Blood Relations - Chapter 14

Friday, November 14, 1997

From his left foot, Dimitri extended a tendril of shadow. It wound a path across the carpet and up the wall to unlock the door of the apartment. Compelling Amber to open the door, he withdrew the nebulous limb and took several steps back.

He was being careful to avoid the rays of the morning sun, since even the briefest contact would have been extremely painful, not to mention being potentially fatal.

Waving Amber inside, Dimitri bent at the waist in an exaggerated bow as she stepped into the living room. With the foyer filled with sunlight, Dimitri resorted to urging Amber to shut and lock the door.

He was shorter than he’d been in the yard, and his frame was compressed to fit in the cramped, dark apartment.

Even so, his face was too close when he bowed, and Amber wanted to flinch away from him. But her body wasn’t under her own control. Dimitri had driven her out of the bedroom window and sent her running faster than she would have thought her limp legs could carry her.

He had forced her into the apartment, and whatever he was planning, Amber suspected that the human couple in the bedroom wouldn’t survive much longer.

“The humans are not your concern yet.” Dimitri waved toward the tacky paisley-purple couch in the living room. “Please, have a seat and rest your head. I’m sure you feel dizzy, but that’s a side effect you’ll have to deal with. You drank two gallons of poison, and the only thing keeping you alive right now is the fetus inside you acting as a filter.”

Dimitri paused to laugh. “Of course, the side effect for him is a magically enhanced bloodlust, hence your increased cravings. Even with your child helping, it isn’t possible to leech the poison out of you. The only way to be rid of this is to have someone cast a healing spell on you.”

“Why?” Amber asked, her body flopping back against the couch once he’d released her.

“It’s a question for the ages, to be sure.” Dimitri crossed the room and settled himself on a bright neon green recliner. He propped his boot-covered feet on a wire cable spool that was turned over to be used as an improvised coffee table.

“I poisoned you as a test. I wanted to see what the vampires would do, and they spread out to look for me. The leader of your coven looked up until an hour before dawn, and he intended to question me even if it meant risking his own life. But, he wasn’t trailing that far behind the others, and they all stayed out late.”

Dimitri steepled his fingers under his pointed chin, staring at Amber with unblinking black eyes. “Whether you know it or not, you have that whole coven wound around your dainty fingers like rings, and they’re enchanted with you because you sacrificed your humanity for your partner.”

“Do you have a point?” Amber asked.

“After the child is born, do you believe you can go back to being normal?”

Amber shook her head. “I want to, but if you’re asking me like that, I must be lying to myself.”

“There’s no need to be bitter with me,” Dimitri said. He curled all his fingers except for the index digits and then he turned his hands outward, clasping them together while he pointed at Amber. “You made the choice to drink poison on your own.”

“You manipulated me,” Amber spat, her eyes glowing with an angry fire. “You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist blood on my lips in my condition. I had no more choice than an animal would with a pan full of antifreeze.”

“Amber, a human being would have resisted,” Dimitri said. “Have you given yourself over so completely to your animal side so soon?”

“It’s a lot easier for me than you think. I was losing pieces of my humanity from the moment a daemon killed my family and my best friend. There wasn’t much left to shuffle away from, and the cravings...” Amber lifted her head to look at the bedroom door across the living room. “It’s all too easy to think of them as food now.”

“If I compelled them to come to you, you wouldn’t resist the need to feed, would you?”

“How can I? If I stop eating, I’ll die, and my child will die with me.” Amber glared at Dimitri with unrestrained rage, but even the act of staying angry was draining her. “You’ve cut me off from my food supply,” she said, panting for air. “You took me away from the coven, even though they were protecting me from my urges.”

Dimitri laughed, his expression filled with amazement. “What a puzzle you are, Amber. I can understand why the vampires would be attracted to you.”

He sat forward in the seat, his expression becoming earnest before he said, “Let me ask you this. Do you think Helen is still going to answer your prayers now that you’ve slid over to the dark side?”

