Queens and Monsters: A Vampire Shifter Romance (The Blood Falls Book 1)

“What the hell is that?” It was like I fell down the rabbit hole into an alternate universe of horrors.

Lou stalked around us to the bed where she gathered Tymothy up in her arms. The boy seemed more annoyed at his mother’s interruption than the fact there was a monster outside the door.

Seema grimaced. “I don’t know but we’re safe in here.”

I resisted the urge to leap out the windows and run for my life. “How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been keeping us safe in here for the last two days.” Seema tossed a dagger onto my nightstand and sighed. “Where the hell have you been?”

“First explain the rabid Dreg! That’s more than bloodlust. There’s something wrong with him.” I glanced around. Tymothy sat in the middle of my bed, coloring beside Lou. The rest of the room appeared to be empty.

“Things have been a little complicated since you disappeared.” Lou shrugged.

I finally took a second to really look at both women. Lou had dark bags under eyes. Seema had more intensity shooting out of her than I’d ever seen. “It’s so good to see you both.” I gathered Seema into my arms, reassuring myself she was alive. Her warmth was the exact opposite of everything I’d just seen throughout the House.

She rubbed my back and a little of my own tension eased. “I thought you were dead.”

“Are you okay?” Lou yanked me into her arms for a quick hug.

“I am. Are you?”

She grimaced. “We can’t get out of the house no matter how hard we try.”

I reached out again, feeling the invisible wall just outside my windows. “What is it? Why could I come in?”

Seema sighed heavily, tucking her wild strands away with her fingers like she was weaving a tapestry. “I’ve tried everything I know. No spell from my Nala blood works, no Creation from my Axl blood does anything. We’re stuck in here with those things.”

“You’re Nala, too?” That explained the magical door spell.

“Just a bit.” Her warm smile gave me the tiniest bit of comfort. “We didn’t know anyone could make it through in either direction, so to answer your question, I have no idea why you got through.”

That was a very disturbing turn of events. I shivered, rubbing up and down my arms in a gesture that should have been comforting but definitely wasn’t. “And those things? How many are there?”

Seema glanced back at the door, the color draining from her face. “I have unfortunately witnessed my share of humans who didn’t survive Turning. The insanity that rips their mind apart kills them. They don’t live long enough to hurt anyone else, generally. What’s happened to those poor souls…it’s something very different. Something twisted.”

“What’s more than bloodlust? Are they sick? Poisoned?” Or the thought I was too afraid to say out loud. That Mary and Helena did something to them.

A shiver raced over my skin giving me goosebumps.

Seema’s shoulders lifted and paused as she shook her head slightly. “There’s stories…ancient stories.”

Lou shivered. “Those are stories we tell children to make them behave and give them nightmares.”

Seema waved at the door. “I don’t think they’re stories.”

The color drained from Lou’s face as her eyes met mine. “Zombies.”

Even though I wasn’t completely surprised I was still somehow shocked by how much sense it made. Half dead, half alive, hungry and driven. “How?”

Lou moved further away from Tymothy and lowered her voice. “The scary stories we tell each other are that there are places where another world can reach into ours. When they touch humans it pulls them between worlds and changes them forever. It’s the story you tell when you don’t want kids playing on a cliff or in a cave.”

“Or in an abandoned house,” Seema offered. “Except we don’t call them zombies. The samhain call them the Lost.”

The Lost. A shimmering blackness that blots out the timeline. Destiny.

I really, really didn’t like this new addition to my list of impending life changes. “Rhymus is dead.” His cold, vacant stare flashed through my mind again.

Seema squeezed her eyes shut. “I found Vyctorya after she’d been attacked. I brought her back…but she wasn’t herself anymore. She was different. Not like them, but not samhain any longer.”

Like Mattieu.

Lou touched my arm. “Where have you been?”

“I’m guessing you don’t know about the poisoning? The blood on my bed?” I pointed toward Tymothy who, luckily, was so absorbed in his coloring that he didn’t hear what I said. I would need to be more careful with my words.

“What on earth?” Lou instinctively moved between me and the bed, blocking her son. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper. “What poisoning?”

“Me. Helena and Mary tried to kill me. That’s where I’ve been—trying to get healthy again.”

Lou and Seema traded a look of confusion, then Lou said, “They tried to kill you?”

Seema shook her head. “That must be why Helena demanded that giant breakfast. It took me an hour longer than normal to get to Rhysa. By then the room was clean and there was no sign of where you’d gone or why.”

Unbelievable…or perfectly believable depending on how I looked at it. “It was right here. They jumped me, put some sort of cuffs on my wrists that blocked my gifts, and then forced me to drink their blood. My mother cursed me so that any Axl blood would be poison to me…and somehow they knew it.” A shiver raced over my skin as that night replayed in my mind.

“Of course they did,” Lou began laughing maniacally. Her eyes had gone glassy from the rage bubbling up inside her. “They’re behind everything. All of this is them.” Whether she realized it or not, she waved at Tymothy as she spoke.

Everything. My poisoning, the zombies, and… “You think they’re the ones that had you kidnapped?” The dread in my belly multiplied.

“I know they are. I’ve been watching for years. Antyne is his own unhappy enemy, but those two have been manipulating, strategizing, gathering power to overthrow him and take the House for themselves. They most likely are behind your parents’ tragedy, too. I bet it goes that far back.”

The shivers multiplied. How did Mary and Helena know about the curse? Was it because they’d been scheming that far back? “Can you be more specific?” I was absolutely sure she was right, but I needed more.

