Page 71 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
Beside him, almost within reach of Asil’s fangs, the vampire had paused in surprise at the light show.
“You didn’t quite kill Beatrice, I think,” he said. “Some of us take a lot of killing, don’t we? She has a talent for electricity work. It is useful, but don’t worry, I will finish her off and make sure none of these come back. So your night will not be entirely useless, you see. With all of them gone, I will control the story of how I killed the Moor. I will be sure the world knows that you fought the good fight.”
VIII
Two of the human-shaped wolves were down before Ruby saw any vampire at all. The wolves—whatever their shape—moved like swift-flowing water. The vampires moved so fast that mostly Ruby just caught impressions.
A minute or so after the first wolf fell, there was a hiss of…something that scraped across her nerve endings. Not sound, though she felt like she might have heard it with her ears.
“What was that?” she asked Alan, who was still guarding her and the vulnerable humans in case everyone was wrong and the vampires could get inside the mansion.
“Witchcraft and a little pack magic,” he answered. Like Ruby, he had moved to the window to stare out into the darkness. “Pack magic to make the humans stay away and not notice any sounds or lights or weird stuff.”
“Lights?” Mari-Brigid asked.
“Weird stuff?” Ruby asked at the same time.
“Vampires gain odd abilities as they age,” Alan answered.“Magical things. There’s supposed to be at least one of the old ones who can teleport. I’ve heard of another one who can create fireballs—like in D&D. You know, weird stuff.”
“If that’s the pack magic”—Ruby found that now she could tell that there were two separate things going on outside that teased her senses—“then what’s the witchcraft doing?”
He smiled. “Moira—you remember about Moira—laid out a boundary: a magical fence that should keep the battle contained to the street in front of us. Minimize the damage we have to explain away.”
“A witch?” Bobby sounded worried. “You work with a witch?”
“I’m mated to one,” Alan said with a bit of a growl. “A white witch.”
“There isn’t a white witch in the world who could confine vampires as old as these.”
Bobby sounded like he knew what he was talking about. Ruby supposed that if you were a driver and bodyguard who worked for vampires, you learned a thing or two about the monsters.
“My mate couldn’t do it,” Alan conceded. “But our pack is lucky enough to possess two of us who have mated with white witches. Moira, our second’s mate, is a very, very powerful white witch. She wasn’t worried about keeping the vampires in her trap, so I wouldn’t worry about it, either, if I were you.”
They couldn’t actually see much of the battle from the reception room. Ruby wasn’t sure she’d see very much with a front row seat, given the speed at which the battle was being fought. Alan was more useful. He had sharper senses—and possibly his pack bonds to help him.
“Three vampires,” he told them, his head tilted as if thathelped him hear the battle outside. “Not a walk in the park, but we have seventeen wolves here, not including me. Should be manageable.”
Ruby could tell when the last of the vampires died because the tension drained from the figures—some human, some wolf—that she could see through the limited view the reception room window gave of the battleground.
Ruby started to leave the room, but Alan shook his head. “Wait until the bodies are taken away. Vampires aren’t always as dead as they appear. Especially old ones. We’ll dump them in the water. Tradition holds it has to be salt water, but my grandfather tells me that any large body of water, or even running water, will do.”
The front door opened and someone entered the house. Someone with a cane, it sounded like.
“Glad that’s over with,” said a woman rounding the corner to join them. She switched on the lights and left everyone blinking.
“There,” she said. “That should be on, right?”
She was a bit unsettling, and it wasn’t the green shoulder-length hair or the near-black sunglasses that almost covered her scarred face. She walked in a sea of magic.
Alan smiled at the newcomer. “Lights are on. But you could have left them off.”
“You must be Moira,” Ruby said, because she’d heard stories about the witch. “I’m Ruby.”
“Alan and Miranda’s Ruby?” the blind witch asked.
“Asil the Moor’s Ruby,” said Alan.
The witch smiled crookedly. “So Tom said.”
