Jane The Nymph: The Boxed Set (The Circle Series Book 2)

by Naomi L Scudder

  The vamp spun Jane around to face him, somehow while also remaining within her. Jane wrapped her legs around the vampire’s slim hips as he fucked her against the wall. He bit her again, this time on the neck, and again Jade screamed as the sweet, thick magic flowed into her chi.

  The older the vampire, the more concentrated his venom. Which meant Jane had neurochemicals coursing through her bloodstream, instructing her body to turn on every neuron in her pleasure center.

  Every last one.

  This was the fucking Jane was used to. But vampire magic had always come at a price - the curse around her wrist.

  He bit Jane a third time, on the wrist where the nymph’s brand now swirled with delight, soaking up all the energy the vampire gave. And Jade screamed at the sky, certain she would die of pleasure.

  But she didn’t. And Jane, now more aware of her surroundings, was able to keep her mouth shut until he finally came.

  He took forever.

  The magic the vampire gave was what the nymph craved the most, and it assimilated within Jane’s body without any effort. By the time the old one set her down, Jane was feeling like her old self again.

  “I’m sorry if that was too much,” said the vamp.

  Jane laughed in his face. That’s exactly what she’d been made to contain. And exactly what she was trying to rid herself of.

  “If you find yourself in need again, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

  The blood and energy they’d exchanged served as a metaphysical link between them. Either would be able to reach out to the other with a mere whisper of a thought.

  “Thanks, but I’m getting rid of this curse,” she said and left the vampire in the alley.

  FUCK! That was not supposed to happen. She’d intended on breaking the seal on the magic held under the circle, then using that wild magic to break free from the nymph tied to her soul. Then she’d never have to fuck in the street again if she didn’t want to.

  Now she had to worry about how long it was until Amari kicked her out of The Circle for breaking the rules.

  It wouldn’t be long.

  Jane ran back to her apartment. The nymph’s magic would heal the bite wounds and the burn from the coffee shop in a few hours, but Jane wouldn’t risk being seen on the street with three horrendous tears in her flesh.

  When the wounds had mostly scabbed, Jane got in the shower, washing off any of the residual energy and body fluids left from her vampire romp. It had been a long time since she was desperate enough not to insist on protection - even with a vampire physiologically incapable of impregnating or infecting her with anything.

  Jane found comfort in the barrier a condom put between their bodies. She couldn’t help needing to feed the nymph, but insisting on a condom every time made her feel like she had a modicum of control in a situation she had no control over.

  It would be two weeks before Jane needed to feed again, vampire energy sated the nymph the way no other magic could, but she’d be kicked out of The Circle well before then.

  6

  “Why couldn’t you follow the rules?” Jake asked Jane as he escorted her to The Laughing Cat. He’d caught her on the street as her shift ended at the coffee shop. There was no need for him to manhandle her this time. Jane followed him willingly to her own exile.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She tried to keep up with Jake’s huge strides. “I couldn’t help it,”

  “Did you go visit the woman I told you about?” he asked at an intersection while adjusting his boot.

  “What woman?”

  “The one on the business card I gave you.”

  Jane had completely forgotten about that.

  “Jesus, woman, how do you expect me to help you when you won’t help yourself?” The look he gave her wasn’t something Jane was used to seeing. Jake genuinely cared about her wellbeing.

  “I don’t need your help.” Jane said and marched ahead of him, directly into The Laughing Cat.

  The energy of the bar washed over her in a way it hadn’t the first time she’d been escorted there. The bar almost seemed alive, welcoming her, and her magic, within its walls. Wooden chandeliers were the bar’s only source of light, aside from the scarce bit of natural light from the yellowed, dusty windows, and the massive fixtures swung gently in the wake of all the energy the bar housed.

  Sharp pieces of each practitioner’s ambient magic tumbled about the ether, colliding and crashing into each other, causing raised hackles and a general sense of distrusting unease among the people.

