by Anne Malcom
Eternity’s Awakening
The Vein Chronicles Book Three
Anne Malcom
Contents
Glossary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Buried Destiny
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Anne Malcom
Glossary
Awakening: In the first two hundred and fifty, then five hundred years of undeath, a female vampire’s heart begins to beat once more, for one year. In which time the body is more vulnerable to attack and the unyielding and cold body becomes accommodating to life. Accommodating enough to conceive and carry a child to term.
Apollo: Olympian deity, recognized to be the god of sun and light, among other things. Also responsible for the curse of the vampire. Immortal.
Ambrogio: The first vampire. A human man turned immortal by the wrath and the gifts of the gods themselves. Mortal. And then immortal.
Artemis: Apollo’s twin sister, goddess of the hunt. Immortal.
Extermuis: Supernatural bar which caters to the most depraved of immortals and invites all sadistic pleasures.
Eleos: One of the lesser known and lesser seen of the gods. Often seen wandering the woods in human form. Goddess of mercy and compassion with the ability to see the future of mortals and god alike.
Hybrids: A weapon created by dark magic. Humans turned into animalistic form of vampire, with all the strength of a traditional vampire but little to no mental capacity, expect loyalty to their ‘parent’ vampire.
Hades: God of the Underworld, where every dead soul is banished to upon leaving the earth. Owner of every dead, and undead soul. Immortal.
Ichor: The blood of the gods which was bestowed, or cursed, upon the first vampire to enable immortality.
Mortimeus: Vampire learning institution, whereupon vampires learn the history of their race and are schooled in murder, torture and sadism. Only vampires of the highest Vein Lines are able to attend.
Praestes: Literal Latin translation of ‘protector’. A generation of humans designed to fight vampires and supernatural creatures. Their blood one of the only things fatal to vampires. Mortal.
Selene: Human destined to be sacrificed to Apollo and instead falls in love with a human man. The love is the death of her and the birth of all vampires on this earth. Mortal.
Copyright © 2018 by Anne Malcom
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by: Hot Tree Editing
Cover Design: Simply Defined Art
Chapter 1
People who hadn’t met me might’ve been either surprised or horrified to see me chained up in a dungeon, naked, bleeding, and having a really fucking bad hair day.
People who had met me wouldn’t have been surprised at all to see me chained up in a dungeon, bleeding and naked. The bad hair day would’ve surprised them. I always had excellent hair. Even that one time I died for a hot minute. And all those other times that I was close enough to blow Hades a kiss.
Most of the people who knew me would’ve likely sent the person who put me there—my first love, who so wasn’t dead, and so was a huge dick—a flower arrangement, or at the very least a bouquet of severed human heads.
I wasn’t exactly what you’d call popular in certain circles. In most circles, actually.
Which made no sense, because I was awesome.
But as long as I thought I was awesome, my kind-of soul mate Thorne thought I was awesome, and my legit soul mate sister Sophie knew it, nothing else really mattered.
Well, the chained-up and bleeding thing kind of mattered. It was a huge bummer, actually.
But I couldn’t really start at the chained-to-the-wall part; the people who didn’t know me needed some background. I’m sure they—and even the people who knew and hated me—would agree with me in the fact that Jonathan was a huge dick. And that wasn’t even factoring in the torture thing.
But we had to go back.
Not to the beginning. I’d already had one of those.
Past some of the blood, but not past the worst of it. The worst was yet to come, and even chained up, tortured, naked, and bleeding, I didn’t know it, but I sensed it.
Sometime after the beginning—closer to the end, actually
“Your heart. It’s so fucking loud.”
He laughed, the sound vibrating his throat. “Sorry, babe. I’ll try to rectify that in the future. We can’t all have the stillness you boast.”
As if to make his point, or maybe for some foreplay, he laid his callused palm on my chest.
The teasing look immediately left his face, and his emotions poured through me with panic and dread.
Because that resounding roar of a heartbeat wasn’t coming from his chest.
It was coming from mine.
Thorne gaped at me, horrified. “Isla, are you telling me your fucking heart is beating?”
I jumped up from the previously peaceful position we’d been lying in.
He followed me as I wrenched on my robe and stomped into the living room. I wasn’t sure why I was stomping in there, but it seemed safer than staying in the bedroom.
Maybe if I changed locations or something, my heart would just stop beating.
Okay, that totally wasn’t the reason, because such a thing was impossible for another year, at least. I was moving locations because there was liquor in the living room.
Thorne made it so I couldn’t reach the liquor I so needed. Instead he yanked me backward just as we entered the living room, bathed in the soft glow of 3:00 a.m. Not even during the witching hour did New York succumb to darkness, the lights from the city streaming in my windows and illuminating Thorne’s silver eyes.
