Her Vampire Master

Chapter Fifteen

"Liz wait." The feminine voice she hadn't heard in years called out to her.

She opened her eyes looking around the room, it was her living room the same as she remembered, dim lights casting shadows on the pale walls. Denim couch pushed off to the side, the rug rolled up, and the same painting of Degas ballerina's hanging on the walls. Her parents had put them up when she had started ballet classes. She rubbed her eyes not believing what she was seeing, she looked at her friend seeing her kind heart-shaped face that she hadn't seen in so long.

"Nova?" Her lip quivered as she said her friend's name. "Am I home?"

"You fade in and out, I keep trying to catch you." She pushed her dark hair out of her face, "But you move too much and it keeps changing things, sometimes it's the three of you, and sometimes it's just the two of you, and sometimes he's gone and it's just you."

"What do you mean?" She asked looking into her friend's familiar brown eyes.

"Sometimes she's with you guys too, but he's the constant in every time." She shook her head sadly.

"I must mean something to you pet." He chuckled from the corner of the room, his arms wrapped around Mary's thin waist. "Every time, you seek me out. Could it be love?" He said as he leaned over the vampire's shoulder.

"She's fading fast," Nova said her soft voice filled with worry, "We'll try and find you again. Please stay strong."

***

Elizabeth awoke with tears in her eyes, she hadn't dreamed of Nova in such a long time. Her friend had been in love with Ciaran and he as in love with her in their own time, it was the reason she had done the spell to help her friend and been thrown so far back in time. She wiped the tears from her eyes and stood to wrap the sheet around her body, she made her way to the jewelry box that sat unopened on the dresser. Ciaran had given Nova a simple ring, of course, her friend being forgetful had misplaced it.

The spell the two had found would send a person back to the item, they had thought that it would send Elizabeth to when Nova had lost the ring. She had accidentally gone to the time when the ring was made. When Charles had placed the ring on her finger she had felt her stomach roll with anxiety. It was no longer a pure symbol of a promise between the two lovers, but to her, that simple silver band was a curse and she hated that she had been foolish enough to think that it meant something so extraordinary before.

She opened the ornate little box, to run her fingertips across the ring. It had meant a lot to Nova and her Ciaran, not the one that she knew now; for she couldn't think of the two as the same person. The kind and gentle redheaded vampire who had helped them study for their exams or had treated the two girls to various study snacks as he had courted Nova would never again be seen through innocent rose-colored glasses of youth. She wondered what had happened to change the cruel vampire out of his heartless evil ways.

She shut the box letting it snap loudly in the quiet room and moved to sit back down on the bed trying not to think about the past or the future, sometimes it was confusing for her. Charles had left the room sometime in the early hours of the morning, he had started a fire in the fireplace making the room warm and cozy. She was grateful for that, it was nice not to wake up to the aching cold. She scrubbed her face with her hands, fingers going up to hair to try and untangle the wild locks.

It was still very early and her dream had left her in a depressed state of mind, she knew that's all it was. They couldn't be seeking her out in her own time, from what she had understood of the spell it would halt things until she rejoined the timeline. She wanted to go home, she longed to have the life she had before wandering if her crush was going to ask her to homecoming. That had been the most pressing question of her life then, how small it seemed in comparison.

If only she could remember the spell to send her to her own home when she had arrived in this world it was a traumatic experience from the start. She woke up in a dark alleyway in Bristol, the air heavy with the smell of unwashed bodies.

She had tried every spell she knew or even half knew, to try and reverse it at the time, nothing had worked and she was left here. That's when her "none of this is real" had become her mantra, she had whispered it to herself as three men had come drunkenly staggering into the alley she had been hidden in. Had screamed it as the two drunk men had held her down tearing at her clothing while the other pulled her trousers down, She said it out loud as they had raped her pounding into her body, she was found the next morning whispering it.

The watch had been called when she had been found filthy and half-clothed huddled against the wall. She knew from books and television that she should be taken to a hospital in the back of her mind she reasoned that was the next course of action. She was covered with a scratchy wool blanket and put in the back of a carriage, she would probably see a doctor or a counselor, and of course the police. She didn't know how she would be able to talk about what had happened to her and hoped that she wouldn't have to.

That wasn't what had happened though, she was taken to several workhouses as the constable waited for someone to claim her, but she wasn't from this time so of course, none of them knew her. She was finally dumped in front of a church the nuns taking her in with no complaints cleaning her up in a cold room while a woman scrubbed her with a brush and another doused her in icy water.

They had scrubbed until they felt she was clean and free of lice, then they had cut off all of her hair. She was given a small cot to sleep on and they followed a routine, the shock had taken days to wear off. When it finally did, she had awoken with a scream, another woman in the dormitory warned her that if she kept it up someone might try and smother her with a pillow. She choose not to talk much after that, most of the others had left her alone with her crazy mumblings and were glad for the silence.