Kindred Souls: Entire Series Books 1 - 5

by Bree Branigan

  “So, hoping to see your vampire girl-friend again, Fletch?” they teased him as they walked into town. He laughed it off. Pretended that all he really wanted from her was to get his twenty dollars back.

  There was no twenty dollars to get back, Fletcher just wanted to be done with the vampire story and all the teasing that followed.

  He had spent a few days in the library, trying to find something, anything, that turned his insane theories into a plausible thesis. There was nothing. Nothing but folklore and fiction, all of which were interesting, definitely sexy, but not real. By the time he got to Dracula he realized just how ridiculous he was being and let go, making an honest attempt to get it all out of his head and move on.

  After a week of trying, he still couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  Fletcher was experiencing something that was usually reserved for the vampire after they’ve fed on someone. The way their victims tasted and smelled haunted them until it was time to feed on someone else. It made moving on to the next victim a bittersweet experience.

  He had no way of knowing that it was that nostalgia for his taste that brought Nora back to the bar that night. No way of knowing that as he tried to discreetly glance around the room in search of her, he had already been spotted.

  Elise had warned Nora repeatedly against going there tonight. There was no reason to. Chances were no one would believe the boy even if he did manage to remember what had happened. So the best course of action, in Elise’s opinion, was to stay away from him and avoid him like a modern version of the plague. Find new bars, new people, new victims to love and forget in one night, and never speak of it again.

  It all seemed like a good plan to Nora until she found herself there, watching Fletcher at a table surrounded by his friends and a group of loud girls giggling at his every joke. Nora wasn’t sure if she hated them on principle or - was she jealous?

  What was it about him? She could practically taste him again, his smell strong even from across the room – overpowering all other scents and reaching her like cartoonish waves floating her way and hooking her.

  Nora knew right away that she needed to get out of there. That this had been a terrible idea and that, against all odds, Elise had been right all along. This. Him. Her. This whole affair—it was better left alone. Behind them and forgotten.

  She was so caught up in the importance of her departure that she lost sight of him momentarily. The moment of panic grew as she glanced back over her shoulder to look for him and found him standing there, one hand in each pocket of a pair of jeans that hadn’t been washed in weeks and a light blue shirt that smelled of soap, aftershave and cologne.

  “It’s you.”

  “Me?” Nora felt her stomach flutter. She looked down at the table and swallowed, willing herself to stay calm. “I’m sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.”

  “I don’t.” He shook his head. It was her voice, hitting him in waves and shaking him up to the point that he reached out to her without thinking, gripping her shoulder in an attempt to gently turn her around. “It’s you. I know it’s you.”

  She felt her pulse race. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped back, pulling herself away from him and using a hand to pluck his hand off of her when he didn’t let go. “Do you mind?”

  You know what I’m talking about,” he insisted, his eyes fixed on hers as he tried to keep his breathing steady. His heart beat furiously in his chest, as if he could recognize danger in her, in those lips, in that voice. He had only heard it once, but that smoky sound was stored at the back of his head in the same way his favorite singers and musicians were. “You were here last week.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nora insisted, distracted by the pace of his heartbeat pumping blood through him in a way that was almost cruel. She could smell it; the familiar essence of him that she’d quietly kept to herself by refusing to feed on anyone else that week. “I’ve never seen you in my life.”

  “Come on,” Fletcher pleaded with her, “I’m not going to ask for anything or accuse you of anything, I just want to talk.”

  “Talk?” She turned her attention back to the bottle of beer she’d been nursing for over an hour now. Merely there for credibility and decoration. “What could we have to talk about, superstar?”

  “You know me?” He ran his hands through thick, dirty-blond hair.

  “It’s a college town. You’re the star of the Bats. I’ve heard of you.”

  It was a lie. He’d been chosen like any other victim, out of attraction and magnetism. Magnetism that, she had to admit, she felt even now as she tried to ignore him.

  “Please,” he insisted. “Even if you don’t know me, even if you have never seen me before, there is something about your face that I find really familiar. Something that’s been stuck in my head for days. And if there’s any way you can help me figure out why that is, I’d be forever grateful.”

  It was hard to hide her surprise. This wasn’t just about him vaguely remembering who she was. He knew. Nora could see the recognition in his eyes as clearly as he must have spotted it in her own when she looked at him. She wondered if her want for him was as obvious as his want was. She knew that he couldn’t smell her blood the way she could smell his, but surely he could he see her feathers were ruffled?

  He must have. It was his one trading card.

  “Just leave it alone,” she exhaled, shaking her head and turning her attention back to her beer, instantly regretting that moment of defeat.

