Blood Spirits Read Online Free

glanced back at the security guard, who frowned at the window and then at me. She didn’t see what I did.
    One quick glance. Now I could see us both, but Ruli was a double image, growing more faint by the second, until she was a blur.
    â€œMa’am?” The voice was more insistent.
    â€œI’m all right.” I smiled, doing my best to project normalcy. “Jet lag.”
    Other bored, tired passengers eyed us from their uncomfortable seats. The security guard asked me a couple of questions, my answers were sane and boring (we’ve been up for hours, waiting for the flight to London, see that old lady over there? That’s my grandmother) and she let me go.
    My heart was still beating hard when we boarded our flight a short time later. I didn’t tell Dad or Gran what I’d seen, because I still wasn’t sure what to think.
    Real or not real? I thought in frustration, as the plane bumped down the runway. Though the security guard and the gawkers hadn’t seen anything, Ruli’s appearance felt way too real, the way that Ron Huber had been real. But Ruli’s appearance had also been different than Ron’s—he’d vanished in a blink, like most of the apparitions I’d seen.
    So why did Ruli fade slowly? Either this was some kind of weird form of communication, or something drastic was going on . . . maybe in her dreams. So was Ruli really talking to me? Ron had definitely been talking to me.
    I’d only met Ruli twice: once when I rescued her from her family’s castle and again on my last day in Dobrenica. She had rich friends, a high ranking family, and she was married to Alec. Given all that, it made no sense for her to be calling to me, especially in that ghostly form. But nothing about apparitions made sense.
    Thinking such things at thirty thousand feet made me kind of squirmy. But we landed at Heathrow in perfect safety. It was a relief to find Mom waiting at Heathrow, looking bulky and unfamiliar in cold weather gear. She hugged us each, then said, “Milo is feeling funky. The cold. He asked me to apologize for not being on hand to greet you.”
    Gran murmured something polite and proper, but in French. When she didn’t even attempt English, she was upset, though you would not have known it to look at her. Her tension was another reason I kept Ruli’s apparition to myself. At first I’d thought it was due to her flying for the first time, but if anything, landing made her more so.
    Yeah. Because she was about to see Milo again; that is, Marius Alexander Ysvorod senior, whom she was supposed to marry back in 1939. Instead, she ran away from Dobrenica with Ruli’s and my grandfather, Count Armandros von Mecklundburg, when she was sixteen and Milo was around twenty.
    This would be their first meeting since the eve of World War II.
    Dad took Gran’s arm and walked ahead. Mom gave me a humorous roll of the eyes and whispered, “Milo was bummed about how it’d look not to meet her, but I told him she’d hate a public reunion.”
    â€œBet he’d hate that, too,” I muttered back.
    â€œBig time.” Mom grinned.
    When we got through customs and made our way outside, there was Emilio, the dapper, gray-bearded little man who had been Milo’s aide-de-camp for many decades. And Alec’s for nearly two.
    Beaming with hearty good will, he bowed to Gran and welcomed her in Dobreni. “So good to see you again, Mam’zelle,” he said to me. “How was your trip?”
    I mumbled something and then stepped back as Mom introduced my father. Emilio gazed up into my father’s face. No two men could have been more dissimilar than the short, trim Dobreni and my rangy, rumpled father with his wild Rasputin look.
    â€œWhoa,” Dad said with his usual cheer. “Winter is cold . Nobody ever told me that cold is cold.”
    Emilio chuckled. “Is this your first visit outside of California, Mr.