The Vampire's Bond: A Vampire Romance For Adults (The Bonded Series Book 1)

by Samantha Snow

  “My sincerest apologies,” he offered with saccharine sincerity, pressing a hand to his chest. “I didn’t mean to devalue you. That extra fifteen cents sounds very important.”

  “So much penny candy,” Siobhan agreed earnestly.

  And then Barton ground to a halt again, scenting curiously at the air ahead of him. His ears laid back slowly, and he whined before he huffed out a low bark. He padded forward a step and then rapidly jigged backward until he bumped into Siobhan’s legs once again.

  Siobhan cast about until she found a stone, wrinkling her nose when she had to reach into the plants up to her elbow to grab it. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed it. It landed on the suspect ground, and then Barton nearly leaped out of his fur and ducked behind Siobhan’s legs when a portion of the grass erupted into flames.

  “That wasn’t what I was expecting,” Siobhan remarked calmly, tipping her head to one side as she watched the crackling flames as they ate away at the grass. She wasn’t actually sure what was burning, though. She just knew it burned bright and hot, as the flames were nearly white and they burned out so quickly they hardly had a chance to touch the pepper plants.

  For a moment, they all just sat there as Barton buried his face against the ground, trying to drown out the smell of lightly toasted pepper plants, burning grass, and whatever the accelerant was. Siobhan sort of wanted to follow his lead, but she had a bit too much dignity to let herself do that, even if she had purchased that dignity for a dime and a handful of penny candy.

  She contented herself with clamping a hand over her nose and mouth, and she glanced over her shoulder in time to see Jack lift an arm to bury the lower half of his face in the crook of his elbow.

  “That’s gross,” Siobhan informed him, probably unnecessarily, her voice muffled by her hand. Jack rolled his eyes in return, but he did not actually argue with her declaration.

  Eventually, Barton reluctantly straightened back up and resumed his steady trot forward. He seemed calm enough, but Jack and Siobhan hurried to cross over the scorched ground behind him.

  With a hiss and a metallic clunk, there was one more burst of flames behind them before it went out, and both Siobhan and Jack nearly leaped out of their skin.

  “Can we be done with the deathtraps?” Siobhan demanded, throwing her hands up. Barton blinked up at her, looking not particularly impressed by the outburst, before he turned and continued moving. With a huff, Siobhan followed along behind him, Jack’s footsteps picking up a moment later.

  She supposed her wish was answered, though, as they ran out of maze only a few yards later, the path opening up to the end point in the center.

  The only word Siobhan could think of to describe their goal was a cellar. There was no building at the center of the maze. No grand structure. Instead, there was just a small patch of cleared ground and a square port in the ground, and it took all of Jack and Siobhan’s combined strength to heave it open, one side at a time. It opened onto a staircase, unsurprisingly. Siobhan was getting sort of sick of tunnels and ramps and staircases leading down into darkness.

  Cautiously, they began the trek downward, Barton leading the way and scenting the air carefully. There was nothing unusual for him to find, though. Once they made it to the bottom of the stairs, the square room at the bottom held only a sleeping mat on the floor and a man laid out on top of it, motionless in sleep. The rough stone of the walls seemed to sap all of the heat out of the air, but beyond that, the room was entirely unthreatening.

  The entire room smelled of the pepper in the maze above, as if it had seeped through the soil and stone. The fact that there wasn’t any water on the floor was actually a bit surprising, but Siobhan supposed they weren’t that far underground.

  Harendra looked peaceful, but most people did while they were asleep. Siobhan and Jack crept closer to him, still cautious regardless of how well they knew that he wasn’t going to budge until one of them actually woke him up.

  His skin was dark, his brows were heavy, and his features were narrow and pointed. He was slim and lanky, with willowy limbs, his legs stretched out straight and his arms crossed over his chest, his hands lax and limp. He was wearing a long, simple linen shirt and equally simply pants, and his feet were bare.

  Siobhan began the process of waking him up, biting into her wrist and dripping her blood over his mouth. As with the previous Lords before him, he twitched and stirred. And then, Barton began to growl. He grabbed onto the back of Siobhan’s shirt and gave it a tug. Following his lead, she backpedaled several paces, just in time, as Harendra lashed out with one hand, his fingers clenching on the air where Siobhan’s face had been just a moment before.

  Barton turned and fled halfway up the staircase, and Siobhan and Jack made to follow him, only for Harendra to surge to his feet and lunge forward, slamming into Siobhan’s back. She hit the wall with a reverberating impact, all of the air evacuating her lungs with the force of it, leaving her wheezing against the rough stone.

  Jack stepped in front of her, and Harendra ground to a halt, glancing between Siobhan and Jack.

  “You are not Vampire Lords,” he informed them in a voice like an oncoming earthquake and rushing tides, like a tornado ready to rip the world to pieces for daring to cross it. “Why have you woken me?”

  Jack explained the situation quickly, his words tripping and stumbling as they spilled out of his mouth in his haste to explain the situation with the angels. As he spoke, Harendra’s eyes gradually narrowed, until finally he lifted an arm and backhanded Jack across the face with enough force to send him crashing to the floor and skidding a few feet.

