Free The Vampire's Revenge by Raven Hart Page A

and cooking fragrant spiced oatmeal for breakfast. I was glad it wasn’t time for Renee to wake up yet. I didn’t want her to hear the troubling news I had for her mother. She’d had to deal with too much evil lately, more than any nine-year-old ever should.
    I didn’t waste any time in explaining the situation to Melaphia. She responded by covering her face with her hands and moaning. I didn’t blame her.
    “What do you think, Mel?” Olivia asked. “Is there anything you can do? Chants to call on the gods? Spells? I’ve contacted some of the practitioners of the Celtic magic tradition, and they’re working on it, but in the meantime, I thought perhaps you—”
    “It’s too much!” Melaphia cried, slamming both fists on the table.
    I laid my hand on her arm. “I know it’s a lot to ask, especially now, but . . .”
    “No! Do you hear me? I can’t do it again. I can’t save the world. Look at what happened the last time I tried! Because my timing was off by seconds, William died and he’s never coming back!”
    Olivia leaned in close and said gently, “Darling girl, you did your best. What happened to William wasn’t your fault. There is no doubt you saved humanity by closing the portal from hell as quickly as you did. Otherwise, Savannah would have been overrun by demons.”
    “To hear you tell it, Savannah’s going to be overrun with demons anyway! You can’t ask me to do this. It’s too much!” Melaphia folded her arms on the table, lowered her head, and sobbed.
    Over Melaphia’s bowed head, I looked helplessly at Olivia. “Liv, why don’t you go on to bed. I’ll be there soon.”
    With a parting pat of Mel’s shoulder, Olivia nodded and headed downstairs. I sat and stroked Melaphia’s dreadlocks while she cried. She was right, of course. William and I had placed the weight of the world on her shoulders more than once. The pressure we’d put on her to help us fight satanic forces would have stressed out anyone. But Renee’s kidnapping had brought Melaphia to the brink of madness and her nerves weren’t fully recovered. The last thing she needed now was to feel as if she’d been saddled with the responsibility for the souls of potentially every human on earth.
    She stopped crying and sat up, gathering her strength to tell me something I could tell I wouldn’t like. “Dex came again yesterday.”
    Dammit. I had forgotten all about him. “What happened? Did he threaten you again?”
    “No, he didn’t. We actually had a good talk.” Melaphia sniffed and delicately blew her nose with a tissue. “He’s taken a professorship in Ireland and he wants Renee and me to go there with him and try to make it as a real family.”
    “A real family,” I repeated numbly. Between the lines in Melaphia’s words was one inescapable fact. The family she and her daughter had grown up in was composed of two vampires and two mystic, shape-shifting Egyptian sighthounds. Not exactly what you would call the Brady Bunch.
    “First he wanted to take Renee and now he wants to take you both,” I muttered.
    Melaphia abruptly shoved her chair back from the table and stood up. “Take me? I don’t belong to you, Jack!”
    “Oh, Mel. I know. I just meant—”
    “You just meant you think of me as being destined to serve you like all my female ancestors back to colonial times. And you think that Renee has no choice but to serve you when her time comes.”
    “Surely you know you’ve always had the right to leave. William and I would never have kept you here against your will. You could have done anything you wanted. Gone anywhere. Made yourself into anything. William would have paid for you to tour the world, further your education however you wanted, whatever.”
    She sobbed once in frustration, leaning against the cabinet for support. “Don’t you see it wasn’t as simple as that? He would have made any of those things possible for me, but he wanted me here. He had the expectation that I would stay. He