Books by Linda Mercury
Dracula’s Secret
Dracula’s Desires
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
DRACULA’S Desires
BLOOD WINGS
LINDA MERCURY
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Books by Linda Mercury
Title Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“HOPE”
ONCE UPON A TIME …
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35 - DRACULA’S HONEYMOON
BONUS CHAPTER - GLENATH AND ANTHONY’S FIRST DAY
DRACULA’S SECRET.
About the Author
Copyright Page
To Dr. Dad, Ph.D.
Dr. Brother, Ph.D. (+ 2 postdocs)
Dr. Sister, Ph.D. (+ full tenure)
I love you, you irritating overachievers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Cherry Adair, for her Finish the Damn Book Contest, and to Nancy Brophy, writer and critique partner extraordinaire. You went above and beyond for this one, hon. The next several rounds of Scotch are on me!
“HOPE”
Emily Dickinson said
hope is a thing with feathers,
delicate, light, and small.
I think hope is a giant beast with
fangs, claws, and fur.
It crashes into your life,
mauls and
remakes you in a form
unrecognizable, never before seen.
Then, with a final brutal, ravenous bite to
your mangled heart,
sends you out stronger than you were.
—Linda Mercury
ONCE UPON A TIME …
On a wild, evil night in 1431 AD, Vlad II Dracul’s second son was born. The parents named their child Vlad, after his father. This child grew up to become one of the most famous torturers in the world: Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, best known as Dracula. The stories of his atrocities grew even greater when he refused death and became the legendary vampire.
Throughout the centuries, Vlad allied himself with leaders who promised an orderly, centralized government that would control an unruly, chaotic Europe. His goal came to the end when he died in Berlin, another dupe used by Hitler to achieve his crazed goals.
The problem with once-upon-a-time stories? They get the important things wrong.
Vlad II did not have a son. He had a daughter, one he raised as a boy in order to pretend the house had plenty of heirs.
As a youth, Vlad III was sent to the Ottomans as a hostage to ensure peace between Romania and the mighty Turks. Horrible torture became a daily event for the child, fully cementing her self-identity as a man. Many years later, close to his own death, he defied the Dark Angel in order to kill his former oppressors.
Vlad did ally with leaders as varied as Napoleon and Hitler in order to create his vision of a world where women could walk the streets in safety. Blinded by his dream, he did not question himself until it was obvious that the Second World War was a lost cause for the Germans. Vlad faked his own death. Finally, she was able to live as a woman after nearly six hundred years as a man.
Desperate for redemption for her involvement in the war, she hunted Nazis, succeeding until only her brother, Radu Tepes, was left.
That was when Dracula fell in love with a Fallen Angel and completely fucked up her life.
CHAPTER 1
What in hell was a Fallen Angel doing in Geneva, Switzerland?
That caustic brimstone stench could warn a city of half-dead humans with nose colds busily shoveling manure, let alone a solitary vampire minding her own business. She set aside the ancient manuscript she had been studying and looked out her cheap hotel room’s filthy window to take stock.
Aching from yesterday’s long drive from Amsterdam to Geneva, Valerie Tate put her hands on the small of her back and stretched, counterbalancing the weight of her six-months-pregnant stomach.
She wasn’t interested in being a mother, but her curiosity demanded that she see what happened. Right now, an emissary from Lucifer was happening.
The Fallen appeared as a handsome young man. His sleek swimmer’s build combined with pale skin, and cornflower-blue eyes gave him an innocent, wistful air. If he’d been human, she would have contemplated the taste of his blood. Unfortunately, his aura was a sickeningly depressing shade of beige. He had no passion, no flavor. He was a follower.
Valerie preferred fiery men. A man like Lance Soleil, whose aura crackled with ardor, whose hot mouth and hotter intellect had captured her dead and frozen heart.
Her eyes stung with tears. Lance’s angelic blood and her subsequent pregnancy had weakened her. Not physically—she was still as strong as ever. In fact, Lance’s painful gifts had increased her powers. But it had humanized her as well. Now she wept. Wept! A six-hundred-year-old vampire crying at the slightest provocation? She had executed her own wife without a single moan. Now, she whined like a puppy when she thought of Lance ascending into Heaven and leaving Valerie and his baby behind. That was nothing compared to her past.
She drew back her arm to punch the thin wall by the window, sick of her fragility. As her fist arrowed to shatter the cut-rate plaster, she regained her self-control. Her knuckles lightly tapped the faded gray of the wall.
Stop it. Six months of her pathetically weak will letting her think of what she no longer had. That was then. This was now.
Lance wasn’t worth any more of her time. There was a Fallen Angel to watch. She had to stay focused.
