Strange Brew

DARK SINS Jenna Maclaine

Venice, 1818

My body hit the wooden floor with a loud thud. I'm not sure if it was the fall that knocked my breath from my chest, or the naked man who landed on top of me. Either way, I was left lying on the cold floor, blinking up at the ceiling, and trying to drag some air back into my lungs. I don't have to breathe, you understand, but it's one of those human quirks, like a love for whiskey and chocolate, that being dead just doesn't change. You see, I'm a vampire.

"And a very bad witch," I muttered, trying to push Michael's body off of mine.

He groaned and rolled to one side. "You are not a bad witch, love. But I think you might have dislocated my knee that time."

I gave him an arch look. "Where the hell are our clothes?" I asked.

We both sat up and looked back at the bed. Sure enough, there were our clothes, lying on the sheets as if our bodies had simply vanished from them. Which they had.

"Oh, damn," I spat. "We were supposed to end up naked in the bed, and the clothes were supposed to end up on the floor!"

Michael smiled at me indulgently, his blue eyes twinkling. "Yes, dear, I know. You're getting better, though. We were just a few feet away this time."

I growled in frustration as he stood, scooped me up, and tossed me on the bed. He started at my right ankle and began slowly kissing his way up the inside of my leg.

"I am a bad witch," I said. "I've spent the last three summers in Inverness with my aunt Maggie, who hates me, and the best we've accomplished is to give me enough control over my magic so that things don't blow up or burst into flames anymore. Even Maggie thinks I'm a bad witch. And possibly evil."

"She doesn't hate you, darling. She's just afraid of what you are, and I think she's also a bit jealous."

"Of me? For the love of the Goddess, why? She's got more magic in her little finger than I could even think about calling."

He stopped kissing the side of my knee and looked up at me. In the candlelight, his cheekbones stood out in sharp relief, making his beautiful face look more than a little dangerous.

"Not more magic," he said, "and not better magic. I've seen your magic, Cin, and your aunt cannot even come close to it. She's just better at working with what she has than you are. Be patient, love. You'll find your way. I believe in you."

I smiled and reached down, pushing a lock of dark blond hair off his forehead. "But what if I never figure it out, Michael?" I asked softly. "I have all this power, I can feel it inside me, but I just can't seem to get it to work the way it's supposed to. My spells are a disaster and only work a fraction of the time. The rest of the time I have to be careful that I don't accidentally…"

"Turn someone into a weasel?" he asked.

And, yes, I had done that once. I groaned and flopped down against the pillows.

"Cin, sweetheart, love of my undead life," Michael said as he trailed kisses up the inside of my thigh, "it's only been three years. You're the first witch anyone's ever heard of who's been turned into a vampire and still kept her powers. We have eternity ahead of us. Have some patience, and it will come to you."

I snorted. "You know very well that I'm the least patient person—"

"Are you going to talk the entire way through this?" he asked as his breath caressed the most intimate part of me. I shivered as his mouth hovered there, almost touching but not quite, and everything I was about to say went clean out of my head. "Because I have more interesting things you can do with your mouth, mo ghraidh."

I giggled and raised my arms over my head, grasping the headboard, stretching my body across the decadent satin sheets to display my curves and valleys to their best advantage. "Oh, no," I replied with a wicked grin, "I'm finished. Please continue."

He lowered his head, and I heard the wood under my fingers crack as I called his name.

Sometimes i have premonitions. It's a gift I inherited from my father, as I inherited my magic from my mother. What I feel is never a solid knowledge of what's to come, but a nebulous feeling of unease that something is wrong, or about to be. It happens sporadically enough that I know that just because I don't feel that I'm in danger, it doesn't mean I'm not. On the other hand, whenever I do feel it, I know without a doubt not to ignore it.

I woke with Michael's body curled against my back, his right arm slung over me. I blinked several times, wondering what had pulled me from my sleep, and then I felt it. My stomach dropped, as if I'd just fallen from a great height, and chills broke out along my skin. I threw the covers off and jumped from the bed. I checked the lock on the door, then starting tossing clothes at Michael.

"Michael, get up. Something's wrong," I said, and threw his boots at him.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know," I replied, "it's only a feeling, but I'll be damned if I'm going to get caught naked in bed by a bunch of vampire slayers. I have no wish to repeat what happened in Austria last year. Fighting naked is just awkward."

I struggled into the leather riding breeches I'd had on last night. Getting into them was not easy, but the only things I'd unpacked thus far were dresses. I would rather not fight in a dress if I had a choice in the matter. Actually, I would rather not be fighting at all. Michael and I, along with our companions Devlin and Justine, spent most of our undead lives hunting and executing rogue vampires but this trip to Venice was supposed to be a holiday. As a human, I had always wanted to see the city and it was one of the places Michael had promised to take me when he'd turned me into a vampire three years ago. Pushing down all thoughts of romantic gondola rides, I pulled my boots on. I had just reached for my dagger when the first blow hit the apartment's door. I winced and hoped that Devlin and Justine had heard the crash from their rooms down the hall. If it came to a fight, I certainly wanted our friends at our backs. Michael grabbed his claymore and stalked from the bedroom, wearing nothing but his pants and boots. I hastily pulled his shirt on over my head, tucked the dagger into the waistband of my breeches, and followed him.

