by Tracy Tappan
BLOOD-BONDED BY FORCE
Tracy Tappan
Blood-Bonded by Force
Book Three in The Community Series
The Vârcolac warriors face their biggest challenge when one of the demented Topside Om Rău goes rogue and starts stealing Fey power, driving them all toward an Otherworld apocalypse.
With a single act of unspeakable cruelty, half-demon Pändra Parthen permanently binds herself to Vârcolac warrior Thomal Costache. Stuck together for life, the two enemies must find a way to live with what cannot be undone. As time apart from her ruthless father allows Pändra to uncover her true self, she tries to mend the breach with Thomal. But he is stalled in seething rage, troubled by an inner turmoil even deeper than the abuse he suffered at Pändra’s hands. To free Thomal, Pändra makes a perilous sacrifice…and lands herself in the demon town of Oţărât.
Half-Rău Big Nỵko Brun is the one man who has a slim hope of breaching Oţărât. But Nỵko took himself out of the hero business after failing the people he loves too many times. He even abandoned Faith Teague, the woman who was destined to be his mate. Left to fend for herself while her world crumbles around her, Faith also makes a sacrifice that traps her in the violent hell of Oţărât. Now the fate of both women rests on Nỵko’s enormous shoulders, but he can’t manage a rescue without Thomal’s help…and then only if the proud Vârcolac can somehow find room in his heart for his enemy.
**Content warning: not intended for gentle readers, this book contains profanity, violence, and intense adult situations.
Also by Tracy Tappan
The Community Series
Dark paranormal romance
Available on Amazon
THE BLOODLINE WAR
THE PUREST OF THE BREED
LUNĂ ZNĂ
(Free short story)
Coming in 2015!
The Wings of Gold Series
Military romantic suspense
EIGHTBALL TWO-THREE
(Free introductory novella)
BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY
(click here to read an excerpt)
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Praise for
THE BLOODLINE WAR
Book One in The Community Series
**Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Awards Bronze Medal for romance**
“Tracy Tappan has a hit series on her hands that is full of action, great characters, snark and attitude!”
~ Dii Bylo at Tome Tender
“I LOVED THIS BOOK! (And boy, can Tracy write a hero!)”
~ Lauren Seiberling at Romance Novel Giveaways
“The book starts out strong and just keeps going with the action and suspense!”
~ Michelle Oxrider from Snarky Mom Reads
“I couldn’t give this book a simple rating. I had to give it infinite gold stars. It was just that wonderful.”
~ Wendy Mitchell from Rage, Sex, and Teddy Bears
“The Bloodline War, the first book in The Community Series and author Tracy Tappan’s debut novel, puts a fresh spin on the vampire mythos.”
~ Tara Carlson from Dividing by Zero
Praise for
THE PUREST OF THE BREED
Book Two in The Community Series
**Finalist for the USA News Book Awards for Romance**
“Tracy Tappan does a grand slam in this second book of The Community Series. This is a very fast, action packed, exciting book!”
~ Teri Lloyd from Sportochick’s Musings
“What an adrenaline rush!”
~ Talina Perkins at Bookin’ It Reviews
“Dev is a total sweetie wrapped up in one very hot warrior package.”
~ Maria Trojanowski from Book Junky Girls
“This book is solid! Wit, humor, snark, love story, steamy romance, sexy men, secrets, intrigue, and fantastical creatures.”
~ Michele Breux-Rowley from Dauntless Indies
“It is packed to the pages with every emotion possible, a fully mind blowing thrill ride that will have you on your toes, and have you turning the pages with abandon!”
~ Gemma Hopgood from Fantasy and Romance Book Reviews
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Robyn Segel Shifren for her invaluable help with ballet questions. Also to my editor, Faith Freewoman, for her expertise in the world of dance, as well as Tarot card reading. How lucky am I that one of my editors is such a Jack of all trades?
Jessa Slade, also my editor extraordinaire, once again applied her genius to peeling back deeper layers of my characters. I am indebted to all of these fine woman.
All mistakes are my own.
To my readers.
Every day I sit at my keyboard is pure joy
because so many of you have reached out to
share your enthusiasm for my writing.
It feels really danged good.
Thank you.
Note to readers:
The symbols above and below some of the characters’ names don’t affect pronunciation, and they are not meant to resemble a language. They are used solely to indicate a type of breed (Om Rău, Half-Rău, Fey, or Fey-Rău). This will make sense to you when you enter the story world.
The name Om Rău also is like the word moose—the same form for both singular and plural.
Celtic Quaternary Knot
Celtic Meanings of the Five Fold Symbol
Inner circle = fifth element binds the other four
Blood-Bonded by Force
Book
One
Chapter One
Topside: Fairbanks Ranch, San Diego, California, November 9th
Pändra Parthen crumpled to her knees with a hiss, clutching at the bloody slash in her stomach, pain burning through every vein in her body. Her hands shook as she grappled to shove her intestines back into her belly, but the slippery ropes were uncoiling faster than she could push them back in. A scream slammed up her throat and battered at the backs of her teeth. Blood fountained through her fingers and splashed to the floor. Not my blood. Can’t be. There’s too sodding much. She panted roughly, her cheeks working like bellows. Do. Not. Scream.
