The Hollows Series Books 1-4

I took a gasping breath and held it. I flicked my gaze at what I could see of her. Her mouth was inches from my ear. Her eyes were black, the hunger in them a frightening contrast to the calm sound of her voice. Her gaze was fixed to my neck. A drop of saliva dropped warm onto my skin. “God, no,” I whispered, shuddering.

Ivy quivered, her body trembling where it touched mine. “Rachel. Stop,” she said again, and terror swept me at the new edge of panic in it. My breath came in a ragged pant. She really was trying to get off me. And by the sound of it, she was losing the battle.

“What do I do?” I whispered.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “I need your help. I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”

My mouth went dry at the little-lost-girl sound of her voice. It took all my will to close my eyes.

“Don’t move.”

Her voice was gray silk. Tension slammed through me. Nausea gripped my stomach. I could feel my pulse pushing against my skin. For what felt like a full minute I lay under her, all my instincts crying out to flee. The crickets chirped, and I felt tears slip from under my fluttering eyelids as her breath came and went on my exposed neck.

I cried out when her grip on my hair loosened. My breath came in a ragged gasp as her weight lifted from me. I couldn’t smell her anymore. I froze, unmoving. “Can I open my eyes?” I whispered.

There was no answer.

I sat up to find myself alone. There was the faintest sound of the sanctuary door closing and the fast cadence of her boots on the sidewalk, then nothing. Numb and shaken, I reached up to first wipe my eyes and then my neck, smearing her saliva into a cold spot. My eyes rove over the room, finding no warmth in the soft gray. She was gone.

Drained, I stood up, not knowing what to do. I clutched my arms about myself so tight it hurt. My thoughts went back to the terror, and before that, the flash of desire that had washed through me, potent and heady. She had said she could only bespell the willing. Had she lied to me, or had I really wanted her to pin me to the chair and rip open my throat?

Seven (#u1e4cd244-3c3d-5afa-9b66-582f24b5f037)

The sun was no longer slanting into the kitchen, but it was still warm. Not warm enough to reach the core of my soul, but nice. I was alive. I had all my body parts and fluids intact. It was a good afternoon.

I was sitting at the uncluttered end of Ivy’s table, studying the most battered book I had found in the attic. It looked old enough to have been printed before the Civil War. Some of the spells I’d never heard of. It made for fascinating reading, and I would admit the chance to try one or two of them filled me with a dangerous titillation. None even hinted at the dark arts, which pleased me to no end. Harming someone with magic was foul and wrong. It went against everything I believed in—and it wasn’t worth the risk.

All magic required a price paid by death in various shades of severity. I was strictly an earth witch. My source of power came gently from the earth through plants and was quickened by heat, wisdom, and witch blood. As I dealt only in white magic, the cost was paid by ending the life of plants. I could live with that. I wasn’t going to delve into the morality of killing plants, otherwise I’d go insane every time I cut my mom’s lawn. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t black earth witches—there were—but black earth magic had nasty ingredients like body parts and sacrifices. Just gathering the materials needed to stir a black spell was enough to keep most earth witches white.

Ley line witches, however, were another story. They drew their power right from the source, raw and unfiltered through living things. They, too, required death, but it was a subtler death—the slow death of the soul, and it wasn’t necessarily theirs. The soul-death needed by white ley line witches wasn’t as severe as that required by black witches, going back to the cutting the grass analogy vs. slaughtering goats in your basement. But creating a powerful spell designed to harm or kill left a definite wound on one’s being.

Black ley line witches got around that by fostering that payment onto someone else, usually attaching it right on the charm to give the receiver a double whammy of back luck. But if the person was insanely “pure of spirit” or more powerful, the cost, though not the charm, came right back to the maker. It was said that enough black on one’s soul made it easy for a demon to pull you involuntarily into the ever-after.

Just as my dad had been, I thought as I rubbed my thumb against the page before me. I knew with all my being that he had been a white witch to the end. He would have had to be able to find his way back into reality, even though he didn’t last to see the next sunrise.

A small sound jerked my attention up. I stiffened upon finding Ivy in a black silk robe, slumped against the doorframe. The memory of last night washed through me, knotting my stomach. I couldn’t stop my hand from creeping up to my neck, and I changed the motion to adjusting my earring as I pretended to study the book before me. “’Morning,” I said cautiously.

“What time is it?” Ivy asked in a ragged whisper.

I flicked a glance at her. Her usually smooth hair was rumpled, waves from her pillow creasing it. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her oval face was slack. Early afternoon lassitude had completely overwhelmed her air of stalking predator. She held a slim leather-bound book in her hand, and I wondered if her night had been as sleepless as mine.

“It’s almost two,” I said warily as I used a foot to push out a chair across the table from me so she wouldn’t sit beside me. She seemed all right, but I didn’t know how to treat her anymore. I was wearing my crucifix—not that it would stop her—and my silver ankle knife—which wasn’t much better. A sleep amulet would drop her, but they were in my bag, sitting out of easy reach on a chair. It would take a good five seconds to invoke one. In all honesty, though, she didn’t look like much of a threat right now.

