“Like to like,” she answered him. “I don’t know why you heard my call, just that you did. I could not have given you your wish if you had not been earth-touched.”
He knew what she meant. How could he not? He remembered that sense he’d had of how she was a part of the earth that had held them together in its maw. He’d sensed it because the earth spoke to him, too.
Vampires develop abilities, the Master had told him. The Master could make humans do as he wanted even before a blood exchange—a rare gift, and useful.
Thomas’s mother’s family were scholars, back as far as their family history went—all the way, the stories said, to the dragon scholar who knew everything that dragons knew and turned into a man to see what men knew. Thomas’s mother had told him that her family was founded by a dilong, an earth dragon. “Only a story,” his father had said, rolling his eyes. He had never cared for anything that reminded him that his wife’s family had higher status than his.
Thomas looked at the assembled fae. “Why do you say that she is mad?” he asked.
“My father’s blood runs in the earth,” the big man whispered in Margaret’s voice. “His fire consumes me. When I emerge I will burn them all to dust and beyond.”
“We think the Flanagan died two years ago,” said the woman in subdued tones. She did not look at the man who sat next to her and spoke with Margaret’s voice. “That he gave her his last strength so she could call out and find someone to help, so she could be saved, but it was too late.”
“What would you expect of her?” asked the boy. “Alone for nearly a century. Trapped with only the dead for company, under the earth. Chained, without food or water. Neither dying nor living. And now she has the power of her father, who killed the Iku-Tursas.” He shivered and hugged himself. “She will kill us all.”
“No,” said Thomas, coming at last to his feet. “I shall not allow it. The girl I knew would not want your deaths on her conscience.” She had rescued him, a vampire who had hurt her, and still she rescued him. She did not need the blood of these fae on her hands.
It took him four days to find a way to the place she’d been kept. As the old man had promised, many of the tunnels he’d known were collapsed or filled, but his sense of the ways beneath the mining town was as good as it had ever been. He found a path.
As before, though, that earth sense he had did not betray her to him. It was the blood he’d taken from her. Like calls to like, she’d told him. While all the fae around her thought she was talking about her magic.
He rose in the absolute darkness and felt the shape of the last obstacle that stood between him and his goal. It was not just winter’s chill, it was colder than that. He found himself wishing for a light to see the väki, but he’d never needed a light down here, so he hadn’t brought one.
“Why come you smelling so of death?” It was a woman’s voice; he hadn’t expected her to be a woman.
“I am vampire,” he told the kalman väki. “I bring death with me.”
“Mine is the power of illness, of mortification of living flesh,” she said. “But I would keep my charge though I have no power over the dead.”
“No more than I do,” he said gently. “I mean her no harm, guardian spirit. I killed those who did.”
He’d killed them, her father’s betrayers, so that Margaret wouldn’t have to. They hadn’t expected it, and he’d been careful to take out the boy first. Then the big man who could—Thomas was pretty sure—pick and choose how much Margaret could say through his lips.
He was a vampire, and these fae had believed he was their dog to do their bidding. They hadn’t expected a monster, despite knowing what he was. Killing them had not taken him long.
Thomas had been raised in Butte, among the Irish, Finns, and all the other races who had come to pull the treasures of the Richest Hill on Earth. He might wear the face of a Chinese man, but he came from a family of scholars and lived among the people here for all of his childhood.
A väki of whatever kind was a protector of the treasure it guarded. No one would set such a creature to keep a prisoner in. Only a fae would think that a vampire would assume a väki of the grave would be an evil thing. Her father or perhaps the Finnish fae who had first warned the Flanagan of the dragon must have sent it to protect her. If they meant his Margaret no harm, the väki would not have prevented them from reaching her.
If Margaret had remained powerless in the heart of the earth, they would have left her there to rot. When her father’s power came to her—or whatever had happened that she could tell their thoughts and return her own—she could finally take action against them; they had decided they had to kill her.
Somehow they’d discovered that she’d called him for help—perhaps she’d taunted them with it—that she had someone she could call for help. It didn’t matter. What do you send against the spirit of the dead? A vampire. They had the weapon they needed; they just had to point it in the right direction. Once Thomas had dealt with the väki, they would have killed Thomas and Margaret both.
But Margaret hadn’t told them everything about him. They assumed she could summon him because of the wish she’d granted him, that it had given her some sort of magical power over him. But it had been the blood. If she had trusted them—as they implied—she would have told them about that part. Telling him about the väki had been their first mistake. Not knowing that he’d bitten her and taken her blood had been the second.
Nick, who had served her father almost all his life, would have known a vampire saved her. But neither Margaret nor her father had told Nick the whole story.
The final, and greatest, mistake had been implying that Margaret had been driven insane, imprisoned in the earth. What was it Nick had said? “She’s quite mad.” A subtle word was mad. Nick had used it to imply one thing without a lie crossing his lips. Thomas would have been angry, too, imprisoned by his enemies. The earth was her element; it nurtured her and sustained her.
If he was wrong, if they had been innocent of all he suspected . . . ? Well, then, he was a vampire, after all—and they were fae. He would not regret their deaths.
But he had not been wrong, because he could feel the guardian move out of his path, satisfied by his answer. He slipped by it and found the fragile thing he searched for, little more than bones in chains.
“Please,” she said, her voice as quiet as the whisper of the spring wind.
He broke the iron shackles first, throwing them as far from her as the confines of the tunnel allowed. He pulled a blanket out of the pack he carried and carefully, gently put her upon it.
“What would you do for me in return?” he said, raising her up and touching a damp cloth to her face. She pressed her face against it, sucking on the moisture. It would take her a long time to get water that way—and it would be slow enough not to make her sick from it.
When he pulled the cloth away and soaked it in water from his canteen again, she said, her voice hoarse, “Anything. My gratitude you have.”
“Yes?” he said, pressing the cloth against her face again. “You gave me such a gift last time. Gratitude is a poor substitute. Perhaps I should give your gift back to you, shall I?” He picked her up, and she was such a light burden, lighter even than she’d been the first time he’d carried her out of the mine tunnels.
“Oh, yes,” she sighed, understanding what he didn’t say, as she had before. “I should love to see the sun again.”
GRAY
This story, as some of my other stories have, started as an assignment from my writers’ group. Take a color and a holiday and make a story out of it. As it was February, I chose Valentine’s Day—but red would have been too obvious.