  Jane could only see it because she was unaffected by it.

  “HEY! Get your hands off her!” a dark-haired fox shifter yelled to a fae man who had his hand firmly on his partner’s ass.

  “Who do you think you’re ordering about?” the small, older fae man responded, still grabbing a handful of the female fox’s ass cheek.

  “What? I don’t get a say in this?” she yelled at both of the men and kicked her assailant right in the nuts.

  Jane laughed and gave the auburn-haired and freckled fox shifter a nod as she passed.

  The vixen sneered at Jane. “And what are you looking at, Tiny?”

  Jane smiled and shook her head. This town really is fucked up.

  On her way to the back office, Jane snagged a handful of fries off a plate on the service bar. “Hey!” shouted the cook. “Those aren’t for you.” Jake gave the cook a shake of his head and Jane had the stolen fries stuffed in her mouth and swallowed before she and Jake reached Amari’s office.

  Amari sighed from behind his tiny desk when he caught sight of them.

  “You look like you want to be here about as much as I do,” Jane said.

  “Have a seat, please,” he said when Jake closed the door behind himself. Today Amari wore a vibrant purple shirt with a soft gray waistcoat.

  Jane thought he looked quite dashing, in a stuffy kind of way. “Your clothes are very nice,” Jane said as she seated herself in the office chair opposite him. “Are they tailored?”

  “They are,” Amari said.

  The “con” in “con-artist” stood for confidence. And Jane had enough confidence to sell her lies.

  Or so she thought.

  First was to gain your mark’s trust, which she tried with flattery. “And I’m quite impressed by the energetic vibe your bar has. It’s very inviting to us magical people.”

  “Practitioners,” Amari corrected.

  “Right. The only trouble is...” Jane paused to tap at her pointed chin. On the surface, an innocent gesture, but it was precisely calculated to lean on Amari’s emotions in a very particular way. “Your bar is full of people who don’t get along. I can help with that.”

  Jane leaned into the back of the chair. She couldn’t, but her old con-artist habits were hard to break, and she was about to get chucked out of the very place she desperately needed to be.

  She had to at least try.

  “No you can’t, and you’re well aware of that,” he replied and rubbed at his temples. Amari veered back to the reason they were both there. “Do you have any explanation for what you’ve done?”

  In fact, she did.

  Jane thought of all the reasons she’d broken his laws. All the individual steps that brought her to his city in the first place. About how she tried to con the oldest vampire on the east coast and it had cost Jane her freedom. About how after six years of forced servitude via the Nymph’s Curse he placed on all the girls he captured, she finally escaped. That she needed to be here so she could finally break his hold on her. And that once she did, she was going to go back, stake him in his goddamn perfect face, and free the rest of women she’d been enslaved with.

  But Jane told him none of that. She didn’t expect anyone to understand, least of all the man who ran the most egregiously energy imbalanced bar she’d ever seen.

  Jane sat silent and motionless, waiting for her exile.

  Amari sighed, again. “You have two days to leave The Circle, after which I’ll be f
orced to have Jake remove you from the city limits. Jane, I hate casting people out of my city, but you left me little choice. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”

  Jane stood to leave the tiny office. “Nope,” she said and left The Laughing Cat for the last time.

  Or so she thought.

  7

  Two days. That’s all the time Jane had to work with. She had to figure out how to break open the seal in just two days.

  She had to.

  Jane mulled over all the ways she could try again while Jake escorted her back to her place.

  “What are you gonna do?” Jake asked on the front stoop of her dumpy studio. Jane stopped in her tracks and looked Jake dead in his sad eyes.

  “Do you want to come in?” asked Jane.

  “I really can’t,” Jake said, stepping out of reach of her touch.

  Jane smirked at him. “My tank is on full. I had a really old vamp earlier. Come on in,” Jane said and unlocked the door. “I’ll tell ya all about what I’m gonna do.” Jane threw her hip into the swollen door, unsticking it from its frame and stumbled into her studio.

