Keystone (Gatewalkers) Read online

  She imagined it. She must have imagined it.

  It was a psychological reaction, the heightened detail of the game tricking her brain into sending signals that the VR projectors could not emulate. Pain, whether from the loss of a few hit points or a “killing” blow, registered only as pressure.

  Just like the candle. Like the sting of hitting Jack’s hand. Which had both felt very, very real.

  A dull ache throbbed in her wrist.

  Psychological. It had to be psychological.

  Charlie willed herself to slap him, pull away, call out her emergency logout code, anything. She couldn’t so much as tear her eyes from his.

  The dull ache became a sharp sting.

  Charlie felt her pulse creeping upward, pressure building against her eardrums as adrenaline told her body what her mind refused to accept. A vampire was attacking her. A real one.

  Run! she screamed at herself.

  The vampire dug his fangs deeper with a soft moan of satisfaction.

  The doorframe splintered, the door flying open. In a movement so fast it barely registered, a pale, long-fingered hand clamped onto the vampire’s blond hair and yanked his head away from Charlie’s wrist. A steely forearm sent Charlie reeling backwards, out of reach.

  She stumbled, falling hard on her back, but it felt as if something snapped back into place, allowing her to think clearly again.

  And she could clearly see Rhys, hood flung back and flashing ivory fangs, he and the vampire hissing like a pair of angry snakes. Or a pair of angry vampires.

  I like the dark. Maybe he should have said, I don’t like sunlight, because it burns me to a crisp.

  Clutching her bleeding wrist, Charlie scrambled backward until she fetched up against wall. The vampires faced off, eyes locked, on the brink of a snarling, clawing, biting brawl.

  Charlie’s eyes darted past them to the door, but she barely dared to breathe much less draw their attention. Her stomach churned. Blood still seeped between her fingers. Pressure, she reminded herself from first aid class, and carefully adjusted her grip on her wrist. Pressure to stop bleeding.

  “Control it, Gareth,” Rhys said, his voice pitched low, the first words spoken between them.

  The blond haired vampire showed no signs of backing down, fangs bared and snarling.

  “Gareth. Her blood,” Rhys said slowly and deliberately, “is not worth your life.” He spread his fingers, as if cupping something in his hand. Or as if getting ready to rip out the other vampire’s heart.

  Gareth quivered, his distended lips lowering over his fangs, but his scowl remained. “You are interrupting my meal.”

  “She is not for you.” Electricity arced between Rhys’ fingers, almost like the toy plasma balls from her high school science lab. Her gut said he wasn’t playing.

  Gareth’s nose twitched. He cast Charlie the briefest blur of a glance. “I suppose I should not let such a small thing mar our friendship,” Gareth said, his voice perfectly level, as if he hadn’t been about to go for Rhys’ throat moments before.

  Rhys closed his fist, extinguishing the net of light. He smoothly reached up to pull his concealing hood back into place. Gareth relaxed his hostile posture and did the same.

  The other vampire breezed out the door, vanishing as quickly as a shadow in the light.

  Charlie scrambled to her feet. Still in shock, she blurted out “That was a friend? It looked like he wanted to rip your head off.”

  “He did.” Rhys met her stunned gaze with a cool expression. “Gareth is lacking in self control.”

  “I’ll say,” Charlie muttered.

  Rhys’ eyes dropped to Charlie’s bloody wrist. Her spine prickled, registering that she still faced a dangerous predator. Her gaze darted to the door. If she sprinted suddenly enough –

  His hand shot out, bony fingers clamping around her chin to bring her face up to meet his eyes.

  “Be still,” he said.

  Charlie froze, as if her muscles no longer belonged to her. A bird trapped in the gaze of a snake. Rhys took her wounded wrist, blood banding it like a crimson bracelet. Charlie could only watch helplessly as history prepared to repeat itself. Rhys bent to cover the punctures with his mouth. Charlie squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to feel fangs again.

  Rhys’ tongue ran across the wounds. The lingering ache faded away to numbness.

  Charlie’s eyes blinked open and abruptly she could move again. She snatched her wrist back and yanked herself away.

