Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE VAMPIRE'S BOND 3
THE BONDED SERIES BOOK 3
SAMANTHA SNOW
Copyright ©2018 by Author
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
This is book 3 from the “Vampire's Bond” trilogy. If you are new to the series then start with Book 1!
When Siobhan MacLeod died she was brought back as a vampire by Jack Blackwell, her future lover.
And now Siobhan was set to learn that everything happened for a reason and her new life as a vampire was set to take on a whole new meaning...
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
It was a calm night, all things considered. The manor was quiet. There were still more occupants than usual—everyone was leery about simply going back to normal when no one knew what the angelic situation was going to be like—but on that night, they were getting along. The Vampire Lords all seemed content to keep to themselves, perhaps relishing in the lack of any immediate danger. There were no states of emergency. It was just a quiet night, verging on early morning.
Siobhan MacLeod ordinarily would have been enjoying the peace. She had been a vampire for only a few weeks at that point, and she had barely had time to just stand still and breathe. As it was, though, she and Jack Blackwell were sitting outside on the porch, staring expectantly at the sky.
At least it was a nice view, she reflected, as her bronze-green eyes traced the path of a satellite. Somehow, the moonlight managed to make her look even paler than she already was (granted, she still wasn’t quite as pale as Jack, who had been sun-deprived for decades as compared to Siobhan’s mere weeks), but if nothing else, it meant her chin-length red curls stood out more than ever.
She slid a glance over to Jack, admiring that view for a moment as well. The bronze that all vampires acquired made it a bit difficult to appreciate the green of his eyes, but the moonlight made his short black hair look like mercury, and she had always appreciated his profile.
Granted, none of that made her any less impatient. Patience, on the whole, was not something that had ever been one of Siobhan’s saving graces.
“He said today, didn’t he?” Siobhan asked eventually, toppling backwards and leaning against Barton, as if the wolf-dog were some sort of gigantic, elaborate pillow. (For his part, he grumbled and fidgeted and fell back to sleep.)
Truth be told, they hadn’t actually been waiting all that long, but she had left her cellphone inside and had nothing to do, so the twenty minutes she had been on the porch had gradually stretched out into an eternity.
“He said today,” Jack confirmed for the sixth time, not even looking up as he scrolled through the update feed on his cellphone. Siobhan considered stealing it from him, but she knew he would just take it back without even blinking.
(She also contemplated getting up to go grab her own phone or a book or something, but she didn’t want to get up. Laziness did not suddenly cease to exist once mortality was no longer present; Siobhan could be semi-immortal and lazy simultaneously quite effectively.)
Siobhan huffed out a breath and squirmed impatiently, but before she had a chance to complain further, two shadows fell over them from above, blocking out the dim light of the night’s small moon, each silhouette equipped with two pairs of wings.
Gabriel landed first, his sister touching down only a moment after him. While Gabriel seemed reasonably at ease, Anael looked as if she was going to try climbing out of her skin. Siobhan supposed she could understand that; vampires and angels didn’t have the greatest history with each other.
The thing about angels was that they all looked as if they had been made from a mold. All the men looked alike but with different color palettes. All the women looked alike as well. It was a bit unnerving when there were more than one of each in the same place, made even more unnerving by the fact that they were all perfectly symmetrical to a frankly alarming degree, but Siobhan had begun to get used to it.
Whether or not angels were attractive rather varied, though. In general, Siobhan would say no, since they usually wanted to kill her and looked highly displeased. Gabriel, though, was rather fond of her (very fond of her, actually, based on past actions, though she rather hoped those feelings were waning) and tended towards a calmer, less outraged demeanor, so Siobhan was perfectly willing to admit that he was attractive in a broad, angular sort of way. He had tan skin, like coffee with a bit too much cream, his hair was a slightly metallic shade of brown, and his eyes glowed a medium shade of purple.
Anael, like the other female angels Siobhan had seen, had deceptively soft features, like a delicate doll. Her wings were white but with a faintly blue tint to them and only moderately paler than the rest of her, save for her deep red hair, which fell to her waist like a waterfall, and her eyes, which glowed like fire opals.
Both of them wore the unusual armor that angels tended to favor: black and like a second skin, a strange, unidentifiable material that was neither cloth nor metal but something in the middle.
“I didn’t know you were bringing company,” Siobhan observed, sitting up once again and letting Barton stretch out more comfortably. Though she knew Gabriel meant no harm, she couldn’t help but feel wary. True, she had never fought Anael before, but Anael had never proven herself to be an ally either. She had been very thoroughly neutral in their few past encounters.
