Chapter 22 Katarina
My bare feet barely made a sound as I walked over the gravel pathway. Looking down, I watched my toes float along the ground as though they weren’t really a part of my body. Something felt off. Strange. Like I wasn’t quite me, although I was fully aware of my surroundings.
My white nightgown rustled against my legs as a slight breeze danced along my side.
It was a cool night in New Orleans, unusual for this time of year.
But I wasn’t complaining. It felt nice and I smiled.
The gravel beneath me barely moved while I stepped slowly, one foot in front of the other as though time would stop while I played in the cemetery.
Something flew over my head, but I couldn’t move fast enough to see.
Like I was walking through a thick haze of molasses, I lived in a state of partial suspension.
A woman laughed beside me. As I turned my head toward her, I felt my red, curly hair float to the sides, delayed by the sluggish motion in this space. She laughed again, obviously seeing the confusion on my face.
“Don’t fret, dear. This is how it always is.
” The deep timbre of her voice caught me off guard.
She was a petite woman with tanned skin, straight black hair, and large, dark eyes that would easily captivate any soul.
Her bright, white teeth glimmered under the moonlight when she looked up at me and smiled.
Wearing a white dress similar to mine, her footsteps made no sound either as she walked beside me.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice holding a strange little echo within this weird world.
Instead of answering, she reached up and grabbed one of my curls. As she pulled the strand of hair tight and then let it go, she pursed her lips. “These must be from your mother’s line.”
“You knew my mother?”
The woman shrugged. “A little,” she admitted.
Again, I asked, “Who are you?”
We started walking down a pathway to the left, leading us toward some of the original tombs. “I am your grandmother. And I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
“My grandmother?” She didn’t look a day over thirty. And while I had no intention of clarifying that with her, I needed to know more. “You knew my father, then?”
The woman sighed and looked up at the clear night sky. “I do know him—”
“He’s alive?” I interrupted.
“In a way,” she said cryptically. “But I am not here to talk about him as much as I want to talk about you.”
“Where are we?” I finally asked. My brain had realized I wasn’t really walking through the oldest cemetery in the city with the grandmother I’d never met. In fact, I knew I wasn’t here, yet I was having a really hard time remembering where I’d been before this.
“We’ll get to that. But first, I want to learn more about you and your magic.”
“My what?” I stopped walking, forcing her to turn around and look at me. “I am not magical.”
She smiled and bopped me on the nose with her long finger.
“Oh, but you are,” she whispered. “I didn’t sense it at first, especially since it took so long to manifest. But now I think you may be one of the strongest grandchildren I’ve ever sired.
” She continued to examine me with her keen eyes and sharp gaze.
I felt frozen in place while she scrutinized every inch of my soul. “What happened to you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why now? Where is this power coming from?”
I looked down at my hands as though they might be glowing with all this magic I supposedly had. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t a vampire, or a shifter, or a fae—wait, something about those creatures felt familiar…
The woman suddenly grabbed my face in her hands and jerked my head until I was looking down at her. “They muted your memories,” she mused. “But why?”
Sucking in a deep breath, she tried to take in all my secrets at once while she studied me.
But then she opened her mouth and a fog of blue passed from my lips to hers as I stood by, helpless to stop her.
I didn’t feel the exchange in a negative way—like she might suck away my energy or even kill me.
But there was something…familiar that passed between us.
“Interesting,” she said, finally letting go of my face. Grabbing my hands in hers, she turned my palms over until they were facing the now darkened skies above. “I’d always wondered why he’d chosen your mother.”
“My father?”
She nodded, still studying the lines along my fingers. “He was a half demon. A cambion.”
“Cambion?”
“The son of a succubus mother and a human father.” She suddenly smiled up at me, a demure look of mischief dancing across her silky skin. “I’ve sired many cambions throughout my years in this realm. Your father…well, he was one of a kind.”
“Wait,” I shook my head and yanked my hands away from hers. “You’re a succubus? Like, an actual demon?”
With a little curtsey, she lifted the sides of her dress and bowed her head. “In the flesh. Well, kind of.”
