by Lily Levi
Seeking Serena Complete Series (Books 1-5)
Reverse Harem Romance
Lily Levi
Copyright © 2017 by Lily Levi
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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Sought (A Seeking Serena Serial Book 1)
1. Serena
2. Ambrose
3. Serena
4. Serena
5. Theron
6. Serena
7. Orlando
8. Serena
Sensed (A Seeking Serena Serial Book 2)
1. Serena
2. Pollux
3. Ambrose
4. Serena
5. Theron
6. Orlando
7. Serena
8. Deadmourn
Stolen (A Seeking Serena Serial Book 3)
1. Serena
2. Pollux
3. Ambrose
4. Serena
5. Theron
6. Zane
7. Cain
8. Serena
Sacred (A Seeking Serena Serial Book 4)
1. Serena
2. Zane
3. Pollux
4. Serena
5. Theron
6. Cain
7. Ambrose
8. Serena
Served (A Seeking Serena Serial Book 5)
1. Nikolai
2. Ambrose
3. Theron
4. Cain
5. Remus
6. Serena
7. Zane
8. Amun
9. Serena
10. Nikolai
11. Serena
12. Amun
13. A Time Remembered
14. A Time Forgotten
Also by Lily Levi
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Copyright © 2017 by Lily Levi
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Serena
It wasn’t enough to walk away from beneath the suffocating shadow of the Deadmourn Mansion and it wasn’t enough for them to watch me go. I felt it then in my bones and the thrill of the impending hunt was a terror unlike any I had experienced in my hundred years.
But here I was and the game was over.
“Where’d you get the scars?” he asked, breaking my thoughts.
I said nothing because there was nothing to say.
“Anyway,” he went on. “You really know some stuff. More than any other woman I’ve been with, anyway. Most of them just lay there and let you fuck ‘em like they don’t care or something.”
I pulled my knotted hair into a bun atop my head and stared at the man in the corner of the vanity mirror.
He lay in the middle of the bed with one large hand behind his head and a cigarette in the other, smoking like he was some greasy 1980’s pornstar after a long, hard fuck. His black mustache twitched as he sucked on the edge of the filter. He blew out the smoke out thick and hot with his unwillingness to inhale.
I closed the front of my lace shift and turned on the stool to face him. I gave him a smile and when he pulled away the cigarette and smiled back, I very nearly felt sorry for him.
“You’d rather die in a bed fire than die of cancer,” I said. “Anyway, you aren’t getting the full effect. You’ve really got to take it all into your lungs. You want to feel them burn with the smoke.” I moved from the stool and crawled back up onto the bed beside him. “That’s how you know you’re doing it right.”
“Show me,” he whispered.
I took the cigarette from between his fingers and pressed it between my lips. The hot smoke swirled deep into my lungs and I breathed it out slowly between us.
He nodded, took the cigarette back from me, and tapped the ashes out into the ashtray on the bedside table. “Look,” he said slowly, even tentatively. “I’m supposed to be seeing someone else tonight, just trying to be upfront, but what’s your name? Again, just trying to keep it real, you know?”
I laughed. He didn’t care what my name was, not really, it was just something to say.
I considered giving him a name different from my own, but it didn’t matter.
“Serena,” I said. “Serena Moon.”
He chuckled at this. “Moon,” he repeated, drawing out the ‘oo’ too long and striking at an old hidden chord of irritation. If I’d felt sorry for him, the feeling was no more.
“Yes,” I said, pressing my face into his neck to take the thing I actually wanted without further ceremony.
I’d once found a serene joy in the afterglow of sex. I’d let myself toy with the fantasy of the unnamed man beside me. I’d tell myself that I was like them, alive and with my days as numbered as theirs - and they had been numbered, until they weren’t anymore.
Master Deadmourn and his spawn had changed that, though it hadn’t been their intention. After that night in the mansion, I was never supposed to be anything ever again.
And yet here I was, drinking from the veins of yet another sorry excuse for a man.
But the man - I hadn’t gotten his name - tasted even worse than the one before him.
Wiping my mouth, I picked the cigarette up from the carpet and finished putting it out in the ashtray beside his lifeless head.
His brown eyes stared at me, glassy and still full of surprise.
I closed them and added the lines of his face to the collection of faces I would see when finally, like all despicable creatures, my time would come to finally rot in hell.
I pulled the lifeless weight of his body, still glistening with sweat, down from the bed and onto the carpet. With my forearms curled into his wet armpits, I dragged him across the floor and pried open the bedroom closet.
