Chapter 12

She was a tricky one, that Alazzdria, Eliot thought, annoyed.

She might have been batshit crazy and annoying as hell, but the old witch certainly had a sense of humor.

He had to give her that much, he admitted as he glanced around the dusty manor she’d bought on a whim.

A sick, twisted sense of humor.

“I just don’t understand why, in the world, we have to live here,” Hazel declared.  She glanced around the dusty entryway with a sniff of disgust.  “It’s revolting, Eliot…”

He tried not to shudder as she glanced up at him with those soulless, black eyes, all the while twirling a black ringlet around her pinky finger.  Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders like twisting shadow.

“What on earth possessed you to buy it?”

“Shut up, Hazel,” he growled, shrugging off her whine by turning his back on her.  “I told you not to ask me that.”

“But, I liked France,” she pouted.  “I hate it here!”  She kicked her feet so that the billowing hem of her black dress swished at the air.   “It’s so God-awful boring.  I shall go mad—”

“But you’re already mad, Haz.”  The mocking voice came from the doorway where a pale figure stood holding two wine glasses in a pale hand.   “We both are,” he added, before stalking across the dusty floor.

The falling snow had slicked back his dark hair into a wet cap, and his boots left wet marks against the wooden floor.

Before Hazel, he paused and shook his two glasses so that the liquid contents swished around noisily.

“I brought breakfast,” he announced with a dazzling grin that revealed the two sharp fangs protruding from a row of pearly white teeth.

Eliot turned to catch Hazel rolling her eyes as she glared at her brother with a frown.  Her pale fingers reached down to smooth the front of her dark gown.

“What is the menu tonight, Sage?” She asked morosely.  “A blond bimbo?  A busty red-head?  You have horrible taste in meals, you know…”

“Brunette,” Sage announced with a chilling smile.  “Young and lovely…if I do say so myself.”

“You do say so,” Hazel scoffed, but slowly she pulled herself upright and reached for a glass.  Her button nose wrinkled as she sniffed the dark liquid that almost overflowed from the top.  “Ugh.”

With two slim fingers, she pinched the bridge of her nose and took a dainty sip.

From the look twisting her beautiful face, Eliot was surprised when she didn’t spit the liquid back out again.

“I can almost taste the whore’s perfume,” she choked, disgusted.  But Eliot noticed that she took another sip anyway.

A deep swig that made her pale throat lurch as she gulped.

“Liar,” Sage accused mockingly.  “She tastes delicious—and you know it.  For being the middle of damn nowhere, this place doesn’t have that bad of a menu choice, eh Eliot?”

The dark gleam in his eyes gave the words made Eliot wonder, with a twist in his gut, just what poor girl had fallen across the vampire’s path.

While Sage knew better than to kill his feeds—and break one of their few, if only, laws—he did have the tendency to be a discriminate feeder.

Sometimes he took a little too much.  Bit a little too deeply.

Played with his prey a little too roughly.

But, at least he had learned over the years to leave them alive.

“I trust that you didn’t make a mess?” he grumbled, turning his back on the both of them.

“Of course not,” Sage said, a little too quickly.

“Oh, Eliot, you’re no fun,” Hazel scolded.  He heard her lick her lips, no longer pretending that she didn’t enjoy the taste.  “Want a sip?”  The contents of her goblet wish as she held it out to him.  “It really is delicious…”

There was a note of wonder in her voice, and Eliot couldn’t help realizing that whoever’s blood they were drinking did smell good…

Tantalizing, even.

Light and crisp like warm summer rain—as if he even remembered what that felt like.  Let alone tasted…

“No,” he snapped, leaving the two of them behind to march across the room.

There, by a large bay window, stood a dusty piano stood half covered in a white sheet that had long since turned gray with dust.  It must have belonged to the old tenants, he realized.

He doubted that it even still worked.

Hesitantly, he pulled the drape back and allowed his finger to fall heavily on a key, sending a dull, heavy note cutting through the air.

Dun!

It sounded alright, he thought critically, if a little out of tune…

“Eliot!”  With a sigh, he turned to face the accusing stare of the twins.  Their black eyes gleamed above their matching glasses.

A bad sign.

“Why did you bring us here?”  Hazel demanded.  “First you drag us back to this wretched country.  Back to this place.  Then you buy this—”  her hand shot out to gesture around them in a sharp motion, “horrid house.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?”  Sage finished for her, taking another sip from his glass.

“Tell us!”  Hazel stomped her foot when he didn’t quickly enough.

Eliot sighed.  He was tempted to lie to them again—he didn’t own them a damn thing, anyway.

It wasn’t like he wanted them around…

But still.  He turned to face them fully, bracing himself for their reaction.

“Alazzdria’s back.”

It wasn’t the usual time of day that one made dramatic revelations.

Eliot supposed that he couldn’t blame Sage and Hazel for looking bored over the “breakfast” they slurped.

“Who?”  Sage grumbled.