The third blow cracked the frame, and the door swung drunkenly in on one hinge. Five men and two women swarmed into the room. I choked on the smell of sulfur and blood. Witches, then. Ones who practiced dark magic. Michael glanced at me, and then pulled the great claymore from its scabbard. A tall man, apparently the leader, stepped forward. The wizard wore dark clothes and a black cloak. He might have been handsome, even with his slightly receding hairline and a nose that was too large for his face, if it hadn't been for the fact that evil and dark dealings radiated from him like heat from the sun. The tip of Michael's claymore came to rest at the man's throat.

"Cosa volete?" Michael asked. "What do you want?"

Despite this invasion, Michael would be reluctant to run the man through. The Dark Council and the High King himself frowned on vampires killing humans, and the wizard had not offered us violence. Yet.

The man never spoke. He simply raised his right hand to his mouth, palm up, and blew across his palm. A cloud of pink powder swirled into the air and, before I could shout a warning, Michael's sword clattered to the floor and he collapsed beside it. I rushed forward, falling to my knees next to him. I turned Michael's face to me, and brushed his hair away, running my fingers over his lips, across his sculpted cheekbones, over his dark brows. I knew he wasn't dead. Without whatever magic animated a vampire he would be nothing more than a seventy-year-old corpse, dust and bone in my fingers. He was alive, but he wasn't breathing. I knew he didn't have to, but in the three years we'd been together I had never seen him not breathe, even in his sleep. Whatever the wizard had dosed him with had put him so far under that there was no consciousness left.

I glared up at the man, fear squeezing my heart. "What have you done, wizard?"

The man smiled, and it was not a nice smile. I lunged for Michael's sword and had just wrapped my fingers around the hilt when the wizard's companions fell on me like a pack of wolves. Fingers dug into me from all directions as I rose to my feet. The four men had taken hold of my arms and one of the women had grabbed me around the waist. The other woman had attached herself to my legs, trying to pull me back down. I threw my weight backward and the women fell to the floor in a tangle of skirts and limbs. Pulling my sword arm in front of me, I forced the two men holding my right arm to stumble forward and I brought my knee up into one man's groin. He released his grip on me, falling to his knees in a howl of agony. I jerked my arm from the other one's grasp and slammed my elbow into his nose. Swinging Michael's claymore in a wide arc toward the other men, I smiled as they released their hold on me.

"Codardi!" one of the women shrieked as the men stumbled back in fear.

She stood, with her steel-gray hair disheveled around her face and a maniacal look in her eyes, and raised her hands toward me. My Italian wasn't good enough to follow what she was saying, but the slow, deliberate cadence of her voice certainly made it sound like a spell. I was not about to give her the opportunity to finish it. I called up my own magic, feeling it build within me, and hoped that just this once it would do as I bid it.

I held my left hand out in front of me and a surge of power hit the woman with the force of a battering ram, sending her flying across the room. Hearing movement behind me I whirled around, magic in one hand and the great claymore in the other, just in time for the wizard to hit me squarely in the face with a handful of his pink powder.

The look of satisfaction on his hawkish features was the last thing I saw before the world went black.

The droning hum of voices pulled me back into consciousness and I found a stone floor, cold and damp, under my cheek. Groaning, I rolled onto my back and pushed my dark red hair from my face. What had I been doing? What time was it? What day? I blinked, and stared up at the ceiling. There seemed to be a netting of black lace above me. That wasn't right. I frowned, trying to get my bearings through the fog that clouded my head and dragged at my body.

And then it all came rushing back.

I sat up so quickly that the room spun and I had to brace my hands on the floor and close my eyes to keep from blacking out. When I finally opened them again, I found myself in a large rectangular stone chamber. Torches and numerous large candelabra, such as you would find in a church sanctuary, illuminated the windowless room and cast flickering shadows over the wizard's black-robed coven, gathered at one end of the hall.

A quick assessment of my surroundings revealed that the only way out was the heavy wooden door behind me. It was a massive thing studded with iron bolts and flanked by two cloaked and hooded figures. The one to the left of the door raised her head as I struggled to my feet. The witch with the steel-gray hair glared at me, her eyes blazing with hatred, but the monotonous repetition of the spell the two of them were chanting never wavered. I braced myself for the impact of their magic but when nothing happened the tension in my body eased slightly and I allowed myself to turn my back to them and survey the rest of the room more closely. What I saw made my stomach tighten in fear.

Against the wall to my left was a heavily carved stone altar, perhaps four feet high and ten feet long. Laid out of top of it was Devlin, the leader of our group, looking much the same as Michael had back at the palazzo. He looked as though he was asleep, but I could detect no rise and fall of his chest, no movement of any kind from him. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall, and every inch of him was thickly muscled. His massive chest was bare, but he still wore breeches and boots.

I turned to my right to see Justine, his consort and my dearest friend, laid out on a similar altar against the opposite wall. She was stark naked. Justine was a former courtesan, and a very practical Frenchwoman. Unlike Devlin, she would have gone for her weapons before her clothing. At least our attackers had given her some semblance of dignity by draping her long, silver-blonde hair over her bare breasts. It still made me angry to see her there like that, naked and helpless. She was Justine, the Devil's Justice, and she deserved better than that.

I swung around to face the phalanx of robed figures at the far end of the chamber. There were ten of them, all garbed in black robes with hoods raised to hide their faces. They chanted in low voices, perhaps in Latin, in perfect unison with the other two witches behind me. Some were women and some were men, but the man I was searching for exuded so much evil that I could have easily found him in a crowd of a hundred, let alone ten. The wizard stepped forward and pushed his hood back to reveal his blond hair, graying at the temples, and his cold, dark eyes.

