CHAPTER THREE

“Magic, Mom, magic is what’s going on,” I answered with a shrug, figuring Luke could take care of my mother’ s memories later on… That is, if he possessed such a skill in his repertoire, which I really hoped he did.

Otherwise?

You’re not going to start contemplating anything ‘otherwise,’ Kate, I firmly told myself. Your brain is about to implode on itself as it is! Anything more and it’ll be the looney bin for you for the rest of your life.

“Magic?” Mom repeated before she nodded like that made sense to her.

Magnus, meanwhile, never took his angry gaze from Gray and suddenly demanded, “Why is the enemy not dead?”

At hearing that, my mother began nodding in earnest, tearing her attention away from Yolanda and spearing it on me once more. “Katie, it’s the best way,” she said. Concern was etched on her face as she studied me and continued nodding like she was trying to convince me through body language alone.

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Katie,” she repeated my name solemnly and then paused before leaning forward to whisper, “he knows too much.”

“Mom, we’re not killing anyone.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” she shrugged, giving me that serious look she did whenever she was trying her hardest to persuade me to do something—like getting plastic surgery. “But sometimes—”

“—Mom! We are not killing anyone !”

I turned back to Luke, lowering my voice as I tried to ignore the fact that my mother seemed to have no problem with murdering an innocent person in order to cover up my alleged kidnapping tracks. “Gray needs blood, and he needs it immediately.”

“He is our enemy,” Magnus snapped.

“Magnus isn’t wrong,” Luke said.

“He is wrong,” I argued, shaking my head. “He might have been your enemy in the past, but he isn’t any longer. And whatever is happening to him now… isn’t good,” I finished as I looked at Gray and noticed he was even paler than before. He was actually now so weak, he could barely hold his head up.

Luke’s jaw was as tense as Magnus’s and he looked at me for a few seconds before firmly shaking his head. “Kate, there’s no way I’m going to sit here and allow the leader of the Dark Coven—”

“—the former leader of the Dark Coven,” I corrected him.

“What’s the Dark Coven?” Mom asked, but we both ignored her.

“He needs my blood, Luke,” I insisted .

Luke’s lips grew even tighter, and I could see his hands forming into fists on the tabletop. When he spoke, his voice was carefully measured, and it sounded like he was holding something back. “There’s no way I’m letting Valerian Shadowbane feed from you.”

“He’s no longer Valerian Shadowbane,” I protested yet again, feeling my own temper heating up because Luke had no idea what he was talking about. “He’s…” Then I glanced at the man in question who had slumped down further into his seat. If he didn’t get blood soon, I wasn’t sure what could happen to him. And I didn’t want to find out.

“If he’s no longer Valerian, then who is he?” Luke demanded, almost glaring at me.

I swallowed hard. “He’s Gray.”

“Gray… what?”

“Just… Gray.” It was strange maybe, but I felt an odd sense of protectiveness towards the man in question. Even if Luke and Magnus didn’t believe he was a changed man, I did. Because I knew the truth: Artemis had led me to Gray, which made me pretty sure that Gray was meant to play a vital role in my life. Maybe in all our lives .

“You don’t know that he’s changed. You don’t know that he’s any different from the murderous villain he was,” Luke started.

I shook my head. “I do know.”

“How?”

“Because he’s the man I kept meeting in the garden that Artemis created, Luke. A garden of her own design that was meant to allow Gray the time it took for him to transform—and to learn how to become an entirely different man.”

“Or so you believe.”

I shook my head. “I know it’s the truth because Gray told me as much—that he knew he was imprisoned in order to repent for something.”

“For ‘something’? But he didn’t know what that something was?”

I nodded. “The ‘what’ wasn’t important.”

“How can you say that?” Luke almost shouted at me, shaking his head like idiocy was contagious and I’d just come down with a severe case. “How in the hell do you repent for something and not even know what the thing is that you’re repenting for?”

I didn’t have an answer for that other than, “there was a reason Artemis wiped his memories when she placed him in a state of stasis. ”

“Reasons we don’t know.”

I nodded. “Whatever her reasons for not allowing him to remember who he was—they were her reasons. Which means, she must have known better than we do now.”

“Kate,” Luke started, shaking his head like he was as far from believing this as far could be.