“How else could they know something your mother did before you were born? They had to be involved somehow.”

That seemed true, but maybe in the time between Tiynan’s death and my birth she told someone.

“No,” Lou said, coming toward me with a wagging finger. “I can see you thinking through other options, but there aren’t any. Who else would want Anya and Tiynan dead? Who else would want to use Dregs to keep the bloodline going? Why did they want you dead?”

“It doesn’t mean Antyne isn’t involved.” Except it made no sense for him to want his wife and son killed. He had no reason to bring me into the family and name me heir if he wanted me dead. He could have just killed me.

But if it was Helena and Mary…they killed their sister, but they also removed the heir from the bloodline, putting Rhymus in line instead. Killing me would do the same. And if Rhymus couldn’t have children like the rest of the main bloodline, they needed to find a way to fix that, too.

They knew about one curse, but not the other, and that meant they were there for one but not the other. I could deny it all I wanted to, but Mary and Helena killed my parents…and they wouldn’t stop until I was dead, too.

A deep foreboding washed over me as I stared out the windows of my bedroom. This war between the Houses was inevitable but wrong. The timing was so rushed, so were the reasons, and now this. The invisible wall surrounding the House of Axl shouldn’t exist and neither should the monsters killing everyone in the House.

But that wasn’t the dread that really pulled at the depths of my soul. Something bigger and darker, something that had once felt distant now felt very, very close. If I could sense the Plane I had a feeling that glimmering darkness would be so close I could finally touch it.

Everything felt important and immediate.

“So you’ve been using a spell to keep the zombies out, but there’s nowhere else to go because of the wall?” Were we seriously talking about zombies now?

“It’s more like a bubble. It surrounds the House in every direction.” Seema stood at the windows. The afternoon light began to bend making her look younger. “When this all began I still believed we could save ourselves. That we could heal the hurt and stop the destruction…then I realized I couldn’t call for The Doctor. I couldn’t leave. Things spiraled quickly from there, but Lou and I found each other and decided to hide in here.”

“Why here?”

Lou colored with Tymothy. “It’s on the edge of the bubble, has everything, and we hoped it would be where you returned if you came back.”

And here I was. The silent clock in my mind that kept track of my daily rhythm, the same mechanism that reminded me when a test was coming up or an essay was due, began to tick faster. The countdown was almost over. Dray should be attacking by now…unless Gigi was able to stop him.

“They’re coming.” Except I really hoped they weren’t. Was it bad to hope the Alliance stayed away and left the House of Axl here to die?

Yeah, it probably was.

Didn’t help that I’d probably die right along with them.

“Who?” Lou and Seema asked at the same time.

“Everyone.”

Lou blanched. “No. Not now.”

I nodded, stared back out the window, hoping I’d see them if they came. If they did, maybe the sheer quantity of samhain would be enough to disrupt whatever this Plane wall thing was. Of course that was a problem too since there were rabid zombie dregs running around and no one seemed to be particularly good at stopping them.

“Did we kill it? Sword through the heart and another through the throat?”

Lou shrugged. “We think so. Maybe. Hopefully.”

Hopefully was good enough for me. It kept me from freaking out.

Seema pushed in between us. “Someone better start making sense. Who is coming?”

It took me two tries to pull my gaze from Lou’s. We were having an intense conversation of silence and strategy. “The Alliance. My poisoning was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They’re coming here, now, to put an end to Antyne’s power grab.”

Seema jerked back, her brows dropping and furrowing. “What does that mean?”

“War.” Lou crossed her arms. “And we can’t do shit from in here to help.”

We needed to change that. Sitting inside with a bunch of zombie while everyone we knew and loved fought to the death wasn’t the strategic option I was willing to accept.

“What if I could get you out?” Saoirse said power wasn’t my issue, it was knowledge. In the last day I’d crammed so much information I felt like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, ready to face off against Morpheus with a wave of my hand.

Lou blinked a few times. “You think you can?” Her expression wavered between disbelief and hope as she snuck a glance at Tymothy.

I believed I could, but I didn’t know for sure. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

“Hell yeah.” Lou stood up and began adjusting her armor.

“Is there somewhere safe for Tymothy?” I began mapping the property in my mind, looking for a place the fighting wouldn’t touch.

“Yes,” Seema said with a nod. “If you get me through this dome I can take him to the crypt. There’s no reason anyone should be there. It’s not far. It’s stone on all four sides and easy to shield with my magic. The same magic I used to keep us safe here.” She stared Lou down. “I promise he’ll be safe with me there. But you’ve got to get rid of these things or no one is safe.”

That left Lou and me to come up with a game plan. “We have a war and zombies. Take them on together one at a time or split up and fight on both fronts?”

“They might not come. We should hunt the zombies down first and clear the mansion. If the Alliance comes, we can tackle that next.”

So the big question remained: did Gigi manage to stop Dray? I’d give just about anything to be able to feel him right now, even if he hated me.

“What about Tymothy’s father?”

Lou’s whole face turned to stone. “Just before all hell broke loose the Dreg Army was ordered to fall back and await orders.”

“But now no one can give orders because the mansion is behind a shield.” They were assembled and ready to fight–they were just expecting the wrong enemy at their door.

“You need to be smart about this,” Seema whispered. “The armies know what they’ve signed up for. Like it or not, let them fight. No one signed up for rabid Dreg zombies.”

Lou shrugged. “She has a point.”

I rolled my shoulders and began tapping into what I could of the Plane, distant as it felt. “All right then. Let’s go fight some zombies.”