked that moment to growl. I blushed. “A little.”

  “Come on, we got dinner in the back. Let's go sit down. Connie!”

  Another girl stuck her head out of the back. She had freckles and a riot of red hair. I could see a series of tattoos peeking out below her olive-green sleeves. “Yeah?” she asked.

  “Come watch the front. We gotta go and talk to Loretta's grandbaby,” Ms. Marquesa ordered.

  Connie gave me a look. It didn't have the same weight as Ms. Marquesa's did, but there was something behind her hazel eyes that made me feel like she was seeing more than just my face. I resisted the urge to cross my arms over myself.

  “Yeah, alright then,” Connie said. Her voice was so soft that I barely heard it.

  Before I knew it, I was being ushered into the employee lounge. There was a whole slew of food. Chicken and seasoned rice and some kind of mixed vegetables in sauce, enough of it to feed a family of five. My mouth watered. I didn't make drooling sounds, but it was a close call.

  “Go on, then. Sit down,” Jenny pointed to one of the folding chairs. I sat. It was cold against my back.

  Ms. Marquesa picked up a plate and started loading it up. I thought she was making it for herself before she shoved it in my direction and took the seat across from me. Jenny stood in the doorway.

  “I think I oughta start at the beginning,” Marquesa said, “best place after all. I could start with once upon a time or something, but that's best for fables, and this ain't no fable. It's the truth, pure and honest as can be.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Jenny chimed in, moving past her grandmother to pick up dinner for herself.

  Remembering that I had my own food, I picked up a plastic fork and took a bite. It was good. Better than good. Maybe it was because I had been living off of fast food recently, but I didn't think so.

  “Thank you,” I said, indicating the meal.

  Ms. Marquesa shook her head. “Think nothin' of it. I know there weren't nothin' to eat at Loretta's place; cleaned it out myself. But anyhow, like I was sayin', once upon a time is for fables, and this isn't one of those. I tell ya that all the things you've read about, faeries and vampires and witches, are all real. Magic is real, it's just sleepin'.”

  She said it all with that matter of fact tone that another person would have used to describe the weather. I blinked at her, and then at Jenny, and then down at my plate. My mind, being the bastion of witty repartee that it was, could only form one thought: “Wait, what?”

  She chuckled. “I could complicate it all, talk about how the world has magic in it, great big roads of it that the average person can't see. I could even give you fancy names like Ley Lines or Magical Weave, or names in a hundred different languages, but the truth is, ya don't really need to know that. What you need to know is that magic used to be strong, but it's grown weak.”

  “Why?” I asked, feeling intrigued despite myself.

  I loved magic. Okay, more accurately, I loved the idea of magic. I liked reading about it, hearing about it, watching movies with it. You name it. Call me a nerd if you want, but I'll just tell you that's a vague and outdated word with no real meaning and keep reading my comic books.

  “We don't know,” Jenny answered. She shrugged her slender shoulders in an elegant motion and I decided that she wasn't just pretty, she was Cover Girl gorgeous. The blue shadow matched the blue in her jeans and I didn't think it was on accident. “We just know that it stopped working.”

  “When?”

  “Again, we don't know.” Jenny pulled apart a piece of chicken and stuffed a good portion of it in her mouth. “But it was a while ago, a couple hundred years, maybe.”

  “Not that long,” Ms. Marquesa interrupted, “but close. Still, we was told it happened because magic needed a rest, it needed to sleep, and so we let it be. Well, most of us, anyhow. Some dabble.”

  “Witches?”

  “Mmmhmm. Witches an' beings that need it to live. But they all went into hiding, pretended to be human while they waited for some sign, something to happen to shake it all up again. They stopped doing the big kind of magics that made everyone believe. They waited for a sign.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, drawing on my years of playing video games, “signs have happened.”

  “You happened,” Jenny said pointedly.

  I repeated my super snappy line of, “Wait, what?”

  “The prophecy. Didn't your daddy ever tell you why you weren't allowed to come back here?”

  I thought about that. I know I had asked, but my dad worked in marketing; he was really good with words and messing with them until they said a whole lot and nothing at all at the same time. Had he ever actually told me why me being with grandma was bad? Aside, of course, from a random late-night phone call no more than thirty minutes ago.

  “Just that it was dangerous,” I answered, bringing another bite of food to my face.

  “Could be, prophecies are fickle things.”

  There was that word again. Prophecy. I'd read enough fantasy novels to know how those kinds of things ended up. In short? Badly. Prophecies either meant the end of the world or the rising of some great evil and the death of the person they were about. Of all the numerous daydreams that I'd had, I never wanted to be at the center of a prophecy.

  “Okay,” I said, setting down my half-finished meal, “here's the part where I start to feel confused.”

  “Your grandma had a gift for seeing things.”

  “Like looking into the future?” I asked.

  Ms. Marquesa nodded her head, reaching up to brush her fingers through her natural curls. “Future, yes, but the present and the past, too. If magic hadn't been sleeping, she'd have been a full-fledged oracle, I believe. Instead, all she got was snapshots, pictures of what had been, and what might be, and a little in between.”

  There was a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach. I wasn't stupid. Sure, I had dropped out of college before even getting an associate's degree, but that had to do with being lazy, not unintelligent. I could put two and two together. If my dad thought me being here was dangerous, and my grandmother had a gift for prophetic visions or snapshots, and Jenny's first words about me were that I was a witch? Yeah, I saw exactly where this was all going. “And she had a prophetic snapshot? About me?”

  “Hole in one, powder puff.” Jenny smirked.

  “What did she say? What was it about?” That squeaky voice was not me panicking, I swear.

  “
That you would have the child that brought magic back into the world.”

  “Oh boy,” I managed right before my head went all light and dizzy. I was not going to pass out. Nope. Not going to happen. I swear I was cooler than this. Who was I kidding? No, I wasn't. I was not now, nor had I ever been, anything close to cool. I was on the edge of totally barfing all of that food I had just tossed on an empty stomach.

  “Breathe, Lorena,” Ms. Marquesa placed a hand on my neck, visible since I had put my forehead between my knees. “It's okay.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said, talking to the denim on my thighs, “I think you and I have really different ideas of what okay means. You just told me I'm going to have a magical prophecy baby. That isn't even in the universe of what I would define as okay.”