Her father despised weakness.
So did she, in truth.
Raymond came to stand dispassionately over her, his Gucci loafers stopping just short of the spreading stain of her blood. She didn’t look up—couldn’t, really. Just as well. Raymond’s eyes were such a startlingly clear blue, they appeared almost colorless when he was enraged. Like now.
Not the jolliest of sights.
The room fractured into a prism around her as the electrical charge of her father’s power seared through her once more, tearing the hole in her belly wider. A gritted, “No,” made it past her lips. She toppled over, landing with a hard splat in the pool of her own blood. Her viscera boiled up and out of her, piling onto the floor around her body.
Silence.
No. The thunder of her heart and the harsh cadence of her breathing were deafening.
Wetness soaked through her jeans and into her knickers. The books on the shelves she’d been scanning mere moments before Raymond’s arrival slanted sideways and grew moss: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce… Through pain-slitted eyes, she stared up at Raymond. Tall and refined, his features sculpted and handsome, his hair a rich mane of silver-blond falling to his collar, he was a man who could be as warm-hearted as ruthlessly cold. Let a soul act according to Raymond’s rigid specifications of behavior and all would be dandy. Break a rule and the poor sap earned herself one beastly punishment.
Until recently she and her father had an unspoken agreement about those rules. If she chose to break a minor one, she would do so outs
ide of his general knowledge and make sure her actions wouldn’t damage his reputation in any way. The one exception was her penchant for dressing like a tart. She did that with full awareness it cheesed him off. But then…he’d never overtly told her not to do it.
On his end, Raymond wasn’t supposed to act behind her back. He would tell her what to do and she would do it, but it was understood that there was always clear communication.
He’d broken this rule.
Without asking, Raymond had used information Pändra acquired regarding the Vârcolac, the bloodsuckers who held the dubious honor of being Raymond’s mortal enemies. They’d earned this unenviable status by kidnapping Tonĩ Parthen, Raymond’s daughter from his first wife. Tonĩ and her brother, Ãlex, possessed an extremely rare and powerful gene called Royal Fey Dragon, a gene Raymond wanted bred into his grandchildren. With this scheme in mind, Raymond had always planned on reuniting with the daughter he’d abandoned. But the Vârcolac had ruined that by abducting her.
For nearly a year now, Raymond had been trying to snatch Tonĩ back. To no avail. He needed to find an easy way into the Vârcolac’s secret, underground town to wage a proper war. His brilliant plan? To kidnap a Vârcolac delivery woman—Pändra had unearthed her schedule, and this was the information Raymond had swiped—and persuade her to reveal the entrances to the Vârcolac’s lair. But Videön, Pändra’s mental half-brother, had tortured the poor girl to death, which had inadvertently led to another woman getting captured: Marissa Nichita. She was the pregnant wife to one of the Vârcolac, making her a perfect bargaining chip to trade for Tonĩ. Except…
Pändra had released Marissa a little over an hour ago.
Two could break the rules in this sick game she and Raymond played, eh?
But of course Pändra’s actions had violated her father’s most stringent and unforgivable rule: never openly defy him.
And so here she was…sweat running in rivulets down her neck, her vision tunneling.
Raymond clasped his hands behind his back and gazed down at her coolly. “What a perishing disappointment you turned out to be, Pändra.”
She gritted her teeth against a stab of pain piercing through her sternum…her heart. Not from her father’s power, but his words. What a pile of wet lettuce she was. Here her guts were spewed around her like tangled macramé, and what made her want to cry was one, wee sentence of Raymond’s. And he was only confirming what she already knew. She’d thrown away her status as her father’s favorite—or his second favorite—with both hands.
Raymond turned and walked crisply for the door, the tap of his Gucci loafers across the marble floor managing to sound both elegant and lethal, the same as on his trip into the library to mete out her punishment. Her father’s power shot out of her like someone yanking a cord from an outlet. Her bowels jerked once against her fingers, then came to a quivering rest.
“You may put your ring back on now.” Raymond’s voice floated back to her as he disappeared down the hall of this Fairbanks Ranch mansion that served as both her home and prison.
My immortality ring. She squinted up to the top of the desk where she’d left it. Enchanted specifically for her, that red crystal ring would take away the worst of this horrendous pain and heal her with miraculous speed. But up there on that desk it might as well have been in Siberia.
Other options? Lie here and let herself waste? What a perishing disappointment you turned out to be, Pändra. She blinked slowly. Tempting.
“You sure as hell dropped a clanger by lettin’ that girl go, Pändra, you dimmock.”
She carefully angled her vision toward the doorway.
Her older brother, Mürk, was standing just inside the library.
She stared at him dully. He was as likely to have come to insult her as to help her. It was anybody’s guess. “I hadn’t realized that,” she rasped past the dry lump of her tongue. “Thank you ever so much for enlightening me.”
Mrk crossed the library and knelt at her side, heedlessly planting a knee into the shimmering pool of her blood. “Sufferin’ fuck, he really brasted you, didn’t he?”
