by Meg Xuemei X
There was a pause on the other side.
“I can spare you some pointers for free on how to really keep the Angel,” I offered. “He’s hard to tame.”
“You hexed him!” she hissed.
I laughed, chillingly, and with delight.
“So, the Angel complained,” I said, testing her, while my heart pounded so hard.
I remembered the part where Gabriel had demanded I unhex him.
I’d played along. After the fake, ridiculous ritual, his longing for me hadn’t lessened a bit. The lust had been so thick in his stunning green eyes that my heart had fluttered.
He’d asked aggressively, “When will the spell wear off?”
“You’ll tell me when you’re no longer interested in me, or any woman,” I had said.
He’d gritted his teeth. “So, you’re making me impotent by unhexing me? That’s another hex!”
If I’d claimed him or hexed him, he’d never have come to me to whine about it. He would have been my mindless, happy slave, who would do anything to please me. And he would never be able to be rid of my imprint, either.
But I hadn’t told him that.
I’d seen the white-hot heat in the vampire princess’ eyes when her gaze had fallen upon Gabriel, so she must have made sexual advances toward him. And if he’d told her that I hexed him, which only meant somehow, he’d managed to fend her off, or was trying to.
“You’re pure evil, you Wickedest Witch!” Jasmine shouted at me through the vampire’s mouth. “You tortured him with your dark magic, and he’s still traumatized!”
Kettle. Pot.
But what game was Gabriel playing?
“Did he expect the Wickedest Witch to feed him milk and honey?” I smiled sadistically. “The Angel shouldn’t air his dirty laundry everywhere. When I have him again, he’ll have to apologize profusely.”
“You’ll never have him again,” Jasmine said, protectively and possessively. “He’s mine.”
I had to test her, though I dreaded the answer. “He can’t be yours, darling, even though your venom tainted his angelic blood. Haven’t you tried to compel him? How has that worked out for you? I sympathize with your frustration, but I’ve imprinted him. My spell doesn’t wear off easily, and your foul blood can do nothing about it. I bet you’ve tried over and over, and failed again and again, pathetically. Guess what, darling, the Wickedest Witch in the universe is way more powerful than you. And when I wiggle a pinkie, he’ll come running to me, as fast as his wings can carry him.”
“Bitch!” she said. “Unhex him! Release him from your claws, or I’ll drink you dry.”
“My witch’s blood might be too much for you.” I laughed, as the Wickedest Witch should. “Learn to threaten better, and I might consider your request.”
“Your nasty spell doesn’t have the power you believe,” she said. “I can still make him do things, things to make you blush. He’s mine, and he knows it. He’ll never harm me. He’ll spend eternity with me, gladly.”
“What an adolescent,” Kaara said, rolling her eyes.
“She never acts her age, does she?” Marrok chuckled.
Jasmine hissed.
“Be useful for once, vampire girl,” I said. “Pass the message to Desdemona: he wants a date, he’ll get one.”
Kaara and the wolves traded an alarmed look. They hadn’t expected that I’d propose to meet the vampire Dark Prince. They would protest fiercely later.
An instant later, the Dark Prince’s rich, velvet voice came through. “Hello, Lady Fiammetta. Finally, you’ve come to your senses. If you’d been so amiable before, we’d never have gone to war. The last thing I want is to upset you.”
“How touching,” I said.
“Should we set the date, so I can prepare to make my palace presentable for one such as you?” asked the Dark Prince.
“No!” Kaara and the wolves answered at the same time.
“You want a proper date with Lady Fiammetta? You come to the only bar in the City of Nine,” Marrok said. “Feel free to bring your lovely sister and her Angel lover.” He knew I hated the sound of “her Angel lover,” but he had to say it to get Gabriel to the Keep.
“They now speak for you, Wickedest Witch?” Desdemona asked mockingly. “When did that happen? You would never allow—”
“Why not?” I cut in icily. “I’ve got an agent, and he’s reputable.”
But the vampire was right. I really didn’t like the wolves speaking for me.
