Magic and Mayhem: Once Bitten, Twice Shy (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Have Wand, Will Travel Book 2)

by Teresa Reasor

  “There may be a problem dissolving the marriage, Master Stewart,” Adcock said, his gaze upon the ground, though he spoke to Arthur.

  “What sort of problem?” Phoebe asked.

  “It usually takes the presence of both parties before us to deny a marriage.”

  “Is attempted murder not sufficient grounds for divorce? Or, better yet, since the marriage was not consummated, why can we not annul it?”

  “It is written in our law that the bond has to be at least six months long before it can be dissolved. To give it a chance.”

  “I may not be alive in six months, Adcock.”

  “Something that is always true for all of us.”

  Irritation at the vampire’s arrogance gripped Hunter by the back of the neck and squeezed. He fought the urge to snatch him out of his chair and shake him till his neck snapped.

  “I will not die Trevor Ricci’s wife.” There was a predatory grace in the way Phoebe moved toward Adcock, her eyes glowing with an eerie light. Hunter moved to cut her off before she reached the Councilman. “Move, Hunter. I do not mean to kill him.”

  “If you harm him, you may never find a way to annul the marriage, Phoebe.”

  She lifted her hand gracefully…and a force jerked him out of her way and set him down twenty feet away with a jolt.

  She returned her attention to Adcock. “We both know the reason you ran during the fight. You are a coward, and your life means more to you than anyone else’s. I don’t hold that against you. But I will give you an incentive to solve this problem…

  “For every day I must wait for this marriage to be dissolved, you will feel pain. For every day you have found no way to make it possible, the pain will worsen. When you find a way to break it and come to me with it, your pain will end.” She twirled her finger around and around, stirring the air while her face glowed with an inner power. A pain/pleasure flow of electricity sizzled along Hunter’s skin, even from twenty feet away.

  The Vampire Council members moved restlessly, their robes rustling as though stirred by a warm wind.

  Hunter suddenly understood what his sire meant when he said she had promise. Phoebe Stewart was possibly the second most powerful vampire he had ever met.

  “If I die before you find the solution, you will live with this pain forever.”

  Adcock caught his breath and gripped his chest. “You can’t do this.”

  Phoebe’s features hardened into a mask. “I already have. I suggest you and your other Council members find a solution for the dissolution of both the marriage and my father’s contract immediately.” Her scornful look raked the Council, and they shrank away from her. “Otherwise I may have to create an incentive that will inspire you all.”

  * * *

  PHOEBE STALKED OUT of the ballroom, too angry to maintain the façade of control. She needed to escape this house and get as far away from Adcock as possible. Otherwise she might do something she’d regret. His arrogance knew no bounds, and he’d earned his punishment.

  The fact that she truly might be dead before they found Trevor and the poison didn’t matter to him. He was a typical vampire, in that death had dulled his ability to feel empathy or caring for anyone but himself.

  She hoped she never lost the ability to feel, no matter how much it hurt. And she was hurting plenty right now.

  She hurried up the stairs to the gallery and rushed to her bedroom. When she pulled aside the scarf, she saw the puncture wounds were once again draining. The bite was getting worse by the moment. After only two days, her body had finally decided it could no longer heal the wound, and the bite was throbbing again. She threw the last of the casual travel clothes she’d set out into her suitcase, tossed the spike heels she’d worn to attend the meeting into the closet, and got out a soft pair of flats.

  “May we come in, Phoebe?” Arthur asked from the doorway. Hunter and Luke stood next to him.

  “This is your house, Arthur. You can enter any room you wish.”

  “Where do you plan to go, Phoebe?” Arthur asked.

  “Away.”

  “This is your home.”

  “No it isn’t. Not anymore. I cannot trust the people or the vampires in this house any longer. And I cannot trust myself to deal with them reasonably.”

  “That includes me?” Arthur asked.