"Where is Michael?" I demanded in English, hoping he would understand.

I was frightened and angry, and the smattering of Italian I knew had deserted me. There were undoubtedly other questions I should have asked, but this was the most important one. Michael was my world; without him, nothing else mattered.

The man looked a bit surprised and then stepped aside, waving a hand to the other robed figures who parted to reveal yet another stone altar. There was blood on this one, but it was old blood, human blood. None of it belonged to the man who was laid out on top of it.

"Michael," I whispered, and surged forward.

Too late I remembered the strange black netting. I hit it with the full force of my body, and it popped and sizzled as it burned me. I staggered back, one singed hand reaching up to touch my face. The wizard laughed. It was a ward, and a particularly nasty one at that. I called up my magic, summoned it from that place where it lives deep inside me, and pushed it out through my hands, visualizing it moving through my body and into the ward. The netting wavered, like cobwebs in a breeze, but held fast. I tried again, hoping that I had weakened it. The steady hum of the coven's voices grew louder as I gathered all the magic I could call and threw it at the ward. Whatever spell they were chanting strengthened the binding and my magic bounced off the barrier and flew back at me, hit me squarely in the chest and knocked me to the floor.

"They said you were a powerful witch, and yet you cannot break a simple ward," the wizard observed, and I was surprised to realize that he was English. Then again, Venice was lousy with Englishmen these days. I rose unsteadily to my feet as he stalked around the ward, which surrounded me in a ten-foot circle and arched above my head as though someone had hung a net woven of darkness over me. "I thought perhaps you would make a useful addition to my coven, vampire, but even the most inexperienced of my followers knows the spells to break a ward. I must say, you are a disappointment."

I glared at him. It was close enough to the truth, but I wouldn't let him see that he'd hurt my pride, even a little bit.

"I'll kill you for this, wizard," I spat.

He leaned in close to the ward, his dark eyes mocking me with cool disdain. "You can threaten me all you want, vampire, but nothing on this earthly plane frightens me, especially not an inept witch caught in my web."

I smiled. "Oh, you'll fear me before this is over. I promise you, you'll die screaming for my mercy."

Sometimes bravado is all you have.

His arrogance faltered just a bit, and then he recovered and inclined his head, returning my smile. "We shall see, vampire. We shall see."

"What do you want?" I asked. "Who are you?"

"My name is Edmund Gage, and what I want is vengeance."

As I watched him circle the ward, I tried to recall ever having seen the man before, let alone having done anything to him that would require this level of retribution.

"I don't believe I've ever wronged you, Mr. Gage," I stated.

"Oh, not you, vampire, not you. It's that bastard Marco I'll have my vengeance on."

Marco was the Regent of Venice, the local master vampire. I'd met him when we'd arrived in town, since it was proper protocol to present ourselves at the local court whenever we entered a new city.

"If you seek to harm Marco through us, then you've chosen the wrong vampires, wizard. We do not belong to him."

He shrugged. "You will do for my purposes all the same."

"Do you have any idea who we are?" I asked.

He inclined his head again. "You are The Righteous—judge, jury, and executioner in the world of the vampires."

He was correct. We constantly traveled throughout Western Europe, and it was our duty to deal with anything the local Wardens couldn't handle. We had no allegiance to Marco, though, or to any Regent. Unfortunately that also meant that with all four of us trapped here, it was unlikely anyone would notice we were missing for quite some time.

"If you know so much about us, Gage, then you should know that we do not belong to Marco. We are the High King's subjects alone, and if you kill any of us, you will bring down his wrath upon you. Trust me when I tell you that you really do not want that."

I'd never met the High King, but we were his, and I hoped that I was right about him avenging our deaths.

"Ah, but it must be you, my dear. A witch for a witch—that is what I require. Marco took something precious from me, and it will shame him that I took you in his city."

"A witch for a witch," I repeated. "What are you talking about?"

Gage came within an inch of the ward. If I could have breached it, I could have snapped his neck before he had time to draw a breath.

"He took my daughter from me," he said, each word filled with pain and barely contained rage. "She would have been the greatest of us all, and he bespelled her, defiled her, and turned her into a bloodsucking leech."

Marco's consort… Sara? Now that I thought about it, she did look a bit like Gage, the same blonde hair, the same dark eyes. She must have inherited her mother's nose. She was a pretty little thing, not at all someone I would take for a practitioner of the dark arts, and she was completely in love with Marco and he with her. And there was not a bit of magic left in her. It seemed I truly was the only witch whose powers had survived the turning.

"Sara is your daughter?" I asked.

"Do not!" he yelled, and then his voice dropped to nothing more than a sibilant hiss. "You are not fit to say her name."

I shook my head. "Marco may have bespelled her, Gage, she may have even been bespelled when he turned her, but once she was turned, he lost all power over her. Vampire tricks do not work on other vampires. She has complete free will. I saw her not a fortnight ago, and she was happy. If she's under any spell, it's only that of a woman in love."

"You speak in twisted lies," he spat.

"It's no lie. They are in love, and she is his consort. Her magic is gone though, Gage," I said softly. "Let her go. Let us go. Vengeance will not bring your daughter, or her power, back to you."

"No," he said flatly. "Marco will pay for what he did. He will pay, Cin Craven. He took from me, and I will take The Righteous from under his nose. It is not enough, not nearly enough, but it will do for a start. Your friends are merely here for my amusement. There are some devious spells I can spin with the blood of a vampire, you know. You, however, you will be mine."

"Not in your wildest dreams," I assured him.

