Sweep - Stakes Read online

  “I understand,” she said, and that same little blush crept across her cheeks again.

  There was definitely some sort of chemistry and history thing going on between them, but I wasn’t going to judge her for that. Besides, I didn’t have the time or the luxury of putting too much thought into the fireworks and pledges of fidelity going off between Kyle and Annika.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “Well, if I was going to change you, I’d bite you and drain most of your blood. Then, I’d let you feed from me. Either my wrist or my neck. But that’s all very intimate, wouldn’t you say? Plus, I don’t have to do the part where I bite you.”

  “This is going to be awkward no matter what,” I mused.

  And it was. In the end, Kyle bit his own wrist and let me have some of the blood. I won’t go into more detail than that. Since I hadn’t been bitten, it wasn’t something I was craving, so I wasn’t ravenous for it the way people are in the movies.

  What I was ravenous for was fried chicken. Right up until I got the vampire blood. Then, the hunger was gone. It wasn’t like the mullein and other herbs the witches gave me. They just took the edge off, but it was still there in the back of my brain niggling at me.

  No, with the vampire blood, it was gone. My mind cleared too. It was like thick, gray storm clouds were lifted away. Even my vision seemed sharper.

  “Did it help?” Kyle asked expectantly.

  “It’s incredible,” I said. “I feel brand new.”

  “Yeah, well, please don’t tell anyone that,” Kyle said sheepishly. “The last thing we need is people hunting and harvesting vampire blood as the newest designer drug.”

  “We won’t,” Annika said. “We won’t tell anyone outside of the family about any of this.”

  “Thank you,” Kyle responded.

  “So do we just come back in a couple of days? You said you were going to the council.”

  “I can call you,” Kyle said. “We do have phones. I know we live in a remote village and all, but it isn’t actually the nineteenth century.”

  And that was it. Kyle and Annika exchanged phone numbers, and it was time for us to go. On the way back to Coventry, Annika was quieter than I’d expected. She was deep in thought about something, and I worried that it was Kyle.

  “You can tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, I’m not going to judge you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What don’t you know? That you can talk to me?”

  “You’ve got a lot going on.”

  “I’m not worried about that right now,” I said. “I feel great, actually. Talk to me, please.”

  “Brody is your brother,” Annika said. “I don’t want you to be upset with me.”

  “Oh my gawd, Annika. This so isn’t like you. Just spill it, woman. You’re my best friend. You can tell me anything.”

  “You mean that?”

  “That you can tell me anything?” I asked.

  “That I’m your best friend.”

  “Of course, I mean it. I guess we haven’t had a we’re best friends forever ceremony, but it’s true.”

  “You’re funny,” she said and then looked down at her feet before taking a deep breath. “Okay. I felt something for Kyle back there, and I’m not sure how to process it. I feel so guilty.”

  “Why do you feel guilty? You can’t help how you feel,” I said. “And I did notice some energy between the two of you.”

  “I don’t know that things are going as well as I would like between myself and Brody.”

  “Maybe you’re just feeling that way because Remy proposed?” I offered.

  “It’s more than that, though,” she said with a sigh. “Every day that he doesn’t propose, I find myself relieved.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to hate me.” Annika bit her bottom lip.

  “I’m not going to hate you, Annika. I thought you guys were rushing into things too fast. It seemed for a while like things were working out, but maybe my gut feeling was right in the first place.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “More?”

  “Something has been different about him. It wasn’t noticeable at first, but if I look back, it’s been happening for the last six months.”

  “So basically the entire time you’ve known each other,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I just didn’t pick up on it until recently,” she said.

  “I haven’t noticed, but I guess I’ve been paying attention to my own things. I feel bad now that something has been going on with my brother and I didn’t notice.”

  “The thing is, I don’t think you would have noticed either. It’s been so subtle right up until the moment it smacked me in the face.”

  “Well, what is it? You’re keeping me in suspense here, and I’m starting to worry.”

  “He’s just been getting darker. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s evil, Brody has definitely been more withdrawn and moodier. It usually gets more intense any time you have to work magic. It’s like he’s jealous of your growing power.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “We were played off each other a lot as kids.”

  “I know, and that’s why I tried to be super understanding about it. I even offered to work with him to strengthen his power, but he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want help. It’s like he resents that he might even need someone to teach him.”

  “You could have talked to me about this. Brody and I have reconnected as adults, Annika. I wasn’t going to go psycho overprotective older sister on you.”

  “I know, and I kept planning to talk to you, but it never seemed to be the right time,” she said. “This isn’t the right time now, either. We have more important things to worry about than my boy problems.”

  “Annika, you’re important too. I’m sorry that I keep stumbling into stuff and you have to pay attention to my life instead of yours.”

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s the other way around. I pull you into stuff.”

  “Well, this time, you saved me.”

  “I saved you for a couple of days. I know that Kyle will do everything he can to make this happen, but it’s not a done deal until it’s done.”