  For the second time since she’d become a vampire, she felt nauseous. “Yes, it includes you, Arthur. I’m no longer part of your corporation. Which makes me a free agent, and I can do whatever I damn well please now.” She zipped her suitcase.

  “Even if I order you to remain here.”

  “You don’t want to do that, Arthur.” She went to the three poster-sized photos she so often sat before to calm herself, taking them off the wall to stack them next to the suitcase.

  “We need to talk, Phoebe.” Arthur said in his most conciliatory tone. “There are things you need to know.”

  She shook her head. “You used me to deal with Trevor and Armanno before the wedding. And you used me to deal with the Council just now. You expected me to kill Trevor and Armanno. Did you honestly believe I didn’t know what your plans were? Whenever you decide it’s time to apply brute force, you use me. I am tired of being used. I’m trapped in this damnable marriage to a male I detest because you wanted to use me for that, too. What more do I need to know?”

  “If you had told me …”

  “I was going to leave right after the wedding, Arthur. I thought it would be a marriage in name only. After all, since vampires don’t give a shit about the ideals of loyalty, marriage, the sanctity of life, why would it have been anything else?”

  Phoebe tucked the poster-sized photos under her arm and gripped her suitcase. “I wish you’d never turned me. I was never meant to be a vampire. You should have let me die. And now I don’t have very much time left, I don’t want to spend it here. I want to go to my own home, the home I’ve been building in the mountains, and live out what time I have left the way I want.”

  Hunter stepped in front of her. “Phoebe, you’re at your most vulnerable right now. You will be isolated there, unprotected.”

  “What difference does that make to anyone but me, Hunter?”

  His gray eyes looked more intense than she’d ever seen them. “It makes a difference to me.”

  “What you’re feeling won’t last. Male vampires aren’t capable of fidelity for any length of time. There’s too much more to experience out there. And too much time to do so.”

  She felt an overwhelming need to weep and shoved past him, zipping out of the room with vampire speed before Luke could stop her.

  * * *

  “SHE HAS EVERY right to be angry. Everything she said is true. You had to have known what kind of male you were giving her to,” Hunter snapped. “Did you plan for her to kill him so you could gain control of the Southeastern territory?”

  “There are other issues you are not aware of, Hunter. It was important for her to be in the midst of the Ricci clan. Recently key leaders have been killed. Angelina Gomez in Texas was killed, and it nearly decimated the vampire population there. Andre Cassard fell in Louisiana, and the Creoles have been halved.”

  “You should have told her why she needed to be there. She’s your daughter. She’s been loyal to you since her transition. And with her power, you’ve probably been using her to your advantage for years. But she needed to know why. Not to be thrust into it blindly.”

  “It has been a balancing act, Hunter. She is very powerful. Do you know what the Security Council might do to her if they discover what she can do?”

  “But you were going to use her as an assassin anyway, weren’t you?”

  “I knew she would protect herself when the time came.”

  “But she didn’t. She protected you instead.”

  Arthur flinched. “I know she did. With her last strength. For those last few minutes I thought she had died and…” His eyes flared with pain. “Whatever you may think, I love my daughter.”

>   Hunter attempted to control his outrage. “You didn’t tell her you were on a fishing expedition. You didn’t prepare her for any of this. She thinks you wanted to get rid of her.”

  “Never. I was going to lay it all out for her before she left. She is not good at hiding her feelings, and I was concerned that if I told her everything beforehand she might do something to make Ricci and Trevor suspicious. At least her disinterest in Trevor kept him off balance.”

  “So you were manipulating her to your own ends. For all her strengths as a vampire, she still thinks like a human, with human emotions, human values. She recognized Trevor’s deliberate cruelty and didn’t trust herself not to react to it. She was going to leave right after the ceremony because she knew she would kill him eventually. She has killed, but she doesn’t enjoy it like some.

  “As for the Vampire Council, Vlad met with her for only ten minutes and recognized how powerful she is. She hides it well, but he is good at sensing things. Hell, I sensed it, but didn’t know the half of it. I still don’t.”

