by Holly Ryan
Slayers Give Happy Endings
The Slayer’s Reverse Harem Book 5
By
Holly Ryan
Copyright
Slayers Give Happy Endings © September 2018 Holly Ryan
Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Cover design: Erin Hayes
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About the Author
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Chapter One
Pain and screaming, so much that I thought I was reliving my battle with Paul all over again. But then pain in my stomach, sharp and horrible, cut thought everything else. Hunger. Thirst.
The taste of blood woke my taste buds, easing that horrible ache just a little, but it was never enough. Even while I was guzzling it down, it still wasn’t enough. It consumed my thoughts, made me rabid for more.
And then?
I woke with a start in a dark room. Pitch black, but I could see everything in vibrant detail. The dresser across from the bed I lay in, the minor chips in the wood, the individual grooves in the brass handles. It was as if the sun shone through the window and highlighted all of these things.
Smells also seemed heightened—the freshly washed sheets caressing my back, lavender, wood, blood, and...everything. All mixed together, and at the same time separated into individual components. It made me thirsty.
Existing made me thirsty.
I tried to get up, but my arms and legs were bound with silk. Eddie’s scarves. He’d tied me up with them once a while back. How long ago had that been? How long had I been here, tied up?
How long have I been a vampire?
The realization of what I was slammed into me, even though I’d known what was happening to me at the very, very back of my mind. Still, waking up a vampire was brand spanking new to me. I felt different but the same, I supposed because the initial bloodlust madness had run its course. I was still me, a vampire slayer in the most literal sense. Just thirstier. And sensier. Yes, that was a word now. As the slayer, my senses had been badass anyway, but now I’d be able to read in the dark. I’d just leveled up spectacularly.
I snapped myself free from the silk scarves, maybe a bit too hard because I split the headboard and footboard in two in the process. Oops.
Still me, just stronger.
I flew out the bedroom door and blurred down the steps within seconds, not even out of breath because...well, I didn’t have any breaths.
Still me, just faster.
“Groovy,” I said to the empty living room.
The lights were on down here, but everything seemed so different and new. Still cozy and warm, but like I hadn’t felt the dark wood floor underneath my feet in months.
“Belle,” a velvet voice to my right said, a seductive kiss to my whole body.
I whirled, my loose, blonde curls flying around my bare shoulders. There in the kitchen, sitting around a brand new table, were my three favorite vampires, the devil, and my kickass dog, Cleo. I froze when I saw them, caught in their wide-eyed stares, because it seemed like forever since I’d last seen them. My heart, eerily silent, ached for them. I’d missed them so much. Not the devil, of course.
Cleo came over to sniff me, gave a pathetic little whine, and then pressed her nose against me until I scratched behind her ears on her favorite spot.
My vamps rose out of their seats slowly, their orange-yellow gazes never wavering, as if they thought I might attack them or...
Oh no. Images from my battle with Paul, the state of my body afterward, flashed through my head with startling clarity. I looked down at myself to see what they saw and hoped it wasn’t like what I remembered. I’d been broken then, barely clinging to life. Now, my fingers, hands, arms, everything were whole again. No scars anywhere, just flawless, gorgeous skin that I couldn’t stop touching.
Yep, it was a superficial thing to worry about. No one ever said I was perfect. Besides, I didn’t want to be an immortal while I looked like moldy leftover spaghetti.
“Slayer,” Jacek said, taking a step closer. The movement rustled his black athletic pants that rode low on his hips, and he wore a black shirt, an item of clothing I’d never been a fan of on him. His short dark hair was almost as messy as Eddie’s, like he hadn’t bothered with it in a while. “How do you feel?”
“Um.” My voice felt rusty from lack of use, or possibly from screaming too much through the pain of becoming a vampire. It had hurt. I remembered that vividly. “Dead, but...in a good way?”
Jacek and the others smiled, and I didn’t miss the large dose of relief in them. How bad had my transition been?
Sawyer stepped forward. His silky black curls glinted in the light, and I couldn’t believe how many little details I’d missed on the suns and moons inked onto his bronze-skinned arms. Even from about eight feet away, I could make out the intricate details. They were stunning. He was stunning.
“Do you need anything?” he asked. “Some blood?”
“A coat?” Eddie glared at the devil, whose sapphire eyes roamed over my naked body in sinful worship.
“I hope not,” the devil purred. He sat with his legs spread at the head of the table in black leather and jeans, a curious smile stuck to his lips as he studied me. His short blond hair shone like diamonds, and power radiated from him, as well as something else. I had a feeling he was trying to magnify my desire, but his magic bounced off of me and died a lonely death. He’d never been a big fan of vampires. Maybe that was why. Because he couldn’t control us with desire.
“Blood,” I rasped.