  Rhys didn’t chase her. He only watched her, waiting for her reaction. Almost challenging.

  Charlie peeked at her wrist, hardly daring to take her eyes off of him that long. Blood smeared her hand, wrist, and arm, but the punctures stopped bleeding. She looked quickly to the inviting door.

  “I wouldn’t,” Rhys said, startling her out of her skin. “He may yet change his mind.”

  A strange ringing accompanied the rising pressure against her ears. The room seemed much darker than it had been moments ago. The game had broken. The tilting floor suddenly rushed toward her face.

  “Charlie!” Rhys’ arm broke her fall. “Breathe!”

  Charlie gasped, filling her lungs. She had forgotten to breathe. It should have tripped the emergency safety, automatically stopping the game.

  A VR projection wouldn’t have been able to catch her.

  Houston, we have a problem. “Toto, we are not in Kansas,” Charlie muttered. Vampires. It just had to be vampires. Her insides quivered.

  Rhys eased her to a sitting position. “Lower your head. The dizziness will pass.”

  “I don’t think it will,” Charlie said, but she obeyed. There were three reactions she could take. 1) Continue telling herself it was completely psychological, and start futilely trying to log herself out of the “game,” 2) panic and go into hysterics, which she despised, or 3) accept it for what it was and proceed forward.

  “It’s real, isn’t it,” Charlie mumbled into her knees. She could feel all her limbs beginning to tremble. No, no. Stop that. No hysterics. Calm. Breathe. Charlie made herself take several deep, shaking breaths, and cautiously lifted her face from her khaki knees.

  Rhys nodded, watching her carefully.

  “I just got bitten by a vampire,” Charlie said, to clarify for the record. If someone had told her that morning that she would be bitten by a vampire, she’d have thought… well, she would have thought that they were talking about a game. But it wasn’t a game.

  Rhys nodded, his expression turning wary.

  “I am not going to freak out,” Charlie said, much more calmly than she felt she should be.

  “‘Freak out’?”

  “Go into hysterics. Scream. All that.”

  “Wise of you.” Rhys’ words could have been a statement or a veiled threat. She didn’t know him well enough to tell. She didn’t know much of anything anymore.

  Charlie straightened a little further, not yet meeting Rhys’ eyes. “If I ask an odd question, will you answer honestly?”

  “You are in no danger of becoming a vampire,” Rhys said.

  “Good to know,” Charlie said, startled. She hadn’t thought of that. Yet. “But that wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “What I wanted to ask was….” Charlie steeled herself. “How do I know if this is real?” If it was still just a realistic game – which possibility seemed to recede into the distance every moment – then Eliza was probably curled up on the cade floor laughing her heart out. Either that, or calling security to haul her off to a psych ward.

  But if that were so, why hadn’t her distress triggered an emergency shut off?

  Rhys took her hand and held up her wrist. “Is this the stuff of dreams?”

  Two pale purple spots marked her skin. She gingerly ran her finger over them, the drying blood stiff and sticky. They didn’t feel like they’d been open wounds minutes ago. Maybe she could convince herself it was psychological after all. Charlie pressed her thumb down
on the marks, hard. It hurt. Sore, like a muscle bruise.

  Charlie pulled hand back and got out her pocket computer. She opened her contacts list and tried to call her sister, but “No signal” flashed across the screen. She tried again. No signal. Not just interference from the VR projectors. No signal at all.

  A strange feeling began bubbling up. A tingling akin to fresh adrenaline, but so different. The thrill of starting a new game, a new adventure. Seinne Sonne was real. Pixies, elves, magic, and whatever the heck Taryn was.

  Vampires.

  The thought brought her back to the fact of her situation. Rhys was a vampire. A blood-sucking, dark-loving vampire, complete with fangs. Obviously eternal youth and beauty was out of the question for these vampires. “Can I see your fangs?”

  Rhys pursed his lips slightly, eying her slantways. Come to think of it, he had always been careful not to expose his teeth when speaking. He hesitated for a long moment, then gave her a strange sort of grimace, peeling his lips back. His outside incisors curved down from the rest of his teeth, sharp and long.