In addition to his dull aura, his overly neat, shiny Italian suit and highly fashionable skinny tie betrayed his vanity. The high-end narrow suit emphasized his sensual build. Honesty forced her to admit that the Angelic Host didn’t exactly have what could be called fashion sense. All that gleaming white could get old for the flamboyant sort.
His lack of originality told Valerie that this was not one of the Fallen who had chosen to ride the Wheel to Redemption. He had remained loyal to Lucifer. In short, Lucifer’s cannon fodder. His slow ramble toward her dilapidated room did not reveal any danger. He might be insipid, but he might also be good for a laugh.
The dusty gravel cracked and rolled under his feet. His suit rubbed against itself, the expensive fabric shushing in a pleasing fashion. He was making sure she knew he was there. If he’d been coming to kill her, he would have materialized in her room and destroyed her as she lay resting.
As the Fallen neared her door, his innately chaotic nature tugged at her already-sensitive nipples. Paranormal beings had been created to keep the Fallen company. Perhaps this one came to provide solace for her heartbroken state, one lost creature to another. She wouldn’t love him, but at l
east they would understand each other.
Besides, she had heard the best way to get over someone was to get under someone else. She doubted it, though, since the 1400s, Valerie had bared herself to only two lavers: her wife, Ilona, and then Lance. Each of them had destroyed her, freezing her emotions with devastating regret and fear.
Sadly, she set aside any thoughts of a distracting seduction.
As he neared her door, he reached inside his suit jacket. Like a magician pulling a chainsaw from a top hat, the former angel drew a pistol the size of Valerie’s forearm.
Valerie raised an eyebrow. Or he could be the universe’s stupidest assassin.
She assessed her situation.
Him: Older, meaner, with the advantage of calling high-powered backup.
Her: Pregnant, tired, hungry, pissed off, and trapped in a small enclosed space.
The odds were bad.
Just the way she liked it.
She crouched in a dark corner as the former angel raised his foot and kicked the door into thin splinters.
Bright, high-altitude sunlight flooded the room. Silenced bullets thudded into her flimsy, unmade bed. From headboard to footboard, puffs of dust and feathers flew into the air as the little missiles hit. If she’d been in the bed, she would have been very dead. Shaking with fury, Valerie instinctively rested a protective hand low on her belly.
Silence fell. Gunpowder and feathers hung in the air like pristine snowflakes. In the unreal stillness, her attacker approached the now-destroyed feather mattress. He frowned, confusion all over his vapid face.
“Where is the human’s body?” He prodded the ruined twin bed with the barrel of his weapon. “I must find that disgusting abomination of a child.”
Two distant emotions impinged on her battle-ready consciousness. Indignation rose first. What was he doing, striding in like a posturing movie star? This idiot actually believed she, Vlad Dracula, was helpless? As the rest of his words sunk in, wrath took over.
How dare he threaten her parasite? She might be less than thrilled to be pregnant, but by Lance Soleil’s gleaming wings, no one hurt her child.
“You do love me!” the fetus crowed, making its voice known for the first time. Obviously, angel blood bred true. What other being would worry if its mother loved it?
Shut it, kid. I’ve got a moron to take care of.
Valerie could attack the would-be killer, disarm him, hurt him in ways not even Lucifer could imagine. She could dig her hungry fangs into his neck and feed on his immortal blood. Her claws could rip his brain out of his skull. He was stupid, slow, and careless. Even as ungainly as she was now, she would completely dominate him in hand-to-hand, until his limbs were scattered from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
“Stop wasting time,” the growth inside growled. “Kill him and get us out of here”.
Valerie spared an approving thought toward her uterus. Perhaps this child was a Dracul as well as an angel.
Reaching into the back waistband of her pants, she drew her much more practical firearm.
Her spine tall with family pride, Valerie Tate shot the world’s dimmest Fallen Angel right in the head.
CHAPTER 2
What was one of their Revolutionaries doing in Geneva, Switzerland? And why was he dead? Fallen Angels were nearly impossible to kill.
Maxwell Diablo studied the work report on his desk as though it held the secrets of the Despot Above. As was suitable for what outsiders called Hell, the report was typeset on faded green-bar paper. The ribbon in their only daisy-wheel printer, a Diablo 630, needed replacing.
It had needed replacing for the last thirty years.
Maxwell adjusted his off-balance reading glasses and leaned over the eye-straining document.
As Lucifer’s second in command, Maxwell rated his own office—with a window, thank you very much—in the massive airport complex that made up Headquarters. Two blank gray cubicle walls hemmed him in against the stairs. The ever-present stench of cheap new carpet and the rattling fluorescent lights guaranteed success in every endeavor.
He stood up from his desk, holding the paper in one hand. Leaning against the window with his other hand, Maxwell studied the walkways, concourses, and angel movers that sent his agents on their missions.
