she asked.
I shook my head, afraid my voice would crack. I was walking a knife edge, wanting to know what kind of a world she lived in but fighting to keep from entering it.
Her eyes grew fervent. Torso unmoving, she levered one of her knees up onto the coffee table, and then the other. God help me. She was coming at me.
“Living vamps can bespell people—if they want to be,” she whispered. The softness of her voice rubbed against my skin until it tingled. Double damn.
“What good is it if it only works on those who let you?” I asked, my voice harsh next to the liquid essence of hers.
Ivy’s lips parted to show the tips of her teeth. I couldn’t look away. “It makes for great sex—Rachel.”
“Oh.” The faint utterance was all I could manage. Her eyes were lost in lust.
“And I’ve got my mother’s taste for blood,” she said, kneeling on the table between us. “It’s like some people’s craving for sugar. It’s not a good comparison but it’s the best I can do unless you … try it.”
Ivy exhaled, moving her entire body. Her breath sent a shock reverberating through me. My eyes went wide in surprise and bewilderment as I recognized it as desire. What the hell was going on? I was straight. Why did I suddenly want to know how soft her hair was?
All I’d have to do was reach out. She was inches from me. Poised. Waiting. In the silence, I could hear my heart pound. The sound of it echoed in my ears. I watched in horror as Ivy broke her gaze from mine, running it down my throat to where I knew my pulse throbbed.
“No!” I cried, panicking.
I kicked out, gasping in fear as I found her weight on me, pinning me to the chair.
“Ivy, no!” I shrieked. I had to get her off. I struggled to move. I took a lungful of air, hearing it explode from me in a cry of helplessness. How could I have been so stupid! She was a vampire!
“Rachel—stop.”
Her voice was calm and smooth. Her one hand gripped my hair, pinning my head back to expose my neck. It hurt, and I heard myself whimper.
“You’re making things worse,” she said, and I wiggled, gasping as her grip on my wrist tightened until it hurt.
“Let me go. …” I panted, breathless, as if I had been running. “God, help me, Ivy. Let me go. Please. I don’t want this.” I was pleading. I couldn’t help it. I was terrified. I’d seen the pictures. It hurt. God, it was going to hurt.
“Stop,” she said again. Her voice was strained. “Rachel. I’m trying to let go of you, but you have to stop. You’re making things worse. You have to believe me.”
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?
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
