CHAPTER TWO

“Whatever you’re thinking, Mom, stop. We aren’t murdering anyone.”

“I can assure you that whatever you think this is, it’s nothing illegal,” Luke suddenly piped up as he took a step forward like he’d just realized he had a voice. At his words, I had to wonder if that actually was the case—because this whole situation seemed pretty illegal to say the least.

“Who the heckity-heck are you?” Mom shot back, placing a hand on her hip as she glared at him before she began to wobble in her stilettos, quickly responding by balancig herself with a hand against the wall.

“Luke, this is my mother, Nancy. Mom, this is Luke.”

“Uh-huh…Your partner in crime, no doubt,” Mom said, narrowing her eyes at Luke.

I took a deep breath, trying to regain some semblance of control over the situation, but as soon as that thought occurred to me, I rejected it because the situation was already off the leash and careening into oncoming traffic.

“Luke has nothing to do with this, Mom,” I said as I wracked my brain, trying to find some answer to the complete nonsense that was happening all around me. First things first—I needed to get everyone away from this room. “Can we all please just shut up and go… back upstairs? We can explain and discuss… everything around the dining table and then maybe we can also come up with a plan. ”

“Fine,” Mom huffed, already turning on her stilts. But before she could even take so much as a step, Rocco suddenly strolled through the hole in the wall, his hooves loudly crunching on the broken glass.

“What’s all the commotion about, huh?” he grumbled as Yolanda hung from one of his horns.

“Yeah, why’s there a huge hole in the wall that’s big ‘nuff ta fit an elephant?” Yolanda chimed in, her voice speedy and shrill, as usual.

Rocco rolled his eyes. “Why’s there a stone wall there in the first place, ya yutz?”

“A talking, disembodied head!?!” Mom suddenly shrieked as she reared back like a spooked giraffe, nearly pitching herself right onto her ass.

“Son of a bitch,” I started as I realized how epically this situation had just blown up. I was so over the whole thing that I couldn’t even find the wherewithal to be surprised that my mom could understand Yolanda. As far as I knew, she still couldn’t understand Rocco.

“Yeah, yeah, nice ta meetchoo too,” Yolanda said as my mother shook her head and stared at the shrunken head, her mouth hanging open like a trout.

“Why or how is that head talking, Katie? ”

“It’s not,” I answered, unsure of what more to say. I mean, really, how could I explain any of this? “It’s just a… a toy. It’s not a real shrunken head.”

Mom stopped saying whatever she’d been about to and seemed slightly disappointed by my response, even if she did accept it. And thank God for small mercies!

Rocco, meanwhile, brought his gaze to Gray, who was still very helplessly suspended in midair and very much naked. The goat’s eyes widened, and then just a hint of a smirk began to form on his goat lips.

“Is this the settin’ fer some weirdo porn flick you’re starrin’ in, boss?” he asked me. Then he chuckled to himself and shook his hairy head. “First, it was just them sex books she was writin’ an’ now she movin’ to the big screen—I tell ya, there ain’t no innocence left in this world no more.”

“Porn!” Yolanda cackled, swinging back and forth from Rocco’s horn like she was seriously affronted. “An’ it’s been brewin’ right undaneath our noses the whole time!”

“It really doesn’t look like a toy,” Mom said as she squinted to peer more closely at Yolanda, who was so busy gabbing, she didn’t notice .

“An’ we didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout this bein’ no porn studio, did we, goat face?” Yolanda added.

“Ah, jeez… nope, we sure as heck didn’t, yakkity yak,” Rocco responded. “We sure as heck didn’t.”

“Enough!” I snapped, my face burning with embarrassment, not to mention rage, shock, panic and fear. “Rocco, turn around and walk back up the stairs. Now!” I ordered him, clenching my fists at my sides to resist the urge to start tearing my hair out.

“No need ta be so touchy, liver lips,” Rocco retorted.

“Now!”

“I’m goin’, I’m goin’! Sheesh!”

“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Katie,” Mom said while giving me an arched brow to emphasize her statement.

“Mom,” I answered through gritted teeth, feeling my chest tighten with what I was pretty sure was a pending heart attack, “please, just go upstairs. I’ll explain everything to you up there.”