  “Your story seems implausible,” he intoned, and he advanced a step toward Siobhan. Barton leaped down from the stairs to land in front of her, his teeth bared and his hackles raised as he snarled with all the heat of a wildfire.

  He posed no threat to Harendra. The Vampire Lord could have killed him with his fingertips. He was a good distraction, though, and Harendra came to a halt long enough for Jack to drag himself back to his feet and place himself between Harendra and Siobhan. With that handled, Barton bolted, squirming his way under the stairs and staying there.

  With a slow, world-weary sigh, Harendra lashed out with only one hand once again, his fingers curling around Jack’s throat and hauling him off the floor. He turned and advanced a few steps toward the wall to slam Jack’s back against it. “I have no proof that you’ve woken me for the reason you say you have, especially considering how ridiculous your story is.”

  The entire time, his tone hardly changed. It remained low and modulated, as if he was only complaining about an incoming rainstorm or a flat tire. There was no rage on his face or anger in his voice, as if he didn’t actually care about what was going on. About what he himself was about to do.

  Jack tugged ineffectually at the hand around his throat, his feet kicking at the air a few inches above the ground.

  “Your story sounds unlikely,” Harendra informed them once more, his tone frigid and unyielding. “Why should I not simply call you out as the adventurous pranksters that you are and put you out of everyone else’s misery?” His hold around Jack’s neck began to tighten.

  “Wait, please!” Siobhan all but shrieked, desperately scrambling back to her feet and pulling a handful of feathers out of her pockets. She skittered forward the few steps between her and the Vampire Lord to brandish them at him. “I took these from two different angels. One of them was an archangel.”

  Harendra did not relinquish his hold on Jack, but he did at least take the longest of the feathers from Siobhan’s hand, holding it up to inspect it. Dubiously, he drew the shaft of it across the skin of his forearm, and his eyes widened minutely as it actually managed to draw blood.

  He hummed thoughtfully, lifting the feather to inspect it from every angle, before at last he let Jack go, dropping him back to his feet, though he was on them for only a moment before he melted down the wall to sit at the base of it. He seemed content to stay there for the ti
me being, trembling slightly where he sat.

  “Angels, was it?” Harendra mused quietly before he tucked the feather away, into his pocket. “Very well. You’ve convinced me at least well enough that I shall investigate.” He gave them each a slow, lingering once-over, as if he still wasn’t convinced of their honesty, and then he simply disappeared, with only a stale gust of air marking his exit.

  Jack let out a ragged, explosive sigh and laughed weakly before he let his head thump back against the wall. “That was something,” he observed after a moment, his voice rough. “I don’t know what, but it was something.”

  “He was fucking crazy,” Siobhan insisted sharply, her voice half an octave higher than normal. “He thought we were just waking him up for shits and giggles? And that meant he had to try to murder us? And he’s supposed to be in charge eventually?” Her fingers were clenched into her hair by then as she tried to make the entire situation make sense. “He’s going to murder the first vampire who looks at him cock-eyed!”

  “Presumably,” Jack sighed, and he dragged a hand through his hair, “if he was actually that bad, then whichever Lord came before or after him would have done something. It’s not like they just wake up in a vacuum; they see each other during the changeover. For days, actually.”

  “What, so he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed?” Siobhan demanded, and Jack shrugged helplessly at her.

  Slowly, Jack put his hands on the wall and began to lever himself back up to his feet, though he still leaned against the wall. With a sigh, his head thumped back against it. Barton grumbled and finally crept out from behind the stairs to latch his teeth closed on the edge of Siobhan’s jacket and begin to tug her toward the stairs.

  “Good idea,” Siobhan sighed, and she let him tow her up the stairs, moving slowly until she could hear Jack following her up the stairs a few steps behind her. “Let’s just…get out of here. I’m going to go back to the manor and hide in the bathtub for the rest of the night.”

  “Good plan,” Jack sighed behind her.

  Even so, once they emerged from the cellar back into the maze, they took their time meandering back through the maze. They let themselves get lost, until everything smelled of pepper and Siobhan knew her hair would smell like it for days. She couldn’t say she minded, though, as long as she didn’t actually fall into the plants.

  Eventually, Jack took her hand, and they moseyed through the maze at a sedate pace, their hands swinging idly between them.

  By the time they made it back to the manor, they didn’t actually spend any time hiding in a bathtub, but they were content to let Marcus worriedly feed them after he heard their tale. Barton was content to be fussed over, despite his relative lack of involvement.

  In the end, the night ended better than it began, and they were content to curl up in a pile in bed for a few hours once the sun rose.

  All of the Vampire Lords were awake. They weren’t sure what was going to come next, or if they would even be involved.

  THE FINAL

  CHAPTER

  It was a long trip after that. They hopped on a ship back to Japan, and from there, they cruised to California, where a vampire whose name Siobhan couldn’t recall drove them back to where Jack’s truck was sitting in long-term parking in Washington. And from there, they retraced the original drive in reverse, heading from Washington all the way back to Maryland.

