the breeze as if with a life of their own, glared up at her, baring her teeth to reveal fangs that gleamed. She was holding Lucy up with one hand, clutching the bunched-up front of her borrowed shirt. And by her side, a black panther—a black freaking panther—crouched and snarled, baring its fangs, as well.
Lucy couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. She was silent and shaking, and her heart pounded at a rate that had to be dangerous to her health.
“Put her down, Aunt Rhi.” James’s voice was firm as he came around the car and put one hand on the woman’s shoulder. “She’s here to help us, after all.”
“Pitiful that the salvation of our race lies in the hands of this puling, weak little mortal.” But the woman did lower Lucy to the ground.
Lucy looked back toward the gate at the entrance to this horror film set, her entire being itching to run. But there were others standing there now. And she thought they might be vampires, like this dark-haired one, who surely must be their queen. One of them even wore a cloak that floated and snapped 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.
“This way,” James told her, leading her through the foyer with one hand on her elbow. The others had remained outside, Rhiannon moving toward the strangers near the gate and into the arms of the one in the cape.
Lucy moved along, letting James guide her toward the curving staircase with the thick banister and twisted newel posts that were probably works of art beneath the years of neglect. She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Inspecting the house and musing mentally about what it must have looked like once was her way of trying to distract herself from her almost paralyzing fear and the odd, surreal sense of having just landed in the middle of an old Stoker novel or a Bela Lugosi film. This new reality—this impossible world—was all around her. She could see it, hear it, touch it. And yet it couldn’t be real, this world where a pack of vampires lurked outside while their offspring walked her through their haunted mansion.
“I’m sorry about Rhiannon,” James said. “She’s…not overly fond of mortals.”
That comment drew her gaze to his. “She’s a…vampire.” It was difficult to even say the word. Even more difficult