“Fine,” she huffed, turning to face Magnus and holding out her arm to him as if to request his assistance.

“Go with her, Magnus,” I ordered him and, thank God, he simply nodded. Mom then gave Rocco and Yolanda one last suspicious glance before she began wobbling towards the hole in the wall that would lead her to the hallway and the staircase to the Hanged Man’s room. I watched the three of them leave with a fraction of relief inside my chest. But that fraction of relief only lasted until I thought about the fact that Mom had just witnessed all the things she had.

At that, my heart started pounding like a jackhammer as I tried to regain some semblance of control of myself. Gray, meanwhile, still floated in midair, his eyes wide with fear and confusion.

You need to take this situation calmly, one step at a time, I told myself.

And the first step was getting Gray down.

“He can’t stay suspended in midair like that,” I told Luke, my hopeful gaze pleading with his stern one.

He breathed in deeply but fortunately nodded. “At least, we agree on that much.”

“Then how,” I started to ask before Luke lifted his hands and extended both of them forward, his palms facing up, as if he were offering something precious to the ceiling.

“I channel myself as The Magician,” Luke called out. “And I ask to bring the unseen into the seen world! I ask my thoughts to manifest and my intentions to be born into physical form!”

At that, the dimly lit room seemed to blaze up with a feeling of intense energy. All at once, I could see a slight outline of what appeared to be a tarot card delineated around Luke—like he was being featured on the card’s face. I figured that made some sort of sense, considering he was The Magician.

He shifted his hands then, one of them continuing to point towards the ceiling while the other pointed towards the ground.

“The flow of divine energy courses through me,” he continued. “I manifest the bridging of the spiritual and material realms.”

His fingers were slightly curled, and as I watched, a white, glowing ball of light materialized in each of his palms. The circular light pulsated gently with an otherworldly luminescence and made a sort of popping, fizzing sound. Even though it might have been a cool parlor trick, I wasn’t sure how two glowing balls of light were going to get Gray down. But as I was about to ask Luke that exact question, he flicked his wrists, sending both balls of light hurtling towards Gray. The balls of light struck the IV that was attached to Gray, severing it at his throat. In response, Gray dropped to the ground with a loud thud that I was sure didn’t feel good.

I rushed to his side, worried that the fall might have injured him. But when I reached him, he just looked up at me wordlessly, his eyes locked onto mine.

“Where is the garden, Kate? Where am I now?”

“It’s okay,” I said softly as I dropped down to my haunches and reached out, gripping his shoulder and trying to sound reassuring despite the turmoil in my chest. “I’ll explain everything later, okay? Right now, we just need to get you out of here.”

“Can you walk?” Luke asked him gruffly once he approached the two of us. It was clear Luke didn’t trust him, but he also couldn’t deny that Gray needed help. In fact, Gray was so weak that when he attempted to stand and I stood with him, he leaned his entire weight on me, nearly knocking me over in the process.

Gray shook his head weakly. “I... don’t think so.”

“Help me get him out of here, please,” I said to Luke.

Luke hesitated for a moment before nodding reluctantly, as if realizing he had no alternative. Then he took one of Gray’s arms, and I took the other, pulling Gray to his feet. Even then, Gray couldn’t support himself, so we assisted him as we made our way across the debris-strewn floor.

“Luke,” I started and looked over at him, “what are we going to do about my mother? She saw... everything and apparently, she can understand Yolanda too.”

Luke nodded. “That also surprised me.”

“So?”

He gave me a grim expression. “That’s the least of our worries right now.”

“If she starts asking questions—”

“—then we’ll deal with it,” he cut me off, his lips tightening. “But right now, we need to focus on figuring out what the hell is going on and what the hell we can do about it.”

I nodded, knowing he was right. But as we left the ‘sex dungeon’ behind, I couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in my stomach. My mother seeing all the things she just had was one more complication in an already impossible situation.

###

Twenty minutes later, I felt like my life was a scene straight out of Alice in Wonderland, with me playing the part of Alice, wondering how I’d fallen down this rabbit hole.

