Serafina and the Virtual Man (Book 2 of the Serafina's Series)

by Marie Treanor

  “Naked?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Making love to you?”

  She smiled sleepily, her eyelids fluttering open. “Maybe.”

  Still holding her, he eased onto his back and blinked as some kind of shadow seemed to whisk past toward the door.

  He sat bolt upright. “What the fuck was that? Did you see something there?”

  Jilly sat with him, holding on to his shoulder. “Yes, sort of.”

  He stared at her, his heart beating like a kid’s when he’s just imagined the monster in the cupboard. He dragged his hand through his hair and gazed at her. “You saw it too?”

  She nodded.

  He took a deep, calming breath. “I saw something like that before, when you woke me up. I thought it was death, finally coming for my spirit. Only then there was you, and you were solid and real and smelled like heaven.”

  She laid her cheek against his shoulder, rubbing his arm and his back. “It isn’t death,” she assured him, just as if she knew. “Or at least not exactly. We saw it in the cellar too. We think it’s checking up on us.”

  Adam frowned, dragging his gaze away from the door where the shadow seemed to have disappeared, to glance down at JK’s face. “What is checking up on us?”

  “We think it’s the Founder, the first ever vampire from whom all the others were created. We had to kill a lot of vampires last year. Plus, Blair’s broken some kind of unspoken rule by being with Sera, and this may have pissed him off too. And, Melanie, who’s a witch and insatiably curious, has been digging up information on him from all sorts of weird, wonderful, and forgotten places. I think he’s checking out all Blair’s human connections, although Blair thinks there’s no actual danger in that.”

  Adam put his arm around her shoulder, took a clump of hair in his fist, and gently tugged her head back to meet his gaze. “Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”

  JK smiled. “If you hang around with us, Genesis Adam, you’d better get used to things that sound insane. The really worrying thing about those is, they’re generally real.”

  His breath caught on a half laugh as he dragged her back down onto the pillows. Whatever happened in his life now, it was not going to be dull around JK.

  ****

  The “shadow” of the Founder paused against the front door of the flat. There was no threat there that he could envision. The man had come close to death, but he had a strong spirit, so strong that it had crossed the Founder’s mind for the first time in centuries to make a new vampire of him. If Blair didn’t. But he’d hung on to life, because of the girl.

  Interesting. But only human emotion. And sex. There was nothing truly magical or paranormal about these two. Not like Blair’s human. Or Blair’s human’s friend, the curious witch. But even there, he’d found no active danger. He was content to leave them and move on.

  For now.

  New Release Mailing List:

  If you’d like to be informed of Marie Treanor’s new releases as they happen – including Book 3 of the Serafina’s series – please subscribe to her mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/w84NH.

  About Marie Treanor

  Marie Treanor lives in Scotland with her eccentric husband and three much-too-smart children. Having grown bored with city life, she resides these days in a picturesque village by the sea where she is lucky enough to enjoy herself avoiding housework and writing sensual stories of paranormal romance and fantasy.

  Marie has published more than twenty ebooks with small presses, (Samhain Publishing, Ellora’s Cave, Changeling Press and The Wild Rose Press), including a former Kindle bestseller, Killing Joe. Blood on Silk: an Awakened by Blood novel, was her New York debut with NAL.

  Other E-books by Marie Treanor:

  BLOOD GUILT (Blood Hunters, Book 1)

  BLOOD OF ANGELS (Blood Hunters, Book 2)

  SERAFINA AND THE SILENT VAMPIRE (Serafina’s, Book 1)

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS (The Gifted, Book 1)

  Available now from NAL Signet Eclipse:

  The Awakened by Blood trilogy:

  BLOOD ON SILK

  BLOOD SIN

  BLOOD ETERNAL

  Available now from Ellora’s Cave:

  The Psychic Seductions trilogy:

  HUNTING KAROLY

  GUITAR MAN

  FREEING AL

  Available now from Samhain Publishing:

  KILLING JOE

  GOTHIC DRAGON

  ARIADNE’S THREAD

  THE DEVIL AND VIA

  QUEEN’S GAMBIT

  REQUIEM FOR RAB

  Fairytale Fantasies (with Bonnie Dee):

