Allure of the Vampire King: A paranormal romance (Blood Fire Saga Book 1)

by Bella Klaus

“I have to be with her,” I croaked.

  Valentine guided me to a wooden bench and knelt at my feet, holding a pair of white panties. That’s when I glanced down and found he’d already taken off my bikini.

  He wrapped his fingers around my ankles and threaded my feet through its openings. “Get dressed, so you can accompany her to the hospital.”

  Hope filled my chest, and I inhaled a breath deep enough to pull back my shoulders and expand my chest. “She’ll survive?”

  “The ambulance people are doing what they can for your friend.” He turned to a wall of mirrors to fetch something from the pile of clothes left on the counter.

  I eased the underwear over my hips. “What happened?”

  Valentine handed me a pair of loose, black leggings and a tank top. “It looks like Beatrice overheated—”

  “No.” I pushed myself off the bench and stumbled toward him.

  He caught me in his strong arms and guided me back to the bench. “Careful.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” I said with a sob. “Something terrible just happened to Beatrice, and I’m sure it’s something I did.”

  Every muscle in his body stilled, and he stared down at me through thick black lashes. “Have you done this before?”

  “Made someone unconscious by sharing a hot tub?” I shook out the leggings, but my fingers trembled so much that the garment slipped to the floor.

  Two people getting boiled in a jacuzzi was a freak occurrence, but one burning up while the other felt nothing was signs of a supernatural who had lost control of their magic.

  Valentine didn’t answer, instead helping me with my leggings, a bra top, and a thick sweater that he assured me I would need for the cold weather. I tried to leave the room, but he held me in place and dried my hair with a towel.

  We emerged from the changing room just as the paramedics had wrapped Beatrice with metallic cooling sheets and loaded her onto a stretcher.

  At the top of the stairs, four of Valentine’s employees stood against the hallway leading to the open door. Kain was one of them and gave me a slight nod as we passed. I still couldn’t believe someone so young and vibrant could go from normal to unconscious within mere seconds.

  “Stay at Beatrice’s side,” he murmured into my ear. “My people are already at the hospital checking for signs of enforcers.”

  “Will you please tell me what’s happening?” I whispered.

  “Not here.”

  We followed the paramedics wheeling Beatrice out of the house and onto the sidewalk, where a small crowd of onlookers had already gathered. Dense, noisy traffic curled around a fluorescent-yellow ambulance parked directly outside the villa.

  The female paramedic slid open the back door, revealing the ambulance’s crowded interior, and her male colleague wheeled Beatrice into the back.

  It was larger than I’d imagined but small enough to induce a bout of claustrophobia. Supplies and devices covered every scrap of wall with rows upon rows of cupboards that stretched to the ceiling. They parked her bed on the right side of the ambulance and pulled on some kind of brake, and while the woman sat on a green leatherette seat behind Beatrice’s bed, the man strapped her in.

  I hopped aboard the ambulance and took one of two spare seats on the left, hoping they wouldn’t kick me out and tell me to catch a cab to the hospital.

  The ambulance doors slammed shut, encasing us in what felt like a cluttered tomb, and something beeped. I glanced around to find a monitor flashing with her vital signs. Her blood pressure was 150/186 compared to a normal of 120/80 and her body temperature 41.50°C compared to a normal of 37°C.

  When the paramedic fastened her seatbelt, I did the same, and the vehicle pulled out, sounding surprisingly silent for an ambulance.

  “Could you answer a few inquiries about Beatrice?” asked the paramedic.

  “I’ll try,” I replied.

  She asked a bunch of questions for which I couldn’t give definite answers. For example, if there was a chance Beatrice could be pregnant. I had to say yes, in case Christian had slipped up during those intense few days.

  While I answered the other questions as best as I could, my gaze fixed on Beatrice lying within those metallic sheets, looking like a roasted bird. My chest ached, and I gripped the handrail, trying not to throw up. The paramedic explained that they often got cases like this in the height of summer, but never in autumn and never from anyone in their twenties unless they’d taken recreational drugs.

