Chapter Five #2
“I hope you’re better by tomorrow, sweetie. If you are... Well, maybe you should bring that young man with you for Christmas dinner? He’s not going home to Louisiana?”
“He can’t go back. Cursed.”
“Ex-girlfriend with a psychotic streak,” Brax explained over her shoulder. “Penny, we shouldn’t be out here. It looks deserted, but—”
Penny looked up at him, an amused smile eking through the worry on her face as he smiled back, his grin mirroring hers. “Do you promise to behave if I bring you? No biting?” she murmured.
“Not a dog,” he grunted.
“Then why are you humping my—”
Brax slapped his hand over her mouth. “I’d love to accept your invitation and meet the rest of Penny’s family. I hope she and the roads are both sane tomorrow.”
“Call me if she doesn’t improve. I’ll be up late.”
“Mom, you need sleep!” Penny blurted.
“ And Mr. Brax...” her mother’s voice was a growl so low that Penny turned to see what had suddenly caused the heating to malfunction. “If you do a thing to my little girl...”
“You can’t hurt Brax. He’s bringing my fever down. It’s the only thing that works. I tried cold water, and ice, and everything. You know how when people have to put their bodies together not to freeze to death?”
“Penny, you have a fever, not hypothermia,” her mother pointed out, voice sounding more bewildered by the second.
“No, but he’s half-frozen, and I’m half-burnt. We were perfect together. Are. Are perfect together. We make everything just right.”
“Oh. Well. I... I’ve never heard you talk about a young man like that before, sweetie.”
“Well, I’ve never spent time with a young man like this before. Although he’s old. Wayyy old.”
“She means I’m 29!” Brax shouted, glaring at her. “Hang. Up.”
“Gotta go, Mom. Hope I see you tomorrow. Merry Christmas Eve to everyone!”
Penny found herself spun around, her chest to his, her back to the icy window, where the freezing world outside was actually causing icy trails to form.
“I was starting to wonder if biting you might be worth the extreme, debilitating pain,” he ground out. “Your mother is going to stake me! You told her we were putting our bodies together. That I was naked in your apartment.”
“You were naked in my pussy and mouth, too. And we are putting our bodies together,” Penny moaned as he gripped her, lifting her a little. She climbed him, wanting more of his touch, wanting him inside of her once more.
“We’re in public!”
“There have to be other people to have a public,” Penny argued.
“Well, we don’t know if someone else is going to come stumbling down those stairs.” Brax stopped, exasperated but unable to resist taking a kiss from her parted lips.
“I also told her that we were just right together,” Penny breathed when he parted from her.
Brax’s expression softened. “You were only talking about the temperature.”
“Maybe. Maybe more. I told her you were my helper. So cool.” Her mind felt slippery again. “You don’t melt, even when I rub myself all over you.”
He let out a low moan. “No, I seem to solidify, princess.”
Another screech of metal and rubber caused the mood to break. A loud klaxon-like pinging from Penny’s dropped phone also erased the romance.
“What is it? That sounds like some kind of emergency alert.” Brax looked over her shoulder as she retrieved the phone.
“Residents in the campus area from...” Penny started reading, mumbling to herself.
“State of emergency. Impassable roads. Crews trying to discover the cause...” Brax picked up her train of words, both trailing off. “The town is icing over. Starting from here. Come on.” Brax bundled her to him and started carrying her back to the relative safety of her apartment.
Penny nodded and swiped as another weather alert popped up on the screen.
“The wind chill is below freezing and still dropping. People are being told to stay put and not leave the house unless absolutely necessary. On Christmas Eve! Brax, Christmas Eve is supposed to be a time for people to be together. Family. Even if I don’t really get along with mine. And you don’t have one?”
“Nope.”
Penny looked back at the window as it disappeared from view.
Before she descended into the basement, carried in Brax’s arms, she caught sight of an ambulance parked crookedly in the intersection where the town’s roads led to the campus pathway across the river. “No one is on campus tonight. I hope.”
“Someone must have been. There was an ambulance trying to get there.”
Her stomach twisted. People need help. I need to get better. I have to help. “What if some monster is doing this, Brax? Or maybe that clumsy witch upstairs started something magical that normal people won’t be able to cope with. You and I aren’t normal.”