  CINDERELLA UNMASKED

  DEMON LOVER

  AWAKENING BEAUTY

  SEX AND THE SINGLE PRINCESS

  Available now from Changeling Press

  Tales of the Damned:

  CITY OF THE DAMNED

  Christmas Cookies: CHRISTMAS OF THE DAMNED

  Santa’s Helpers: DAMNED SANTA

  DRAGUL RISING

  ROGUE WARRIORS

  Jack o’ Lanterns: WITCH OF ALLOWAY

  ESCAPE: Devilish Fantasy

  Hot Flash: SWAN SONG

  Big, Blooming and Wild! WILLOW THE WISP

  Heat Stroke: COOL POOL

  STEAMY NIGHTS

  DEMON’S KISS

  WOLF HUNT

  Holiday Howlz: CRY FOR THE MOON

  Available now from The Wild Rose Press:

  MAGIC MAN

  GHOST UNLAID

  Sample Chapter from SERAFINA AND THE SILENT VAMPIRE

  Have you read the first book in the Serafina’s series, Serafina and the Silent Vampire? Please enjoy this first chapter!

  SERAFINA AND THE SILENT VAMPIRE: Serafina’s, Book 1

  By Marie Treanor

  Ebook $2.99, available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and i-Tunes

  Silence has never been so sinful…

  Welcome to Edinburgh’s unique psychic investigation agency, Serafina’s.

  Serafina MacBride is psychic - but not strictly honest. While staging a hilarious vampire attack at a client’s party, Sera is stunned to encounter a real vampire - annoying, gorgeous and inaudible to everyone but her. When her client’s son is found dead with puncture wounds in his neck, she tracks the silent vampire to his lair.

  But the amoral and seductive Blair is also on a mission - to find and kill a nest of young vampires who’ve invaded his territory. Soon Sera is drawn into the bizarre world of the undead, where danger lurks in the shadows along with forbidden sensual delights - and a murderous conspiracy to flood the world with financially astute vampires who talk.

  Supported and hindered by Blair’s eccentric, undead friends, and by her own motley crew from Serafina’s, Sera and Blair uncover surprising truths about each other and about the mysterious Founder from whom all vampires are descended.

  In the end, Sera draws on powers she never knew she had in a frantic fight to defeat the forces of evil and preserve the strange, complicated being she’s trying so hard not to love.

  Chapter One

  Serafina was having a blast.

  Not only had she strung smelly garlic bulbs all over Ferdinand Bell’s large, beautiful house on the outskirts of Edinburgh and defaced every single room with rough wooden crosses, she now got to swagger through his evening party guests like Buffy the Vampire Slayer on patrol and drink old Ferdy Bell’s vintage champagne while she was at it.

  And she got paid.

  Work didn’t get much better than this.

  On the whole, Bell’s guests were taking the bizarre ornamentation in their stride. They were here to celebrate the promotion of his son Jason to a partnership in a major financial investment company and so were drawn from a wide age group. However, they were all, clearly, stinking rich, and whether they wore traditional evening dress, kilts, trews, formal gowns, or stylish designer outfits, they shrieked money from every pore. Well, money and manners, Serafina supposed, since no one had actually laughed in ol
d Ferdy Bell’s face yet. Or in hers, unless you counted Jilly, whose eyes gleamed in answering delight whenever they encountered hers across the room.

  The guests gave odd surreptitious glances at the garlic strung across the doorways and windows, and at the somewhat ugly wooden cross nailed to the wall above the fireplace and upstaging a hideous, abstract oil painting. Serafina guessed that most present were already aware of old Ferdy’s unique theory that a vampire was stalking his family. They might have considered him senile, though what they imagined her excuse was, she’d no idea. It wasn’t as if she’d tried to blend in: she wore jeans and a short, leather jacket with its pockets blatantly full of sharp sticks.

  Realizing that one of the catering staff was passing her with a bottle in either hand, she stuck out her glass with alacrity and received a grudging refill. She toasted the back of the waiter’s head before knocking half the contents down her throat.