"Oh, no, dear—in reality. You will get hungry eventually, and then you will drink of my blood and I will bind you to me, as I have bound my other followers."

I laughed. "I'll die before your tainted blood ever passes my lips, Gage."

He smiled. "That's fine with me, too."

I tried, truly I did. Long after Gage had gone, I looked for holes in the warding, any spot where there might be a weakness in the magic that held it together. I tested it until my' hands were raw and bloody with burns. The thing that frustrated me the most was that I knew Aunt Maggie had a book specifically on spells to break wards. When I closed my eyes, I could see the damned thing on the shelf in her rented flat in Inverness, its brown leather-bound spine mocking me. If I'd been a better student, then maybe I'd have remembered something about what was in the book but, as Maggie had often said of me, I concentrate about as well as a puppy. And now that one, tiny character flaw was going to get us all killed.

Two of Gage's followers were in the chamber with me at all times. Apparently the chanting had to be continued for the spells to hold, because they rotated in turns every few hours. I tried talking to them. I tried begging, pleading, bribery. The only response I received from any of them was when one spat at me and hissed, "I hope the master kills you slowly, you bloodsucking whore."

I stopped trying after that. There's no reasoning with zealots.

The sound of the door opening brought me unsteadily to my feet. Gage stalked in with an ornate golden cup in his hands. I could smell fresh blood from across the room, and my stomach churned. I had no idea how long we'd been his prisoners, but I hadn't fed since the night before we were taken—and I was hungry.

"I have something for you, vampire," he said. "Something I think you want badly by now."

He walked up to the ward. Here was my chance. If he wanted me to drink, he would have to break the warding. I watched in fascination as the warding melted for him, and his hand and the cup passed through the small hole. It wasn't as much as I'd hoped for, but it would do. If I couldn't get out, then I would pull him through the ward to me. I lunged for him and nearly made it, too. I had been so intent on what the one hand was doing that I didn't notice that he'd conjured a ball of pure magic in the other. The magic hit me when I was a bare inch away from him. The force of it slammed me into the far side of the ward, searing the skin on my back through the fabric of Michael's shirt.

The man was smart. There was no way he could have thrown that blast in reaction to my movements. I was a vampire and, whatever his unnatural magical talents, he was still human. I could move faster than his eyes could track. No, he'd thrown his magic at me at the same instant he'd passed his hand through the ward. As I slowly picked my battered body off the floor, he set the cup on the ground and then stepped back.

"Drink," he said.

I walked to the cup slowly, never taking my eyes off him. I picked it up and passed it under my nose. It was human, but I didn't want to drink it. I knew it was his.

"It's your blood, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yes, and it's filled with my power. Drink it and join me, Cin Craven, and I will let you live."

I drew back to throw the cup in his face.

"Before you do that," Gage said, staying my hand, "think of what I can offer you. Think of the power, Miss Craven, what it would feel like to bend all that magic inside you to your will. I can make you the witch you were born to be."

"A practitioner of the dark arts was not what I was born to be, Gage."

He laughed. "You are a vampire. You live in darkness. Now let that darkness live in you. I can make you more powerful than any white witch could dream of being. Let me make you what you were meant to be."

I saw the utter conviction of what he was saying shining in his eyes, and for the smallest moment I was tempted. I glanced at the cup of blood. What would it feel like to have utter control over the magic I possessed? I looked back at Gage, and he smiled. And over his shoulder I could see the lifeless form of my beloved stretched out on an altar dedicated to everything I had sworn to fight against.

I shook my head and threw the cup at the ward, slinging its contents at Gage as I did so. The blood spattered against the black netting and disappeared. The ward was fueled with blood magic, and it had sucked up Gage's blood like rain on a drought-ridden field. I began to rethink my assumption that Aunt Maggie's book would have anything in it to break this ward. Macgregor witches did not deal in blood magic.

Gage raised his hand, and the cup stirred from where it had fallen on the floor. It spun three times, and then it flew through the ward and into his outstretched hand. He caught it without ever looking away from my face.

"I will be back, vampire. Perhaps you will have reconsidered my offer by then."

"Don't count on it," I replied.

"It matters little to me if you join me willingly, as the rest of my coven has, or by force."

"You cannot force me, Gage."

"Yes, you seem willing enough to sacrifice yourself for your morals. But are you strong enough to sacrifice your companions as well? You will drink what I offer, Miss Craven, because the next time you throw this cup back in my face, I will take it and I will fill it with your lover's blood. I will drain them all dry before your eyes. Tell me," he said, almost sweetly, "can you sit there and watch them die when you could save them?"

"You're going to kill them anyway," I whispered.

"True, but if you drink from me, I'll bring them a swift death at the end of a stake. They'll never know what happened. If you refuse, I'll wake them just enough so that they know they are dying, slowly, and they'll know that you could have saved them, but you wouldn't. I hope that gives you something to think about."

He strode from the room, and the heavy wooden door slammed behind him, echoing through the chamber like a gunshot.

I sank to the floor and cried, my sobs muffled by the unending chanting that echoed through the chamber.

Gage was true to his word. After what seemed like an eternity, he returned with his entire black-robed coven in tow. They surrounded my warded prison like vultures waiting for the opportunity to fall on me and rend me to pieces. I ignored them and kept my eyes on Gage. He was the key. If he'd bonded the coven to him by blood, then his blood and his death should break the bond. I didn't know if any of them had enough magic on their own to fight us all, but I was willing to risk it. Gage's power radiated through the chamber, and I didn't feel anything that came close to it from any of the others.

