Blood Born by Linda Howard Page A

years ago thought she was totally cowed, or if they were so arrogant they didn’t think she could possibly harm them or interfere with their plans. She voted for arrogance, because no one topped the vampires in that. Three years ago she hadn’t known they even existed, but since then her survivalhad depended on learning as much about them as she could, and fast.
    And yet,
they
needed
her;
they needed her to break the spell cast by an ancestor she hadn’t known about until they’d told her about her witch blood, which was something else she hadn’t known about, much less that she was evidently descended from a long line of über-witches. Because they needed her, they’d assured her that she wouldn’t be harmed, but at the same time, they had no qualms about threatening her parents and her younger brother and sister to make her do what they wanted.
    She’d been terrified at first. She hadn’t known what they were talking about, only that she and her entire family had been kidnapped by these monsters, then separated. She was kept in luxury in a large bedroom in a mansion, while her family was kept, the vampires said, in a dungeon somewhere. After being held in total seclusion, except for the monsters, after being scared half out of her mind, finally it had occurred to her that she had a weapon against them: herself. They used her family to force her to do what they wanted, but, by God, they had better keep them alive and at least reasonably well-treated or she wouldn’t do a damn thing the monsters wanted.
    Standoff. After trying unsuccessfully to bully her, they had finally relented and shown her cell phone pictures of her family, and every now and then they would place a call and she’d be allowed to talk, very briefly, to one of her family just to reassure her that they were still alive.
    So long as her family was alive, she would
try
to do what the vampires wanted. They set up a work area in the middle of the huge bedroom, bringing in tables and a comfortable chair, and then they had brought her tons of really old books, books so old she was afraid to turn the pages because she kept expecting them to fallapart under her fingers, but they never did. There were so many books that they were stacked everywhere, piles of them, some of them so huge and heavy she couldn’t lift them and had to either call one of the vampires for help or shove and tug at the books herself to get them out of the way. She did a lot of shoving and tugging, because as a general rule she’d rather eat ground glass than ask a vampire for help.
    For the first several weeks, she’d been at a complete loss. A witch? Her? If she’d been a witch, wouldn’t she have stopped them from kidnapping her family? But they’d told her she “must learn”—yeah, that was real specific—and the threats against her family had spurred her to at least
pretend
she was doing something, so she’d begun leafing through those old books. She didn’t like touching them, had to force herself to look at the pages. They gave her a creepy feeling. The paper smelled … weird, as if wasn’t really paper at all, but something else she couldn’t identify. And some of the pages were stained with what she thought was blood, which
really
gave her the creeps. If these books were about witchcraft, it was the bad kind of witchcraft, not the kind that was all about being one with nature and treating people with respect, stuff like that.
    Some of them were in some kind of weird language she couldn’t read. How the hell was she supposed to “learn” if she couldn’t read the language? On the other hand, if the vamps had been able to read the books, they wouldn’t have needed her; likewise if they suspected she really had no clue how to learn what they insisted she learn, so she kept her mouth shut and dug into the books.
    The books that were in that weird language she shoved off to the side—why waste time with them?—and began concentrating on those that were sort