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “I really don’t know what you mean.” She nearly hissed at him, trying to make up for the mistake she’d just made by practically admitting he was right.

  “But you just said…” Fletcher was frustrated. He could see that she knew what he was talking about. That she knew who he was as well as he knew who she was. The woman he’d been fucking in his dreams all week long. Sometimes it was nice and slow, and he let her drink from an open wound on his chest as she let him fuck her. At other times it was fast and vicious and he woke up in a sweat coming all over her tits. “Look, I don’t want to bother you, just let me buy you a drink.”

  “I have a drink.”

  “You’re killing me here…” He clenched his jaw.

  She smiled at the irony.

  “Okay, so if you don’t know me, then you will just let a stranger vent a little bit. That’s like a good deed, you know? Good karma. Everyone can use some good karma.” His crooked smile was irresistible.

  “You’re not taking no for an answer, are you?” Nora asked, glancing over her shoulder once again to fix him with a look that tried to be annoyed but was mostly intrigued; by him, his determination, his resolve to know whatever it was there was to know. This was unheard of. He was unheard of. He was just not possible.

  “Nope.” He smiled.

  Nora glanced around, finding other members of her clan easily and making sure none of them could recognize Fletcher as someone she had fed on already. It was against the rules that she was more than breaking as she stood up and led the way out the door.

  Chapter 4

  “What are you?” He stopped walking for a moment, and stood facing her, his head tilted, his eyes boring into hers.

  Nora laughed, and kept on, her heels crackling with the gravel underfoot.

  He continued walking beside her. “Seriously, I know I wasn’t dreaming. I know what happened.” He paused, as if all the knowledge in the world couldn’t actually make him say the words. “So what are you?”

  Nora breathed deeply. “If you’re so sure of what you saw, then you don’t need me to tell you.”

  Fletcher sighed, sticking his hands back in his pockets and moving to sit on a bench a few feet away from them, at the risk of her taking that opportunity to disappear. He was a little surprised to look up and find her still there, standing right where he’d left her. He lowered himself onto the wooden bench and exhaled with relief as he lea
ned back.

  Nora followed hesitantly and perched herself on the edge of the bench, as if getting ready to run.

  “Look,” he started, “I’m not sure of what happened but I keep having these visions.” He paused and closed his eyes, though it was hard to tell if he was closing his eyes because normal people didn’t have visions, or because he was trying to revisit them. To conjure the version of her in his dreams, with those fierce eyes and those blood-stained lips, and compare her to the one that sat next to him. “You’re in them. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. You are in my dreams, feeding off of me. And…”

  “And what?” Her voice was urgent; agitated.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Do I fuck you in these dreams?” She stared at him intensely.

  She already knew the answer to her question. She didn’t know why she was experiencing the high bond that followed a vampire’s feeding, or how it could be possible that he not only remembered her, but felt so connected to her that just sitting there together made him react physically to her presence. Nora could smell his sweat, feel the heat radiating from him, and taste his lust. She’d been having the same dreams, but how could he be?

  “Yeah…” he said, the blood that was rising to his cheekbones impossible to hide from her hunger. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what the dreams are. You drink and we have vicious…fuck, we just destroy each other. You destroy me, mostly.” He half laughed, flustered, “I don’t mind very much at all.”

  She laughed. A low, throaty laugh.

  “I just know what I felt, and it’s been driving me insane, okay?” He looked at her, his face a picture of desperation.

  His honesty squeezed hard on the obsolete organ that was her heart, and she knew it was a terrible idea but she couldn’t lie. At least not for now. She’d just tell him the truth and feed on him again, let the venom do its thing this time around. Let him forget.

  What would it be like to just let someone know? Nora wondered. She hadn’t been a sire yet, so her contact with humans was reduced to those she fed on, and the occasional encounter with one of the chosen ones right before they were embraced. It wasn’t the same, though. Fletcher was just… just what? She couldn’t put her finger on it, no matter how hard she tried to figure him out as he went on and on about what it had been like to spend a week thinking he was either crazy or a victim of some sort of undead attack.

  “Then I googled real vampires…” He was venting. Speaking one hundred miles an hour.

  “You didn’t,” she laughed with a shake of her head, knowing perfectly well what happened when one went to the web with the great questions of life. Such as, what is a vampire? “Find anything interesting?”

  “I think you know I did,” he laughed back at her, “but it wasn’t very helpful at all.”

  “No, I imagine it wasn’t.”

  “So I’m right?” he asked, his entire body twisting toward her, his whole posture the kind of hopeful that made him disarming. “You did feed on me.”

  “You’re not supposed to remember it, though.” Her feeling of calm surprised her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s hard to explain, but you just weren’t supposed to remember any of it in the morning. That’s just how it works.”