“Will you also bring your lawyer to our date?” Desdemona asked, chuckling. “And what do you know about a proper date, savage Wolf King? Besides, this is a private date between my future queen and me, which doesn’t involve you or anyone else. So, it’s only proper that I welcome my future bride in my palace.” He fixed his gaze on me through his vassal. “I vow to guarantee your safety, should you come to my tower. You’ll be treated as a queen.”
The wolf general spat, “It’s a trap! He strapped Bella on an operational table and pumped his venom into her veins. He’ll do the same to you, Lady Fiammetta. Don’t go to his lair.” He turned to the messenger. “My mate says hello. She’s still debating whether she should take your head or heart when the day comes.”
Desdemona laughed lightly. “Lovely. But neither my head nor my heart belongs to her. And none of you are my concern, either. Lady Fiammetta, I’ll never disrespect or violate you. Everything between us will be agreed upon and based on mutual respect.”
Kaara snorted.
“For three years, I waited for you. Didn’t I, Lady Fiammetta?” said Desdemona. “I never forced your hand. I watched you quietly and adored you from a distance. I was patient. I’d have continued to wait for you if you hadn’t shown affection for your Angel pet.”
“We’ll have the date in your palace tower, Prince Desdemona,” I said, “but on one condition.”
“Any condition,” he said eagerly. “Which is?”
“I’ll let you know soon,” I said.
“And I’ll be waiting keenly,” he said, and he was gone.
Jasmine didn’t return, either.
Now we all regarded the vampire vassal.
“Should we kill him now?” the wolf general asked.
“We need to show good faith to the Dark Prince,” I said. “Secure him for now.”
The wolf general howled, and several shifters moved into the chamber.
I headed toward the door and let them handle the details. Kaara accompanied me, as did Marrok and his general.
“Do we have a map for the vampire tower?” I asked, as we prowled through the black garden, returning to my tower.
“Yes,” Kaara said. “I’ve compared the map we collected, to the one Marrok has. It’s a match. The map is accurate. But we don’t know which room Gabriel is kept.”
“The vampire princess will keep him in her bedchamber,” I said.
“Fia, Gabriel and I talked about the hex,” Kaara said. “He realized you’ve never hexed him and that you’re his fated mate. But he told Jasmine that you hexed him, which means he didn’t sleep with her.”
“And even if he had,” I said, “I wouldn’t leave him behind.”
“You can’t seriously consider going to the leech’s lair, Lady Fiammetta,” Marrok said.
“That’s exactly what I’ll do,” I said. “That’s the only way to get Gabriel.”
“I’ll go with you,” Kaara said.
“No!” Marrok said. “I forbid it.”
Kaara narrowed her violet eyes at him. “You forbid it?”
“Yes!” Marrok snarled. “I’m not going to lose you.”
“If we lose Fia, we lose everything,” Kaara said. “Pandemonium will go poof in less than a month. Even if the planet doesn’t go up in flames, I’ll still go with Lady Fiammetta. I told you when you were with me in the beginning that I’d guard Fia with my life, and you accepted it.”
Marrok sighed. “I’ll accompany you to whatever tower or hell you enter.”
“D
esdemona won’t allow any wolf inside his tower,” I said.
“We need to come up with a better plan,” the wolf general said. “It’s stupid to dive headfirst into the vampires’ lair.”
“What’s your better plan, Antonio?” Kaara asked.
“We besiege the vampire tower and demand Desdemona give up Gabriel,” Antonio said.
Kaara rolled her eyes. “Like he’ll gladly agree? And we don’t have enough soldiers to lay siege to his tower.”
“That’s not it. We’re the distraction,” Antonio said. “When we cause enough chaos, Gabriel will make his escape. He’s one of the best fighters I’ve met. The vampires can’t stop him.”
“If he could escape, he’d have been here now,” Kaara said. “The vampiress’ venom is in him. She bonds him to her. Haven’t you paid attention to how Lady Fiammetta interrogated Jasmine? We got the information we needed from her.”