Amber’s scowl melted, her brown eyes filling with an anxious look. At last she understood why Dimitri was able to manipulate her. The blessing that protected her from daemonic possession had been revoked, and without it, she was helpless to defend herself from the wyrm’s telepathic commands.

“I...” Amber closed her eyes and thought, I’ve lost all my powers.

“Let me be completely blunt with you.” Dimitri waited until she opened her eyes before he  said, “If I leave you alone and send you back to your beloved coven as you are, you will recover from this poison with your coven’s help, and you will go on to deliver your child.”

He paused, and his face shifted subtly, filling with sadness and sympathy at the same time. “But, you will always be cursed. You will always crave blood, and once you return to eating human food, blood will become foul to you again. You will be disturbed by the feeding habits of your child and your partner, and yet, you will still have cravings to join them in feeding.”

“I know,” Amber said.

“Just listen,” Dimitri insisted in a patient voice. “You’ll age, and your body will fail you. None of your vampires can prevent that. They can’t turn you, or grant you their eternal life spans.”

“But you can.”

“I can, and I can give you a knowledge of magic that doesn’t require a connection to your goddess. I can help you to live with your coven forever, or at least until the humans find you and wipe out the entire nest.”

Dimitri held up his hands when Amber’s thoughts churned into anger again. “I’m not threatening to expose them. In fact, all I’m doing is offering you the chance to spend more time with your partner and your child.”

Amber bit her lower lip, rolling it over her dull fangs until the skin began to stretch painfully near the breaking point. “What do you get out of this?”

“Allies,” Dimitri answered without hesitation. “A war is already brewing among some of the mystical races, and more are going to be joining the fight soon. I’m arriving here alone with no one as backup. I should have at least one ally here, but Erick used my training to become very effective at hiding from me.”

Hiding. The word echoed in Amber’s mind. If she had a specialty, it was in hiding.

Her gaze remained cool as she watched the wyrm. He was probably choosing his words carefully in order to keep manipulating her.

Dimitri continued on as though he were unaware of her thoughts. “As allies go, you’re pathetically weak, and you’d need my protection more than I need anything from you. The vampires aren’t much better, but they’ve got strength and speed. You might have been able to help me if you could still perform that nifty locator spell of yours and find Erick for me. But now, you’re worthless to me, except perhaps as a bargaining chip in my negotiations with Emil.”

Amber bit back a bitter remark. Verbal jabs wouldn’t hurt the wyrm any more than a punch would, which was assuming she could stand to throw one. She asked, “What kind of magic can you teach me?”

“I can teach you thousands of spells. In addition to my own experience in shadow magic, I’ve also tapped into the minds of other magic users who could summon elements or perform healing spells. I can’t perform healing magic, but I could pass you the experiences telepathically, and you could try them out to see if you could heal yourself.”

Amber stared at Dimitri with narrowed eyes. “This is another trick.”

“If you say so.”

Amber was silent for a very long time. During her lengthy internal debate, her thoughts wandered to the question of why the couple in the bedroom hadn’t woken up yet. At first she assumed that they were day sleepers. The windows in the apartment were covered in doubled layers of blankets to block out the sun, and the duct tape holding the blankets down was covered in dust. 

But she still would have expected them to wake up with Amber raising her voice. She wondered if they were heavy sleepers, and then she realized that Dimitri was keeping them unconscious, just as he had forced Amber to run outside in the early morning light.

There were no clocks anywhere in the poorly furnished apartment, so she had no way of guessing how much time passed before she relented. But it was several hours, and Dimitri never moved or spoke while he waited for her to come to a decision.

He sat forward the moment that Amber nodded and said, “Fine, I accept. You’re going to manipulate me either way, but this way you can claim I made a choice, right?”

“Something like that,” Dimitri agreed.

“So what do I do first?” Amber waved a hand at the bedroom door. “Do you want me to drain them or swear loyalty to you?”

“Neither. For now, I just want you to close your eyes and relax.”

Amber closed her eyes, and something in her head popped. Drowsiness overwhelmed her, and she was out cold a few seconds later.