Ellowyn Found: An MM Vampire Trilogy Omnibus Edition Books 1 - 3

by Kayleigh Sky

  “That is not my call.”

  “You are king, Zev. It is your call.”

  For a moment, silence built, then Zev said, “Not this morning. This morning, I’m just a vampire with free time.”

  “Take Uriah.”

  Another pause. “Is something going on with you two?”

  Moss snorted. “As much as between me and the sisters.”

  “Hm. Well, anyway, I’m taking Emek.”

  “Zev—”

  “No argument. And don’t follow me.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’m a vampire,” Zev said. “He’s human.”

  “I’m not convinced. The bastard’s got a cold heart.”

  “They don’t think we’ve got any, you know.”

  “Be careful, Zev,” Moss said again.

  “I’m going to the portal. You know where to find me.”

  “I’d better not have to.”

  Asa jumped, Moss’s voice right outside the door. He hurried back to the chessboard, glancing up as Moss stepped into the study. A shadow swept across his face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting. I brought the king’s breakfast.”

  Zev slid past Moss. He wore jeans and a sweater and carried his socks and boots. Asa dropped his gaze to Zev’s bare feet. Was it a vampire thing, never wearing shoes inside? Moss was barefoot too, but Asa didn’t want to strip him and pound him into the nearest mattress.

  What the fuck was wrong with him that Zev’s bare feet were getting him hard?

  “Have you eaten yet?” Zev asked.

  Asa nodded. “I… brought yours.”

  “Good. Go put on some warm clothes. I want to walk, and I want you to come with me. Ask Marcus to pack us some water, and meet me on the back deck.”

  He nodded again.

  When he stepped outside a few minutes later, his gaze fell on Zev leaning against the railing, arms crossed in front of him, his face to the sun. Beyond him, the lake glittered like tanzanite, and a slow smile grew on Zev’s face as though Asa’s heart beat on the outside of his body and Zev could see every part of him, every emotion. He flushed, feeling sweat break out on his skin.

  Once it had been his dick that had betrayed him, jumping to life every time Zev crawled through his window. He’d wanted to sink through the floor in embarrassment over what was happening in his pants. His body didn’t lie, and now his heart didn’t either. The strange connection between them filled him with unease though. Was he really in tune with Zev? Or was he only imagining Zev cared?

  And even if Zev did, so what?

  Nothing could erase the past.

  He lifted the backpack Marcus had given him, and Zev pushed away from the railing. “Want me to carry it?”

  “I’ve got it.” He slipped his arms through the straps. “Where are we going?”

  “The other side of the lake. The view’s worth it.”

  He shrugged, not really caring about that. Green pines and mountains already surrounded them, but he set off after Zev anyway.

  They skirted a few pale boulders strung along the ground like a dinosaur’s sun-washed vertebrae.

  The crust of hard snow broke underneath Asa’s boots. It wasn’t deep, only a few inches and blindingly white in the bright sun. Not a single cloud marred the blue of the sky. His breath broke in sharp, short gusts. Zev moved quickly. Well, he didn’t have a damn backpack either. His hair formed a knot on top of his head, and a ski cap stuck out of his pocket. Asa sweated under his coat and sweatshirt. He concentrated on the globes of Zev’s ass, bunching with every step, the long legs eating up the trail.

  A mile or so later, they came back out on the lake’s edge. Broken tree branches tangled the shoreline. Farther down, a pier stretched out into the water.

  “Does anyone else live around here?”

  Zev glanced over his shoulder. “Not anymore. My aunt and uncle owned the property. They spent as much time on the surface as under.”

  “And we never knew.”

  “You knew. You just ignored it. Humans are the pinnacle of evolution after all.”

  He looked back again, this time with a wink to take the sting out of it. But Asa’s mouth had turned sour, and he let out a pent-up breath and said, “Sounds like none of you liked home much.”

  “True for some of us,” Zev said. “Others of my people are still down there, and I can’t talk sense to them no matter how hard I try.”

  “Leave them. They want their own world.”