Gabriel shrugged and clasped his hands together behind his back. “She wanted to meet you,” he offered simply, and he sounded so matter-of-fact that Siobhan couldn’t help but let herself begin to relax.
Despite that, Anael seemed more like she was contemplating hiding behind him. Siobhan grinned and waved cheerfully. Her fangs maybe made her grin a bit less charming than it once was, but really, it was just something Anael would need to get used to.
“Hi!” she offered pleasantly. “I’m Siobhan.”
“And Jack,” Jack chimed in, finally looking up from his phone and nodding his head once in acknowledgement.
Anael observed them for a slow moment, her wing
s tense and folded tightly to her back. Finally, she bowed her head and offered, in a soprano voice, “Hello. It is…a pleasure to meet you. My brother speaks rather highly of you.”
“I’m a bit surprised to see you with him, actually,” Siobhan remarked plainly. More often than not, angels and vampires wanted to kill each other, frequently by ripping each other into pieces. The fact that Siobhan could consider Gabriel a friend had taken a lot of careful work and coaxing on her part, and it had not endeared him to the rest of his kind in the slightest.
Anael offered something like a smile, tiny and hidden in one corner of her mouth. “He infrequently makes sense,” she ignored the scowl Gabriel leveled at the side of her head, “but in this case, I liked what he was saying more than the orders I was being given.”
“And the other angels?” Jack wondered, sliding his phone into his pocket.
“I’ve met with a few of my siblings,” Gabriel sighed. “So far, Anael is the only one I could really convince, though the others at least seem…non-hostile. Out of self-preservation, if for no other reason.”
“Better than nothing,” Siobhan conceded, one shoulder lifting in a lackadaisical shrug. “I’m just glad they aren’t planning on mobbing the manor.”
Gabriel snorted. “Your Vampire Lords killed every seraphim. The rest of the angels aren’t particularly enthusiastic about even being on the same continent as them.”
Siobhan sputtered out a laugh behind one hand, and Jack returned pleasantly, “I am perfectly okay with that.”
With a crooning pout, Siobhan wilted sideways onto his shoulder. “You mean you don’t want to take up angelic combat as a sport?” she sighed, hooking her chin over his shoulder.
“We basically did, though,” he pointed out dryly. “It sucked. We almost died.”
“Yes, I recall,” Gabriel returned blandly. “Regardless, it seems like it will be unnecessary.”
With a gleeful whoop, Siobhan pumped both of her fists into the air and toppled over backwards, landing flat on her back when it turned out that Barton had squirmed too far out of reach. Unconcerned, she stayed where she landed.
“It’s good to hear you’re doing well,” Jack offered after a moment, leaning back on his hands.
“For the time being, at least,” Gabriel agreed.
It was a brief visit. Fifteen minutes later, Gabriel and Anael bid both Siobhan and Jack farewell and left with a parting, “Next week?” from Gabriel.
“You better,” Siobhan returned, lifting a hand to wave from where she splayed out over the porch. She watched them rise higher into the sky before they vanished, and she levered herself up onto her elbows and then upright until she was seated.
“Think all this ‘Heaven wants to cause the apocalypse’ stuff is done for?” she wondered, running the fingers of one hand through her hair. She picked absentmindedly at a tangle in her curls until it relaxed and her fingers could pass through the strands smoothly.
“We can hope,” Jack answered easily, but he was more often the pragmatic one of the two of them. “There are still a lot of angels out there, though. We’re probably going to hear from at least some of them eventually.”
Siobhan groaned and let her forehead thump down against his shoulder. “Why does everyone have to be so pessimistic?” she whined, fully aware that she was being entirely too melodramatic.
She couldn’t see Jack’s face just then, but she knew he was rolling his eyes at her, and a moment later, he leaned over to kiss the top of her head. “We need to balance out your bursts of optimism,” he answered dryly. “We need to keep the cosmic balance and all that in order.”
Siobhan straightened up again and punched his shoulder lightly. “Dick,” she pouted before she climbed back to her feet. She stretched her arms over her head, arched her back until her spine popped and clicked her tongue so that Barton heaved himself back to his feet.
As Jack got up as well, Siobhan contemplated the sky for a moment before she decided, “It’ll be sun up soon. Let’s go play keep-away with Alistair’s cleaning supplies and watch him slowly go crazy trying to find them until then.”