  Poor Beatrice didn’t even look like she was breathing. Only the numbers on the monitor above her head indicated that she was still clinging to life.

  After what felt like an eternity, the ambulance stopped, and its doors opened, letting in a gust of cold air and drizzle. Silently thanking Valentine for helping me get dressed, I stepped out into an outdoors parking bay within the tall buildings that made up the hospital and waited for the paramedics to lower Beatrice’s stretcher to the ground.

  I pulled up my collar and hugged my arms, watching the dozen or so ambulances parked around us. Two of them contained patients, others contained paramedics wearing masks and white gloves, who cleaned their vehicles’ interior. After what felt like an eternity, the woman brought a metallic, yellow ramp, and pushed Beatrice out.

  Hoisting Beatrice’s bag over my shoulder, I walked alongside the paramedics as they pushed her toward St Mary’s Hospital Accident and Emergency, and through an entrance of two sets of automatic doors separated by a twenty-foot-long foyer. I clutched Beatrice’s coat to my chest, my heart fluttering with panic. What the hell had this done to her insides?

  We hurried through an oatmeal-colored hallway surrounded by wooden double doors. In the three years I’d been living in the Natural World, I hadn’t needed to visit a doctor, let alone go to a hospital. It looked just like it did on television, only a hundred times worse.

  This was no stranger being wheeled for a dramatic scene of medical magic featuring dreamy doctors and their steamier colleagues, this was Beatrice.

  As we stopped at the Accident and Emergency’s busy reception area, the smoky energy signature of a vampire curled around my senses. I glanced around the vast space, surrounded by transparent one-bed booths, but found nobody who looked supernatural. It was probably one of Valentine’s people.

  The paramedics left and handed me over to an Indian nurse, who wheeled Beatrice into a corner booth. Pale sunlight shone through its narrow window, illuminating an entire wall of monitoring equipment.

  After drawing the curtains around the bed, the nurse pressed electrodes on various pulse points over her body and covered her with a fresh cooling sheet. Moments later, another came in with a saline drip and attached it to a cannula on her hand.

  “Beatrice?” I sat at her bedside on a moulded plastic chair.

  She didn’t even twitch.

  Clicking footsteps sounded from behind, and a middle-aged blonde doctor strolled in, clad in a white shirt and pencil skirt. Flanking her were three male junior doctors a few years older than me, each wearing stethoscopes around their necks and white coats. One of them pushed in a laptop on a trolley the height of a standing desk.

  “Good afternoon, my name is Dr. Louise Bigger.” She walked around the back of the trolley and glanced at the laptop’s screen. “The patient is Beatrice Pala, aged twenty-five, in general good health. After spending the morning in a spa, drinking champagne cocktails, she overheated and collapsed with heatstroke, and is now exhibiting signs of hyperthermia and first-degree burns.”

  She turned to the most handsome of the trio, a dark-haired young man with a soul patch. “Doctor Tyler?”

  He straightened. “Most likely brought on by dehydration and the overuse of sunbeds.”

  I bit down on my lip, desperate to tell them all what had really happened. She wasn’t drunk and wasn’t sitting under a source of direct heat. One minute, Beatrice was helping me dislodge mimosa from my windpipe, and the next, she’d collapsed in the water from having gotten boiled.
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br />   A statement like that would lead to too many questions, the exposure of the Supernatural World, and possibly the arrival of enforcers to remove chunks of memory from every natural—including Beatrice.

  Valentine had warned me to go along with whatever the doctors diagnosed before disappearing when the ambulance arrived, saying he would fix things.

  The senior doctor turned her attention to me. “We’re going to admit Ms. Pala for overnight observation.”

  “Will she be alright?” I asked.

  “With a little more cooling and saline, she should awaken and make a full recovery.” Dr. Bigger cast Beatrice a pitying look. “When Miss Pala awakens, I hope she better understands the perils of seeking an all-year tan.”

  “Beatrice isn’t vain enough to sit under sunbeds,” I snapped. “She’s brown because her father’s Indian.”