  Cheeks turning pink, Charlie took hold of one, the back of her mind insisting that it had to be fake. The fang was solidly rooted, not just a good Halloween cap. The grimace on his face turned truly awkward.

  Charlie quickly let go of his fang. “Sorry,” she said. “I just….”

  Rhys waved it away, still grimacing. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.

  A giggle bubbled up and burst free before Charlie could stop it. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she said again. “The look on your face.”

  The corner of his mouth curved upward as if despite himself. “It was not what I expected,” he said wryly.

  Charlie started to apologize again, but stopped herself. Now she was feeling a little giddy as well as lightheaded. So much for not freaking out. All she did was invent a new way to freak out. And tried to pull out a vampire’s fang. Charlie felt another giggle trying to escape.

  “Why haven’t you killed me?” Charlie said.

  “Do you want me to?” Rhys sounded amused.

  “No, but… teen dramas notwithstanding, vampires by nature aren’t exactly the good guys.”

  Rhys shot her a sharp look. “Gareth and I are not true vampires. We were bitten, not born as one.”

  “Bitten? But you said….” Charlie looked down at her wrist.

  “Natural born vampires have a venom that sometimes poisons the blood.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Sometimes the venom has no effect. Sometimes a healer can remove the taint before the transformation begins. Sometimes the bitten one dies. Sometimes the bitten one is killed by their own family, fearing what they may become, whether the blood is tainted or not.”

  “Your family didn’t.” Seeing as he was still alive.

  His face hardened, his pale eyes deadening. “I have no family.”

  Oh yeah. The whole mass slaughter of his bloodline. Sensitive subject. The concept sank into hollow reality. No family. No parents, no siblings, no wife, no kids, and probably a bad idea to ask about it. Merely thinking about it settled a heavy weight on her shoulders. To lose her father, her sister, her niece and nephew, all at once….

  Charlie’s stomach did a churning crash. Her niece and nephew. She was supposed to baby-sit tonight. “How do I get back?”

  “The only way to return to your world is through the same Great Gate you arrived through,” Rhys said.

  “It closed,” came Lallia’s small, guilty voice.

  “Closed? What do you mean closed?” Charlie demanded, her voice rising. If she couldn’t get back, she would miss her shift at the cade tomorrow. If she missed two shifts without notice, she would lose her job. Eva would be worried sick when she didn’t come home.

  “The Keystone can open it,” Lallia offered.

  Charlie latched onto it. “So we can find it and use it, just like you wanted. Nothing has changed.” Except everything had changed.

  “The Keystone? The Keystone is broken,” Rhys said. “That is why the Great Gates are opening at all.”

  Charlie felt her life shatter. “I’m screwed,” she mumbled, her head sinking back onto her knees. She covered her head with her arms. There went her job. Her family. Her life. A ridiculous bad day had just become a lifetime.

  It felt as if a gaping black hole opened inside her.

  Charlie lifted her head, finding unexpected moisture on her cheeks. “I’m never going home. Am I.”

  Lallia fluttered over to pat her cheek in sympathy. “It isn’t so bad here. Seinne Sonne truly is a lovely kingdom.”

  “There’s no place like home,” Charlie said. She took a deep breath. Pull yourself together, girl. It isn’t the end of the world.

  Then again….

  She heard a slight rustle. “If…” Rhys said, hesitant. Reluctant. “If you were to find one of the larger fragments, it may hold enough power to open a Great Gate.”

  Charlie felt a small seed of hope budding. There was after all, someone tied to the Keystone sitting right next to her.

  Rhys held out his hand to her. Charlie hesitated, but he reached out to wrap his cool fingers around her wrist.

  “Come,” he said, drawing her to the door.

  “Where are we going?” Charlie asked.

  “Home,” Rhys said as they descended the stairs. “You may stay at my house tonight. Unless you have your own arrangements?”

  Of course she didn’t.

  As they emerged from the tavern, the sun was sinking into the spider web of masts and rigging along the docks. The sight was beautiful, but Charlie couldn’t summon the energy to appreciate it.

