Page 31 of A Vampire in a Pear Tree
A faint rumble in the distance had me turning my head to listen.I couldn’t imagine a storm had rolled in so quickly when the weak winter sun was out earlier, but the sound of thunder was unmistakable.
Becket, who had been handing out glasses of champagne, leaned over the loft railing and reminded everyone of the rules.“You guys have ten minutes.Nothing but fists, and since we don’t have Gabriel present to heal people, keep in mind that if you get hurt, you have no one to blame but yourselves.Ready?And ...go!”
The men, who had spread around the room in a circle, all rushed forward toward the center ...all but Owain.He had turned to look in the same direction as me, his head slightly cocked as he, too, was trying to catch the sound of thunder.
Drake and Baltic took his distraction to try to tackle him, but right as they rushed him, he lifted a hand, and to my utmost surprise, they stopped and looked at him in confusion.
Behind them, Christian and Finch had ganged up on Yrian.
“What is it?”Baltic asked, clearly understanding that something wasn’t right.
I set down my champagne and stood up, moving over to the window high on the loft wall.
“What’s wrong?”Aisling and Ysolde asked at the same time.
Something in their voices must have gotten through to the men, because the others stopped fighting and quickly got to their feet.
I held my breath for a minute, then caught the faintest hint of words carried on the frosty wind.
“Owain!”I dashed to the stairs, almost falling down them in my haste to get to him.“They’re coming!”
“The Morrigna,” he said in a tone that had goose bumps rippling down both of my arms.
“Who or what is a Morrigna?”Drake asked, glancing up at where Aisling leaned over the railing asking what was going on.
“Get the women to the house,” Owain said, taking me by the hand, Orla swooping down and clutching the bare flesh of his shoulder as he ran for the door of the barn.
“It’s his mom and her sisters,” I called to the others over my shoulder.“They want to capture Owain and imprison him again.”
I’ll give the dragons and the vampires credit—when they needed to, they acted without question.We hadn’t taken more than three steps outside the barn when the others burst out of it, the women being hustled toward the house.
“We are not weaklings who have to be protected,” I heard Aisling protest.“I can help!”
“We don’t know how dangerous Owain’s mother is,” Drake answered, more or less stuffing her into the house via a side door before following us to the front.
“It’s more than just my mother,” Owain said, swinging me behind him as we turned the corner to the front side of the house.“She’s called on Clan Cailitin to help.”
“Oh, shite!”Orla said, and, to my surprise, flew onto the roof, where she hid behind a chimney.
“Why do I have a feeling this is going to be bad?”I asked Owain, peering around his shoulder to watch the black cloud that was moving toward us at an extremely fast rate.Carried before it, the cries of, “The Morrigna, the Morrigna comes!”grew with each second.
“Because it will be.”He turned around to face the semicircle of dragons and vampires behind him.“This is not your fight.Stay with your women.The Morrigna has no cause to harm them or you, but the sons of Cailitin are not to be trusted.They live for war, and care not whom it is against.”
Baltic actually smiled, pulling from his pocket a small blue crystal.“If we can’t fight Dark Ones, then druids will do in their place.”
The front door opened, and Aisling and Ysolde emerged, both looking annoyed.
“Some people keep forgetting what a Guardian savant is—holy merde, are those birds?”Aisling stopped next to Drake, her gaze on the growing cloud of black shapes flying toward us.
“Ravens,” Owain said, his eyes assessing Aisling.“Clan Cailitin has a sympathetic link to them.Berry—”
“No,” I said, knowing full well that he was going to ask me to go into the house with the others.“I’m a knocker.There’s not much they can do to me.”
“Other than remove your head,” he answered, his lips twisting slightly before he said, “But I believe your point is valid.We are stronger together than apart.”
I was a bit startled by that supposition, but decided now was not the time to discuss what sounded perilously like relationship talk, and instead nodded.“I wish I had my bow.I used to be a pretty good archer when I was in college.”
“Luckily, Yrian likes to be prepared,” Becket said as she emerged from the house with an armful of various weapons, mostly bladed.Finch and Christian, who had stopped by the latter’s car, returned with two large swords.“And I did archery at college, too.We have a couple of bows, if you’d like to use one.Yrian added some magical oomph to the arrows, so they should work pretty well.”