At twenty-six, Mürk was two years her senior and the eldest of the seventeen-sibling blended family who’d been brought into this world—same as Tonĩ and Ãlex—to be Raymond’s breeding machines for the ultimate Fey race he planned to propagate for regular human takeover.
Mürk was a right frightening-looking blighter, tall, broad, muscular, and black-eyed like her. He kept his hair shaved off, exposing a ghastly array of black flame tattoos that began above his ears and trailed over the top of his skull.
All seventeen of them wore black flames, the tribal markings denoting them as born of Ұavell, the last Om Rău female in the world with pure demonic bloodlines.
Pändra’s flames had been on her stomach, now utterly buggered.
Mürk inspected the snarled mess of her intestines. “Hurts a shitload, doesn’t it?”
Her focus automatically shifted down to Mürk’s belly, where he had his own gnarled scar. So he’d been privileged to endure this same punishment, had he? For what transgression, though, she didn’t have a Scooby.
She swallowed tightly as nausea speared up her throat. A spate of vertigo tilted her senses upside down, and her eyelids dragged down.
“You’re going into shock,” Mürk informed her.
“My ring,” she croaked, her lips trembling.
Mürk used a small crystal dish to scoop her ring off the top of the desk. He couldn’t touch it directly because of the painful shock it would give him. “You’ll close up soon after you stick it on, so first we’d best put you back together a bit.”
She sucked in a sharp breath as her brother painstakingly started cramming her intestines back into the gaping hole in her belly. A halo appeared around her pupils and her pulsebeat frayed.
Chapter Two
Pändra leaned toward her dresser mirror and applied her fire engine red lipstick, smoothing on the finishing touches for her upcoming night out.
One of her extra-special nights out.
She was dressed in one of her few slutty outfits that didn’t expose her midriff; something she wouldn’t be doing for a while now the tattoo on her belly was shanked through with an ugly red scar. Feck knew where her jewel belly-button ring had chipped off.
A leather romper was tonight’s outfit of choice, the garment hugging her like skin to a grape. Plenty of cleavage was exposed from the plunging metal zipper in front, and the half-moons of her arse were put on display by the short-shorts—although her cheeks were covered by fishnet stockings that rode down to her knees. Below that, she was wearing tall black “pirate” boots, the leather hugging her tight over the ankles and calves then flaring into a wide cuff at mid-thigh.
In the reflection of her mirror she saw Jorgé, the Parthen butler, come to attention in her bedroom doorway. “Your gentlemen friends are here, Miss Pändra.” The butler stepped aside to allow two men access to her bedroom: Bo Bo and Duane.
Hardly her friends.
The two were a couple of deviant masochist grotbags who mucked about with her because they got their rocks off on the shocking and aberrant life she led outside of this prissy mansion…and for the skill she had at terrifying them. Their relationship was symbiotic in its way. Whenever she needed an extra-special night out to blow off a head of steam, these two found her something vile to do. As a reward for their efforts, she lavished plenty of abuse on them.
Bo Bo, real name Beauregard, was short, stocky, and suffering from early pattern baldness. He vaguely resembled George Costanza from Seinfeld, but without the glasses. Base humiliation got him off, and he generally didn’t give her much trouble.
Duane was a different article altogether. He was a long streak of piss, tall to Bo Bo’s short, and lanky of build with greasy hair. He had a complexion riddled with acne and beady eyes like a shithouse rat’s. He was into full-on physical domination and pushed Pändra to make things worse for him. He was the dodgy tosser she ha
d to watch.
True to form, as soon as Duane saw the mean look in her eyes, his expression brightened maliciously.
She squinted at the two in the reflection of her mirror. “It’s going to be blood sport tonight, lads.” She needed to clobber someone more than she needed oxygen. “What’s the crack on that?”
“Fight at the pits,” Duane answered.
“Blades?”
“Just fists.”
She turned around and settled her bum on the edge of her vanity, putting the lid back on her lipstick tube with a sharp click. “Dull as dishwater, Duane.”
“Well, there’s a—”
“Goin’ out?” Mürk propped one shoulder against the jamb of her bedroom door.
She showed Mürk her teeth in a smile. “Private party, love. No big brothers allowed. Terribly sorry and all.”
Mürk surveyed the length of her body. “It’s too soon afterward, Pändra,” he said quietly.
She caught back a flush of heat. Did the gobbin really think she needed to be reminded that five hours ago she’d been wallowing in a mound of her own guts? She hooded her lids at her brother. “No worries, mate. I’m hale.” She lifted her right hand and wiggled her immortality ring at him.
Mürk shook his head. “You still lost a lot of blood, Pändra.”
She could practically hear Duane snicker.
She flashed her brother a murderous look. Fecking asshole, Mürk, giving away a weakness in front of her minions. Anger moved like heavy mire into her chest. “I’m touched, truly, at your show of brotherly love.” She picked up a pack of Camels from her dresser and pinched out a ciggy with the tips of her sharp, red-painted fingernails. “But if you’re worried I’m too dicky, I could pan your head in to prove otherwise.” She tucked the cigarette between her lips.