“Not only that,” I continued, “but I kept seeing Gray in my dreams and he constantly told me that he knew he was in exile and atoning for something he did, even if he didn’t know what it was. But it turns out that he was atoning for being himself, Luke. He was atoning for being Valerian Shadowbane.” Taking a breath, I detected the skepticism in Luke’s eyes. No doubt, this was much harder for him to accept than it was for me, probably because he’d known Gray when he’d been Valerian and, apparently, Valerian must have been a pretty bad dude. No matter now—Luke needed to accept the truth that Gray was a different man at present.

“This is all conjecture,” Luke continued. “You have no solid proof of any of this.”

I gave him a copy of the glare he was currently giving to me. “There was a reason Artemis locked Gray up like she did and there was a reason the card of the Hanged Man led me to him.” I paused. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but you need to hear it. And you need to ask yourself why Artemis would have bothered hiding Valerian in the first place. Why didn’t she just kill him when she had the chance?”

“Those are all good questions,” Magnus suddenly piped up before giving me a clipped nod. Meanwhile, my mother pulled herself away from his neck, where I was pretty sure she was in the process of giving him a hickey.

While Magnus might have thought my points were good, Luke still didn’t appear as convinced. “Maybe there is a reason Artemis did what she did, but then again, maybe there isn’t.”

I shook my head. “Don’t be so stubborn, Luke.”

“I’m not being stubborn. I’m being logical.”

Clearly, my job here wasn’t done. “Look at this situation the way we’re supposed to look at it—through the eyes of the Hanged Man.”

He frowned. “What does that mean?”

“That it’s a situation that requires us to take a different perspective. ”

Luke breathed in for a few seconds and then breathed out just as long, glancing down at his hands. He extended his fingers and then cocooned them back into his palms, like he was having a really hard time accepting any of the things I was telling him.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted finally. Then he looked at me, his expression a mixture of reluctance and uncertainty.

“Just tell me you’re open to the idea that Valerian might have changed—that he might not be the same man you think he is?”

He sat there quietly for another few seconds that felt like hours. “Artemis may have made a mistake, Kate, and if she did—well, we could be making another mistake that could cost us all our lives.”

“And she might not have made a mistake. She might have simply done what the moon wanted her to do.” I paused a moment. “I’m sure she disliked Valerian just as much as you did!”

Luke nodded.

“What are you both talking about?” my mother interrupted, her shrill voice piercing the otherwise stillness of the air. “And what the heckety-heck is going on?”

“Magic,” I said again .

But this time Mom shook her head. “You can’t just tell me there’s magic here and not explain what that means, Katie. Are we talking magic like magic mushrooms? ‘Cause that would explain a lot of the hallucinations I’m having.” After a pause, she tapped one obnoxiously long and red fingernail against her lower lip for a few seconds. Then she shrugged and looked at me again. “Kate?”

I held back the urge to yell at my mother to shut the F up. But seriously, this was not the time for her to be machine-gunning me with questions I couldn’t answer and didn’t want to.

“And why is the goat sitting at the table?” Mom continued, like she was hellbent on giving me the worst headache I’d ever endured.

“Why shouldn’t I be sittin’ at the table, swizzle stick?” Rocco barked out. “What you got ‘gainst goats anyhow, huh?”

Mom didn’t respond, which meant I was pretty sure she still couldn’t understand him. And that was just as well because on the list of things I didn’t want to explain, Rocco was definitely close to the top.

“And no one has given me an explanation about the talking shrunken head yet either!” she lamented, throwing her arms up into the air.

I tried to ignore my mother as best I could, instead choosing to keep my gaze locked on Luke’s eyes. It was really important that I convinced him that Gray wasn’t the man Luke continued to insist he was. So important, that it might have been the difference between life and death. Actually, looking at Gray now, I was pretty sure it was the difference between his life and his death.

“Luke, please just consider the possibility that you’re wrong in your thinking.”

Luke swallowed hard, but then nodded with a long sigh. Even though I didn’t think he was convinced, he seemed to be waving the white flag of surrender, or at least that was what I hoped. I looked at Gray once more, before returning my attention to Luke. “He’s not doing well at all.”

Luke glanced at Gray, then breathed in deeply and gave me another quick nod. As if in response, Gray suddenly slumped forward, his eyes closing as his head dropped, like he was no longer conscious.

“We have to do something,” I urged Luke as I yanked up my sleeve and stood up. “He needs blood and he needs it now. ”

“Absolutely not, Kate,” Luke replied, a fierce protectiveness in his eyes as he held his arm out and forced me back into my chair.

“What are you doing?” Mom squawked. “Is this some kind of weird blood initiation? Are you part of a cult, Katie? Oh my God, what have you gotten yourself into?” A pause. “Magnus, are you involved in this cult?”