  “I’m just going to focus on how much better I feel right now,” I said as Annika pulled the car into my driveway. “Right now feels like a good time to live in the moment.”

  I got out of the car, and as I was walking up to the house, I noticed there was a dark gray cat in the window that looked just like Meri except that he was definitely lighter. Evil Meri. The cat so snarky that he made Meri look like a sweetheart.

  His coat had definitely gotten lighter, and as that had happened, he’d made fewer and fewer appearances. It was too easy to tell them apart, and he’d stopped trying to trick us. At that point, he just lurked around watching until Meri would find him and run him off. Where he ran him off to, I had no idea.

  Right on cue, Meri jumped up into the windowsill next to evil Meri. Even though I couldn’t hear it, I saw him hiss at his wicked doppelganger. Then he bopped him on the head several times, and evil Meri jumped down and took off. Meri gave chase, and they were gone before I walked through the front door.

  I had just closed the door behind myself and locked the deadbolt when I heard Brody and Remy pull up in the driveway. I don’t know why I’d expected they’d be gone longer, but perhaps Annika and I had taken more time that I thought.

  “Your hair,” Annika said.

  I heard the car doors shut. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “It’s bright red again. I thought that perhaps it was changing in the car, and yep, it’s changing.”

  “So I guess bridging the conversation about how we already found a vampire to supply us with blood is going to be easier than I thought. I was wondering how we were going to bring it up.”

  “Oh, yeah, totally,” Annika said. “It’s going to be obvious to them the second they walk in that you are looki
ng much better. Even without the hair, it would have been obvious.”

  Meri came down the steps as the front door began to open. “What did you do?” he asked as he plopped down between my feet. “And why didn’t you take me along?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about it,” I said.

  “Didn’t even think about what?” Remy asked as he came through the front door. “Oh. Wow.”

  “So Annika took me to see a vampire,” I said. “I’m feeling much better.”

  “She did what?” Brody came through the door, and I picked up on an edge to his voice that I wasn’t sure I liked.

  “So Annika had a friend as a kid that was a vampire, and she thought she knew where he lived. We went to see him,” I said.

  “And he cured you?” Remy asked hopefully.

  He seemed to be taking the whole thing far better than Brody. I wasn’t sure why Brody was so upset, but I could only guess that things between he and Annika were worse than I expected.

  “I’m not totally cured,” I said. “He gave me some blood to keep me alive, but Kyle said he had to take the matter to the vampire council. He said he’d know something in a couple of days.”

  “So you went behind our backs, and the guy didn’t even give you enough blood to cure you?” Brody said. “Why did we go steal these books if the two of you already had this thing figured out?”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “I wanted to talk to him with just me and Brighton,” Annika said. “I figured he would be more likely to help. Vampires can be very private and secretive.”

  “Sure,” Brody said. “I’m going up to the library.”

  Nobody tried to stop him. It wasn’t that he sounded furious, but it was obvious he’d shut down. I looked over at Annika, and she gave me a little shrug.

  “I got the books,” Remy said. “I wonder if we should go talk to Ralph anyway. You said that Kyle needed to get permission from the council, so maybe we should keep working on a backup plan.”

  “Won’t that vampire need permission from the council?” I asked.

  “I have no idea how any of that works. We can find out from Ralph, though.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live, it was just that I didn’t want to meet with Ralph. He didn’t like me for whatever reason, and I found it was best to just avoid him as much as possible.

  “Fine. I guess it’s better than sitting around waiting for an answer from Kyle.”

  Chapter Three

  Remy drove us to Ralph’s shop and parked in the nearly empty lot. If not for the fact that Badersmith Books was a cover for the Coventry Paranormal Society, I’d imagined it would have been out of business a long time ago. There were never any customers there when I visited. Not that I visited that often.

  I supposed it was possible that I always came during his slow times, or perhaps he did most of his business online. The internet was making brick and mortar businesses obsolete. Still, I was glad we didn’t have to count on the web to find a vampire. I could only imagine the type of crazies that would respond to an add looking for a vampire willing to donate blood. Even if we were on the paranormal dark web, I imagined that some ingenuitive humans had made their way onto those sites. The kind of humans who thought it was fun to hack into the secret websites of paranormals. But that was neither here nor there.

  I wondered what Ralph was going to make of all of us walking inside. Would he even talk to us without offerings from the Tuttlesmith library? We probably should have called ahead.

  The books Brody had taken were very old, and they were written in a language I couldn’t read. Remy explained that it was an ancient version of a witch language. The one I knew was a much more modern version. I asked him if I should learn to read them, and he said that I probably didn’t want to know what was inside those books. The old ways weren’t the same. A great deal of it was darker magic born of darker times that he said I wouldn’t identify with.

