Page 106 of Vampire's Choice
For now, she forcibly shifted her mood into a better place to visit Clara. Charlie had finished one of her bolstering energy infusions, because the tingling remains of it filled the yurt and vibrated out from the fortune teller.
The brief respite from visions had helped Clara add weight, and strengthened her mentally. For Play Night, she’d looked almost healthy.
The toll this vision had taken shocked Ruth. No wonder Marcellus had seemed so out of sorts. It had stripped all progress away and taken even more, as if punishing Clara for the hope her recovering health had instilled. Ruth wasn’t sure how she was sitting up on her own. Her face was so drawn it looked skeletal, and Ruth could have fitted three fingers into the pockets of her collarbones.
“Marcellus says enough. That even a gift from the gods has limits for what it can ask.” Clara gave Ruth a tired smile and gestured, so Ruth sat on the bed with her. “I need to see this thing with the Trad through, though, before I make any decisions.”
Ruth wondered if she’d live long enough to do so.
“Maddock thinks he might be able to reinforce my life energy and give me more strength. Yvette even proposed turning me, sending a request for it into the Council.” Clara gave Ruth a lopsided smile, baring her human canines. “Since my visions are proving to be as much of an asset to your people as to the universe. I don’t know what to do.”
She sighed, rubbing her face. “I don’t know how Maddock’s spells, or vampirism or whatever will impact the visions. They seem to be getting a little vindictive. I don’t know what it will do if I mess with them. I’ll decide after we figure this Trad thing out,” she repeated. “It feels like it’s a really important one. I don’t want to block something that will help save the world. And I don’t want to stop being me.”
Clara’s hand tightened on Ruth’s like a vise. Her focus sharpened, a laser point ripping through the universe. Ruth was already surging forward to hold her as the fortune teller bucked in the grip of the first convulsion. “Charlie…”
Charlie held onto Clara from the other side. “Just let it pass through,” she instructed, her eyes full of pain.
As before, after only seconds, Clara went corpse still. No need to protect her tongue. Ruth thought she might prefer to see her have a full seizure.
The twitching started. Tiny moans. Ruth gritted her teeth, and at one point, she and Charlie clasped hands over top of Clara’s, a knot to hold her to this earth.
“Oh fuck, Charlie…”
Clara’s face was becoming even more drawn, her body shaking. Charlie’s grip tightened. “Hold fast,” she said. “We can only wait it out.”
When the telltale veins finally began to throb in her forehead, blood trickled from the tender shell of Clara’s ear, and from her nose. It didn’t rouse Ruth’s blood hunger in the slightest. Her fear and anguish for Clara far eclipsed it.
She held Clara in her arms as Charlie found a towel to blot the blood.
“I’ve barely begun to know and enjoy you,” Ruth whispered. “Become a vampire. You’ll be eternally beautiful and can eat anything you want.”
Clara’s eyes rose, and her quivering lips curved. She managed a chuckle, though the head resting on Ruth’s shoulder was too weak to lift.
“You’re an important key, Ruth,” she murmured. “No matter what you and Merc decide about the marking, you have to go see Kaela. Your experience, what you see and feel, what you know, will help you see something the others miss. You might not be in time to stop…whatever it is, but it will give them more of a chance to counter it. Whatever the plan is.”
Hair rose on the back of Ruth’s neck as Clara’s fixed gaze locked on her. As she’d spoken, her hand had latched onto the hem of Ruth’s shirt with a strength her body didn’t seem to possess. The force of the message planted a foreboding impossible to shake.
“It would be so much easier if these visions would just spit it out,” Ruth muttered to Charlie. “The Fates may be the worst communicators ever.”
Charlie folded the towel and set it aside. Putting her hands on Clara’s, she started humming, in a rhythm that reminded Ruth of Kohana and other staff members, doing a ritual drumming on moonlit nights. Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Connecting to the earth’s heartbeat.
The harsh intensity in Clara’s gaze melted away, leaving the normal light in her hazel eyes. She slowly came back to them, one hand lifting to touch Charlie’s face, then Ruth’s. “I’m all right,” she rasped, when she obviously wasn’t. But that wasn’t what she meant. She held onto them as she looked at Ruth. “I’m glad I got to meet you, too.”
Ruth took a firmer hold on the girl. “Screw that fatalistic bullshit. Figure out a way to live until we can take care of this, whatever it is. Once that’s done, do what Marcellus wants. Let Maddock block the visions. You’ve said you’re going to die if you don’t stop. Maybe that’s the Fates’ way of saying ‘Okay, you’ve done enough.’”
Clara’s startled look suggested she’d hit a point the girl hadn’t considered before. When her expression turned inward, pensive, Ruth shot Charlie a subtle look of triumph, and hope, however slim it might be.
“You can go back to being a normal fortune teller,” Ruth continued. “One people think has offered amazing insights into their lives. The stuff that would be obvious if they’d get the hell out of their own way.”
The lines around Clara’s eyes crinkled. “Like that you’re falling in love with Merc, but you’re terrified of the binding of a third mark, and what that will mean for the two of you.”
At Ruth’s surprised look, Clara lifted a shoulder. “It’s not just cosmic visions I stay on top of, you know.”
Ruth pinched her gently. “Even if I agree to it, it might not take. I don’t think a vampire has ever tried to mark an angel. Or an incubus.”
“If it doesn’t work, but it gives you an advantage, them believing you’ve marked him, pretend it did around the vampires. Yvette says she can’t detect Catriona’s marks, and she thinks it’s because she’s Fae. So it has a precedent.”
Whether intentional or not, Clara had given Ruth an out, or rather, more time to adjust to the marking idea. Or discard it entirely.