  Zev stepped closer, face flushed with cold and exertion, a pained look twisting his features. “Their world? Our world? There is only one world, Emek. What we do here matters there. What they do matters here. My people are dying underground. In cave-ins, by the chemicals seeping into the water supply. They have no king, no work, no hope. I won’t abandon them.”

  Pain glittered in his eyes, and Asa’s stomach clenched, mixing with anger that anything stirred in him at all. He kept his voice low. “You aren’t their keeper, Zev.”

  “No,” Zev said. “I am one of them. Why did you say you weren’t on the train?”

  Asa gaped, tongue fumbling for words that didn’t come. His heart jumped in a valiant attempt to escape his chest. Of all the fucked up luck. Running into anybody on the train was bad enough, but the prince? Jesus, he had no memory of him at all.

  A breath wheezed out of his lungs. He took another and said, “I… I wasn’t on it. I was in Bakersfield before I came here.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I met someone who told me about the job and who to talk to. I met up with a guy named Matt Lau who used to work for you. He put in a word for me with Jere.”

  “Who told you about the job?” Zev asked.

  “Louise.”

  “What was her last name?”

  Asa took another breath, anger climbing into his chest now. A divot had formed between Zev’s eyes, the only sign of his frown. Other than that, he looked merely curious. “I didn’t know her last name. I didn’t ask, because I figured she might not want me to know. Whores don’t always know the best people. Or the best vampires.”

  He thought maybe he could shame Zev with that, but Zev only gazed up into the pines for a moment, then shook his head. “Vampires. I heard a rumor once that the king before me fed his human wife.”

  Asa’s stomach turned, and his head grew as light as the air. “Fed…” His voice came from far away. “Fed her blood?”

  “Supposedly she smelled like him.” Zev shrugged. “I never noticed it. Now come on. I want to show you something.”

  Asa followed. He wasn’t sure how. His heart thudded in time to the crush of the snow beneath him. He hadn’t fed from a vampire. That wasn’t possible. He’d dreamed about being hurt, but it had been a crazy, chaotic dream. And he’d been covered in blood, so the fear of injury was… natural. Drinking blood, not natural, and it had never happened. Anyway, now he had to worry about Otto’s swain blowing his cover, though the vamp had no proof of anything. Who, for sure, could say that Asa was lying?

  Their trek took them to the other side of the lake and back into the forest. The path was as wide as a road and maybe had been a road once, though now patches of snow hid matted weeds and pine saplings grew in the open.

  Asa panted as the road rose up the mountainside. The snow deepened, and his boots sank.

  Zev panted too, swallowing a breath as he glanced back. “Okay?”

  Asa nodded. “Yeah.”

  “We’re about there. There’s a cabin. We can light a fire. I keep the place stocked with wood.”

  “You come to the lodge often?”

  Asa knew Zev didn’t host the coven meeting here usually.

  “Not often, but I do. I have a friend who uses it too.”

  After another half mile, the path dipped back down and leveled near the lake again. A valley opened in front of them. Asa’s breath clouded as he gasped. The mountain rose green and white on both sides of the valley against a deep blue
sky. Nothing moved, and the only sound outside his heart was the occasional thump of snow falling from the branches. The cabin sat halfway down the valley, a two-story structure built of logs and gleaming panes of glass overlooking a creek meandering by a strange depression in the valley floor.

  Asa pointed. “What is that?”

  “The Nolana Portal. Come see.”

  A shiver ran down Asa’s spine. Was he walking on a city right now? How many bodies piled underneath him? He inhaled cold air and felt the ground shudder under him from another small quake. Zev kept walking. What if Asa fell into the portal? Would the sightless creatures that still lived there crawl out of the dark and attack him?

  Except, they didn’t crawl, and they looked like him.

  The snow breaking under his feet sounded thunderous. He caught his breath and fixed his stare on Zev’s back and didn’t look away.

  They crossed the stream over a wooden bridge and approached the edge of the depression.

  His voice emerged rough through tight jaws. “Can we fall in?”

