by Abby Knox
“Do you feel that?” Magda asked.
“Yes,” said Drew and Alice in unison.
Drew didn’t know what Alice felt, but what he felt was the warmth of his true love’s skin that he’d been stewing over for the last month and a half. His mated female, whom he never thought he’d have the privilege to touch again. He started to shake. He looked up. Alice’s lip was quivering. Drew wished everyone else would disappear and leave them be.
Magda said to them, “Don’t be stupid. He’s right. You choose your own destiny. Time means nothing. Our past lives don’t matter. Legends and visions are wide open and not set in stone. The infinite universe is chaos. It sounds scary, but deal with it. Shit happens. And sometimes nothing happens. It’s OK. Because we’re all just dust clouds bumping into each other. Maybe that’s what it means. But don’t let it scare you. Or just choose what scares you. Choose love. Always choose love. Visions are not what they seem. OK, I’m done here. You kids be good and stop whining. Goddess almighty, you two think too much.”
As they stepped off the stage and the crowd started carousing again, Drew watched Alice’s face change as if she was having an epiphany. Then she said something weird. “The stag in the woods.”
“What, love?” he asked.
“It reminded me, right before you came to me that night. We’re all the same. Vampires, witches, normals. None of it means anything because we’re all made of the same stuff.”
“Does that mean you forgive me?”
“That depends. Do you forgive me?”
Drew scooped her up and landed a huge kiss on her mouth. They kissed so hard and so deep that Drew did not feel Magda tapping his arm. Finally, he and Alice broke apart long enough to listen to the priestess.
“Except that one vision was pretty specific, vampire. That wasn’t you killing her. That was someone else.”
Before he could process that thought, Jordan the barista hopped up on stage, grabbed the mic and said, “OK, boys. Lock the doors.”
And then the lights went out.
Chapter 17
Alice
She froze and tried not to let her mind race. This was her coffee shop. She had let all these people get drunk and now they were panicking. Women were screaming. Thank goddess it was late and there were no children here anymore. Because, it looked like they all might die tonight.
In the darkness, she felt Drew’s arms around her. “It’s gonna be OK, babe. All the Sisters are here, plus you have me and the priestess. We can handle these guys.”
She tried to breathe in and out slowly. “Are you telling me they’re really vampires?”
She must have said it a little too loudly, because Jordan was right in front of her, still on the mic.
He was laughing maniacally. “Why yes, Virginia, vampires are real, and they are right here in Birchdale, if you can believe it. We’d like to give a special thanks to our boss, Alice, for giving us a chance and for making us feel truly welcome and special. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give our hostess a round of applause for having just the best instincts for hiring new people. Come on, give it up!”
Alice reached down and grabbed her wand, but as soon as she touched it, it clattered to the floor. In fact, she was having trouble feeling her hands at all.
“Bad news, Drew,” she said. “I think all the Sisters and the priests and you have all been poisoned. I can’t reach my wand. I can’t summon anything; my brain is just … so tired.”
And then there was screaming.
“They’ve started feeding,” Drew said. “I have to do something.”
“How is this possible? They weren’t even nocturnal. They worked morning shifts, day shifts…”
Jordan interrupted her again. He really did have bat hearing like a vampire. “Sweetie, don’t sweat the details, but if you really want to know, ask yourself if you ever saw us coming and going out the front door.”
Alice thought. No, she had not ever seen them using the front door during the daytime. “Which means…”
Jordan laughed again. “Which means…” And then he continued in a fake, over-the-top stage whisper, “Thanks for leaving the tunnels open. This really could not have worked out any better.”
“That’s enough,” said Drew, pulling Alice away from the stage and weaving through the crowd, his arms around her protectively.”
He spoke as he walked, seemingly about the history of the Les Paul guitar. Alice didn’t understand a single word.
“What are you doing?”
“Echo-locating. Everyone has their own vibration. I’m helping you look for the Sisters, as I appear to be the only person here not totally sapped of energy.”
Alice’s knees were wobbly and she giggled. “You’re telling me you don’t sleep upside down or grow wings, but you can echo-locate? That’s convenient.”
“Not helping,” he said.
Then Alice heard a very specific scream. It was coming from Birdie.
“Drew, they’re after the Sisters! I think they planned this so they could get to us. I think they’ve been watching you and they think we can give them more power by feeding on us.”
Drew growled. “You’re right. And they had to poison you and lock you indoors so you couldn’t overpower them. Cowards.”
Alice was starting to hyperventilate. “What are we going to do? Birdie!”
Just then, some light came back on. But it wasn’t electrical power.
It was a set of glowing eyes, and they were coming from the back of the room. It was an eerie blue light. And then the two eyes started to rise. Someone was using some extremely deep magic and now that someone was levitating.
After about a minute of everyone falling silent and watching this incredible sight, Alice realized she recognized the shape of those eyes.
“Morgan!”
Yes, it was Morgan, and she was about seven feet off the ground. The blue glow was actually the whites of her eyes, as they had rolled back in her head. She was chanting. It wasn’t anything Latin that Alice knew from the average grimoire. This was older than Latin. Despite the poison in the smoothie making her feel floppy from her scalp to her toes, Alice knew these new vampire assholes had messed with the wrong crowd.