  Pixies. She’d been kidnapped by fairies. Part of her still expected that any moment Eliza would pop in from the front room and laugh at her for taking any of this seriously. That it was just some elaborate joke. That Charlie was incredibly gullible for believing it for a moment.

  ***

  “Wait here,” Rhys said, gesturing to a chair in the disused parlor.

  Charlie sat heavily, a plume of dust flying into the air. In Rhys’ memory, the chair had never been sat upon before. He was unused to entertaining callers in his home.

  Charlie’s fingers wrapped around her wrist again, as they had been for most of the quiet walk back to Rosethorn Manor.

  “Matters will become clearer in the morning,” Rhys said. It was all he could offer her. He whisked through the door and up the stairs before she could respond.

  It felt decidedly strange to have another living, breathing being inside the walls of his house. Even stranger that it was a Gatewalker, and a woman at that. Rhys could faintly hear Charlie’s pixies chattering, the sound alien to his silent sanctuary. He could not remember how long it had been since he last set foot on the second floor. He could not remember if he had ever gone up to the attic at all. Nevertheless, Rosethorn was his home.

  He bought Rosethorn Manor as a place to sleep away from the guild house, where a bit of stray sunlight or an indiscreet feeding would have disastrous results. The house was out of the way and no one questioned his coming and going as they might at the guild house. Moreover, people tended to avoid the place because of its appearance.

  Rhys opened the door to the master bedroom, intending to air and dust it for his guest – he hadn’t set foot in it in weeks, preferring to sleep on the cot in the basement. He found, to his surprise, that the windows were unbarred and open, allowing the cooling breeze to carry out the musty air. The furniture also displayed a suspicious lack of dust.

  Rhys lightly laid a hand on the carved wood of the doorway, “I wondered how she got inside so easily.” Rhys felt the faintest rise of warmth beneath his hand. The slightest stirring of approval. “You like her that much, do you?” Rosethorn seemed almost to purr with smug content.

  He supposed the house, having seen so many lives pass through her rooms, must have been a touch lonely, with only himself inside her walls. Rhys lightly stroked the wood, almos
t as if caressing a pet. “Perhaps someday you will have a proper family living here again.” When he was gone.

  Rhys pulled blankets from a chest of drawers and replaced those on the bed. When he returned to the first floor, he found Charlie curled up on the threadbare chaise lounge, fast asleep. The pixies slept puddled at the bottom of the lonely bowl left on a shelf.

  Rhys carefully lifted her up. To his vampire’s strength, Charlie felt little heavier than one of his sister’s childhood dolls. He carried her up to the bedroom and laid her out on the bed. He removed her shoes and installed her between the blankets. Charlie did not so much as stir.

  Did she have any idea what she’d done, dancing into his life so blithely and blindly? The very picture of a fool tripping along the edge of a cliff, oblivious.

  Was Rhys, too, braving the cliff now? There was no love lost between himself and the royal family of Seinne Sonne. He was inclined to think that even if he did manage to rescue Mae from her abductors, she’d just as soon turn around and see him executed.

  Still. Perhaps… perhaps he had allowed the past to color a matter that was simply black and white. A young woman in danger, and Rhys the one who could offer aid.

  Rhys turned from the sleeping human girl and strode down the stairs to the basement. He set about tidying up and storing away everything that should not be left out. There was no saying how long this quest would take. Perhaps he should leave word with Taryn that she should help herself to the contents of his basement. It would be a shame to see all this work go to waste. Perhaps Taryn could be convinced to watch out for the girl as well until she became accustomed to Seinne Sonne.

  Rhys replaced the last few bottles on their shelves and set aside the bowls and utensils to be washed, until there was only one task remaining. Reluctantly he turned to the one table he had not yet cleared away.

  From his belt pouch, Rhys withdrew a small wooden box wrapped in thick paper and tied with string. It had taken Taryn two years to find it. Rhys had searched for nearly eight. Indeed, the item in his hands was the initial reason that he took up herb craft.