  “Have a seat,” said Jane when Jake didn’t immediately sit down in her recliner.

  She sat on the edge of her unmade bed and told him everything. Every last detail, hoping, praying that at the very least he’d find her situation a nice distraction from his own grief, and offer to help her.

  Jake was silent for what seemed like an eternity to Jane. “Everything you’ve tried so far hasn’t broken the seal?”

  “Yeah, and I’m fresh out of ideas. Plus, I think unlocking the door to all that stored magic might help balance out the weird vibe going on in this city.”

  Jake looked at her for a long, long time before he said anything. “You think the key to not only your freedom, but the enthrallment issue with nons, and the jacked up energy we get off each other will be solved by letting loose even more magic?”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “Well, when you say it like that... Look, when I don’t feed this-” Jane jabbed at the contented tattoo on her upper arm. “Everything in my body gets out of balance. The nymph soul that’s attached to mine can’t get her own energy, so I have to give it to her.” That was the first time Jane had ever referred to or thought of the nymph residing within her as anything besides “it”. “If she doesn’t get what she needs she takes it from my magic and life force.”

  “OK. What does that have to do with anything?” Jake asked.

  “It’s an analogy, Jake. The nymph was cursed just as I was. We function together as best we can, but it’s not natural. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Just like damning up wild magic behind sigils and seals isn’t natural either. Magic is for anyone and everyone who chooses it.”

  Jake nodded, “I see.”

  “Once we release it, there might be some growing pains during the adjustment period, but I think everything will find its natural homeostasis.”

  It was like shoving the empath’s energy into the nymph’s well. It didn’t want to fit at first, but eventually, it all worked out. “Jake, I think once the wild magic is free nons won’t try to steal magic from practitioners, and practitioners won’t have to be assholes to each other. The way it should be.”

  “OK. I get it. It probably won’t work, but I’m game. So how do we free the magic?” asked Jake.

  Jane didn’t care if Jake believed it would work. She only needed him to help. “I have no fucking clue.”

  “Gimme some time to figure out...”

  “What if we tried throwing everything we could at it?” Jane asked, interrupting Jake.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I used both my own magic and the nymph’s to no effect, but if we got a whole lot of people to kick in their mojo.” Jane let the shifter put the rest together for himself.

  Jake thought a moment. “I don’t think brute force is the answer.”

  The sentence surprised Jane the way few people could.

  Jake smiled at Jane’s expression. “Contrary to my appearance,” he started, puffing out his chest in a gorilla-ish way, “I try to exhaust all other options before resorting to force. Why don’t we have a look at the type of magic sealing the convergence? Maybe we can figure out a more surgical strike than a ‘bomb the fuck out of’ it approach.”

  Jane nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a better idea. Well, I can tell you it’s old, really old magic. But last time I was there I was focused on destroying it, not scrutinizing the spell itself.”

  Jake shook his head at the tiny girl. “How could you—Jane, I don’t understand how anyone would try to destroy anything without a concrete understanding of how it worked.”

  Jane shrugged, went to the door, all two steps away from where she had been. “Well, let’s go try to understand it.”

  “Oh, you mean now?” Jake asked, getting up from the recliner.

  “Yeah, I’ve got two days, dude.”

  The pair sprinted from her studio to the center of town, Jane taking nearly three strides for every one of Jake’s.

  “No one’s around,” Jake said as they approached a spoke of the traffic circle. “I’ll cross first, you follow.”

  “OK, go,” Jane watched the huge shifter cross the street and disappear into the trees and shrubs of the grassy easement. Jane followed suit, crossing right after she lost sight of him. Pushing her way through the ornamental, city maintained shrubbery and trees, Jane emerged into the center of the circle to find Jake with a man she didn’t recognize.

  The man was tall, just as tall as Jake but with steely eyes and platinum hair.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” the Nordic-looking man said to the odd pair.

