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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