“Demons are real?” I muttered, stumbling backward slowly through the thick air.
“Of course, we are real. Have you not learned anything since you bonded with the men?”
“The men?” Who were the men?
“What did they do to you?” Before I could react, my grandmother slapped me across the cheek, pain radiating down the side of my face.
I turned to yell at her, and she slapped me on the other side.
Muttering several words in a language I’d never heard before, I watched her mouth move while my brain flashed all sorts of images at once.
A blond man. Tattoos. Bedrooms, showers, a mansion.
A room filled with books and a feeling of euphoria that had me gasping for air. Sex. Lots of sex.
“Yes,” she cooed. “Tell me about them.”
“What…what did you do to me?” Another image of people in hooded cloaks. An explosion and the feeling of something crushing my chest. A black dog.
“Grim,” my grandmother whispered.
“I…yes, I think I have a dog named Grim.”
“You do. What else are you seeing?”
“Men. My men.” Tears swarmed my eyes as a flood of memories came racing back.
My heart ached to see them all again, and I hated myself for forgetting them in the first place.
Then there was a memory of one who was slumped to the floor while the world around me crumbled.
I sucked in a sob. “One of them died,” I whispered through my tears.
“Come,” she said softly. “Let’s sit.”
I allowed the woman to lead me to a stone bench underneath a large oak tree. Everything still floated, but I felt like I wasn’t as stuck as I once was. As we sat, I asked, “Are we really in this cemetery?”
“No.”
“Then where are we?”
She shook her head and grabbed my hand. “We are in a dream, but I’m afraid I do not know where your physical body is.”
“Am I dead?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s good, I guess.”
Laughing at that, my grandmother squeezed my hands tight. “Tell me about the first time you had sex.”
“What?” I shouted, completely embarrassed and utterly mortified. I mean, this was my grandmother, after all. Plus, I’d just told her that someone had died right in front of me. Someone I cared about. “No, I can’t do that.”
“Katarina, dear. There is nothing to be ashamed of. I am a demon of sex. It is what gives me life.”
Trying to shake the cobwebs from my brain and suddenly feeling an odd sense of comfort with this stranger who claimed to be my relative, I squeezed my eyes shut and recalled the night I turned eighteen. “I killed him,” I whispered through my tears.
My grandmother wrapped her arm across my back and pulled me closer. It felt a little awkward considering how tiny her frame was. But she was strong, and I couldn’t resist the hug. “He was human?”
I nodded and wiped my cheeks. “Yes.”
“And what about the men of the House of Shadows?”
Feeling the blush creep up my neck, I turned to look at her. “How do you know about them?”
“They are part of your life force now. I felt your love for them when I took a sample from you.”
When she what? This night was getting stranger and stranger.
“The wolf and the fae,” she continued. “You didn’t kill them when you had sex?”
“No,” I said, still a little embarrassed about having this conversation with my new-to-me grandmother. “In fact, it was almost the opposite. Like I calmed them.”
She chuckled. “I’m sure you did. But that wasn’t because of the sex.”
“No?”
“What do you know about your mother’s magic?”
“My mother was a human,” I stated, completely sure of that truth.
“She was not fully human, Katarina. Why else would the witches have killed her?”
“The witches killed her?” Had I not still been floating through this strange molasses-like state, I would have jumped to my feet. “No. It was a car accident.”
My grandmother simply stared at me with a look of pity dancing across her frown. I didn’t need to ask her anything else to know that she was telling me the truth. My heart ached with years of old pain scratching at the surface again. “Why would they do that?” I finally asked.
“Because she wouldn’t join them.” Shifting so that our shoulders touched, she grabbed my hand again and squeezed. “Your mother may have been partially human, but she came from a very powerful line of witches.”
“You knew about them?”
Shaking her head, she clarified. “I could sense it in your life force—”
“The blue fog?” I interrupted.
“You could see that?” When I nodded, she smiled wide. “Then you are certainly the strongest of my living grandchildren.” I had nothing to say, so she continued. “Your mother’s power came from a line of witches with the ability to mute magic. We often refer to them as Voids.”
