Twilight Prophecy. Maggie Shayne
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would expect a woman plucked from the very jaws of death itself to show a little gratitude. Wouldn’t one?”
She didn’t speak so much as purr her words, her voice deep and resonant and menacing.
“Of course I’m grateful. I just … none of this has anything to do with me. I’ve been through hell, and I want to go home.”
“Oh, well, that’s different then,” the woman said. She looked up, over the hood of the car, to the two on the other side. “She wants to go home, poor little thing. That changes everything, doesn’t it? Including the fact that our entire race is facing annihilation?” She snapped her eyes back to Lucy’s, and before Lucy could blink, she was pulled from the car, and lifted off her feet and into the air.
The regal one, her endless raven locks waving in the breeze as if with a life of their own, glared up at her, baring her teeth to reveal fangs that gleamed. She was holding Lucy up with one hand, clutching the bunched-up front of her borrowed shirt. And by her side, a black panther—a black freaking panther—crouched and snarled, baring its fangs, as well.
Lucy couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. She was silent and shaking, and her heart pounded at a rate that had to be dangerous to her health.
“Put her down, Aunt Rhi.” James’s voice was firm as he came around the car and put one hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s here to help us, after all.”
“Pitiful that the salvation of our race lies in the hands of this puling, weak little mortal.” But the woman did lower Lucy to the ground.
Lucy looked back toward the gate at the entrance to this horror film set, her entire being itching to run. But there were others standing there now. And she thought they might be vampires, like this dark-haired one, who surely must be their queen. One of them even wore a cloak that floated and snapped in the wind.
Lucy shot an accusing look toward James, who’d saved her, only to pitch her into a pit of vipers more dangerous than the one he’d pulled her from. He was no hero, no angel. He was one of them.
And why did that realization bring such a crushing sense of disappointment with it?
“Only partly,” he said aloud. “I’m part human, too.”
She blinked in shock. “Did you … did you just …?”
“Hear your thoughts? Yes, I did. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, but you were sort of shouting them at me.”
“At us all,” the one he’d called Aunt Rhi muttered, stroking the panther’s head. The cat pressed up against her hand like a devoted pet.
“Brigit and I are the two who are like no other,” James went on. “Part vampire, part human. The Light and the Darkness. Opposite, and yet the same.”
“One the destroyer, the other the salvation,” Lucy whispered, and in her memory she heard again Lester Folsom’s shocked words as he’d read the prophecy.
This is about the mongrel twins.
“Exactly,” James said. “We need your help, Lucy. We need your help to figure out how it is that we can avert the disaster predicted in that prophecy. The vampire Armageddon.”
“And you’re going to give it to us,” Rhiannon informed her. “Eagerly, willingly and completely. Anything less, and you’ll become … kitty treats.”
Her pet growled as if on cue, and Lucy tried to hide the chill that tiptoed up her spine.
6
The mansion was musty, dusty and falling down, but Lucy could tell as soon as she walked through its lopsided front door that it must have been amazing once. A large chandelier hung crookedly, wearing a canopy of cobwebs and grime, from the center of a water-stained cathedral ceiling. It was missing a few of the teardrop-shaped dirt-colored bits that might have been crystal prisms. There were lumps of furniture covered in filthy sheets, bookcases without any books, dust and spiderwebs everywhere. A few paintings still hung on the walls, but they were too filthy to see very well. A woman in a gown from some other century. A man on a horse. A landscape. The place smelled of damp plaster, mothballs and that instantly recognizable old house smell. And it felt sad, abandoned and lonely.
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