There was a man once, a nice man, who had asked me how many skeletons I had buried in my closet. We’d been in the center of the city, at the top of a three-tiered restaurant, and he had just ordered the chocolate cake. I’d told him in a voice full of solemnity that I had nine or ten and that I hadn’t cleaned it out in some time. It felt good to confess.
He’d laughed at this and then the waitress had come with his chocolate cake. I’d liked him more than some men; more than most men, really. He was kind to me and so I prolonged the end. I fed on others in the interim, though I’d craved his blood most of all.
I set the closet door fully open and the soft, crackling bites of khapra beetles filled my ears. It was a pleasant sound that I had always liked, even as a girl.
I pushed the man into the closet and shut the door against his face. Bloated with blood, I moved back to the bed and sat at its foot. I folded my hands and stared at the close
t door. I was never satisfied anymore. The blood never filled me, only my belly as a physical thing.
Yet still I did it.
It never felt good, but there was no guilt to speak of.
No, what I felt was much darker than guilt or shame. Loathing came very close, but it was more than that. To loathe myself would mean there was a duplicate version of myself who loathed the other self. But this was not the case and hadn’t been in a great, long while. The observer, the mind’s eye, the mind, the heart, whatever it was called, was no longer split from the Serena Moon who acted out the loathsome things.
Like all animals of prey, I killed to survive. Morality has never had a place in nature; things are as they are. And was I not a part of nature? A harrowingly dark part, setting butterflies and lavender flowers aghast, yes, but still a part.
Not that it mattered.
I dressed myself, pushed the remaining cigarettes into my back pocket, and exited the small one-bedroom apartment.
Fluorescent lights flickered down the dim hallway. The scent of mildew lined the walls. I might’ve lived differently, but I suspected only some of us did. There was no sense in drawing attention or being unable or unwilling to flee because of some attachment to a beautiful house or a castle of some sort.
I was more than willing to flee because I had to be. It would be wrong to think that the Master would forget about me. I would need to leave again soon, though it wouldn’t matter where I went, not really.
It just made me feel good to do it; made me feel like I was doing something when nothing could be done.
His dark words still played in my ear. Rise, Serena, rise. And then, with that gnashing, night-wallowing smile, Run, Serena, Run.
And so I’d run, and years later, I’d stopped.
There was no point to it. They were going to find me and they were going to do what they did best. There was no escape and that had to be fine.
Outside, the August night slept still and hot.
I moved down the empty street and between the tall buildings, already crumbling with age. I missed the rains and the chill. They made the streets feel alive even when there was no one else there. It was best that way, of course.
I lit a cigarette from the half-empty carton and blew the smoke out into the muggy air. Summer. I hated summer. Summer was for the truly living, for the happy, for the ones whose days sparkled. Not for me. The cold might understand the way I lived. The cold was a friend, in a way. A dark, silent friend when I was so alone.
“Serena.”
I paused in the street at the horrible sound of my name.
Serena.
I took a long drag from the end of the cigarette before turning to face him.
Ambrose
It didn’t take me long to find her. I’d been watching her since the night she’d left the mansion, marked with our wounds and devoid of blood - a carcassed husk of herself, dragging her feet out from the dark facade of the Master’s home and into the cobbled street, slick with the night’s rain.
Alone and broken, she’d hidden near the docks and taken her sustenance from the diseased rats that had come to her, just as if they’d been called.
I’d wanted to finish her, to thrust my nails into her neck and claw her skin away; to expose the flesh that had defied us in so many ways. It was a terrible strain to watch the strength return to her when I might’ve ended her so easily. She wasn’t supposed to walk away from us, but the Master had stayed my hand.
Watch her, he’d said softly to me, and me alone, excluding the others as he so often did. Watch her and learn what she is. This is my new task for you.
She was better off dead, of course, but I hadn’t argued. I’d only watched.
When she fled from England, I followed her. When she moved from Germany to the cold outskirts of Russia, I followed. I followed her down through the green hills of China and across the deep, dark ocean. I followed her to America where neither of us had any natural right to be.
No one did. It was a place for no one. But here we were.
I followed her through the sweltering shadows of the long streets, one after the next. If I could no longer enter her mind, she could not sense me at all. I let myself admire the curve of her hips as she walked and the bobbing tendrils of dark hair that had fallen from the mass of it atop her head.
“Serena,” I said, resisting the urge to salt the scars of her old wounds. I might’ve called her ‘little lamb’ and so forced her to remember what she truly was: ours. She belonged to us. She was our sacrifice and she had left us.