Sawyer nodded, cutting a glare at the devil on his way to the refrigerator.
Jacek held out his hand for me to join them, but Cleo nudged him out of the way with a rubber ball in her mouth. Her tail went wild and thwacked against Jacek’s ankle.
“Is it playtime, girl?” I asked.
“Ah.” Jacek chuckled as he took the ball from her. “I think someone’s grown bored with the men in this house and missed her slayer.” He tossed the ball to me, and I snatched it out of the air with hardly a blip on my instinct radar.
Then, I threw it. I only meant for it to go up a few stairs, but it sailed to the top and then smashed through the wall. From where I stood, I could see stars through the side of the h
ouse.
“Oh shit.” I turned back to my vamps. “I’m sorry.”
They chuckled as Sawyer crossed the kitchen with a warm mug of blood. “It’s just a wall.”
“And the footboard and headboard upstairs. I’m like the Tasmanian devil. Sorry, Cleo.”
She sat on my foot, not even remotely interested in going to fetch the ball now that I’d chucked it who knew where.
I took the blood from Sawyer and drained it in one gulp, then licked the mug clean while everyone watched. Groaning, I ran my tongue over my lips to catch every last drop. Whoa, and my fangs too. They snuck out, sharp as needles.
My vampires’ eyes shifted to bright red as they watched me, needy and hungry, roaming all over my naked body. Growls rumbled through the kitchen, trembling every particle in the air between us on a direct path to my pussy. Now I felt desire, a powerful heat sinking low and wetting my inner thighs. My entire body hummed with want as I brushed my fingers over my buttery soft stomach, and then lower. I needed them inside me. My fingers would do to ease the ache, I supposed, even in front of the devil who sat there watching, his sapphires bright and hungry, a devious curl on his lips.
“Jesus, Sunshine,” Eddie rasped and leaned against the table. His hard cock pressed against his black dress pants. He took it and squeezed as he sank into his chair, his blond hair flopping over his glasses. “Your desire smell is ten times as strong as it was.”
Jacek and Sawyer also had massive hard-ons pointing right at me, and I imagined the devil did, too, though he sat forward and rocked his hips, a low rumble in the back of his throat as he stared at me.
I desperately wanted to fuck, but I needed answers more. I ran my tongue along my fangs to snap them back up. “How long?” I asked Sawyer who took my empty mug away and led me by the hand to the table.
“Approximately eleven months,” he said, his red eyes fading back to amber.
I stopped as if I’d crashed into a wall. “What?”
He covered my hand with both of his. “It’s a relatively short amount of time when you’re immortal.”
“But...” I looked at each of their faces, but of course they hadn’t changed one bit in eleven months. But I had. Oh, this was going to take some getting used to. “So...” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to make sense of my new reality. “What month is it?”
Eddie frowned from his seat at the table. “It’s October. October third.”
Which meant my twenty-first birthday was in less than thirty days. “Am I insane yet? Would you even know if I was if I’ve been out of my mind with bloodlust these last eleven months? What about Paul? Is he alive? What did I miss? Oh my god, I can’t breathe.”
“Belle.” Sawyer cupped my face in his hands. “You’re dead.”
“Yes, but...breathing helped.”
Jacek held a chair out at my usual spot at the table. “It tends to when you’re not, you know, dead.”
I looked back at Sawyer, processing. “Eleven months...”
“It’s going to take some time to come to terms with it,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”
I nodded, his hands cupping my cheeks giving me strength, and then took my seat at the table to hear more. If I could stand to.
Across from me, Eddie clasped his hands on the tabletop. “Paul’s not dead.”
Nope, I couldn’t stand to. “Shit.”
The devil leaned forward. “But you still had the god bone when you came up through the trapdoor. When the time is right, you can”—he looked at the others—“try again.”
The god bone was the only thing that could kill Paul, a god himself. I’d stabbed him with it already before he flayed me alive, but that hadn’t been enough.
I gazed around the table. “The time is right now. Tonight. I don’t have much time left. No slayer has ever survived past their twenty-first birthday, remember? And I don’t count Roseff because he went insane.”
“On his twenty-first birthday,” the devil muttered and frowned.
Sawyer sat next to me and settled his hand on my thigh, a cool comfort. “Belle, you just suffered through eleven months of newborn bloodlust. We kept you drugged for most of it because it was painful for you, after everything you’d been through. Think of it like this. You just woke up from an eleven-month-long coma. You can’t go do battle with Paul right now because you need to recuperate.”
On the other side of me, Jacek weaved his fingers through mine. “It’s October third. Your birthday is Halloween. You have time.”
“But I don’t. Not really. My slayer power is supposed to turn my brain into a burnt marshmallow poked through with a crazy stick like it did with Roseff, and the other slayers before me. I’m surprised I’m not frothing at the mouth already.”