“Yeah, alright,” Jack agreed, rolling his shoulders as he fell into step behind her. Alistair was one of the few vampires that lived in the manor fulltime even when there wasn’t any sort of angelic crises going on, and his primary job was keeping the place spotless. And of course, with both Siobhan and Jack being fond of Alistair, it meant they had to do their best to torment him periodically. It was a sign of their affection. And their boredom.
It helped that, for as cheerful and bouncy as Alistair was, he was still perpetually a seventeen-year-old boy and he was easy to fluster. They stole his glass cleaner, the bleach he used to clean the sink and the bathtubs, the polish he used for the various wooden surfaces scattered liberally throughout the manor, his duster, his broom, and his dustpan.
Osamu, one of the five Vampire Lords, caught them at it as they were busy stashing the bottle of glass cleaner in a half-full cupboard in the library. For a moment, the three of them stared at each other, and then Osamu shook his head, sighed, and decided, “Carry on,” before he turned on his heel and left the room once again.
Luckily for Alistair, it wasn’t long before the sun was coming up once again, and he was allowed to scour the kitchen for his supplies in peace as Siobhan and Jack headed to their room to sleep for a few hours.
They curled up together, legs tangled and arms haphazardly thrown over each other like a pair of overly affectionate octopi. A couple hours of sleep never sounded like much, but whether they slept together or at different times, they always looked forward to that daily catnap.
*
Siobhan woke up with a jolt when Barton clambered frantically onto the bed and bounded towards the head of it, stepping on Siobhan’s stomach in his haste. A glance at the clock told her she had only been asleep for about forty minutes.
With his front paws on the top edge of the headboard, Barton started barking. Siobhan glanced up at him to see his ears pinned flat against his head and his hackles raised from the base of his skull to the base of his tail. She felt her heart sink. She knew what that behavior from him meant. There was a hostile angel approaching.
She heard Jack stir beside her, but neither of them moved. There was nothing to do until it arrived, except to wait with bated breath and wonder what kind of angel it would be. It couldn’t be a seraph. According to Gabriel, all of them were dead. But what if there was another type of angel even more powerful than a seraph? Gabriel had also mentioned that the hierarchy of Heaven had not ended with the seraphim; there were things that outranked them still.
Outside, a shadow darted past the window, barely visible through the curtains. Accompanying it, Siobhan could just barely pick out the sound of something slicing through the air.
She flinched as she heard glass break in a different room, followed by shouting. By that point, Jack was blearily tossing himself out of bed beside her, and Siobhan stumbled to her feet to follow the sound of the ruckus.
“Go get one of the Lords!” Siobhan told him while she bolted down the hall.
She ground to a halt in the doorway of Myrtle’s room, where the older vampire tussled across the floor with a very irate archangel.
A very irate, very familiar archangel.
“Gabriel!” Siobhan shouted, throwing herself into the fray to pull him off of Myrtle. He didn’t even spare her a glance, but rather set himself immediately to the task of ripping himself out of her hold.
Siobhan tightened her hold on him and began painstakingly hauling him back to the window. Myrtle leapt to her aid once again, and between the two of them, they managed to tackle Gabriel back out of the manor before he managed to destroy anything else.
The sun wasn’t even fully risen, but already Siobhan’s skin was beginning to feel tight. And when Harendra appeared a few yards away, she couldn’t help the small nugget of dread she felt.
There was something almost dead about the expression
on Gabriel’s face. Or rather, the complete lack of any expression on his face. He reacted to whatever was happening around him, and then his face returned to a mask of neutrality, as if his soul had been wrenched out of his body and left nothing behind.
As strange as his behavior was, Siobhan could tell in an instant that he wasn’t in control of what he was doing. Something was controlling him, using him as a violent puppet. He didn’t deserve for Harendra to kill him. Not yet, at least. If there was a way to snap him out of it, Siobhan wanted to find it. If there was nothing she could do, so be it, but she wasn’t going to just give up without even trying. She owed Gabriel more than that.
She latched her hands around Gabriel’s throat and hurled her weight forward, throwing him to the ground. He thrashed, wings beating awkwardly against the grass, and Siobhan planted her knees on his upper arms. She wouldn’t be able to hold him for long, but she bought herself enough time to turn and shout at Myrtle, “Tell Harendra to stand back! Something’s controlling him, and I have an idea.”
The Vampire's Bond 3 (The Bonded Series) Page 1