Gage came to stand in front of me. I took a calming breath and squared my shoulders. One way or another, this nightmare would end here and now.

"Will you drink?" he demanded.

The gods knew I wanted to. I was weak and hungry, but his blood was tainted with evil and I wouldn't do it, couldn't do it. I gritted my teeth and shook my head.

"You know you want it, vampire," he said, his tone almost seductive. "You long to taste that coppery liquid on your tongue, don't you? And the power. Think of it. You have power of your own, Miss Craven. I can feel it, even though you have no idea how to use it. I can teach you."

I realized something in that moment, as I listened to him offer what I had already refused. Despite what he had said the last time he was here, it was important to him that I join him willingly. Whether it was to appease his sense of vengeance or vanity he needed me to come to him of my own free will. I would not give him that satisfaction.

"I am a Macgregor witch, Gage, whether or not I am worthy of the name. Your blood magic is beneath me. You use the dark arts because the Goddess has forsaken you. You have nothing to teach me."

He jerked his head back as if I'd slapped him, and then narrowed his eyes. "So be it."

Gage walked to where Michael lay and stood over him.

"Don't touch him!" I shouted. "If you harm any of them, I swear to you I will make you pay!"

He laughed. "How amusing that you continue to make threats, Miss Craven," Gage said as he pulled a long, deadly looking dagger from under his robe. "If you had any power to make good on them, you would have done so by now."

He raised one hand and passed it over my lover's face. Michael's eyes flew open, and I could see the muscles in his neck straining with the effort to move.

Gage leaned down, smiling. "Good evening, vampire."

"Who are you?" Michael asked, his voice low and hoarse. "Why can't I move?"

"I am Edmund Gage, and I have just been having a conversation with your lady. Did you know that she has all your lives in her hands, and she refuses to save you?"

"Cin? What have you done to her?"

Gage stepped back and allowed Michael to turn his head. His blue eyes focused on me, and I smiled sadly as his worried gaze raked over me from head to toe. Then, satisfied that I was unharmed, he glanced around the room.

"One simple task could save you and your friends," Gage said, drawing Michael's attention back to him, "yet she refuses. She would rather let me bleed you dry. What do you think of her love for you now?"

"Michael, no," I pleaded. "It's not—"

"Shh, m'anam," he said. "I trust you."

I looked at him, and my stomach clenched. He was my world, this man. I had been raised a sheltered and spoiled aristocrat, meant for nothing more in life than breeding more sheltered and spoiled aristocrats. And then I had found him. I had given up my life to save us all, and I had died in his arms. I looked into his eyes and I remembered that night, and all the others that had followed—dancing with him in the streets of Paris; making love to him with the salt of a Spanish sea still on my skin; lying in his arms under a Highland sky, watching the northern lights shimmer above us. He had taught me how to truly live, and love. I loved this man beyond all reason. I loved his body. I loved his mind. I loved the way he made me laugh and the kindness in his heart. I loved the way that he loved me like I was the other half of his soul.

I reached my hand out to him just as Gage's blade came down, slicing Michael's wrist open and spilling his blood across the cold gray stone of the altar.

I slammed my body into the ward and screamed to the gods from the depths of my soul.

And the world stood still.

Nothing moved, Gage's hand was frozen on the downswing, that evil smile I'd come to hate was still plastered across his face. Not a breath or a heartbeat echoed through the chamber. I stared, transfixed, at the drop of Michael's blood that hung suspended in the air below his wrist.

"Three years," came a deep, definitely female voice from behind me. I spun around and was completely unprepared for whoever—or whatever—stood behind me.

She was tall, and I couldn't distinguish any of her features. She wore a cloak made entirely of black feathers. The hood framed where her face should be, but all I could see was shadow. She walked past me, through one side of the ward and out the other as though it weren't there. As she moved the shadows under that hood seemed to move with her. The feathers that made up the cloak grazed my hand as she passed, and they seemed almost alive. They were huge, black and glossy, with iridescent undertones of dark purple and green, and they brushed the floor with a soft whisper as she moved.

"Three years," she said again. "A blink of the eye, really, compared to the millennia I've witnessed. I thought I would give you time to adjust, to learn on your own." She turned and faced me again, standing between me and Michael. As she crossed her arms over her chest her feathers seemed to fluff, like an agitated bird, and then settle again. "Obviously that approach has not worked well."

I shook my head. "Who are you?"

She sighed. "Don't be obtuse, Cin. You called me. Whoever do you think I am?"

I had called her? My mind raced. Gage had cut Michael and I had screamed…

"Morrigan," I whispered.

The feathers ruffled again. "Precisely."

Morrigan, the Great Phantom Queen, war goddess, harbinger of death. She often appeared in the guise of a raven. I had invoked her in one of my last successful spells, to summon The Righteous to me. It was how I'd met Michael. She was the goddess I prayed to the most. And she was here, standing in front of me. I fell to my knees.

"Morrigan, please, help me," I pleaded.

"Oh, for the love of Danu," she muttered as she once again walked through the ward. I looked up, but could still see nothing but shadow under the hood of her cloak. The hands that wrapped around my upper arms and jerked me to my feet, however, were very real. "Get up, child. You have no need of my help. I gave you all the power you will ever need when I created you."

"You?"

"Of course. You are all mine. Vampires, werewolves, anything that walks the night is mine. You are my warriors. There are battles to come—"

"What battles?" I asked.

She grew very still, and I cursed myself for a fool. I was probably not wise to question a goddess.