An uncomfortable quiet fell upon the kitchen, and I realized which of my many questions hadn’t been answered yet.
“Did I do something, or say something, that’s...not me?” I looked to Eddie since he knew firsthand what kinds of things to look for. His little sister, a former slayer, had said some not-quite-right things before she’s burned down their house with the family inside. She’d been much younger than twenty-one, which meant that slayer madness could kick in at any time.
“You...” Eddie cleared his throat, a look of pure torture on his face, and a wave of self-loathing almost suffocated me, dead or not.
What the hell had I put my loves through these last several months? Never mind what I’d gone through. I was more concerned with what I’d done to them.
“You swore that Paul was trying to get inside you, to reclaim his power.” He looked at me, his amber eyes as sincere as I’d ever seen them. “But he wasn’t there.”
I winced at both that recollection and one of my first encounters with Paul. He’d somehow blurred himself into making it appear like he was trying to get inside me even though he’d been standing about six feet away. Had that been what he was trying to do? Get inside me so he could get his power back? Well, he had gotten in, long enough to make me stab myself.
“I-I don’t know, but maybe my subconscious was playing with me? I mean, it is his power inside me which he really wants back, so maybe that’s not so bad that I thought Paul was trying to get at me? It means I’m on alert.” Hmm, that sounded much better in my head.
After a long pause, Sawyer said, “There’s more.”
I sagged back into my seat. “I liked it better when I didn’t know anything.”
A pained look crossed his face while he seemed at a loss for words for a second. “You tried to eat Cleo.”
I stared at him, replaying each syllable of what he’d just said, but it refused to click into place. “I what now?”
Cleo came trotting up to me and nudged her way around Sawyer to put her chin on my knee. Whole. Intact. No slayer-shaped bites anywhere. She looked up at me with her droopy, soulful, bloodshot eyes, and her wet nose flared like she smelled something dead.
“She’s quick to forgive, Belle,” the devil said from his chair at the head of the table. “I think she realizes a lot more than anyone gives her credit for, but you tried to eat her. Not drink her. Eat her.”
“But...” I stroked her silky brown ears, shaking my head. “I would never, ever, do that.”
“Exactly,” Sawyer said and scratched Cleo behind the ears. “Even bloodlust doesn’t do that to newborn vampires. They drink human blood. That’s it.”
This was wrong on so many levels. Cleo was my bad-ass girl, and I loved her because I couldn’t not love her. I would never hurt her, so to hear that I’d tried pinballed my unbeating heart right down to my toes. I curled in on myself then and covered my face with my hands, too ashamed of myself to do much else.
Jacek and Sawyer shifted closer to massage my back. Eddie leaned over the table to draw circles into my elbow with his thumb. Cleo licked my knee. There was no judgement here, folks. Not at all. That fact burned the backs of my eyes, but I didn’t cry. I wasn’t even sure I could anymore.
There fo
r a short, sweet while, I’d been able to choose the direction of my life instead of having my destiny or my insanity-laced brain be forced upon me. Want to go hang out at a vampire nest even though it could be a bad idea? Yep! Want to fuck all three of them because they’re outrageously hot and genuine and just what the slayer needs? Sure do! Want to be immortal just like them? Already bought the proverbial T-shirt! I had made those choices, and I was damn proud of all of them. So to have my life now dictated by my stupid brain did not sit well with this vampire slayer. Fuck no.
Slowly, I forced steel back into my spine and straightened. “I want my brain back, and not this pile of mashed potatoes where it used to be. My brain was kooky before all this, as I’m sure you know, but it was mine.”
“We want it back, too, Sunshine.” Eddie crossed his arms over his white button-down shirt as he sat back in his chair. “We want it back too.”
The devil propped his elbow on the table and studied me, the twinkling of his sapphires on full display, as he rubbed his jaw. “After Roseff looked into Paul’s lake and learned the truth, he began to slowly lose his mind. The timing of that is different for every slayer, but...” He glanced at Jacek. “Roseff had already begun torturing vampires to figure out how to change himself, a slayer, into a vampire. But the day of his twenty-first birthday, he went completely crazy.”
Jacek tensed next to me. “Are you just spouting random shit about my past, or do you have a point?”
Jacek was one of the vampires Roseff had tortured, something he still had every right to be salty about.
The devil ignored him, unfazed. “Belle, you once asked if you could have your slayer power taken out of you, and I said yes, but...the universe needs its slayer. I can’t just put your power in a jar on a shelf somewhere. So, what did you have in mind?”
Right. Without the slayer, everything was off-balance, helter-skelter, chaos. But there had been a time not so long ago—well, about a year ago—when I didn’t have my powers and the universe appeared to do just fine.
“Detective Appelt stole my slayer power once,” I said.