I struggled out of his grip, dislocating his fingers as I did so. He didn’t flinch, or even blink. It was creepy, since he was always flinching or blinking or shaking in rage. Stillness did not suit Thorne.
Okay, that was a lie. Everything suited Thorne. I just didn’t like the stillness, especially when juxtaposed with the fucking radiating thump inside my chest.
“Your heart is beating,” he repeated, the words an accusal.
“No it’s not. Yours is,” I shot back childishly, unable to find something more awesome to say.
Things were bad if my legendary wit failed me.
The thundering echo in my chest was pretty fucking bad.
Thorne stayed frozen in place. “Isla, what does this mean?” His voice was flat, careful. He was clearly trying very hard not to freak out.
That made two of us.
Actually, I never tried not to freak out.
I threw up my hands and began to pace the room. “I don’t know, but my vampire PMS really let me down. It usually warns me at least three years in advance.” I gave him a look. “You’ll probably be happy you missed that, considering I would’ve killed you or at the very least dismembered you once a day,” I said truthfully. I had been known to get a little excited with the limb
-ripping thing as my biology started its attempt to make my body hospitable for creating and nurturing life.
Obviously, my body wasn’t designed for that. My mind certainly wasn’t, hence the limb ripping.
Thorne’s glare told me that he didn’t actually appreciate the honesty. Or the threat of dismemberment.
Whatever.
“This is not good,” I murmured, my mind going over everything that had happened in the past few days, focusing on Jonathan, the cold and resolute promise in his eyes.
“I will need a queen. And I already have you. I do already own you.”
My blood—which had started to run a hair hotter with the circulation it had going on—chilled at the reminder of his words. At the firm knowledge in them. The cruel promise.
Surely he couldn’t have known this was going to happen. I didn’t even know.
Then again, I didn’t know that the man who I’d thought loved me—me, Isla, the human I might’ve been had I not been a monster—the man I’d married and then mourned for almost five hundred years, was not just a vampire but also the head of a rebellion and, worst of all, friends with my mother.
So I probably couldn’t be relied on for the knowing of things at that particular juncture.
I didn’t need to know anything much to kill Jonathan. Or my mother. The image of them together, the knowledge of her having a hand in the one thing I’d thought was pure and mine, sickened me, just as it had ever since I’d been treated to the nasty knowledge that my mother had designed everything that happened between Jonathan and me.
Their deaths would be slow.
I’d make them last for centuries.
“What is this?” Thorne demanded, unaware of my trip down memory lane, or my renewed vigor to make sure I was the only one in my Vein Line not drawing breath. Something saturated his tone, something that was becoming more and more common of late.
Concern.
I hated that. It was, I supposed, an undesirable side effect of him loving me forever and all that. He cared if I was hurt. If I was in danger of getting hurt. If people tried to kill me. Which meant he spent all day errday concerned. Because if I wasn’t in danger of getting injured—I didn’t get hurt, apart from when someone got bloodstains on my Birkin—I was already injured. And people were always trying to kill me.
I put it down to my sparkling personality.
He put it down to that stupid dusty prophecy spouting ‘chosen one’ nonsense. But people had been trying to kill me long before Sophie shared that shit, so one of us was right and it was obviously me.
“What’s what?” I asked, feigning innocence.
Kind of hard to pretend you were innocent when in the eyes of God, you were the epitome of evil. And if you were Isla Rominskitoff.
I thought I pulled it off, though.
Thorne’s fury made the room stifling, or it would’ve been if I’d had to breathe. His hands were fisted at his sides, glare a brand as I paced the living room of my apartment.
“Isla, for fuck’s sake, can we have a straightforward conversation about the fact that your heart is fucking beating even though that’s biologically impossible since you’re a fucking vampire,” he roared.
I stopped pacing, blinked. “Well, that was a lot of fucks used in one sentence. Color me impressed.”
He stepped forward, trying for the whole menacing, murdery vibe.
I inspected my nails.
“Isla,” he warned, his voice rough.
I glanced up at him, rolling my eyes to hide the disquiet I felt rumbling beneath my excellent breasts.
“I’m in heat, apparently.” I narrowed my eyes. “And if you repeat that line to Sophie’s pet werewolf, I will skin you and make myself a new handbag.” I paused, looking at the aforementioned skin. It was rather fabulous. “Maybe some matching shoes too.”
He stepped forward again, face granite.
I didn’t retreat, despite the menace in his eyes. Who was I kidding? The menace was what kept me firmly in place. That and I didn’t retreat, like, ever.
Especially from Thorne. I kind of loved him. With all my broken and shriveled heart.
“If you’re trying to seduce me with the whole murderer thing you’ve got going on, it’s working,” I purred. Then I held my hand up, palm first. “But there can be no getting jiggy with it for at least a year.”