“I do not know the word ‘cult’,” the stooge responded.

“My blood healed him before,” I explained as I kept my gaze fixed on Luke. “I know it could heal him now—that was the power I received from the lesson of The Hanged Man,” I continued, realizing I hadn’t told Luke that much yet. “I can heal Gray… again.”

But Luke was steadfast in his refusal. “I won’t allow you to feed him.”

“Then what are we supposed to do? Just let him die?” I snapped, more than frustrated by Luke’s stubbornness. “After Artemis kept him alive all this time?”

“He ain’t suckin’ my blood!” Rocco announced.

“Mine neitha,” Yolanda seconded.

“Your blood is too powerful, Kate,” Luke explained .

“He fed from me earlier—you saw it.” My blood had rescued Gray from certain death—that much was for sure. “So, what does it matter if he drinks from me again?”

“It matters because… if he feeds from you, he can track you.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t want him getting any closer to you than he already is.”

“Then what about your blood?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m also too powerful—my blood in his body would be like putting gasoline on a fire. Who knows what he’d be capable of?”

Magnus suddenly pushed away from the table and stood up. “I will offer my blood to my enemy in order to keep the Daughter of the Moon safe.”

“Daughter of the what now?” Mom asked, frowning as she stood up. She wrapped her arms around Magnus before craning her neck up to look into his face. Standing there—Mom dressed like a dominatrix and Magnus in his warrior outfit, they looked like two extras from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Yes, we eventually needed to address the fact that my mother had seen and heard way too much, but now wasn’t the time—not with Gray on the brink of whatever he was in the throes of.

“Mom, sit back down.” For fuck’s sake!

“Not until you tell me just what the heckity-heck is going on in this house!”

“Elder Murray woman,” Magnus said, his jaw tight as he looked down at my mother. “You must heed the words of the Daughter of the Moon.”

“You keep calling her that, but what are you talking about?” she barked and Magnus motioned to me with a nod. “Katie is the Daughter of the Moon?” Magnus nodded. “Is that like her stage name or something?” she continued, appearing completely confused as she then faced me. “Is that your porn name, Kate?”

Are you freaking kidding me…

“I will feed the vampire,” Magnus repeated as he faced Luke resolutely.

“We don’t know what your blood will do to him either, Magnus,” Luke said.

“It shall nourish him,” Magnus answered. “I am the strongest of us all—the only warrior—none of you would survive the bloodletting the leech requires.”

“Ohhh, you are a warrior, aren’t you?” Mom crooned, apparently no longer concerned that I was the Daughter of the Moon or that there was a random dying vampire sitting with us. Even Yolanda was forgotten for the time being. Instead, the entirety of Mom’s attention was focused on running her long fingernails down Magnus’s chest as he pushed her firmly back into her seat.

“Tell me again, Magnus,” Mom said, her voice gasping and breathy. “Tell me you’re a warrior!”

“Oh, God,” I grumbled, shaking my head as I tried to think about the fact that it was only a matter of time before Luke wiped her memories of the last few hours right out of her head.

“I am the mightiest of warriors,” He-Man answered, looking as smug as smug could be.

“Oh, Magnus Snailrider, that just made my lady parts fire on all eight cylinders,” Mom purred.

“Stormrider!” the upset warrior corrected her.

Meanwhile, my own lady parts might as well have shriveled up and died. Not that I was paying them any attention with Gray verging on the threshold of what I was pretty sure was permanent vampire death.

Luke hesitated for a long moment before looking at me with another shrug. “Magnus has a point—he would be able to survive the bloodletting Valerian needs.”

“So… you’re okay with that?” I asked, just to be sure.

Luke nodded. “Better Magnus than you.” He breathed in deeply then, like he was trying to decide whether it was better to let Gray die right here, right now.

“You aren’t going to let him die, Luke,” I said, shaking my head. “You aren’t that type of man.”

“And yet, it might still be the best option.”

“It’s not,” I insisted.

He nodded like he’d already reached that conclusion and then swallowed hard as he looked at Magnus. “With your warrior blood, Magnus, he could absorb your strength.”

“He could.”

“Then you’ll have to be prepared for that,” Luke continued.

“Magnus Stormrider is always prepared for all enemy encounters.”

“Oh,” Mom said as she brought a hand to her heart and leaned back into her chair, shaking her head. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a sexier man in my life. ”

“Then you may proceed, but do so with caution,” Luke said to Magnus as the oaf simply nodded.