  “I do what I want,” said Jane.

  The man smiled down at her. “You fit quite a bit of attitude into such a small package, don’t you?”

  Jane said nothing.

  “I can’t have you disrupting the order in my city, Jane,” the man said.

  “What is it with you people here thinking this city is yours? It’s not. It belongs to the people who live and work and pay taxes here, and that, it just so happens, includes me. Now, get out of my way, I have something to take care of.”

  The Nordic man chuckled at Jane. “We’ve been watching you, Jane. Ever since you arrived here in The Circle, I’ve had my eye on you.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” asked Jane. She didn’t care so much as she wanted to draw him into a conversation. She’d conned her way out of worse.

  “We watch all of our citizens. Safety is our number one priority. But it’s hard to achieve with so many kinds of magical people living in one area.”

  “And how does that work,” Jane asked, inching closer to the center of the circle. She hoped to just get a glimpse of the sigils that held the seal over the convergence.

  “It works well when people follow the rules. One of which is no trespassing.” The man gestured to the sign over his shoulder which said exactly that. “As I understand it, you should be on your way out of this city. Instead, you seem to be intent on causing more trouble.

  8

  If Jane knew anything, it was when to cut her losses.

  This man was un-connable.

  “Who are you? Why do you care?” Jane didn’t give one shit who he was, she just wanted an excuse to touch him.

  The tall man in the most expensive gray suit Jane had ever seen extended his broad hand to her. “Gunnar Ahlstrom. I’m in charge of the Corporation.”

  Jane smirked as she shook his hand, and channeled a huge portion of the nymph’s well of energy at him.

  The man was knocked backward into the shrubbery that surrounded the magical seal.

  “Jane! What the fuck!” Jake yelled.

  “I NEED this, Jake. He’s keeping me from it!” Jane said as the man climbed out of the shrubs.

  “That was a mistake, little nymph,” the man said and aimed both his palms at her.

  The nymph, aware of the huge amount of energy the man
was gathering, shot down Jane’s arm and spun full speed around her wrist. “Oh fuck,” Jane said, feeling the nymph’s reaction.

  Jane resigned herself to having lost. The man was pulling more energy together than she’d ever seen, outside of the convergence below her. He would blast her away.

  Jane wondered if it would hurt.

  It doesn’t matter, she thought when she saw the first tint of green magic rise to his palms. I’ll be free of this curse. We both will. Jane closed her eyes and prepared to die.

  But it did matter. Jane had a bigger part to play here in The Circle than getting blown up in the center of town.

  Jake ripped off his shirt, shifted into an enormous silvery gray wolf and lunged at Gunnar. Jake aimed his gigantic jaws at the man’s arms, but Gunnar anticipated him and aimed one hand right at Jake’s face.

  “Jake, NO!” Jane screamed as she saw the horror play out before her.

  But Jake had already tucked his head down midair and readjusted his trajectory. Gunnar didn’t see it coming.

  Jake locked his jaws around the man’s thigh, ripping the suit, and Gunnar’s magic went wide, missing both of them. His green trunk of power flew out of him, landing directly in the second story of The Laughing Cat.

  The building burst into flames.

  Gunnar wailed as Jake pulled and shook at his thigh like a dog with a chew toy.

  “Jesus, Jake, don’t take his whole leg off!”

  Gunnar’s magic retreated into his body, and he swung an elbow down directly on Jake’s head. Jane cringed at the sound of bones cracking, but Jake didn’t let go.

  Gunnar, wobbling on one leg, reached for Jake’s throat with both his green glowing hands.

  “NO!” Jane screamed and launched herself at the giant Nordic man.

  I don’t know if you can do this, Jane said to the nymph within her. But try, please, try for both of us. It was outside of the nymph’s nature, to do what Jane asked of her. But the nymph tried. And as Jane ran to Gunnar Ahlstrom, she jumped to reach the only skin that showed besides his hands.