“You know subtlety isn’t my strongest suit,” Antonio grunted.
“I’ll have to enter the vampire tower for Gabriel,” I said. “Only I can sever their link, so he can leave with me.”
Marrok sighed again. “It’s still a trap. Some of us won’t make it if we enter the tower.”
“You’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll open the portal for all of you to leave Pandemonium before my date with the Dark Prince. My condition for the date is that he and his vampires leave you alone. You will all get off this planet first. When we go into Akem’s jungle, I’ll shield you until you reach the portal. You’ll have one shot, and you’ll take it. I’ll go for Gabriel alone. He and I will follow you later.”
“No!” Kaara snapped. “We leave together, or we don’t leave at all! I’m going into that damn tower with you, and we’ll get Gabriel out.”
“Kaara—” I said icily.
“Fia, trust me,” she said. “I know things you don’t know, and my gut feeling says you’ll need me, or none of you will get out.”
“We’ll go together,” Marrok said. “We won’t leave you and Gabriel behind.”
Just then, a meteor shot across the desolate sky, its flaming tail reddening the horizon, and crashed behind the vampire tower. We watched the black tower sway for a second or two.
Too bad it didn’t crumble down.
16
The Angel
I strolled beside Jasmine in the vampire skyscraper tower, my wings tucked tightly behind me. She was giving me a tour—or, more likely, showing me off.
I observed every escape route and the number of guards on every post, not that the guards concerned me much. It was a habit for me to take in everything within the enemy realm.
Jasmine tried to touch me at every opportunity, laying her hand on my arm, or brushing her fingers against mine. She was especially fascinated with my wings.
My mind drifted to my mate again.
Fiammetta had once come to watch me train. I’d spread my broken wings to their full expanse, ignoring the sharp pain, to impress her. But my witch had only flicked her silver gaze away from me, dismissing my efforts.
I remembered how the dry breeze had sent her perfume toward me, and I’d wanted to bury my face in her lustrous, glossy hair and inhale her scent. My primal instinct had recognized her as my fated mate, only my mind had been too slow to catch up, believing she had put a lust spell on me.
And now, as I was separated from her, every breath I took sent agony into my lungs.
In contrast to my mate’s caress, the vampiress’ touch repulsed me. I kept my expression blank. As long as I was her captive, it wouldn’t do me any good to piss off the vampiress too much. But when she reached for my wings, I shoved her away and said through my gritted teeth. “Stop it! Your touch brings pain and nausea because of the Wickedest Witch’s spell.”
She blinked. “Shouldn’t it be waning now?”
“Not in the slightest.” I smirked at her nastily. With vampires lot, one had to play their game to come out a winner. “Her curse seems more powerful than your blood bond. Check yourself.”
She arched an eyebrow. When my witch had done that, all I had wanted was to fuck her. But when the vampiress did it, I wanted to smack her and send her crashing against the wall.
“Won’t you sustain pain for me?” Jasmine asked.
“The pain is the easy part, but the nausea is killing me,” I said. “And why should I? You’ve done nothing for me other than burn me with your venom and try to turn me and control me. I’m not like those man-toys you used to play with.”
“I saved your life, and all I got from you was a ban on touching you?”
“Spare me that speech, Princess.”
She actually liked it that I talked rough. This primordial vampiress was an adolescent beneath her vicious exterior. She might have read too many romance novels. I spotted a few of them on the shelves in her suite, something like Seduced by the Vampire Lord, The Dragonian’s Woman, and Mate With All the Dragons: A Reverse Harem Romance. The last title got me wondering how the female could possibly handle even one dragon, considering he had all those big fangs, hard scales, and a harder tail.
The women had gone too far on the wild side.
And from my experience hunting dragons, I knew they didn’t like to fuck mortal or immortal women; they preferred to toast them before eating them.
And here, no one had ever set boundaries with the vampire princess, but I was establishing one. So, this was refreshing and even inspirational for her. For the first time, she couldn’t always get what she wanted, and she was giddy about it.