“Nope. Couple of weirdos, aren’t we?” Brax sighed.
“I don’t know any other weirdos. Monsters. I mean, I know of them. I see them. Don’t you guys have a-a group chat or something? Can the magical people do something?” Penny pleaded as she clambered down from his arms.
Brax shrugged, a look of discomfort on his face. “Not to disillusion you, love, but I’m not really the ‘plays well with others’ kind.”
“I figured that out. But you played well with me. And I’m going to leave this town as soon as I can, because monsters are evil and icky—”
“No! No, they’re not like that. Not the ones here! Listen, Penny, you run from this little town to a big city, and you’ll find the ones who want to stay hidden. The bad ones.”
“Like the ones in New Orleans?” she challenged.
“I’m... I’m not going to be like that anymore. I just, well, I just had ‘goodness’ thrust upon me by one very vengeful, creative, not-quite-human ex. The other folks here have chosen that path.”
“Well, tonight you’re choosing it, aren’t you?
You’ve been good with me. Good to me.” Penny pouted up at him suddenly.
“I want to believe that it’ll be okay. That my mom and dad don’t have to see, don’t have to believe me, but that someone will.
Someone I can trust. If I stay here, I have to have someone who gets me.
Someone who can give me a reason to believe that maybe.
.. Maybe the monsters don’t always want to hurt me.
That maybe seeing them doesn’t make me worth hurting. ”
Brax nodded slowly, wrapping his body around hers to stave off the chill, worried as red blotches appeared around her throat and on her cheeks. “You feeling worse?” he whispered.
“Yeah. Because I want to help. I’ve always tried to warn people they were in danger, and now I think they really are, and what am I doing? Sweating.”
“You’re keeping me alive. Undead. I’d be frozen in a little puddle of black and blue without you.
Come on.” Brax scooped her up in one arm and made for his clothes.
“I may be ‘wayyyy old,’ but I have a cell phone. I also have Jakob Minegold’s number.
He’s a vampire, a good guy, and he knows everything about anything in this town.
At least that’s the impression I get. We’ll call him and tell him about the spell gone wonky.
See if there’s any way that we can break it so everyone can have themselves a Merry Little Christmas. ”
brAX WAITED FOR THE ringing to give way to a voice, running his hands lightly over Penny’s back. Wherever his cool fingers touched, her skin lightened for a minute, but as he trailed down, it reverted to a dark, burnt pink.
“Minegold. Good evening, Mr. Leon. Felicitations of the season to you.”
Brax couldn’t help but smile. Jakob Minegold had one of those faint European accents and all the old-world courtliness of a lord or duke.
In person, he gave off an air of regal distinction, a cross between one of those intellectual orchestra conductors and a sort of paler, deadlier Peter Capaldi.
“Good evening. Merry Christmas—if you celebrate?” The conversation felt a tad surreal.
Vampires, celebrating the birth of Christ, the literal killer of their demonic lineage.
But in Pine Ridge, it didn’t seem like having an “evil” heritage meant you stuck to the dark side. Most people around here seemed to revel in breaking all associations, all chains.
Hm. The goody-goodies were actually the “bad boys” of the supernatural world, Brax supposed.
Mr. Minegold’s voice lost some of its joy as he answered. “I do, in addition to many other festivities. But tonight the festivities have hit a snag, and so I must—”
“I think I know who snagged them, Jakob.”
“What? You do?”
Brax told the tale of the bumbling wannabe witch, and heard the other vampire humming to himself, a thoughtful, processing sort of noise.
“That sounds like quite a problematic little spell. But one side of the town isn’t turning into the tropics, I’m afraid.”
“No. I see that on the news,” Brax muttered, looking at the local alerts his phone was popping up—and trying not to look at Penny, sitting in the shadow of the freezer, now rummaging for frozen peas that defrosted as soon as they hit her skin.
“I’m afraid that there is more than meets the eye to this little spell. In fact... Well, I am slightly worried about the idea of Hell freezing over.”