  “It’s fenced, because, yes. The ground isn’t stable. The earthquakes caused a break in the portal, which collapsed with the original exit, leaving this last branch. It was enough to save many of my people though.”

  Zev stopped, and Asa approached his side. The ground dipped into a deep, round hollow as though an asteroid had struck. In the center, snow rimmed a black hole. A white sign with Fall Danger – Keep Out written on it hung on the chain-link fence that enclosed the portal.

  Like a warning that sounded deep inside Asa’s chest, the ground rolled underneath them again. Zev gripped his wrist, but then the earth stilled, and snow falling from the pines was the only sound.

  But Asa’s stomach tumbled into free fall anyway. As untethered as Zev’s strange moves on the chessboard. As the thought of a vampire’s blood running in his veins. He swallowed, anger flaring inside him. “Why isn’t it closed?”

  “It isn’t stable.”

  “You used it to come here.” He fixed his stare on the hole, dark and unnatural like an empty eye socket.

  “I don’t remember a choice,” Zev said. “It was risk it or die. Sometimes I think that’s all bravery is. Going with the risk because doing nothing is riskier. In any case, I doubt this exit connects to the original anymore. No one can use it.”

  Asa glanced at him. Was Zev sad about that? “Why do you come here?”

  “Abbatine was my city. The Nolana Portal was ours. I loved Celestine and stayed for months at a time. My best friend lived there. But I can’t even tell you how beautiful Abbatine was.”

  Asa had seen pictures of some of the cities, but they’d looked like something out of a comic book. It had never seemed real.

  “What was it like?”

  A slow smile came onto Zev’s face. “Celestine was like starlight. Abbatine was foggy from the hot springs. And busy. It was a bit of a resort. The train ran through the center of the city, and the sounds from below filled the air no matter what time it was. I didn’t mind it. Nobody ever had the feeling of being alone in Abbatine, but it might be why I love the quiet. And books. The Celestine Library was my favorite place to go. I used to see Princess Malia there too. She always gave me a special look as though we shared a secret.”

  “Princess Malia? The one with the crossling?”

  Zev nodded. “Our king had wanted us to marry.”

  “You didn’t want to.”

  “I was waiting for my fated.”

  Asa bit back a sneer. Underneath it rose another spurt of fear. “Romantic.”

  Zev smiled wistfully. “We are. But you only see blood.”

  How could Asa see anything else? He’d turned Zev into his dad’s murderer because vengeance was the only thing he had to hold onto. And no other explanation for that night had made sense. He’d given Zev the formula, and all the evidence of where it had come from was destroyed. Everyone murdered. But the vampire Asa had seen outside his dad’s office hadn’t been Zev. Well, well. Come here, little one.

  That hadn’t been Zev’s voice.

  Or Solomon’s.

  Whose then?

  Somebody Zev had known? Somebody he’d ordered? But that didn’t sit right either. He shivered, and Zev shifted his weight, turning from the portal.

  “Let’s get inside.”

  He marched ahead, and Asa followed him back to the cabin, ignoring the numb center in his chest.

  It’s cold.

  That was all. He was cold.

  34

  The Cabin

  Zev stood in front of the fire, letting the ice inside him thaw. The light of the flames bled into the streams of winter sun shining through the wall of windows. The common room rose two stories to the slant of the A-line roof. The hearth was river rock, the walls and floors gleaming red oak. A high-end hunter’s cabin. Not far from here was an old airport, most recently used by the Orla and Gennarah families.

  “The soup is warm.”

  He turned to the sound of Emek’s voice. He stood a few feet away, not near the kitchen. Maybe he didn’t want the soup either. He had his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, his chin low, shoulders rolled in.

  “We can leave soon. Thank you for staying beside me last night.”

  Emek shrugged. “I’ve had worse jobs.”

  Probably.

  “So have I.”

  Now a faint smile touched Emek’s eyes. “Is being king a job?”

  “I wasn’t born to it. Wasn’t really trained for it.”

  “You overthrew the last king. What did you think would happen?”

  The tone of derision stung. As though Zev had upended thousands of years of tradition on a lark. Condemned his friend to dishonor because he hadn’t taken the time to think things through.