“Yeah, bitch! You don’t mess with the pregnant lady. She’s not about to drink what you’re selling, but she is about to fuck you up!” Birdie’s speech was pretty slurred, but it made everyone cheer. Although Alice had to admit she was a little scared of Morgan at the moment.
And then Morgan lifted her arms, and there was a crackle, and something leaped off the tips of her fingers and landed on Alice and in several other spots in the crowd. The Sisters and Magda, their powers restored, took out their wands and in seconds, blasted the vampires. The one that had begun feeding off of Birdie stumbled backward. But then all of the bloodsuckers regained their footing and started grabbing more people to feed off of indiscriminately.
“Why isn’t this working?” Birdie grabbed her wand now that the vampire was off of her. Then Alice realized she had dropped hers on the floor by the stage.
She turned around and lunged for it, but it was too late.
“Oh shit.”
Chapter 18
Alice
She covered her mouth and waited for total annihilation. Jordan had a hold of her wand — Jordan, the sad, skinny, little barista. How could she be so dumb?
She watched as Drew tried to reason with him. “You don’t know what you’re doing, man. That thing is going to kill us all, including you.”
Jordan said, “Do you think I’m any more afraid of death than you are? I didn’t come here to feed, idiot! Maybe they did,” he said, gesturing to his friends, who had several innocent citizens in headlocks, draining them of blood. “I just wanted to get close to the witch, close to something magical that could kill me. And now I have it.”
He twiddled the silver wand in his hand like it was a toy.
“Oh, goddess, I can’t look,” Alice moaned.
As soon as she closed her eye
s, Drew was leaping up onto the stage and tackling Jordan. There was a struggle. Then Alice watched in horror as Drew, a much older and stronger vampire, succeeded in wrenching her wand out of Jordan’s hand. And then he flipped it around and rammed it straight through Jordan’s upper ribcage. The vampire’s heart literally exploded, and the vampire with it, like a confetti canon of guts and gray matter.
Drew tossed the sullied wand over to Alice. She picked it up and winced. “Gross, Drew.”
“Just doing my best,” he said with a shrug. “Sorry, baby.”
Now that she had her wand back and the bloodsucking ring leader was dead, Alice and the other witches were ready to do battle at full strength. Make that ten times their full strength, as their combined energy was strong enough to overpower a demon and an angry mob, let alone some newbie vamps.
The bloodsuckers, feeling the wrath of the Sisters in their combined electricity and thunder, which rattled the windows of the shop, finally relented and made their way to the door to escape into the night.
However, the still-chanting and levitating Morgan had other plans. It seemed like she was no longer in control of what was coming out of her. The next moment, Alice saw in her friend’s face that of Alice the First.
Morgan was channeling. Alice had never seen this before. Only read about it in books. She’d heard of it happening and now she was finally getting to witness it.
Alice the First-slash-Morgan fired a final red blast into the air, and it broke apart and landed on each of the vampires.
In the next moment, the lights were back on and Adam the detective was busting the doors open.
“Morgan! What the fuck! Are you OK?”
Then Alice heard Birdie reply, “I’ll say she’s OK. She just saved all of our sorry asses.”
Morgan started to fall to the floor unconscious, but Adam was there in an instant to catch her. He scooped her up and then looked down at the floor where the attackers lay. He nudged one with his foot. “He dead?”
This time Magda spoke up. “In a way, but no. The curse is gone. Alice the First came back and took the curse back. They won’t be hurting anyone anymore. When they wake up, you can take them to jail.”
Adam nodded as if he knew exactly what his mother was talking about and called for backup on his radio as he carried his woman away from the scene. Magda followed closely behind.
Chapter 19
Drew
Alice and Drew spent the next few hours helping blood donors fill out forms as everyone in town, it seemed, had shown up to donate blood to the victims of the night’s attack.
And then they spent the following week telling everyone it was only a group of goth young men pretending to be vampires. It seemed to work. It always does in Birchdale. People would rather believe the blandest explanation for the weird shit that went on in their town.
Alice had decided to close Kava for a few weeks in order to expel the bad energy. Drew was finally a believer in the hippie mumbo jumbo. Whatever worked. Alice had decided to take a temporary job as a server at Stubby’s, which meant Drew got to see her in a hip-hugger kilt every day. It also meant he had to break his strict no-hanky-panky-with-the-help rule.
Nobody seemed to mind, especially “sister” Jenny, who watched the two of them make cow eyes at each other and seemed to enjoy Drew’s changed demeanor.
One night, Drew was up in his room after closing time, trying to come up with names of new beers for the upcoming May Day festival.
Alice was padding around his place, barefoot, taking her hair down out of her bobby pins and talking about taking a shower.
“Hang on a minute, babe,” Drew said.
She obeyed. “Yeah, boss?” She stood there with a questioning look on her face, her arms above her head pulling her hair down, which made her midriff top ride up even higher.
“Leave the kilt on for a minute. There’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”
She smiled an evil smile. “Anything for you, boss.”
