Witch's Wrath (Blood And Magick #3)(51)
“Precisely. This time I’m not taking any chances. Remy clearly taught you way more than he should have. You gave me quite the shock. But now I know what you can do, and I know what he can do. There will be no more surprises here.”
“You have no idea what I can do,” I said, “Neither of you do.”
The pressure on my back released, and I was able to force myself to my feet. The man who had dragged and kicked me circled around me, now. It was the vampire with only one eye. He snarled at me as he walked into view.
“Look,” he said, propping his wounded eye open with his fingers. Deep, orange light emanated from within the slit of mangled flesh. “I’ll be good as new in no time.”
I turned my hand into a fist and ignored him. He was only there to distract me from the people I really needed to keep my attention focused on. “What do you want?” I asked.
Marie turned her head and raised an eyebrow to Tamara. “I want this house,” Tamara said. “It’s mine, and Remy had no right signing it over to you.”
“I can’t help you with that.”
“You can; all you have to do is sign the papers over to me.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t,” Marie said, “Then I’ll kill your boyfriend in front of you. And then we’ll get your friend Nicole, and we’ll kill her, and we’ll keep killing friends every hour until you do as Tamara wants.”
I swallowed hard. The sternness in this woman’s face told me she was the kind of person who would follow through with a threat like that. She was older than Jean Luc, and she hadn’t been asleep for the last two hundred years. Tamara, even weakened, was a formidable witch. She had, after all, found a way to breach my magickal wards, despite the fact she’d been paralyzed only hours before.
I was outmatched.
The truth was, I was probably going to die anyway. Jared was probably going to die, too. What reason would they have to keep me alive after I signed the papers over to Tamara? The only thing I had going for me was that, for some reasons, Tamara wanted me to sign the house over to her. This meant I had leverage—thin leverage, but leverage nonetheless.
“What do you get out of this, Marie Boucher?” I asked. “What I’d like to know is why you, a vampire with so many centuries under her belt, are playing lapdog to a has-been witch who couldn’t even beat me in a duel she cheated in.”
“Watch your mouth!” Tamara yelled.
“What I get in this arrangement has nothing to do with you,” Marie said, ignoring Tamara’s outrage. “But I suggest you do as she says. Otherwise, things aren’t going to go very well for you or for him.”
“I have a counter offer. Let him go, and then I’ll sign.”
Marie chuckled. “You’re outnumbered, and without your magick you’re just a simple little human whose bones break easily. You’re not in a position to ask for anything.”
My jaw clenched. I tried to glance at the grandfather clock in the other room, to try and figure out how many hours there were until sunup, but I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. If I was going to stall, I had no idea how long I would have to stall for. And without magick, how was I supposed to stall, anyway?
“Even if I agreed,” I said, “How are we supposed to do this?”
“It’s simple,” she said, “I conjure a document signing everything over to me, and you sign it. Once you do, the contract will be made valid, and I will get what I want.”
“But why do you even need me? If you can just pull a contract out of the air, why not just kill me and then take what you want?”
Her face darkened. “Because my ex-husband was a bastard who safeguarded his assets against just such an eventuality by using magick even I can’t overcome without great effort and investment of time. Maybe, if he hadn’t signed the thing over to you, I would have an easier time of acquiring it. But now that it’s yours, well, it makes things simpler in a way; I can just ask you to sign it over to me, and then you can be on your way.”
“You really expect me to believe you’ll just let me walk after I sign your contract?”
My upper lip suddenly felt cold and wet, and when I drew my hand across it, my hand came back red.
“Looks like you’re bleeding,” Marie said, grinning and flashing her fangs like a hungry wolf.
My nose wasn’t just bleeding, it was like a faucet that had sprung a leak. Blood dribbled onto my tank top and against the floor, and the other vampires in the room started to get nervous. But I didn’t feel dizzy, or drained, or queasy—I felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. Invigorated. Energized. My mind was clearing, as if a light were being shined directly onto the surface of my brain, allowing me to more effectively organize my thoughts, my strategies—my way out of this.
“Alright,” I said, “Show me the documents.”
Tamara smiled, satisfied to hear me acquiesce, and clicked her fingers. A stack of papers suddenly appeared in her hand, materialized from a puff of purple smoke. In her other hand, a pen followed, also manifesting in a similar fashion. She looked at the first page of the documents in her hand and nodded approvingly, then walked over to me.
From where I was standing I could see the first page, and damn if that didn’t look like a wall of text. Lines and lines of it, entire paragraphs detailing God only knew what. The document also had tabs stuck to the side of it, presumably pinpointing specific sections of the document where I would have to sign.