Hazel took it a step further with a vicious taunt.  “Your long lost love?”

Eliot rolled his eyes and let the often-used joke slip past without a challenge; he couldn’t love anyone.  Hazel knew that better than anyone.

Instead he crossed his arms and waited patiently for the twins to show their interest.

It didn’t take long.  Hazel kept sneaking inquiring looks at him from beneath her heavy lashes while Sage brooded in silence, until finally he placed his drink aside and met his gaze.

“I’m listening.”

Eliot mentally gauged which words would make the most impact.  In the end he chose just two.

“The witch.”

It had the affect he’d been aiming for.  Sage’s dark eyes went unusually, and Hazel choked on the rim of her glass, sending sprays of red liquid splashing onto her pale throat.

“That bitch?”

“That bloody cow?”

Both twins spoke at the same time, so it was hard for Eliot to distinguish their voices, but he dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

“She called on me,” he said somewhat dispassionately.  “She needs my help—“

“Help?”  Hazel demanded.  She had resumed her drinking and took a slow, measured sip, all the while watching him above the rim. “Why the hell would you want to help her?”

“Exactly,” Sage chimed in, nodding his head.  “How do you know she isn’t just trying to use you—again?”

But that was the point, Eliot thought with a sigh.  Alazzdria was trying to use him.

But this time, the feeling was mutual.

“We’re staying,” he said, without elaborating any further.

The twins shared a look, raising their eyebrows in agreement.

“I mean it,” Eliot snapped.

“Okay…” Sage said, tracing the rim of his wine glass with a pale middle finger.  “You think you can trust her, then we’ll stay.”

Hazel pouted but didn’t argue.

The twins were creepy like that.  While they bickered and squabbled with everyone else, they were eerily agreeable when it came to each other.  Eliot figured that Sage could have offered that they go for a merry stroll out in broad daylight through a field of wooden stakes, and Hazel would consent with little more than a roll of her eyes.

“But,” Sage added on a sharp note.  “We want something out of it.”

Of course.  Eliot smiled though he knew there’d be no real warmth in it.  He wanted to tell the both of them to go to hell, but he had learned a long time ago that it was much easier to play along when the twins were in agreement.

“Fine,” he snapped, without even asking what it was they could possibly want.  Sometimes, it was better to be left in the dark when it came to their plotting and scheming.

Sage shrugged and went back to dining, but Hazel wasn’t so easily appeased.

“You haven’t answered one question, my darling Eliot,” she murmured, voice deceptively sweet.  “You don’t trust this Alazzdria,” she said the name as though it were something nasty.  “And you’ve always hated it here.  So why stay?”

Her coal eyes turned suspicious, and Eliot had to fight to keep his annoyance from appearing on his face.

Caught.  The thought slipped around the edges of his mind like poison, even though he had technically done nothing wrong.  Hazel wouldn’t believe that, he knew.  Especially not if he told her about the mortal he’d spent the past two morning following.

“Are you hiding something from us?”  She went on, suspicious—though Eliot couldn’t blame her; the twins had been through more than enough, this decade alone, to make them more than a little paranoid.

“Are you planning on teaming up with that damn witch to stab Sage and I in the back?” Hazel demanded in a shaking voice.  “Even after what she did to you—”

“Nonsense.”  For once it was Sage and not Eliot who cut in to subdue his sister.  “If Eliot’s said he doesn’t trust her, then he doesn’t trust her.”

His mouth turned up thoughtfully as he rustled his dark hair with his hand.  “Besides, I’m sick of traveling anyway.  A centuries’ worth of novel experiences is enough to last a lifetime.  I even missed dear old Skull Hollow.”

His eyes—a black identical to his sister’s—narrowed, adding an ominous undertone to his words.

Eliot nodded, feeling a similar boredom of travel.  “But,” he added.  “They’ve changed the name; it’s Wafter’s Point now.”

He remembered his annoyance at trying to find the town on a map.

“All the more reason to return, I suppose,” Hazel added.  With a dainty slide of her tongue she erased all traces of red liquid from her lips.  “The mortals should realize who truly owns this town, regardless.”

Eliot kept his face blank.  Hazel was like that—always looking at the managerial side of things.  Though to mortal eyes she would appear barely in the prime of youth, a teenager at best, Eliot had no trouble imagining her elected as the town’s mayor before long.

Sage on the other hand…

Well, Eliot pitied whichever mortal girls would no doubt fall under his accomplice’s charm.  It happened wherever they went—Sage was a heartbreaker…in the literal sense.

“Are we in agreement?”  He asked out loud.

Sage nodded and went back to toying with his drink’s rim, already bored.  Hazel sighed.

“I suppose.”

“Good.”  Eliot turned and headed for the doorway that led to the rest of the massive house.

“Just stay out of trouble.”

“Can do,” he heard Sage whisper ominously, while Hazel tossed him a halfhearted “don’t we always?”