Page 52 of Midlife Vampire Unexpected

“All right, we have a plan,” Mae said. “We’re going to research wards, we’re going to research wraiths, and we’re going to check out perimeters. Let’s get to it.”

Chapter 37

The estate was quiet. Everyone was doing their assigned tasks, pouring over the Internet, pouring over books and with Mae’s permission, Drake fired up the crystals again and was trying to work with Jane to fine tune them and try to get them to focus on specific things.

The problem remained. How could we combat a wraith’s attack? We literally had no idea.

As the night wore on, we grew tired, but we knew we still had to be vigilant. The men had been gone a little longer than normal on the rounds of the cemetery.

I looked up from one of the grimoires I’d been studying. Mae had hers, which included the long heritage of The Estate, but The Estate had never had to deal with wraiths. They were a whole new thing and judging by the experience of this coven, they were going to be a little more than we could handle.

“I’ve gone through everything,” I said, turning to the group in the red room and pointing to the notes I’d made on the whiteboard. They all gathered around. I had a pretty careful drawing of a wraith with my little dry erase pen and I’d put a big red line through it. “How do we get rid of the wraith?”

“Well, the simple answer is you can’t,” Antonio explained. “They are sworn to their liege lord and will do everything there liege lord says until their liege lord dies. Problem number two is wraiths can’t actually be killed. This means once they are assigned, it’s forever.”

“There wasn’t a great deal about those two facts,” I picked up the thread. “So, I looked in the history books a little bit. Around the time of the Great War when the demigods and the Fae split the world, nobody wanted the wraiths because as much as they swear fealty to you, they only do one thing. Suck the life force out of everybody else. Now you would think because they had such great power people would’ve actually stopped them from going rogue or going wherever they wanted, but apparently in the days when the accords were written and the DGC was set up, the wraiths were overlooked and they ended up falling under dark Fae control. I think that might give you some information, Jane, to focus on with the crystals.”

“We’re not using the crystals,” Branson said.

“There has to be a way we can use the crystals and not be found out by the dark Fae.” I argued.

“There’s no way when we’re using a light Fae to access the crystals. We are looking for a dark Fae. The minute a light Fae shows up, the dark Fae we reach out to will pay attention.”

“Well, we don’t have a dark Fae on hand, so we’re going to have to make do,” I said. “Honestly I think we want to see the wraiths connecting with the Fae.”

“That’s only connecting the dots backwards,” Mae said. “I know it’s valuable and important and we want to cut off the head of the serpent, but I’m expecting an attack at any time on the cemetery.”

She wasn’t wrong and I knew it. My vampire hearing was pretty intense and I could already hear the light keening of the wraiths as they gathered over the cemetery. We all slowly moved toward the back windows of the estate and looked down the hill at the cemetery, where the black shrouded figures were gathering above.

“Are Matheus and Branson and Toern and Antonio safe out there?” I asked.

“Fortunately, yes,” Hilda said. “See what the wraiths are focusing on. They’re not focusing on living creatures. They’re focusing on the skeletons.”

“How can we possibly stop them?” I asked.

Jane responded. “We can’t. They will raise the dreams and the nightmares of the deceased.”

I stared blankly at the black shrouded figures fluttering in the moonlight above the cemetery. They weren’t doing anything yet, but I knew what they would soon be doing. They’d done it to me and they had done it to Kartika, and we still did not have a single way to combat them. We knew their history; we knew their patterns. “There has to be a solution,” I muttered.

“We thought the same thing,” Hilda said.

“Is it dark magic?” I asked, completely aware of the fact we couldn’t do dark magic and keep the coven bond alive.

Hilda shook her head, taking my question seriously. “No, we won’t be able to do that. We have the wards and they trap things inside them. It held a monster in there for a hundred and fifty years. What if we tried something totally different?”

“It’s genius,” Mae said, nodding in agreement.

“I think you might’ve come to a conclusion we don’t know about,” I said, trying to discern it.

Mae looked at me, her green eyes flashing. “We’re going to take all the wards of the cemetery down and let them in.”

“That’s slightly insane,” Bianca said. “We’ve been busting our ass to keep the wards up.”

“It’s not a bad idea,” I said. “It somewhat makes strategic sense, but we’d have to be quick.”

“Not following,” Bianca said.

“You’re going to have to trust us on the plan,” Mae said. “It will have to be a tight operation, but I think we can pull it off.”

---