She paused in the street. Smoke billowed out from in front of her and she turned to face me.
“Miss Moon,” I said with a smile I hoped she would find amicable.
Her eyes stared almost boredly into mine. The defiant spark that had been there during our little biting game was now gone. Fear had hardened her and taken its toll, or else she was never afraid to begin with. I couldn’t tell which, only that she was not the same Serena from three years past.
“You’re here to kill me,” she said flatly. She raised the cigarette back up to her curved lips and lifted her brow as if waiting for confirmation. “Well,” she added, when I didn’t answer, “it took you long enough.” She stubbed the ash into the street with the toe of her leather boot. “It’s an embarrassment, really.”
I opened my empty palms to her. “I wouldn’t dream of killing you, Serena.” She’d been waiting for me, then. Of course she’d been waiting.
“Oh?” She dug into her back pocket for another cigarette and lit it with a match from her jacket. She blew the hot smoke out into the large space between us. “I dream of killing you all of the time,” she said. She thrust her free hand into her jacket and shrugged, moving the leather. “So what is it, then? What do you want?”
It was the way she asked the question or the soft shimmer of the tone she asked it in, it didn’t matter. I heard the fear beneath her words. Hardened, yes, that was certain, but Serena Moon was still afraid.
“You think I’m a monster,” I said, taking one step forward.
She stayed her ground and gave me another shrug in an failed attempt at disinterest. “We’re all monsters,” she said. “You, me.” She pointed up to the darkened windows of the towering apartment buildings, paint flaking. “Them, too. All monsters.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, letting my gaze meander down the dimly lit street behind her. The pink pulsing glow of a bar sign caught my eye further down the way.
She gave me a half-smile under narrowed eyes, the same look she’d given us that fateful night in the Master’s mansion.
“I’m surprised you don’t know how long I’ve been here,” she said.
I did. Two weeks and two days. She was staying in an apartment that had belonged to someone else, someone she’d eaten. I’d watched her feast, so graceful in the way she took the blood from another, lesser creature.
She blinked away from my stare that told her as much. “So what the hell do you want?” she asked.
I let the corner of my lip quiver and lowered my eyes to the ground. She would certainly like that. Ambrose the Repentant Vampire had a sort of base kind of poetic feel to it, like a storybook character.
“Forgiveness,” I said, letting the air out of the word as I said it. I found her eyes again and held them steady under mine. “A second chance.” I waved my hand through the air. “I want a great deal of things, but these two are the most important to me now.”
She stared at me and, although I could no longer feel through the ridges of her mind, I could read into the hazel eyes and downturned lips exactly what I had expected.
She would have none of it and she certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
“Buy me a drink,” she said, turning away from me. She walked and I watched her for only a moment before hurrying to catch up to her.
She was supposed to turn me away. The others were coming for her. When they found her, I was supposed to move from the
dejected shadows to save her. She was supposed to thank me and then she was supposed to believe me.
That had been the plan, at least. I had expected her answer.
I pointed to her jacket. “Aren’t you warm?”
She turned her head to look at me as we walked towards the gaudy pink sign atop the bar. “Strange thing about that,” she said.
She was cold, yes, of course. She was as dead as I was; as dead as my brethren; as dead as the Master himself. But, of course, she was then a little bit more dead on top of that, too.
“You weren’t supposed to leave that room,” I said by way of apology. It was the best I could do. By all means, she should’ve died to our bites just as the countless others had before her and just as they would after her.
She wasn’t just supposed to be dead. Serena Moon was supposed to be gone.
“I know,” she said. “Yet here I am, as dead or alive as anything else. And here you are, full of remorse you don’t really have. I can read you better than you’d like to think.”
We stopped at the glowing pink sign and the painted black door beneath it.
“I’m sorry,” I tried again. She would be easy to crack. All I had to do was play the part and not let up. My work would be swift.
I pried the door open and the voices of happy men and drunk women pooled out into the warm night behind us.
She passed me without a word and I followed her inside.
Serena
I motioned to a shadowy corner of the bar where a girl no older than twenty-one sat in the lap of a man twice her age. His silver business tie had been pulled loose and he kissed the back of her neck.
“You like this place?” Ambrose asked, still standing.
“Vodka,” I said, pointing him back to the bar. “Straight.”
One side of his mouth curled up into an amused smile and he left me to sit alone.
I might’ve left, but instead I sidled into a plush black chair opposite the asymmetrical couple.