"You will know in my own good time," she said, and her words were clipped and fierce like the staccato drumbeats at a public hanging.

I dropped to one knee. "Of course. I beg your forgiveness, goddess."

"As I was saying," she continued, "I created you to feed on humans so that you would have a vested interest in protecting them, as a shepherd protects his flock."

As a shepherd protects his flock. I'd heard that analogy before, almost to the word. Devlin had told me that that was how the High King viewed the symbiotic relationship between vampires and humans. Did Morrigan appear to the High King as well? If we were her creation, and he was our king, then I supposed it would be a logical assumption. It would also explain how one man had come out of nowhere, as legend had it, and challenged all comers in hand-to-hand combat until no one stood between him and control of all of our kind. It would be an easy enough thing to accomplish with a war goddess by your side.

"I created you to be virtually immortal, so you would have the power to fight what I need you to fight, and when I need you to fight it. I made you physically stronger and faster, so you would have the skills to wage the battles to come." She walked over to Michael and reached out with one pale, slender hand, running a long, shiny black fingernail down the edge of his cheek. "I created you with the capacity to love the same person for centuries, so that your long lives would not be lonely, and so that you would have something worth fighting for."

The words came softly, almost like a caress. She turned to me.

"He is beautiful. I put him in Devlin's way, you know, all those years ago. I chose him for you. He is my gift, to make up for the life you had to leave behind."

How was it that she had chosen him for me when he had been made a vampire half a century before I was even born?

"I don't understand."

"I know you don't," she said, and nothing more.

I waited for an explanation, but apparently that was all I was going to get. I knew better than to question her further. Instead, I begged for her mercy.

"Please, Morrigan, save my friends. I will give my life for theirs."

She walked over to where I knelt and reached out a hand, cupping my chin and turning my face to the dark emptiness that was her own.

"You really don't understand. As I told you before, you don't need me to save them. You are special, Cin." She leaned close. "You are my greatest weapon."

"Me? I can't even break the ward to get to Gage. I'm worthless as a witch."

She laughed and brushed past me. I watched her weave in and out of the ward, walking in circles around me.

"Tell me, Cin, do you eat as a human does?"

She already knew the answer to that, but she was a goddess and so I played along. "I can eat. I still enjoy the taste of human food and drink, though it gives me no sustenance."

"And can you walk in the sun? Take a morning stroll or an afternoon carriage ride through the park?"

Only if I wanted to burst into flames, I thought. "You know I cannot," I answered.

"Oh good, so you do realize that you are no longer human?" she said with more than a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

"Of course."

"Then why do you insist on believing that your magic must be practiced as humans practice their magic?"

"What other way is there? I practice my craft as my aunt has been teaching me, and my mother before her."

"Fine witches, the both of them, but they are not you. No vampire ever created has had the magic you have, Cin. I have given you a great deal of power, not only your own magic but the accumulated magic of all those Macgregor women who came before you. I chose you because you understand the responsibility that comes with power, it's been bred into your family for centuries, and you have the strength of character to shoulder such a burden. You are my chosen one, and it's time you ceased weeping like a child and used your power."

I opened my mouth and the closed it again, unsure of what to say to that. Before I could come up with a suitable reply, she simply vanished. A heartbeat later I felt her behind me.

"If I cannot make you understand with words," she said, and grasped my head in her hands, "then I'll try different means."

There was a nearly blinding flash of light, and then it was as if I was floating above the room, watching myself below. Gage turned and smiled at the me that was still down there, locked behind the ward. I saw myself walk through that ward, and I knew before I touched it that it wouldn't stop me. I watched my hand raise, and the knife fly from Gage's hand to mine. I felt a rush of power, as though I were in my body and yet out of it at the same time. The power wasn't Gage's or Morrigan's. It was mine. I felt it. I felt everything and, finally, I understood.

I knew why my magic had been so wild in those early days, and why it was so difficult for me to harness now. It wasn't that I had no control of it; it was that I didn't understand how to control it. I was raised to think of magic as a tool, something that could only be performed with the proper rituals and spells. Perhaps that's the way it worked for my human relatives, but this magic, my magic, was different. I had thought of it as something that lived inside me. I now realized that the magic was me. It didn't answer to herbs and potions and spells. It answered only to the force of my will. My magic had been fettered and chained all these years—by tradition, by my teachers, by my aunt Maggie—but it was free now.

I was free. I finally saw exactly who and what I was meant to be.

"There's my girl," Morrigan whispered. She took her hands from my head, and I was back in my own body again. "Now, end this," she said, and snapped her fingers. I felt her disappear an instant before time began to move again.

Gage turned to me, that arrogant smile still on his face. I called my magic and felt it rise up, filling and completing me, and for the first time it wasn't something I was trying to harness or fight.

I smiled back at Gage. I was the Devil's Witch. I was blessed by a goddess and no human wizard, no matter how powerful, could ever hope to stand against me.

I walked through the ward just as I had done in Morrigan's vision. There was no burning this time, no pain. The ward fell before me like a thin veil of cobwebs, not because of any spell or incantation, but because I willed it so. I put my hand up, and the knife flew from Gage's grasp. I caught it and felt a stirring of victory when I saw the first flicker of fear in his eyes.

"How—?"

"I warned you what would happen if you laid a hand on him, Gage," I said. "One drop of his blood is more important to me than your wretched life."

The coven stirred behind me and finally that infernal chanting stopped.

I ignored them and kept walking toward Gage.