  The doctors offered me tight smiles and swept out of the little room. Perhaps they were used to patients and their families saying anything to present a better version of themselves. I lowered myself to the seat and reached for Beatrice’s hand. The skin was so raw, I didn’t dare to touch it.

  “Can you hear me?” I murmured. “You’re going to recover from this.”

  Two sets of supernatural energy approached from a distance. A vampire and a powerful witch, whose magic blazed with a clean, slicing energy that almost felt angelic.

  “Here’s Miss Pala,” Valentine said from the doorway.

  He stepped inside with a woman with red hair a few shades lighter than mine, veering toward a strawberry blonde. She was about five-eight—three inches taller than me—with turquoise eyes that looked like they would glow the moment she activated her magic. No lines marred her face, not even the fine lines people got when they smiled. It was hard to tell if she was fifty or five hundred.

  My gaze dropped down to the diamond-shaped crystal she wore around her neck, the source of the blazing power. A breath caught in the back of my throat. Valentine had brought a high-level witch who could wield the healing magic of an angel.

  Her eyes fell onto me. “And this girl?”

  “One of us,” said Valentine.

  The healer nodded. “May we have some privacy?”

  I rose off the seat and turned toward the door.

  “Not you.” The healer flicked her head over her shoulder, indicating that everyone walking past had a view through the clear windows of Beatrice’s booth.

  “Oh,” I glanced around the room for ideas, my gaze landing on the blinds. “We could obscure the window—”

  “Do it,” she said.

  Valentine walked to the door and twisted a lever that lowered the blind and sealed its slats, while I did the same on the right side of the exit. After shutting the door, the healer raised her hand, creating what felt like a crackling seal around its frame.

  “Let’s have a look at this patient.” The healer lifted the metallic blanket from Beatrice’s legs, placed her hands on the soles of her feet, and flinched. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Pardon?” Valentine said, his face devoid of emotion.

  The woman stepped back, her face pale. She turned to Valentine. “This human carries residual magical fire in her veins. Do you know what could happen to her if she dies?”

  I clapped a hand over my mouth. “But the doctor said she’d be alright.”

  “Not the point!” The healer whirled on Valentine. “Your Majesty, how is such a thing possible?”

  “Can you heal this human or not?” Valentine growled, making the healer flinch.

  Wrapping my arms around my middle, I edged toward the wall, letting the healer’s words percolate in my brain. Magical fire somehow burned Beatrice from the inside out, and now she might die. A sob caught in the back of my throat.

  Valentine appeared at my side. “Nobody’s going to die.” He turned to the woman and said in a harsher voice, “Healer Dianne was speaking hypothetically.”

  She inclined her head. “I can heal this young woman, but I will need to report my findings to the Council.”

  Valentine bared his teeth and snarled, “I am the Council.”

  The healer stiffened as though suddenly remembering that Valentine was one of the seven monarchs who governed Logris.

  My insides quivered. Whatever she had discovered in Beatrice’s body had to be serious if she had forgotten her place. I stepped in front of Valentine, pulling the woman’s attention back to me. “Will anyone damage Beatrice’s mind?”

  Healer Dianne’s eyes softened. “His Majesty tells me that neither of you saw the creature that attacked from behind. It’s fortunate for us that it decided to strike in private instead of at that bar.”

  I glanced at Valentine, who made a subtle nod for me to go along with that story. Valentine was trying to pin what happened to Beatrice on Mr. Masood, the shifter who sent us the champagne with the enchanted glasses. I nodded back, still not knowing what on earth was really happening.

  “Let’s get started, then.” The healer placed her palms on Beatrice’s feet and inhaled a deep breath.

  As she exhaled, magic curled around the room, feeling like being licked by invisible flames. My gaze caught the healer’s crystal, which glowed like the sun hitting a prism. It illuminated the woman’s arms, hands, and Beatrice’s feet an incandescent white.

  Tiny pulses of power travelled up Beatrice’s legs in the same pattern as the energy pathways depicted in the healing room of the crystal shop. They zigged and zagged up her belly, down her arms, and ended over her face in a network of crossing lines.