“I made muffins,” I said. “They were your groceries. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Uh,” she said, shuffling across the shiny floor to the coffeepot in her black slippers. She poured herself a cup of lukewarm brew, leaning back against the counter to sip it. Her wish was gone from around her neck. I wondered what she had wished for. I wondered if it had anything to do with last night. “You’re dressed,” she whispered as she slumped into the chair I had kicked out for her in front of her computer. “How long have you been up?”

“Noon.” Liar, I thought. I’d been up all night pretending to sleep on Ivy’s couch. I decided to officially start my day when I put my clothes back on. Ignoring her, I turned a yellowing page. “Spent your wish, I see,” I murmured cautiously. “What was it?”

“None of your business,” she said, the warning obvious.

My breath left me in a slow exhalation, and I kept my eyes lowered. An uncomfortable silence descended and I let it grow, refusing to break it. I had almost left last night. But the certain death waiting for me outside Ivy’s protection outweighed the possible death at Ivy’s hands. Maybe. Maybe I wanted to know what it felt like for her teeth to sink into me.

This was not where I wanted my thoughts to go. Ivy had scared the crap out of me, but seeing her in the bright light of post noon, she looked human. Harmless. Dare I say, a grump?

“I have something I want you to read,” she said, and I looked up as the thin book she had been holding hit the table between us. There was nothing written on the cover, the embossing almost completely worn away.

“What is it?” I said flatly, not reaching for it.

Eyes dropping, she licked her lips. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said, and my gut tightened. “You probably won’t believe me, but it scared me, too.”

“Not as much as you scared me.” Working with her for a year hadn’t prepared me for last night. I’d only seen her professional side. I hadn’t considered she was different away from the office. I flicked my eyes up at her and away. She looked entirely human. Neat trick, that.

“I haven’t been a practicing vamp for three years,” she said softly. “I wasn’t prepared for … I didn’t realize—” She looked up, her brown eyes pleading. “You have to believe me, Rachel. I didn’t want that to happen. It’s just that you were sending me all wrong signals. And then you got frightened, and then you panicked, and then it got worse.”

“Worse?” I said, deciding anger was better than fear. “You nearly ripped out my throat!”

“I know,” she implored. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t.”

I fought to keep from shuddering as I remembered the warmth of her saliva on my neck.

She nudged the book closer. “I know we can avoid a repeat of last night. I want this to work. There’s no reason it can’t. I owe you something for taking one of your wishes. If you leave, I can’t protect you against the vamp assassins. You don’t want to die at their hands.”

My jaw clenched. No. I didn’t want to die at the hands of a vampire. Especially one who would say she was sorry while killing me.

I met her gaze across the cluttered table. She sat in her black robe and kick-off slippers, looking as dangerous as a sponge. Her need for me to accept her apology was so raw and obvious, it was painful. I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I reached a finger out to pull the book closer. “What is it?”

“A—uh—dating guide?” she said hesitantly.

I took a quick breath and drew my hand back as if stung. “Ivy. No.”

“Wait,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. You’re giving me mixed signals. My head knows you don’t mean it, but my instincts …” Her brow furrowed. “It’s embarrassing, but vampires, whether living or dead, are driven by instincts triggered mostly by … smell?” she finished apologetically. “Just read up on the turn-ons, okay? And don’t do them.”

I settled back into my chair. Slowly, I pulled the book closer, seeing how old it was by the binding. She had said instincts, but I thought hunger was more accurate. It was only the realization of how hard it had been for her to admit that she could be manipulated by something as stupid as smell that kept me from throwing the book back in her face. Ivy prided herself on her control, and to have confessed such a weakness to me told me more than a hundred apologies that she was really sorry. “All right,” I said flatly, and she gave me a relieved, closed-lipped smile.

She took a muffin and pulled the evening edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer that I had found against the front door to her. The air was still tense, but it was a start. I didn’t want to leave the security of the church, but Ivy’s protection was a double-edged sword. She had bottled up her blood lust for three years. If she broke, I might be just as dead.

“‘Councilman Trenton Kalamack blames I.S. negligence in secretary’s death,’” she read, clearly trying to change the subject.

“Yeah,” I said cautiously. I put her book in the pile with my spell books to read later. My fingers felt dirty, and I wiped them on my jeans. “Ain’t money grand? There’s another story of him being cleared of all suspicion of dealing in Brimstone.”

She said nothing, turning pages between bites of muffin until she found the article. “Listen to this,” she said softly. “He says, ‘I was shocked to learn of Mrs. Bates’s second life. She seemed the model employee. I will, of course, pay for her surviving son’s education.’” Ivy gave a short snort of mirthless laughter. “Typical.” She turned to the comics. “So will you be spell crafting today?”

I shook my head. “I’m going to the records vault before they close for the weekend. This,” I flicked a finger at the paper, “is useless. I want to see what really happened.”

Ivy set down her muffin, thin eyebrows high in question.

“If I can prove Trent is dealing in Brimstone and give him to the I.S.,” I said, “they’ll forget about my contract. They have a standing warrant for him.” And then I can get the hell out of this church, I added silently.