  “I thought the war would end.”

  “You got your wish.”

  “Peace is my wish.”

  “You have peace.”

  He shook his head, the view out the window grabbing hold of him for a moment. The snow, white and clean, hid scars from his eyes. “I don’t think so.”

  Emek approached, standing close to him, gray eyes glinting irritation. “You won, and you can’t be happy.”

  Zev smiled, the tightness of it stretching his skin. His voice fell to a whisper. “I won, and I can’t forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Someone.”

  You.

  Unless Emek wasn’t Asa. Unless Zev was fooling himself. But he didn’t think so anymore.

  Emek stepped closer, a whisper apart, touching Zev with his breath and scent, his skin and muscles achingly distant. “You need to forget,” Emek murmured. “You need a distraction.”

  The lust in Emek’s eyes cut Zev off from love as coldly as the Upheaval had stripped him of his old home. His heart beat by rote and empty rooms no one would ever live in again haunted his memory, and the pain of Emek’s knowing that and using it as a sexual opening cut into his soul like a Ryzok. He let out a chuff of a laugh.

  And then Emek’s face softened. He pulled his hands from his pockets and cupped Zev’s face.

  “You can let someone in without giving away your heart.”

  Something in Zev screamed—I want to give away my heart!

  “I promise,” Emek said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  At the moment of saying that, Emek’s eyes froze again. He was lying. But Zev was used to lies, used to gambits. Used to the relentless countermoves of chess. This too was a game.

  But Zev was tired and—

  “I don’t want to be alone either,” Emek said. “I just want to hold you.”

  Zev reached out and pulled him against his chest. A warm, soft sigh brushed his ear as Emek collapsed against him.

  Pinning him in place with a forearm against his spine, Zev mouthed his neck, sucking gently on a tendon.

  Emek moaned, “Oh yeah.” He stroked Zev’s back and pulled at the sweater he wore over his thermal undershirt.

  The to
uch of Emek’s fingers against his skin sent flames roaring through Zev’s body. Gasping, he drew back, grabbed Emek’s hips, and lifted him. Glassy pupils took over Emek’s eyes. He parted his lips and dug his fingers into Zev’s shoulders before latching onto his hips with his legs.

  Steely strong legs. Brutal fingers. Tender lips.

  He melted into Zev’s embrace, arms over his shoulders. “What are you doing?”

  “Taking you to bed. You deserve a bed.”

  A smile tugged at Emek’s lips. “You don’t know me.”

  “I’ve always known you,” Zev said.

  Emek’s smile vanished. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and he licked at it. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth.

  “Em—”

  Emek’s eyes flew open. He grabbed hold of Zev’s hair and face and dragged him into a kiss, plunging his tongue into Zev’s mouth only to pull back and caress him with feather-light touches of his lips the next moment. Zev fell into a maelstrom of gentle, sharp, rough. His lungs swelled with the scent of hot wool, chicken noodle soup, and clean and woodsy soap. The cock rubbing his belly burned him through to the spine.

  Swallow him.

  Keep him inside you.

  Aching with emptiness, he crossed the floor and climbed halfway up the stairs before Emek raised his head.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Bed.”

  He took the room that looked away from the hole in the earth to a view of the forest and the green, snow-dusted pines. Clouds hung like cotton balls in the sky. A heater warmed the room, and the cold sun glared through the window.

  He lowered Emek onto a fluffy white comforter, smiling as he sprawled there and gazed up through sleepy-eyed slits.

  “Too many clothes, my liege. Take them off.”

  “You too.”

  Emek got onto his elbows, working off his boots, wet and dark above the soles. They fell with a thud, one upright, one falling sideways. Zev pulled his sweater over his head, went into the bathroom, then returned with lube and crawled up Emek’s body, pinning him between his arms. He had his shirt off and his jeans undone. Zev let his eyes trail Emek’s form. His muscles weren’t big, but round and solid. A patch of pale hair in the center of his chest narrowed to a thin line. The skin on his belly twitched.