  Jack, one of her three regular, underpaid employees, materialized in front of her. Although an actual guest at the party through his own and his family’s connections, he looked much as he always did: all wild curly brown hair and a harassed expression.

  “That’s no way to treat champers of that quality,” he murmured in his English public school accent, twitching the glass from her hand.

  “Oy!” she protested, snatching it back.

  “Are you pissed?” Jack asked under his breath.

  “I hope to be very soon.”

  “Can we do the job first, Sera?”

  “Spoilsport,” she grumbled, although she did start to walk toward the french doors, where Jilly, displaying a sexy expanse of thigh, was halfway up a ladder, rehanging a fallen string of garlic while guests squeezed past her to make the most of the surprisingly warm late summer evening in Ferdy Bell’s beautiful garden.

  “Is this stuff meant to be on the outside or the inside?” Jilly demanded.

  “Both,” Sera said vaguely. It was definitely dusk, and in another few minutes, there would probably be enough darkness to carry out her plan.

  Jilly lifted one eyebrow. “Then you’d better give me a hand, hadn’t you?”

  “Fair play,” Sera allowed. She turned to Jack, murmuring, “Make sure Tam’s all set. I’ll be along soon to give you the nod. And Jack,” she added, picking another string of garlic bulbs from the basket under Jilly’s ladder. “Try to look as if you’re having fun?”

  Whatever retort he’d been about to make vanished into a smile as someone he knew paused to speak to him amid much back slapping.

  “He’s in his element,” Jilly muttered, clambering back down the ladder. Sera shifted it through the doorway with her foot, politely excusing herself to Jack and his friend, who stood in the way.

  “Good thing too,” Sera replied, arranging the ladder outside with one hand while the other held valiantly on to her glass of champagne. “Plan wouldn’t work, otherwise, would it?”

  Jilly grunted, a sound spectacularly at odds with her angelically beautiful appearance. She was Sera’s best friend as well as her first employee, and fierce intelligence lurked behind her baby-blue eyes, stylish, golden-blonde bob, and perfect makeup. Brought up in one of Edinburgh’s roughest housing schemes, which she’d worked damned hard to escape, Jilly refused to forgive Jack his privileged background, even when having him here as a guest made their own job easier.

  “What is all this?” Jack’s friend asked, riveting his gaze to Jilly’s long, slender leg halfway up the ladder as she stretched above the french door. “Seems an odd theme for a party.”

  Jilly and Sera made brief, sparkling eye contact.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jack said, turning his friend toward the garden before he could catch sight of the women’s inappropriate mirth. “It wouldn’t be the first time the term ‘bloodsucker’ has been applied to bankers.”

  “Still the socialist, Jack?” his friend mocked.

  “Nothing to do with politics,” Jack argued, moving farther away as Jilly came back down the ladder. Reluctantly, Sera placed her glass on the table just inside the french door.

  “What’s this?” Jilly demanded. “Guilt?”

  “No. Jack’s right.”

  “Nah,” Jilly said with conviction.

  “Unfortunately, yes. I’ve got to be capable of taking on the real stalker if he shows up.”

  “You really expect him to, with all these people around?”

  “Well, Ferdy clearly does.”

  “He expects a vampire,” Jilly said dryly, “which is why we’re here.”

  Sera sighed. “Ferdy, bless his old banker’s heart, is not telling us the whole truth.”

  “That why we’re trashing his party?”

  “Yup,” said Sera, hefting the ladder over one shoulder. “That and the fact it’s bloody funny.” She carried the ladder round the side of the house to the shed where they’d found it some hours before. Then, having stashed it, she dusted herself off and walked across the lawn at the back of the house, where little clumps of people stood and chatted, or walked, glasses in hand, around the well-kept grounds. Their features were growing fuzzy in the darkening evening, despite the atmospheric lighting shining down from the walls of the house.

  Underneath the garlic hanging from the french doors, Jilly appeared to have been cornered by their attention-seeking host. All to the good. Sera raised her hand in what might have been misinterpreted as a wave. Jilly’s nod told her the true meaning was clear. Five minutes until she’d bring Ferdy.