Everyone was finally seated around the table in the dining room. Gray was sitting on my left, wearing my terrycloth robe that looked, in a word, ridiculous. The robe, a soft pastel pink, barely reached the middle of his thighs, and the sleeves stopped just above his forearms. He’d attempted to wrap the tie securely around his middle, but the short belt barely formed a knot, and the robe was currently gaping open, revealing all the ridges and valleys of his sculpted chest and abdomen. Luckily, he’d managed to cover his nether regions, because it wasn’t easy trying to keep your gaze above board when the captain happened to be manning a very large ship!

On my right, Luke looked concerned and irritated in equal measure, his eyes darting between Gray and me. Clearly, it was going to take some convincing to make Luke understand that Gray wasn’t his arch enemy–or at least, not any longer. But how could I convince him? I wasn’t exactly bursting with solutions.

Across the table, my mother was still clad in her BDSM outfit (even though I’d asked her to change). She sat next to Magnus (as in, nearly on top of him), busily eyeing Gray with narrowed suspicion, like she believed he was the antichrist. She’d taken her lead from Magnus, no doubt, who was considering the other man with open hostility and had been all along. Magnus had retrieved his enormous blade and it was now leaning against the table, just beside him.

Rocco also sat at the table, on the other side of Magnus’s sword, while Yolanda was resting on the tabletop. Rocco was sitting in the chair like he thought he was human, with his squat, little legs hanging off the seat and his front hooves folded on top of the table. Yolanda and Rocco appeared to be in the middle of doing what they always did—bickering. This time, as far as I could tell, the subject revolved around how Artemis would have reacted to the porn movies being filmed in the sex dungeon…

But I couldn’t say I was too concerned with defending myself against porn accusations—in fact, I wasn’t concerned with anything or anyone but Gray at the moment. Why? Because it seemed that from the time Luke detached him from the IV that had kept him suspended in the air, Gray’s condition was rapidly worsening .

“Do you want something to eat or drink?” I asked him gently, noticing how his skin seemed to be turning whiter by the second.

“I… don’t know,” he responded, and his voice was weak and small. Not to mention the hollows beneath his eyes, which had visibly deepened in the last ten minutes or so. Overall, he had this frail, sunken sort of appearance that wasn’t at all like the fiery man I’d met in my dreams.

Luke leaned closer to me and whispered, “Valerian Shadowbane doesn’t eat food or drink water, Kate. The only thing that can keep him alive is blood.”

“Right,” I responded with a furtive nod, casting a glance at Gray as I breathed in deeply and really contemplated just what that meant. “Because he’s a vampire.”

A vampire! I couldn’t even handle the word. I mean, vampires weren’t supposed to be real—they were strictly the baddies of nightmares or angsty teen movies. And yet… here was Gray—proof of the fact that my life had turned not only upside-down, but inside out.

Luke nodded solemnly. “Vampire,” he repeated, like that was reason enough not to give Gray the benefit of the doubt. And, who knew? Maybe he was right. Maybe I’d made a huge mistake in freeing Gray and rescuing him from Ezra’s blade. Maybe I’d bungled up Artemis’s intentions completely and she’d just simply intended for him to remain in that cold prison from here to eternity. Somehow, though, I didn’t think so.

“Vampire!” Rocco called out, shaking his hairy head. “That what you said, boss? Yakkity yak’s non-stop blatherin’s makin’ it soze I can’t hear ya none!”

“We got us a bloodsucka in the house?” Yolanda wailed, causing my mother to turn her attention to the shrunken head.

“Is someone going to explain how that head can talk?” she demanded, her attention falling on me. I immediately brought my gaze back to Gray, since he was my priority, and as far as my mother was concerned, I didn’t even know where to start. All I did know was that explaining something I barely understood myself wasn’t a good place to even try to begin.

“I ain’t makin’ this shit up, cheese puff,” Rocco continued. “An’ let me tell you somethin’ pal,” he continued as he narrowed his eyes on Gray, who seemed oblivious to everything going on around him. “Don’t think fer one second o’ tryin’ ta eat out my throat, ya hear me? ”

“Mine neitha,” Yolanda said.

“Ya ain’t got no throat ta eat, ding-dong.”

“Kate,” Mom started in again. “What’s going on!?”