"Keep the spells going!" Gage yelled. "She's sworn to protect humans. She won't kill me."

I cocked a brow at him. "Want to wager your life on that?"

The chanting resumed, but somewhat raggedly. When I was about five feet from Gage he conjured a ball of magic in his hand. I expected him to throw it at me, but instead he held it over Michael.

"Come no closer," he warned.

With a flick of my wrist, I snuffed the dark orb as easily as a candle. Gage roared in frustration and rushed me. I sent the knife flying into his shoulder with such force that it knocked him back against the altar. I was on him with my hand around his throat before he knew what had hit him.

"Please," he begged.

"I told you that you'd die begging for my mercy," I said, and squeezed just a bit harder.

"Cin," Michael whispered. "Don't. He's human."

I looked at my consort. I knew that look. I had once asked him to spare a life that he wanted to take. Now he was asking the same of me. Perhaps I could break the spells that held them without Gage's death. I relaxed my grip on Gage's throat… and felt a searing pain in my chest.

I looked down. Gage had taken his moment, pulled the knife from his shoulder and driven it into my heart. It wasn't a wooden stake so it wouldn't kill me, but by the gods it hurt.

"Do you feel it?" Gage asked.

I released Gage and stumbled back a few steps.

"Cin, what is it?" Michael asked. "What's wrong?"

I looked down at the knife hilt sticking out of my chest. Gage's blood had been on the knife. It was now inside me. I could feel it, the darkness in it. I felt it latch on to my own magic and spread through me like a wildfire.

I pulled the knife from my chest, dropping it to the floor.

I turned my gaze to Gage.

"You feel it, don't you?" he asked again.

"I really will kill you for this," I whispered.

"No, you won't. This is what I've been offering you, but you were too stubborn, too full of your precious morals to take it. How does it feel now, vampire?"

"It feels like evil spreading through my blood."

"Exactly," he said in triumph.

"Cin!" Michael shouted. "Fight it! Darling, please, fight it!"

"Silence," Gage snapped, passing his hand once again over Michael's face.

Michael tried to speak, but no sound came out. His eyes though, those beautiful blue eyes, were panic-stricken. I closed my eyes. I tried to fight it, but I could feel the darkness blossoming in my chest and radiating through my body. It was like the slow burn of a good whiskey, multiplied by a thousand.

"That's right," Gage said as he struggled to stand and walk to me. "Do you feel the darkness inside you now, taking you over bit by bit? It feels decadent, doesn't it, to have all that power and not be limited by morals or conscience?"

"Yes," I whispered, and opened my eyes. "But unfortunately for you my conscience and morals were the only things stopping me from doing this—" I said, and drove my fist into his chest.

I felt skin tear and bones break, not all of them his, but I didn't stop until I ripped the still-beating heart from his chest. I looked down at it and then I threw my head back and laughed.

As Gage's lifeless body sank to the ground, I turned toward the coven. They'd abruptly stopped chanting, staring at the thing in my hand. I smiled at them and they bolted.

I willed the one door to close and lock. At first they pounded and pulled, and then they tried magic to open it. Finally, they turned back to me. I stood ready for them, soaked in Gage's blood with his heart still in my hand. The smell of their fear filled the room, mingling with the sweet scent of blood and the pungent odor of sulfur. Under the fear, though, was anger and hatred. They couldn't flee, so they would fight.

The steel-haired woman stepped forward and drew a stake from somewhere inside her robe. "She killed the master," she screamed. "She must die! Kill her! Kill her!"

The others followed her lead, and they swarmed across the floor as if someone had kicked over a nest of ants. I dropped Gage's heart to the ground.

Let them come, I thought, I'm so very hungry.

They fell on me in a blur of black-robed bodies, and I welcomed them. A black cloud enveloped me, pushing down everything I was until it alone was in control of my body. Gage's magic rode me—and it wanted blood. It wanted me to feel just how powerful I could be. My ears rang with the coven's screams of anger, and of pain.

Dimly, as though from some great distance, I heard Devlin's booming voice. "Stop her! Stop her or she'll kill them all!"

Arms like steel bands grabbed me from behind, but I would not be stopped. The magic gave me the strength to tear myself free of his grasp and I hit him with a blast so powerful that it threw him across the room. The darkness inside me reveled in the fact that I could toss a man who was nearly six and a half feet of solid muscle as though he were nothing more than a rag doll. It didn't recognize that this was Devlin, my friend, and as the black magic consumed me I couldn't bring myself to care. No matter how many of them fell by the wayside, Gage's coven seemed to keep coming at me and nothing, not Justine's pleading screams or the hands that tried to hold me back, would stop me. Gage's power had to be satisfied and the only way to accomplish that was with blood and death. Suddenly there was a face in my line of vision, blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, sensual mouth.

Michael, some part of me screamed softly in the darkness, please make it stop.

I held my hand out. As he took a tentative step toward me, a dark-robed figure rose up from the floor behind him. It was the steel-haired woman. With grim determination she raised her stake high and Michael's eyes widened in fear as I sprang toward him. I shoved him out of the way before her weapon could hit its mark. She staggered forward and the last thing she saw in this life was the fury in my eyes as I snapped her neck.

It was over.

With that final death, Gage's magic settled inside me like a nest of vipers coiled in my belly—well-fed, smug, and content. For now. I looked around. Devlin was standing a few feet away with Justine in his arms, a cloak wrapped around her that had been taken off of one of Gage's followers. Some part of me didn't understand why my friends were looking at me with something akin to horror and pity on their faces. I blinked and looked around me again.