  “That wasn’t so hard to explain now, was it?” He chuckled a little.

  She smiled, instinctively reaching out to shove him playfully. Playful was yet another thing they weren’t known to be with humans they weren’t actively hunting. The hunt was a game of seduction. There were no gray areas, and it wasn’t a friendship they were supposed to develop. Not unless the human they were dealing with had been chosen as someone who could not only benefit from being turned, but also bring something to them. People with the necessary kindness and self-control required to be one of them. To not do what Nora was doing right now.

  “So are you a vampire?” he asked finally, relaxing back into the bench with his head hanging back as he glanced up at the stars, “or are you something else? And why do I keep dreaming about you?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” She shook her head, her posture alert, always on guard as she looked around to make sure that there was no one watching them, no one who could recognize her. “Like I said, you are not supposed to be this… aware of it all.”

  “I still don’t understand what that means. Did you try to wipe my memory clean?” He was suddenly not so comfortable. It wasn’t that he feared her. Oddly enough, he didn’t. He was beginning to notice how on edge she was, though, and that was making him nervous.

  “Listen,” she said standing up again and digging into the pockets of a thin black jacket, “I will answer all these questions but not here.” She produced a pack of matches and pressed it into his open palm, “I’ll meet you there, okay? Just, please, don’t talk to anyone and I promise I will tell you everything you want to know. Half an hour.”

  She didn’t wait for a confirmation. Deep down, she knew she didn’t need one. He was going to show up because he wanted to know what had happened between them and, from the look of it, he wasn’t going to let it go.

  A part of her didn’t want him to. There was a very real and very aware part of her that wanted to meet up with him and kiss his lips raw, taste him, and explore all those urges that had been haunting not only her dreams but, as it turned out, his too. How could she not be curious about that? After years of just accepting the rules for what they were, Nora couldn’t help but wonder. She couldn’t stop her mind from getting away from her; imagining the possibilities of what this could mean.

  There was, of course, a very real possibility that it had all been a freak accident. That something in the environment had affected the venom in her bite and left him with his memories. That she would feed on him again and by the time he woke up tomorrow, she would be nothing but the dark outline of a drunken university hookup. Which, Nora realized, was a thought that squeezed painfully in her chest. A feeling she had all but forgotten about until this guy, this child, had marched into her life just a week ago. Now, her head was full of images, thoughts of sucking him off while tangled in her very own bed, back home, where he could never set foot, memories or no memories.

  There was another option, though. One that Nora was too afraid to think about because of its maddening unlikelihood. There was the smallest chance that, impossible as it sounded, he was invulnerable to the poison in her bite. That he could remember and would every time because, for whatever reason, it just didn’t affect him. It was exciting to think that after all these years and several different lifetimes, she could still connect with a human. A human she wanted to know more about right away.

  Chapter 5

  The Moonlight Motel was one of those old-time truck stops that seemed to be frozen in the mid-sixties. A dystopian, alter-universe version of them where the flickering neon lights of the sign seemed more toxic than inviting, and the fallen M that left the sign a sad “Moonlight otel” had nothing to do with this place’s former glory. Or lack thereof.

  Fletcher was there ten minutes early and waited in the car. He wasn’t completely oblivious to how bad this looked. He was there, alone, waiting for a woman that wanted him dead for all he knew. A strong, confident, possibly dangerous woman, obviously in very good shape. While he fantasized about peeling those tight black clothes off her skin, she was probably thinking about killing him before he could tell the world about her. He would have to find someone to believe him first, but why take the risk? Beginning to get nervous, he seriously considered leaving when a truck pulled up ahead of him and she stepped out.

  He slipped out of the car, grabbing his jacket from the passenger seat on his way out. As he clicked the locks on with the lights shining brightly his alarm went off. Its beeping was all the alert Nora would have needed if she hadn’t seen his car long before he saw her.

  She’d been sitting across the parking lot, watching him fidget as he waited for her to show up. Her hesitance came from a different place, of cours
e. Nora obviously had the upper hand, so why was she so nervous? The answer was also relatively obvious, but she wasn’t ready to accept any of it. Not until she figured out what was going on with Fletcher and his strange condition.

  *

  “So do I get to know your name?” Fletcher asked as he wandered further into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed, his hands on his knees, watching her as she shut the door and closed the shabby curtains. The room became dark enough to turn her into a shadow that found the lamp by the bed and clicked it on. “I’m Fletcher.”

  “I know who you are,” she shrugged, moving closer and lowering herself beside him on the bed, her long, dark hair falling forward in her face. “I’m Nora.”

  “Nora…” He reached out, fingers trailing along her jaw and then spilling down her neck, “what are you?”