“Voids?”
“Yes. Their ability is both revered and feared. Most were killed on site for many centuries. And those that lived were often forced into hiding.”
“Is that why the Crescent Coven took an interest in me?”
My grandmother nodded. “That and because of your demon heritage. Witches were spawned from the demons a long time ago. But most will never encounter a real demon or even those with demon traces. So, when they find one…they will covet them.”
“That’s just great,” I mumbled.
Standing, my grandmother looked up at the sky and stretched her arms above her head. Her white dress lifted to show that she wasn’t wearing any shoes either. “I must go soon.”
“Wait! You can’t leave me yet. I have so many questions.” My voice trembled as I tried to rein in my thoughts. “I don’t even know your name.”
“I have many names,” she said sweetly. “But most call me Farah.”
“Farah,” I repeated, forcing my brain to remember what she looked like so that I wouldn’t forget the only member of my family I’d met since my mother died.
Farah reached over and bopped me on the nose again. “Now,” she said, offering me a hand to get off the bench. “Let’s figure out how to get you out of your predicament.”
“What?” I barely had the word out of my mouth before the entire cemetery disappeared and I was pulled into a thousand different directions.
That sticky molasses feeling turned into one that felt like I was plunging down a steep slide or a rollercoaster—totally out of control and completely terrifying.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. And when a large bedroom took shape before my eyes, Farah was laughing at me. “What the hell just happened?”
She didn’t answer right away, so instead, I looked around.
An old house. Grand in stature, yet still had that smell of musty antiques, old wallpaper, and lead paint.
I was lying on a four-poster bed most likely carved in the early nineteenth century.
The white comforter was more modern, but the handmade quilt screamed turn of the century.
I quickly realized I was in a corner room as there were windows both on the wall in front of the bed and on the right side.
Second floor too since I could see the branches of the oversized oak trees outside. “Where am I?”
Farah was walking around the room and examining everything. Just like in the cemetery, her feet didn’t make a sound. “Smells like fields. Somewhere outside the city.”
“A plantation house?” I asked, my stomach dropping at the thought.
She shrugged. “Perhaps. But not one used for regular visitors.” Running her finger along the large wooden dresser on the far side of the room, she clicked her tongue when she saw the dust on it. “Definitely an illusion.”
“So how do I get out of here?”
In a blink, Farah was sitting on the bed next to me, and I muffled a scream as she moved unnaturally fast. “Can you feel any of them? The men? Grim?”
“No,” I admitted, fear and sadness thick in my voice.
Farah looked around the room again, searching for something. “They have spelled this place, and you must break the curse to free yourself.”
“I don’t know how to do any of that kind of stuff.”
“You do,” she said. “It’s just buried deep down inside.”
Tears filled my eyes. “No,” I whispered.
“Are you not a skilled thief?” she snapped at me.
“Yes.”
“Think of this as another job. Find the weakness in the security and break out.”
“But I don’t know how to break the magic.”
Farah closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath. I thought she was annoyed with me, which made me a little angry, but when she looked at me again, she gave me her radiant smile. “I must leave you now.”
“No, please, you can’t!” I reached toward her, only to see my hands disappear through her now translucent body. The tears blurred my vision but I quickly wiped them away, hoping I wasn’t really losing her. “I need you!”
She smiled again and placed her hand over her heart. “Everything you need to save yourself is in here.”
“No, please—”
“You are strong, Katarina. Remember that.” And before I could take my next breath, she was gone.
“No, no, no,” I muttered to myself, trying my best to hold back the sobs.
I was trapped. My memories were foggy at best. And now, the only living relative I had, left me without really explaining anything.
I mean, was I really in this room, or was I in the cemetery?
Did magic really trap me, or could I walk out of here and find the men drifting in and out of my head?
And was Farah really a demon?
Where was I?
My head swarmed with so many questions that the room started to spin. Lying back on the bed, I covered my eyes and took several deep breaths. I needed to get back to my men. I needed to get back to Grim.
And somehow, I needed to figure out how to tap into my magical heritage to make it all happen.