No matter how nasty and volatile she could be, it was actually easy to handle her. It had been damn hard to charm my own mate. Thinking of Fiammetta, painful longing burst in my chest. Would I ever see her again? By now, her memories must have reset, and she couldn’t remember a damn thing about me.
I was totally forgotten in the past on Pandemonium, hanging out with the vampire kind as a half-slave. And my ThunderSong still hovered above the planet in the present time, searching for me, but would never find me. My crew would only realize that they’d lost their great captain forever when they saw the gray planet explode before their eyes.
When I reached the bottom of the long marble stairs and saw the vast door enhanced by a steel gate at the ground floor, my foul mood improved a little.
This might be my chance to break out.
I charged past Jasmine toward the door, and the vampire guards all ducked out of my way like shadow arrows.
“What are you doing, Gabriel?” Jasmine called behind me.
I kicked the door, then the gate, open and dashed outside.
I’d never felt so good to see the overcast sky above the City of Nine, and I inhaled the air of freedom and laughed.
I’d come out. I was free.
Just before I spread my wings and sprang as far as I could from the vampire tower, an unseen force, more powerful than my Archangel strength, pulled me back into the tower.
I collided with the hard floor, denting it, my laugh dying in my throat.
Jasmine crouched beside me, gazing down at me with a doting smile. Before she reached for my wings, which draped limply behind me, I bared my teeth to warn her, and she jerked back her hand.
I had a strong feeling the Dark Prince was watching all this, somewhere. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t spot the freak. The entire tower served as his eyes and ears.
“You’ll only hurt yourself if you keep doing this,” Jasmine said. “You’ll be happier the sooner you accept your new reality. Life in the tower isn’t that bad. You’ll get used to it and grow to love it, as I do. And don’t worry about the witch’s spell. We’ll fix it before the next two moons. Oh, silly me, there’s no moon here.”
I sat up straight, still dazed about having to face the facts: I could never leave.
Jasmine looked at my face, then turned to the surrounding vampires. “Leave us.”
The guards rushed out the door, and in a moment, it was only the vampire princess and me in the ground-floor ha
ll.
I stared at the door indignantly. “Why can they come and go freely?!”
Jasmine settled on the stairs next to me, her chin on her long fingers, and regarded me.
“They’re full-fledged vampires,” she said. “They’ve sworn fealty to my brother and me, so, the tower recognizes them as ours. You, on the other hand, aren’t exactly a vampire, even with half of my blood flowing in your veins. I wonder if I can ever turn you into my kind, even in time. If you swear a blood oath to me, you’ll be able to leave the tower on an assignment, but you’ll always have to return here—your new home.”
I got to my feet, my wings dragging behind me. I wondered if they would ever be whole again.
“That’s a fucking joke,” I said.
“No, my love,” Jasmine said. “I understand you’re a work-in-progress, but for you, I can be patient, as I’ve never been patient with any others. I’m confident you’ll come around. Give it time, Gabriel.”
“I’ll come around sooner if you have your brother release this voodoo on me, so I can go to the Witch Tower to make the Wickedest Witch unhex me. Then you can have me for you forever.”
She rose and leaned to leer at me. “You’re shrewd, Angel. That only makes me fancy you more, because we’re alike.” She cocked her head to the side. “But do you honestly think I’d hand you over to her like that? Do you know how hard it was to acquire you?”
“I’m not some commodity. Drill that into your small head, vamp—Princess.” Then her earlier comments about fixing the curse on me set off an alarm bell in my head. “And what do you mean, not to worry about the witch’s spell?”
“You caught my slip of the tongue, didn’t you?” She smiled intimately. “The Wickedest Witch will be coming to our tower.”
My heart startled, and through Jasmine’s eyes, I could see how my face must have darkened, like the sky before a thunderstorm.
“Oh, don’t give me that pouting look, love,” she said. “She won’t be coming for you, if that’s what you’re worried about. She’s coming for Dark Prince Desdemona, for the date she agreed a long time ago.”
I sneered. “If she’s coming for him, then why didn’t she come a long time ago?”