  Arthur fisted his hands. “You have to go after her. Make certain she is safe. Trevor won’t rest until he ends her, because he needs her dead so he can get to me. Luke and I have discovered who was responsible for Phoebe’s blood supply being compromised, and he has been cultivating the woman’s interest for some time.”

  Hunter jerked around to face Luke. “Does this female have the poison?”

  Luke nodded. “We believe she does. I believe she has been working for Ricci and Trevor from the beginning.”

  “Why the hell haven’t you taken her?”

  Luke and Arthur exchanged a glance. “We were hoping to use her to bring Trevor in.”

  By the blood of the Goddess! They were going to let Phoebe die. “If she wasn’t as strong as she is, Phoebe would already be dead. Did you not notice the bruise is expanding again, and her scarf was sticking to the wound?”

  “Should Trevor discover she’s alone, he’ll come after her,” Luke said, his features alive with concern.

  At least her brother was truly concerned for her. An idea struck him. Hunter hesitated. “Her isolation would not necessarily be a bad thing under the right circumstances. Can you feed this woman Phoebe’s location?”

  “You’d use Phoebe as bait?” Luke shook his head.

  If he used her as Arthur had done so many times before… “Not without her knowledge. I’ll catch up to her and call you to let you know whether she agrees or not.”

  Arthur nodded. “Hurry.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DIZZINESS HIT PHOEBE, and she pulled her cherry red Mustang off the side of the road and rested her head on steering wheel. Nausea rolled over her, and she swallowed against the urge to vomit, shaking with a combination of chills and weakness. Perhaps if Zaira could give her another healing treatment…

  She shouldn’t have spoken to Arthur the way she did. But she wasn’t going to apologize. He had never even apologized for getting her entangled in this Trevor fiasco. She was so angry with him. Angry with Adcock. Angry with everything. And angry with herself for wasting so much time when she could have been living her life the way she wanted to, instead of the way someone else dictated. She should have tried harder to break away. She should have grown a pair and told Arthur long ago how she felt.

  Eventually her stomach quit tumbling enough that she could assess how she was feeling. There were a couple of bags of blood at the house. She’d feel better once she drank one of them. She just had to get there.

  She glanced around to make sure the road was clear and started to pull out. Her car’s wheels moved but the vehicle didn’t. She jerked her attention forward to find Hunter with his hands braced on the grill, holding the vehicle in place. She lifted her foot off the gas pedal, threw the car into park, jerked her seatbelt free, and opened the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  Hunter’s eyes glowed with a blue gray light. “You can’t go off alone, Phoebe. And you can’t expect me to stay behind if you do.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I didn’t need one to catch up to you. The Hamiltons and Babe and his brothers are going to meet us at your house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Luke is going to feed the info of your location to Sophia. He has suspected her of being in cahoots with Ricci and Trevor for quite a while, and he’s pretty sure she’s the one who laced your food with the poison. They’ll watch her to try and catch her in the act, and then take her down. But it also means Trevor may come for you. You’ll be our bait if you agree to it.”

  “This is what Arthur wanted to talk to me about?”

  “No. He was trying to apologize to you. But it was the plan we came up with after you left.”

  Tears burned her eyes and the anger drained out of her. “Of course I’m okay with it.”

  “While I drive, phone Arthur and tell him. He’s waiting for my call, but he’ll be happier to hear it from you.”

  She reached for her cell phone in the cup holder between the seats, and was already hitting the number as she went around to get into the passenger seat.

  Aware of Hunter listening to every word, Phoebe attempted to keep her emotions under control, but she was still a little tearful when she hung up.

  Hunter covered her hands, clenched in her lap, with one of his own. “You need to feed, Phoebe,” he said, offering his wrist to her.

  “Hunter…” The idea of tasting his blood had other longings flaring to life. Her body ached with needs so long unfulfilled. How could she feel like this about him and at the same time feel so ill because of the poison?