  “We should take these back,” I said as Remy and Annika went to get out of the car. “I’m not okay with stealing.” I felt like kind of a goody two shoes saying it, but it was true. I knew that witches had their own way of doing things, but I was still adjusting to their occasional disregard for the morality of regular humans.

  “The books were stolen from witches a very long time ago, Brighton. We just reclaimed them. Technically, it was stealing, but also technically not.” Remy stood outside of the driver’s door, and he’d leaned in through the opening to talk to me.

  “Well, then, should we be giving them to Ralph?” I asked as I finally got out of the car. “Maybe you should keep them in the archives. If you don’t think that will get you into trouble.”

  “I know the two of you don’t get along,” Remy said. “But he is the president of the Coventry Paranormal Society. He will value these books and take good care of them. They are better off with him than they are in a human library.”

  “Okay,” I relented.

  I joined Remy walking in, and he took my hand in his with a squeeze. The sides of my engagement ring pressed into my other fingers when he did it, and I got a little jolt of joy. The zombie curse had dulled my senses so quickly after we’d gotten engaged that I hadn’t gotten to thrill at the prospect of marrying Remy for very long.

  He turned to me and gave me a knowing smile. It no longer bothered me that sometimes he just knew what I was thinking. I don’t know that it ever actually bothered me, but at first it did make me cautious. At this point, it was just a part of who we were.

  Who we were.

  We.

  Remy and I hadn’t gone through the marriage ceremony yet, but it already felt inevitable that we were one. And then while I was walking along, hand in hand, staring adoringly at my husband-to-be, I tripped over a big crack in the sidewalk. He caught me just before I fell on my face.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m good,” I said. “Just tripping over the sidewalk.”

  “Is the blood wearing off already?” Concern clouded Remy’s eyes.

  “No,” I said with a chuckle. “Just normal clumsiness. I’m fine. I swear.”

  We went inside and found Ralph standing behind the counter sorting a stack of old books. He was taking notes about them in a small, black Moleskine notebook.

  “Can I help you?” he asked without looking up from his writing.

  “I think we can help each other,” Remy said as he set the pilfered books down on the counter.

  I was wondering how I was going to approach the conversation with Ralph, and I was glad Remy had taken charge. I didn’t normally need his help handling things, but this time, I was glad to let him take the lead. I stayed by his side, but Annika quickly wandered off to look through the shelves of books Ralph had for sale.

  “What are these?” Ralph asked.

  He turned the books around so he could scan the spines. While Remy was explaining how he and a friend had liberated them from a human library, Ralph thumbed through the offering.

  “You were able to steal these?” Ralph seemed impressed.

  “We were,” Remy answered.

  “That must mean they want to be with you, then. You can’t just steal books like this. They tend to have energy of their own,” Ralph replied.

  “Well, we were able to make it here unscathed, and you’re going through them. I think that’s a good sign their energy is fine with a sale.”

  “I don’t keep enough money on hand to pay for books of this value,” Ralph said, but I could almost see him salivating at the prospect of buying them. He’d been cautious before, but once he realized he could have the books, he was like a predator that had locked onto wounded prey.

  “We don’t want money,” Remy said.

  That made Ralph positively glow. “No?”

  “What we need is a favor,” I said.

  Ralph looked at me through narrowed eyes and turned back to Remy. “What is it you want? I’m not sure I can grant a favor big enough for something like this
.”

  “You can,” Remy said. “What we need is information, and I suspect you have it.”

  “Well, what is it?” Ralph asked.

  “We need a vampire,” Remy said. “I was hoping that since you are the president of the Coventry Paranormal Society, you might know where there are some vampires who would speak with us. If you don’t know, then perhaps you know someone who does.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Ralph said with a smile. “There’s still a vampire in Coventry trying to live under the radar. He doesn’t think anybody knows, but I know.”

  “And you’ll tell us where to find him?”

  “Let me write down that address,” Ralph said.

  He disappeared into the back room and took the books we’d brought with him. I was about to say something to Remy, but Ralph reappeared from the back with an address written on a notecard.

  “Is there anything else?” Ralph asked as he handed the card to Remy. “Ms. Longfield, I don’t suppose you’re interested in discussing some of those books in your library?”

  “No, thank you,” I took the card from Remy. “Have a great day,” I said through a forced smile.

  After that, I spun on my heels and headed for the exit. Remy and Annika followed me out. I guessed Annika didn’t find any books she wanted to buy.

  “Do you know where the house is?” I asked Remy as we got back in the car.

  “It’s an old place on the edge of town. I actually thought it was abandoned,” he said.

  “That’s one way to make sure nobody knows that you’re a vampire living in a town full of witches,” I said. “I wonder why he’s here, and I kinda wish I knew why Ralph knew about him.”

  “Do you want to go back and ask?” Remy asked as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  “No, I’m just going to assume that he overhears a lot of information and gossip,” I said. “And he probably deal in information frequently given how fast he handed over that address in exchange for the books. If it was something he’d never done before, he probably would have given it some thought.”