  Sera went in search of Jack and Tam, who should be ready now to play their parts. The Bells had a good, large garden surrounded by a high wall. There was a small, ornamental maze in the middle and a grove of apple and pear trees some yards to the side of it, running along the high boundary wall. Tam’s instructions were to skulk among the trees until it was time to come to the edge of the wood and “attack” Jack, after which, when Jilly brought Ferdy Bell, Sera would leap out of the trees and, with the aid of a neat bit of smoke kit acquired by Tam himself, turn Tam to apparent dust. Tam would then run off unseen back into the trees until they could either smuggle him out or inform him it was safe to leave, while Sera and Jilly would fuss over Jack, who would, unless he wimped out, have genuine if self-inflicted puncture wounds in his neck. He’d made a tiny set of clippers specially—they’d inflict shallow but bleeding wounds of the right shape. With luck, Sera would get another fee out of it.

  Jack was propping up the hedge on the outside edge of the maze nearest to the trees, but as he saw Sera approach, he straightened and strolled toward her, his gaze darting to check for guests within earshot. A jerk of his head warned her there were unseen people inside the maze. There was no need; she could hear their voices from yards away.

  “Where’s Tam?” Sera asked low as they met.

  “Not here yet, or at least I can’t find him.”

  “Oh, for the love of—” She broke off, adding impatiently, “He is here. Jilly spoke to him on the phone. Where did you look?”

  “In there, of course.” Jack nodded at the arranged meeting place in the nearby grove, which was now satisfyingly dark.

  “If you want something done properly… Wait here. Jilly’s bringing Ferdy in just a couple of minutes,” Sera muttered and strode off in the direction of the trees.

  It was hardly a deep, dark forest, but the lights outside the house didn’t stretch this far, and Sera quickly felt enveloped in blackness. She delved in her jacket pocket for the pencil-thin flashlight and shone it in front of her feet as she walked, occasionally darting it around to search for Tam. It was ridiculous, losing him in a bunch of trees, but she didn’t want to phone him in case the ringing was heard elsewhere in the garden and ruined her carefully prepared spooky atmosphere. On the other hand, she couldn’t afford to take too long or Ferdy would be herding his guests inside from the late evening cool, and her moment would have passed.

  She felt her way around two intertwining apple trees and found Tam.

  She stopped de
ad with shock. His large frame was unmistakable in the flashlight beam, but she’d never before seen it slumped in the brutal hold of an attacker who seemed to be strangling him or squeezing him to death. Which would be quite an achievement considering the size of Tam’s muscular body. And the fact that his opponent, although about equal in height, was far lighter and leaner in weight. And wearing a kilt, as if he was, or was pretending to be, one of the Bells’ guests. Tam’s arms flailed as if trying feebly to fly free. That was terrifying in itself: Tam the Tank physically helpless.

  Sera’s hand wavered, and the beam from her flashlight shifted over a shock of dark chestnut hair. There was a tiny instant when she imagined she’d steeped herself too deeply in this vampire nonsense, because it almost looked as if the stranger had his face buried in Tam’s throat. It sent a weird, almost sensual shiver down her spine before she yanked her brain back into line.

  Who the hell was this? Ferdy’s stalker? Sera didn’t wait to find out. As he began to turn his head, granting her a glimpse of his shadowed face and gleaming eyes, she hurled herself at him feetfirst. Both her boots connected jarringly with hard flesh; her whole being jolted as if she’d been shot.

  It took an instant to realize that she lay on the ground on her back, winded, while Tam’s attacker, and Tam himself, remained upright. Jesus, she couldn’t have lost her touch to that degree! She’d slammed into him. She should at least have knocked him off balance! But then, she should have landed on her feet, not her back, and been ready to jump him before he recovered.

  As she struggled to rise, her blurred vision cleared enough to show her, by the crazily waving beam of the torch, that the kilted thug had released Tam, who leaned one massive shoulder against the tree, shaking his head as if to clear it. Thank God, at least the bastard hadn’t killed him. And now they were two against one, however strong this maniac was.