  “Drink, Phoebe. You’ll need your strength in case we’re attacked along the way.”

  Which was true enough. Her heart was thundering while she gripped his arm with both hands and lifted his wrist to her mouth. “I can give you pleasure while I feed, Hunter, beyond the sharing of blood. Would you like me to do that?”

  His gray eyes heated and began to glow. His throat worked when he swallowed. “We don’t have time.”

  “There’s always time for pleasure.” Her fangs distended, and she struck gently and sucked. The rush of tasting his blood sent a burst of adrenaline through her system. Her power reached out to him, as intimate as running her hands over him, caressing him, sparking his power in return.

  “Phoebe—” He said her name on a breath.

  She had to be careful not to take too much, but he tasted so good. Afraid she’d lose control, she licked the puncture wounds to close them and leaned over the console to cup his face in her hands and take his mouth in a kiss, ardent and hungry.

  Hunter’s hands slipped up under her top to cup her breast, kneading her flesh with careful pressure. She wanted him with a compulsion she’d never experienced before, and her power flared, bathing them both in sensual heat.

  Hearing a sharp tap on the window behind him, Hunter broke away. A uniform shirt and the belt buckle of a police utility belt were all Phoebe could see. She covered her mouth to hold back a laugh.

  “Busted,” Hunter murmured and shot her a smile. He turned to look up at the man through the window.

  The officer made a cranking motion and Hunter turned the ignition key and rolled down the window. “Good evening, officer.”

  “You’ve picked a bad spot to pull over and make out, sir.”

  Phoebe snorted. Hunter shot her a grin, followed by a look of warning.

  The police officer leaned down and shined his flashlight into the car. “Miss Stewart, I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “Caught red-handed.” Phoebe laughed again. “Well, not quite…”

  Hunter tried to keep a straight face, though his shoulders shook with silent laughter.

  “It was all my fault, Officer Howard,” she continued.

  The officer’s lips twitched in an almost-smile.

  “I pulled off the side of the road because I was feeling a little woozy. I’ve been a little under the weather. Hunter came to rescue me,
and it’s so late… I was just…thanking him.”

  “I see.” He raised a dark brow. “My suggestion would be to hold off on the thank-yous until you get home, Miss Stewart.”

  She offered him her best kittenish smile. “I’ll try to control myself, I promise.”

  That earned her a grin from both Hunter and Officer Howard.

  “You’d better move along then…so you won’t be tempted.” The police officer touched the brim of his hat. “Have a good evening.”

  Hunter pulled the Mustang back on the road. “I’ve never been flagged by a cop for making out in a car.” His gaze swept her face in the glow of the dashboard lights. “And I’ve never wanted anyone as much as I want you, Phoebe.”

  Her breath stopped and her heart raced. “I feel it too.”

  “Were you really woozy?”

  “Yes.”

  He scowled in concern. “Feeling better now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Luke and Arthur believe Sophia has the poison. As soon as they’ve found it, they’ll rush it to the lab so the scientists can create an antidote.”

  “They need to hurry, Hunter.”

  His mouth cramped into a thin, firm line. “They know.”

  * * *

  HUNTER’S EYES FLEW open as soon as the sun set to find Phoebe lying beside him.

  The sleep shirt covered her from neck to knees, and wasn’t the least bit sexy. But it didn’t matter. He still felt a rampant surge of need as soon as he looked at her. Could he wake her with a touch? His study halted at the bandage around her throat, which was stained along the edge. His stomach tightened.

  He ran a fingertip along her cheek and sent a gentle trail of power along her skin.

  Her eyes opened and she drew a deep breath. “Hunter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “I’m awake,” she murmured drowsily and turned to nestle against him.

  “Yeah. You need to feed, Phoebe.”

  She remained silent, and for a moment he thought she had fallen asleep again.

  “Yeah. I need to feed.” Her voice sounded breathy and weak.