He stopped in his tracks. Of course, nothing like the promise of a year without sex to yank the murder right out of a man.
“Huh, you didn’t even have that dramatic a reaction when my blackened and shriveled heart started beating again,” I observed dryly.
He opened his mouth to yell, presumably, but there was a knock at the door.
“Oh thank God,” I exclaimed, darting to the door before he could snatch me to him and start being more alpha. That wouldn’t have been humanly possible in any ordinary situation, but since he wasn’t human, and this situation wasn’t ordinary, he’d probably think something up. “I hope it’s a crew of berserkers coming to make this so less painfully fucking awkward,” I muttered.
I didn’t even think about the fact that there were numerous factions out to kill me, and knocking at the door in the middle of the night might not mean Girl Scouts wanted to sell me some Thin Mints.
Then again, in the immortal world, like the city of New York, 3:00 a.m. was not the time of stillness and sleep.
So I opened the door.
“You’re not a berserker, but you’ll do,” I sighed, taking in the witch in my doorway.
Sophie scowled. “Hello to you too, bloodsucking whore.”
I smiled, peering around the hallway before I completely let her in. “Leave your puppy in his kennel today, did you? Or is it past his bedtime?”
If I wasn’t already frowning, I would’ve done so observing the little witch. She looked like shit. Well, she still looked kickass, with mussed black hair, smudged black eyeshadow, matching black lips and a pair of shorts that should’ve been classed as underwear with a Grateful Dead tee tucked into them.
Not my jam, but she managed to work it without making me want to punch her in the face for serious crimes to fashion and laws of decency—though I approved of any and all breaking of decency laws.
She worked the shabby chic thing, the only person in the world to do so, whatever anyone said. I would’ve punched—or killed—anyone else who tried to say different.
But this was more than shabby. She was immortal but still needed human things like food and sleep, so her being here in the middle of night only a handful of hours after we’d gotten home from capturing a witch of all evil didn’t exactly mean good things.
I wasn’t a dab hand at reading auras like the witch herself, but something inside her was drained. Sick. Though she teetered on the Marilyn Manson level of pigment and general style normally, there was a gray pallor to her skin I didn’t like.
And I really didn’t like that I had another thing to worry about—like the fate of my bestie. Though that worrying had been simmering since I got the first glimpse of whatever was battling for power inside her. We just hadn’t had a spare moment to properly address it. She was really good at dodging the subject, and then there was all the other shit, like my dead husband coming back to life and trying to enslave humanity.
Sophie scowled again at my mention of her wolfy shadow, blowing a kiss to Thorne as she sauntered in. She looked between us, measuring the tension in the room as she was so good at doing. I guessed our auras would be streaked with the red of conflict. Not that I knew for sure, but I liked to imagine it that way.
“Excellent, I’m interrupting something.” Sophie crossed the room and jumped onto the sofa, settling in. She waved her hands back and forward at us. “Continue. Act like I’m not here.” She paused. “Well, catch me up first, and then act like I’m not here.”
I pointedly ignored the angry Thorne statue. “It’s nothing exciting,” I said, walking to the bar to pour myself a drink, shaking off the chill from Sophie’s demeanor
that had somehow rapidly improved, as if she sensed my worry. And how my worry would turn to annoying the shit out of her until she told me who I needed to kill in order to make sure she didn’t die.
I really hoped it was the wolf.
But something told me that would not be the case.
Something like the fact that the wolf had not already been killed by Sophie. That meant she kind of liked him.
And then something else told me that the person I’d have to kill to make sure she didn’t die was her—or her evil magic twin or whatever it was inside her. Catch-22.
“Isla’s heart started fucking beating,” Thorne seethed, fury rippling through the air as he settled his quicksilver gaze on me. “So I would say it’s a fuck of a lot more than nothing.”
On second thought, I grabbed the whole bottle and didn’t bother with the glass.
“Oh, it’s that time of the millennia, is it?” Sophie asked, glancing at me with a grin. “Want to go raid a Hershey’s factory? Kidnap Channing Tatum?” Then she looked to Thorne. “Actually, why would you steal steak when you’ve got the whole cow at home?”
I swigged and gave her my middle finger. “Thorne is having a hard time with the ‘no sex for a year’ thing.” I paused, thinking of these new scary powers that Sophie was trying not to let kill her. “Any chance of a magical condom?” I asked hopefully.
Thorne did not like being made fun of, nor did he like me making light of potentially dangerous situations—which I loved to do—therefore he did not give Sophie the chance to offer a sarcastic retort. Despite her totally kickass magical power, there was no magical condom. The vampire race was the strongest of them all, and I was the strongest of our race—I may have been a little biased, but it was still true. Since we were strongest, our evolution was refined and unsusceptible to tampering from the horny females who found children abhorrent—namely me.