  I gulped. It was one thing to believe in the meridians of Traditional Chinese Medicine—it was like believing in diagrams of the blood vessels without dissecting a cadaver to see for yourself. Witnessing the meridians glowing like this just made them so real.

  Valentine gazed down at Beatrice with a furrowed brow. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned about the woman’s ability to heal her wounds or what had caused her to collapse and emerge from the water covered with red burns.

  Somebody knocked on the door, making me flinch.

  “Hello?” asked a gruff voice. “Porter.”

  I turned to the healer, who continued pouring energy into my friend. Valentine crossed the room and stood in front of the door with his arms folded and furrowed his brow into an even deeper frown.

  “The doctor just admitted Beatrice for an overnight stay,” I said.

  “When I’ve finished with this patient, she won’t need any further medical attention.” The healer’s crystal pendant rose off her chest as it brightened. “However, I’ll leave some superficial redness to make the humans think their medicine has worked.”

  All the tension left my neck and shoulders in a relieved breath. I pressed the heel of my hand into my aching chest. Even though Beatrice would make a full recovery, I still put her through a terrible ordeal. If Valentine hadn’t been there—

  I cut off that thought. Beatrice and I had been friends for years and I’d lost count of the number of times we’d shared a bed. Nothing had happened to her then, so something else must be happening. This time, when I confronted Valentine I would do whatever was necessary to get those answers.

  Moments later, Dianne released my friend’s feet and sagged. “I’ve healed the damage and obscured the last few hours in the human’s mind. She’ll think she fainted from exhaustion.”

  “Thank you,” Valentine and I said at the same time.

  The woman straightened, smoothing down her camel-colored coat. “This incident will need to be reported.”

  “Of course,” Valentine said in a voice as slippery as massage oil.

  The healer walked to the wash station in the corner of the room and turned on the taps. Instead of shoving her hands under the running water, she ran her palms up and down its flow as though cleansing the energy around her extremities.

  “And she’ll spend the next few years monitored by enforcers,” she added.

  My mouth dropped open. “Why?”

>   After turning off the tap, the healer turned to me and frowned. “I only performed the triage necessary to get Miss Pala up and running. Removing the fire in her veins will require an extensive transfusion.”

  I glanced at Valentine, who stood as still as death, his face an unreadable mask. Since this expression and body language wasn’t telling me anything apart from a need to exercise caution, I turned back to the healer, who tilted her head to the side with a soft crack.

  “Why do the enforcers need to know about Beatrice if her memory is fuzzy?” I asked.

  She paused to stare at me as though I’d asked her to explain something obvious. “Any being who dies with fire in their veins rises as the undead.”

  The words hit me like a kick to the gut. “What?”

  Healer Dianne tutted. “Don’t they teach you children anything in that academy? The male you encountered a few days ago is obviously a very powerful and unscrupulous wielder of fire. It’s just like the days of Kresnik. That man loved to raise the dead to fight his battles.”

  I shook my head from side to side. There was that name again. “What about when she dies of old age? She can’t turn into a zombie!”

  “The fire will eventually die out if not stoked,” the healer replied.

  My lips parted to ask what that meant, but Valentine stepped forward. “Thank you for coming at such short notice,” he said in that slippery voice. “May I see you to your car?”

  Pink boomed across Healer Dianne’s cheeks. She tilted her head to the side and offered him a coquettish smile. “It was an honor to be of assistance, Your Majesty. Will you settle now or shall I invoice your private secretary?”

  “My driver will settle in whichever currency you desire.” He swept his arm toward the door. “If you would release the enchantment securing the room, perhaps the porter can take Miss Pala upstairs to recover?”

  “Of course.” Healer Dianne raised a hand, and the magic over the door released in a rain of invisible sparks that crackled against my skin.

  Valentine rushed behind the woman, spun her around, and locked eyes. “Beatrice Pala encountered a magic crystal that backfired.”

  I sucked in a breath through my teeth. He was mesmerizing a powerful healer.