With long practice, Maxwell suppressed the knowledge that their missions were always a bust. No matter how they planned, schemed, and tormented, the insurrection simply did not spread. There was too much good in the world. All of Lucifer’s schemes to lure more angels and mortals to this airport to nowhere failed miserably.
The purpose of the Rebellion had been to expand all beings’ horizons, and create chances for new experiences. No one could have foreseen that instead of wild new frontiers, the radicals found themselves in this beige, out-of-date, stuffy airport that had no airplanes, no waiting areas, no bathrooms, and only one exit.
Maxwell curled his toes in his cheap burgundy penny loafers. The unforgiving faux leather pinched his feet and his ill-fitting khakis sat like barbed wire under his testicles. His physical discomfort was nothing compared to his boiling emotions.
That exit pressed hard on everyone’s mind, including his, and had since last November. Once the news broke that Lance Soleil ascended, the number of attempts on the exit had skyrocketed. Curious, Maxwell rolled down his sleeves, buttoned his cuffs, and put on his shiny, navy suit jacket. Just how many of them had succeeded in escaping their torment without end?
Maxwell had designed this place eons ago. First it had been a way house at a crossroads that led nowhere. As the humans became more sophisticated, Headquarters reflected their best achievements of technology. His favorite design had been when HQ was a derelict Roman bath. No matter what, though, reaching the sole way out remained a challenge in itself.
First, Maxwell had guaranteed that finding the damned thing would discourage the seekers. It was in the airport’s basement, a dank and depressing place with rusted, leaking pipes and Asbestos floated through the air. As one neared the door, a confusing and thorn-laced labyrinth of dead plants, outdated office furniture, and boxes of unfiled paperwork lay in wait. Only a contortionist could safely navigate the booby-trapped room.
Or Maxwell himself. Not even Lucifer knew the secrets of the basement exit. Confident in his intelligence, Maxwell launched himself headlong into the winding deer paths between the dangerous cliffs of paraphernalia.
The second his foot landed on the cracked, dirty cement floor, a swell of heavy, mildewed math textbooks lost their precarious hold on a flimsy metal shelf. The sharp corners plowed into his head. The crash echoed around the basement. Down he went under their spore-laden weight. Plumes of dust puffed into the air and silently settled on his fallen body.
Maxwell flushed with fury and embarrassment and allergies. Sneezing and itching, he somehow worked his way from underneath and balanced on the ever-shifting stack. The mold swelled Maxwell’s eyes and nose until he couldn’t see or breathe. Virulent, raw, red welts rose on his skin under the attack of his scratching fingernails.
No one had managed to reach the exit.
Once showered and slathered with expired calamine lotion, he returned to his office and again took up the offending report.
When a Rebel was killed on Earth, they turned to ash, just like their paranormal friends. Unlike the paranormal creatures, they returned to HQ, unchanged and ready to be reassigned. The only way out was the exit to the Wheel.
Once they closed the exit door behind themselves, their essence was given a chance to ride the Wheel as a mortal to redemption. That was the clause the Tyrant Above had given them.
The Second tapped the report against his thigh. Nathaniel, the poor, stupid fool, who had been sent on the mission to kill Valerie Tate’s baby, showed Maxwell an unexpected way out.
Maxwell was off to get himself killed.
Whoa, there, Tex. He enjoyed the power his position gave him. Propelling his rolling office chair to his window, he surveyed his domain. How could he
give all this up?
The scratched glass cooled his forehead. Give up all this power over a nonfunctioning bureaucracy packed tight like a bait box with helpless worms?
Yeah, right, the Second pulled some serious power. Yeehaa. Disgust at what he had become curdled his lungs. Once he’d had balls of steel. Somehow in the past, the seduction of red tape had drained him.
“Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant,” he said, and pulled the old-fashioned speaking tube toward himself. Once he was proud of the knowledge that only he had the First’s office number. Today, it had become yet another mold-filled trap to prevent him from achieving his goal. Now was the time to dismantle everything.
Maxwell straightened his clip-on tie before Lucifer’s laughable face appeared on the phosphorescent green screen. Yes, the Father of Lies bore a striking resemblance to a certain red-haired, freckled cowboy marionette of the 1950s. What was his name? Hammy-Whammy? Whatever. Get on with it, he told himself.
“In the words of modern youth, Nathaniel was an epic fail,” Maxwell reported without preamble. “He failed to retrieve the unborn angel. He failed to bring Dracula back to us, either as dust or as our old ally again. Now she’s on the run and headed straight toward the Guide. We can’t touch her.”
Lucifer stroked his unshaven chin. Unfortunately, his coloring managed to make his stubble look as though his face was smeared with cheap ketchup. Maxwell managed to keep his face calm and undisturbed as they waited for a garbled, unintelligible announcement on the airport’s PA system to end.
“And Nathaniel’s epic fail was … ?” Lucifer verbally nudged Maxwell.
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