Brax let out a startled gulp. “I thought about that. But we don’t—”
“No. We don’t. We do not have a direct entrance to the nether realms, but we are a site where all kinds of energy pools and things cross in and over—especially on the other side of the river, past White Pines, past Blue Moon Lake.
Sometimes I think of it as the ‘Wildwoods’ from that dear old book, The Wind and the Willows.
Alas, if only it were belligerent weasels and stoats. ”
What in the world is he on about? What’s in the woods? I need to read more. “Uh. Yes?” Brax ran freezing fingers through his hair and started sidling up to his living heater.
“It seems to me that this innocent spell gone wrong may not have been so innocent. That’s very advanced magic for a beginner to try, and if she were more than a beginner, someone would have mentioned her name to me by now. I wonder where she learned such a spell.”
“People learn everything on the internet,” Penny called.
“Is that the voice of your burning companion?”
“My burning companion? Yes, and I’m freezing to a second death. We had to call a truce to keep each other from kicking our respective buckets,” Brax said through chattering teeth.
“The internet is a possible source, I suppose. I do wonder, though, if someone sent her the spell. Someone knowing that it might affect you, or her.”
“She’s innocent. Never hurt anyone. If someone wanted to punish one of us, it’d be me. She’d just be caught in the crossfire.”
“Don’t say fire. I’m dying,” Penny groaned.
“You don’t have some powerful sorceress with a grudge in your past, do you?”
Brax’s eyes widened, and he winced. “Would a voodoo queen who sold her soul a long, long time ago and hates my guts ‘cause I ate one of her favorite toyboys do it?”
Mr. Minegold sighed. “Sold her soul?”
“Mhm.”
“To a demon, one presumes?”
“Straight outta Hell, via New Orleans, I expect.”
“I told you monsters were bad,” Penny hissed.
“Quiet, honey, the good guys are trying to stop ‘em.” Brax rubbed his temples. This couldn’t be his fault. It couldn’t be. Marietta had cursed him enough! She didn’t need to curse his bloody town! And had he just grouped himself in with the good guys?
Yep. The world was probably ending.
“This is quite the act of magic. While you were suffering, perhaps your former lover considered that punishment enough. But if you have recently started to enjoy your life, say by having discovered the merits of our little town...”
Brax looked at Penny as Minegold trailed off, leaving the conclusion to him.
“She might have decided to up the ante. I was thinking about that tonight when it started to get bitterly cold inside my apartment. Thought to myself that Marietta wouldn’t like it if she found out I wasn’t starving to death or considering a nice sunny stroll just yet. ”
“And she might be asking for more favors from the demon she’s bound to to speed things along?”
“Cold won’t kill us, but fire won’t save us. I have this thing for women who are bad for me,” Brax sighed.
“Hey!”
“Not you, darling.” Brax grabbed Penny and felt her sigh in relief when his cold body touched hers. “You’re the only good thing that’s ever happened to me, lady-wise.”
“I am?” Penny looked up at him, starry-eyed, a strange little smile on her face. “That’s... weird. But good.”
“That’s us. Weird, but good.” He said it again—and he liked it better when it was paired with Penny.
“I hate to interrupt, but if your former lover is calling up demons from the underworld, there are two theories of how such a thing is accomplished. One presumes she can’t summon him, having no soul to trade—so she must open a gate.”
“That’s not my department. I got bit, but I never bothered with the rules,” Brax admitted.
“Unfortunately, when you’ve lived with great evil, as I have, one bothers with all the rules.
There is a legend that says ‘Should the fires of Hell be pooled into her chalice, she shall burn the gates and doors, she shall open the 9th Gate and see her way clear. What shall be left is winter’s desolation, consuming all with the ice that burns as sharp as fire. ”
Penny tilted her head. “We don’t have a gate. We don’t even have a doorman, and if there are monsters and devils roaming around, maybe we should?”
“The 9th Gate is a reference to the gates of Hell. Someone wants them open. Someone doesn’t just want you to die, Mr. Leon. Someone wants you to suffer.”
Penny leaned against his bicep, shaking. “That’s not okay.”
“No, my dear, it isn’t. Especially because if we don’t stop her, Pine Ridge is going to suffer along with him.”