  Siobhan knew that it hadn’t actually been so long since that initial drive, where Jack had first explained all the outlandish concepts of her new life. But despite that knowledge, it still felt like it had been ages. Lifetimes, even.

  It felt more natural to be a vampire than it had felt to be a human, in some ways, and even the near-constant flickering of Jack’s feelings in the back of her head had turned into a strange sort of pleasant white noise, partially blocked out and as familiar as it had become.

  “So, what happens once we get there?” Siobhan wondered, taking a turn behind the wheel as the truck rumbled over a painfully flat, painfully bland stretch of the interstate in the Midwest. Barton shoved his head through the gap in the front seats to rest his snout on the center console as Jack scratched his ears.

  “No idea,” Jack admitted easily, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. “A guess?” he carried on, “That they’re just…waiting. Some sort of message would have gone out if a seraph had already showed up, so I think they’re just waiting for their numbers to lure one out of hiding.”

  “How do they know a seraph will even show?” Siobhan wondered, glancing at him sidelong. A carrion bird took off from the side of the road as the truck breezed by, squawking noisily for only a moment before its noise was lost in the distance. “What if none of them want to take on that many Vampire Lords?” She paused then, cocking her head to one side as a thought occurred to her. “What if more than one seraph shows up?”

  “Then all the assembled Lords can probably handle two or maybe even three seraphim, especially with the manor staff on hand and whoever else is congregating there to help,” Jack assured her. “Trust me, other vampires will be gathering. Immortals are gossipy nags.”

  “Damn,” Siobhan sighed. “I thought I’d made it out of high school.”

  Jack patted her shoulder consolingly. “In the end, we all wind up back in high school.”

  *

  Everything was…strained, when they made it back to the manor. Siobhan recognized a few of the vampires there, in a vague and hazy way, from her brief stay there in the past, but there were many new faces.

  And of course, there were the Lords, who had taken over the entire second floor, forcing all of the people who lived in the manor full time to move into the old servants’ quarters or to bed down elsewhere. Technically, Jack likely could have kept his room—Regina’s quarters were in the basement, and there were only four other Vampire Lords for the six suites—but no one was really willing to live on the same floor as them. Siobhan felt oddly gratified to know she wasn’t the only one who found them unsettling to be around.

  No, Jack didn’t reclaim his room. He simply set his bag down in Siobhan’s chosen guestroom without complaint. They had gotten rather accustomed to shared naps anyway; it would be unfortunate to go back to sleeping separately.

  The oddest part of being back, though, was that Siobhan kept running into the Lords throughout the day. They were…different than Siobhan remembered them, though her memories of them were brief and consisted only of when they just woke up after being asleep for centuries.

  *

  She ran into Dask’iya on the balcony off of the second floor. Siobhan had stepped through, intent on at least watching the sky, even if she didn’t have her telescope with her. And there was Dask’iya, sitting on the narrow railing as easily as a tightrope walker might saunter down their line, passing a flicker of flame back and forth from one hand to the other. Siobhan took a step back, intent on heading back inside, when Dask’iya’s alto voice brought her to a halt.

  “You may stay, fledgling.”

  Siobhan recalled her calling Jack a fledgling back at the lake house and wondered if there were any vampires other than the other Lords who she didn’t consider to be fledglings.

  Cautiously, Siobhan crept up to the railing, leaning on an unoccupied portion of it on her elbows and tipping her head back to watch a few wisps of clouds pass overhead. From the corner of her vision, she could just see the occasional flicker of Dask’iya’s handful of fire, but on the whole, Dask’iya seemed content to ignore her, her bronzed amber eyes focused far off in the distance.

  Eventually, when the silence felt like it was pressing in on her from every angle, Siobhan started talking.

  “That’s Canes Venatici,” she explained, and she wasn’t even sure if she was speaking to Dask’iya or to herself as she lifted a hand to point to the constellation. “The hunting dogs of Bootes the herder.” She traced a finger over the herdsman’s constellation as she mentioned it.

  “There are a bunch of stories behind him, but my fa
vorite is where he was a grape farmer who made wine so strong that anyone who drank it seemed poisoned, and he was killed by people who were avenging their seemingly-poisoned friends. Zeus put him in the sky as repayment.”

  She trailed into silence after that. She wasn’t particularly waiting for a reply. So she nearly leapt out of her skin when Dask’iya mused quietly, “The stories were different when I was young. So were the pictures that went with them. It is nice to hear how they have changed.”

  Siobhan carried on talking after that, rambling until her throat felt raw. Dask’iya didn’t contribute anything else after that first comment, but she didn’t tell Siobhan to leave, either.

  *

  Siobhan ran into Harendra and Osamu in the library. There was something a touch surreal about seeing Osamu, elegant and quietly regal, draped over a beanbag chair. Less unexpectedly, Harendra was pacing across the library, back and forth, like a feral cat.