It was carnage.

The floor was littered with bodies, twelve of them, to be exact. Throats had been ripped out, necks twisted at odd angles. I took a step back, and my foot hit something. Turning, I looked down into Gage's slack face and blank, staring eyes. It was then I noticed that I was covered in blood. The once-white shirt was soaked with it. I raised my hands, and they too were caked with blood.

"Michael," I said softly, my hands shaking. "What have I done?"

"Mo ghraidh," he said and reached for me.

I stumbled backward. "Don't touch me! Oh gods, Michael, don't touch me! How can I have done this? For the love of the Goddess, why didn't you stop me?"

"We tried," he said. "Nothing short of killing you would stop you from slaughtering them all."

Michael stepped toward me again, but I kept backing up, afraid that if he touched me, the evil would taint him somehow. Panic welled within me, and I started crying uncontrollably. I had killed them, all of them. And it had felt good.

A hand touched my shoulder, and I spun around. Morrigan stood before me again. I looked at her with the horror of what I'd done gripping me.

"Morrigan," I said and raised my hands to her, palms up, as if to say Look what I've done.

"I know, child," she said. "I shouldn't have left you to find your way alone. This is my fault, and I'll make it right."

"What have you done to her?" Michael demanded.

I almost smiled. Only my Michael would speak to a goddess in that tone.

"I have forced her to embrace her destiny," Morrigan replied.

"This is her destiny?" Michael snapped, gesturing to the bodies scattered across the floor.

"Of course not," Morrigan chided. "Her power is her destiny. This was simply… unfortunate."

"Oh, is that all?" I asked in a small voice.

"It was the dark power riding you," she said.

"And it will do so again," I said. "It's still there, inside me. I can feel it."

"Is there nothing you can do?" Michael pleaded with Morrigan.

She nodded and turned to me. "I will make you as you were meant to be."

She reached out and put her hand over my heart. At first I felt nothing, and then what I did feel took me screaming to my knees. It was the dark magic. I had ripped it from Gage when I had taken his heart. It was like a living, evil thing that had taken over my body.

And it wanted me. It did not want to leave, but it was no match for a goddess.

Morrigan's power flowed through me, cleansing me, pushing all the blackness from my body. If light could be black, then that's what came out of me, a flood of bright, shining black light. And it felt as though it was trying to rip me apart as it went.

When it was over Michael was there, his arms around me, helping me to my feet.

"There's my whiskey-eyed girl again," he muttered, and pushed my hair back from my face.

The rustle of feathers made me turn in his arms. Morrigan reached out and took his wrist in her hand, the hand that was still covered in blood from the wound in my chest. I heard Michael suck in his breath, and I glanced down at my own skin. The wound from Gage's knife was gone, healed in whatever Morrigan had done to purge the black magic from my body. She pulled her hand from Michael's wrist, and the gash Gage had made there was gone as well. Morrigan held her hand out to me, her fist closed. It took a moment to understand what she wanted. I held my hand out and she dropped a large uncut ruby into it.

"Made from your blood, and his," she explained.

"Thank you," I said, and closed my fist around the stone, holding it up to my heart.

"Goddess," Devlin spoke up from behind us, "what do we do? She's killed twelve humans."

Morrigan turned to him. "They were evil and they would have killed you. Their altar is stained with the blood of innocents and there would be more where that came from, had they lived. Do their lives truly mean so much to you?"

Devlin's face hardened. "It is not for us to decide the fate of humans."

"No," Morrigan said. "It is not."

In that moment, I realized that she had known. When she'd shown me what my magic could do, that I could stand against Edmund Gage and win, she had known what would happen.

"Why?" I asked.

Michael and my friends cast confused looks in my direction, but Morrigan understood my question.

"Because what happened here was necessary to help you become what you were created to be," she replied.

"Gage infecting me with his power, all these deaths, that was necessary to teach me how to control my magic?" I asked incredulously.

"You may not understand it now," she replied, "but one day you will."

"I pray that whatever you hoped to gain from this was worth their deaths and the nightmares that will haunt me," I said softly.

"If the lives of a dozen evil humans will make you into the warrior who will save millions of innocents then, yes, it is well worth it."

It seemed an easy thing for her to say. She didn't have to live with the nightmares of what I'd done here tonight. Then again, I thought as I regarded her cloaked in her own darkness, a war goddess must carry the burden of far worse things.

"There will be rumors," Devlin interjected. "If the High King were to find out—"

"If he takes issue with anything that's happened here," she said, "I will deal with him."

Devlin just nodded, and pulled Justine closer to him.

Morrigan turned back to me. "Dawn is approaching, and you must go. Rest today, but if I were you I'd put Venice behind me come sunset. Sara likely will not be too pleased to find her father dead, evil bastard though he was."

I nodded.

"Go with my blessing, my children," she said, and then she was just… gone.

I sighed and laid my head on Michael's shoulder, suddenly weary to the very marrow of my bones. All I wanted was a bath and the comfort of my lover's arms around me.

"Let's get you home, love," he said, and kissed my forehead.

"Home," I sighed. "Can we go back to England?"

"Of course," Michael replied softly.

"Sounds bloody marvelous to me," Devlin grumbled. "I've grown weary of this city."

Justine arranged her borrowed cloak more securely around her. "Oui," she said, "I liked Venice much better when the most interesting thing about it was keeping up with what Lord Byron was doing."

"Isn't that the truth," I murmured as Michael swept me into his arms and carried me to the door.