And with that, he picked up his woman and tossed her on the bed as she shrieked in surprise.
Propped up on her elbows, she grinned down at Drew. “What’re you gonna do now, boss?”
He said nothing but planted a teasing kiss on her exposed belly, below the hem of her top, while he hiked up her skirt.
He smoothed the folds of fabric out of the way and examined her black lace panties. He slipped them down her slender hips and pulled them off her slowly, appreciating the baby-soft skin of her legs all the way down.
Then he massaged her sore ankles and gradually worked his way back up, taking care to pay extra attention to every place she seemed to need it.
“Thanks, boss,” she said with a sigh.
“Don’t thank me ’til we’re done here,” he said, cupping her soft lower lips that were already slick for him. She sighed again and opened to him.
He looked down and saw the signs of her readiness. Her nipples were piercing through her white top; her hooded eyelids beckoned him to come and kiss the places where her blood was rushing to. He ran one hand over her soft pussy and gave her sweet folds a gentle kiss.
“How did I get so lucky?” he murmured as he nuzzled her there.
Her voice came out ragged with lust. “As I recall, it had nothing to do with luck. Remember?”
Drew worked his tongue over her until he found her lovely little lady boner, ready and waiting for him. She gasped and he felt her whole body twitch. He loved the way she reacted to his touch, even after exploring and satisfying and daring and deliciously tormenting each other nearly every night and every morning since their relationship troubles resolved in March.
“I remember,” he said, pausing his kisses, nibbles and sucks. “Still pretty great for a calculated risk.”
She sucked in her breath as his tongue began working her over with an increasing fervor.
“I like it when you talk dirty to me like an insurance company.”
“For that you must be punished,” he growled, and rolled her halfway over and playfully slapped her ass.
She shrieked again and laughed. “Naughty.”
“I love you, Alice.”
“I love you too, Drew.”
“I love the way you taste. Tell me, how soon do you get wet for me?”
She wriggled and moaned as he continued pleasuring her deepest places with his mouth. “As soon as I can feel your eyes on me. Sometimes I feel them on me before we get in the same room together.”
“That’s right, you do. Do you know when I get hard for you?”
“When, my love?”
“Morning, noon and night. Eating a sandwich…making beer … taking a walk…watching the game…doing inventory…all of it gives me a boner for you.” He was peppering each thought with more little nibbles all over her sex as she squealed.
“Alice, promise me you’ll never stop wiggling under me like that, even when we’re old and gray.”
She arched her back toward him. “I’ll do anything you want, boss, as long as you finish me right now before we’re old and gray.”
He wanted to keep talking. Not so much to torment her as to tell her things. He wanted to tell her about the change that happened, about the exact moment the beast disappeared. He wanted to ask her if she missed his fangs during sex. He wanted her to know things about herself. Things that had happened to her when he received his humanity back. Good things, but potentially confounding things. Like how when the two magical beings came together, the beast disappeared but his immortality remained. And about how he felt her cells change, become stronger and nearly invincible, too. She was a whole different being now and wasn’t even aware of it. And there was another thing she wasn’t yet aware of, but he thought he could tell…he would have to keep tasting her to be sure.
Drew devoured his woman until her sex convulsed against him in a powerful orgasm that sent her skyward, screaming his name. As he arched upward, Drew swiftly freed his cock and entered her with a wildness that caught her off gu
ard at first. Yes, the taste of her had been a little different tonight.
But as they rode each other into her second climax of the night, he decided to wait on all this news. Time may be a construct, but they had wasted enough of it being apart. The tiny facts growing in her womb would make themselves known. Soon enough.
An excerpt from Abby’s next book …
CHASING THE NIGHT
A bridesmaid and a groomsman have one crazy night together, and spend one crazy day following each other’s tracks in Book Three of the series Her Big Easy Wedding, a shifter romance set in New Orleans!
Chastity
The bride’s wildcat cousin from Baton Rouge was having a rough morning.
Chastity DuChamps opened one sleep-crusty eye. She shouldn’t have done that. The sunlight streaming through the blinds instantly seared right through her eyeballs and into the back of her skull.
Whenever she visited her cousin Rosemary in New Orleans and slept overnight in one of the many guest rooms overlooking the lake, she always woke with a slight bit of confusion over where she was, at first. But that feeling always dissipated in a few seconds as wakefulness took hold. There was the lovely four-poster bed, and a huge window seat with lush pillows and blankets. She would often be awoken with the aroma of coffee and fresh beignets prepared by the cook and all-around wonder-woman Lety, who served guests as if they’d ordered room service.
This morning was not anything like that.
This little room was not becoming more familiar to her the more she woke up. She peeked around for clues. The only thing 100 percent certain was that she was definitely not in her uncle’s house on the lake. This room had a fucking popcorn ceiling, for starters. And these sheets were not Egyptian cotton.
How she got here was another mystery. The only clear memory was she had started the evening at Rosemary’s bachelorette party last night, which had begun with a five-course dinner, with lots of champagne, at the mansion. Everything after that was a blur. Judging from her current state, she’d say the party was a roaring success.
