you and what do you want?” I growled, rubbing my temple with the heel of my left hand.
“Oh my! Direct, isn’t he?” the unicorn mocked with a high-pitched laugh. “I figured that old dragon would have told you.”
“Just told me what you are,” I muttered. No reason to deny it, since he already knew who, or rather, what, Chang was.
The unicorn gave a little push away from the pole and stepped forward so that he was standing between me and Trixie. “The name is Vincent, not that it really matters,” he said with an elegant little bow and a smirk. With a flourish of his hand, he waved at the woman who remained at Trixie’s side. “And this enchanting creature is Missy. She’s the nymph who has been ridding your city of its human infestation, but then I’m sure you already guessed that.”
Missy looked like your average, thirtysomething female—except for her eyes. Shoulder-length blonde hair framed a narrow oval face from which red eyes burned with the light of insanity. Dark energy hung around her like a second shadow. Kyle’s potion had created a monster that I would never have expected. The power burned within her and her body wasn’t able to contain it all. It oozed from her, burning away her soul with each passing day.
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask the woman why she had felt the need to go down this self-destructive road of murder and pain, but I swallowed back the words. Hatred radiated from her like a nuclear plant in meltdown.
No, I kept my focus on Vincent. Nothing could stop him, but he was the one with the power to kill me in the blink of an eye. He was the one determined to turn Low Town into a ghost town in an effort to bring back . . . something. Chang had killed the suggestion of Lilith, leaving me struggling to figure out Vincent’s master plan.
“So, what’s the plan now, Vinnie? Hoping to wipe out all of Low Town?” I asked, dropping my hand back down to my side. At the same time, I shifted my left wrist, checking to see that my wand was still tucked securely up my sleeve. I wasn’t yet sure what the hell I was going to do against the asshole, but for now I was content to just buy some time. The more time I had, the more opportunities there were to make something happen in my favor.
“I had thought about it,” Vincent admitted, scratching his chin. “One town is as good as any other, but Low Town has two warlocks settled within her rotten bosom. I figured there had to be something special about this town if two warlocks were hiding here.” He lowered his hand as a gruesome smile stretched across his thin lips and the same insane light flickered in his eyes. “I thought I would have to destroy every living thing within the wretched little burg just to complete my spell, but then I found something better.”
“And what’s that?”
Vincent waved his hand back at Trixie and cackled. “Why her, of course! She’s just what I need to raise them.” This time he lifted his hand to my left and I twisted around to gaze into the warehouse behind me.
I stumbled back a step in stunned horror at the sight of rows of pale white bodies . The closest wasn’t more than twenty feet away from me. It was a naked woman wrapped in white fabric that shone like silk. Her long white hair looked like it had been recently brushed and spread in a fan beneath her. In the center of her forehead was a shining ruby about the size of my palm.
My gaze skipped over them all. They all looked like that. Perfectly groomed, wrapped in pristine white cloths with gems in the middle of their foreheads. Despite being dead for centuries, there was no hint of decay or rot. They could have all been sleeping. There had to have been at least fifty of them lined up there.
The vampires brought back to life were more than just a message to the Towers; they were an experiment in actually raising the dead. But it still didn’t make any sense. How could killing Trixie give him the power to raise all of his people? Or maybe he didn’t intend to raise them all with just her? Maybe he needed only one and then together they would fan out across the