Cars honked outside. Engines rumbled. A dog was barking in the yard of a house several blocks down. The traffic lights hummed. Someone spoke into the receiver of a speaker at a drive-thru. Horses’ hooves clopped.
Roman frowned. Horses’ hooves?
He reached for his door handle and was climbing out before Jaxon could realize what he was doing. The driver scrambled to catch up, popping open his own door and rushing to his king’s side. Roman barely noticed him. His dark, dark eyes scanned the street and sidewalks. He moved away from the car to round a group of trees and Jaxon was immediately moving with him, as if it were his job to act as not only driver but bodyguard to the king.
It wasn’t pride that had Roman admitting to himself that he was the last vampire on earth who needed a bodyguard. There was a reason he’d become king in the first place. But Jaxon meant well, and Roman certainly didn’t mind the company.
“Is that a horse-drawn carriage?” Roman asked as he stood at the corner of the intersection and peered across two streets to the parking lot of a mall two blocks down.
“Yes, I believe it is, My Lord,” Jaxon replied.
The holidays were upon the mortal world. Street lights were wrapped in tinsel streamers and wreathes hung from the traffic light cords up above. Tiny holiday lights lit up windows and trees in front of businesses, families were dressed in red overcoats bedecked in holiday pins, and pictures of Santa Claus and menorahs could be seen in advertisements upon every city block.
Roman’s gaze narrowed in on the horse-drawn carriage and the giggling family riding in the back and he realized that this was yet another holiday attraction for the mortal world. Some businesses must be selling “sleigh rides,” and children would of course jump at the chance to get up close and personal with the horses and wave at the drivers who passed them by. It didn’t matter that there was no snow on the ground; it was the spirit of the thing they would love.
That warning sensation struck at Roman again. For a split second, he thought of the Hunters and their new leader. But he didn’t feel any of their kind around him. This was not a premeditated danger. This was different.
He stood stock still, staring long and hard at the horses and the open carriage they pulled. As he did, memories assaulted him, caveat niggled at him, and the magic channels inside of him opened up, readying for what might lay ahead.
“Jaxon, remain with the car,” Roman ordered, his concern not for the car but for his servant.
“Yes sir,” Jaxon replied, though the tightness in his voice made it clear that he didn’t like the idea of being left behind if his king was about to waltz into some kind of danger.
Roman’s black camel hair trench coat whipped in a sudden wind as he made his way down the sidewalk toward the mall’s parking lot. He could feel that the people around him were struck by his appearance. He made an imposing figure; always had. From the top of his very black hair to his black trench coat and dark gray suit, he was the image of a very wealthy, very charismatic and powerful businessman alone on a sidewalk in the dark of night. There were only so many kinds of men who could foot that particular bill.
He could smell the disease in some people – and the alcohol in others. The partying had begun early this night, it would seem.
A sharp, hard wave of treachery rolled through Roman, drawing him to a sudden halt on the sidewalk. He spun just as the atmosphere changed. Time seemed to hiccup; it froze – and then jumped into hyper speed. There was no screeching of tires, no applying of brakes to lessen the impact before the collision occurred. The sound of metal crunching on metal was deafening.
Roman had lived through countless generations and just as many horrible happenstances. The sudden stench of disaster, the way time slipped and slithered, and the chaotic echo of death were nothing new to Roman, and so it was with a practiced ease unlike any other that the words of a spell slipped past his lips and infiltrated the horror-struck atmosphere.
Up ahead, beneath the long curve of an overpass, a turning, twisting car that had been vaulted into the air by another vehicle was suddenly halted in its sky-ward progress. It froze in the air, an anomaly to nature, a joke at gravity’s expense. It was an impossibility, and yet it was nothing more than a passing whim for the vampire who controlled it down below.
On the street underneath the suspended automobile, another car had burst into flame. Roman quenched the fire, choked the blaze, and dispersed the smoke into thin air. A third vehicle rolled onto its side, its momentum driving it further and further down the street, half on the sidewalk, half on the tarmac. Roman stilled the car, lifted it onto its flattened tires, and focused on the man behind the wheel.
Alcohol tainted the blood that dripped from the man’s multiple wounds. Roman turned away from him, scanned the unconscious body of the woman in the air-borne car, and found a concussion. He lowered the car gently to the ground on a patch of grass in front of a closed bank. Nearby, the couple in the no-longer-flaming sedan were more or less unharmed, but very shaken up.
The whispers came then. Those whispers turned into chatter that eventually became shouts and cries of disbelief. Chaos was spinning to life, people diving for cell phones, dialing numbers, trying to film the proceedings.
Roman closed his eyes.
Within seconds, he had infiltrated the mind of every man, woman and child on the streets in a half-mile radius. He prepared to erase their memories, clean their thoughts of all trace of his interference…
And that was when he sensed her.
His eyes flew open. Her presence there amongst the others felt like spotting a white butterfly amongst a sea of black moths. She was stark and clean; a light for him to see by. He couldn’t help but focus upon her.
He turned – but it was too late. There, where the horse drawn carriage had been coasting steadily along with its passengers seconds before, the passengers were now sprawled on the parking lot ground and the carriage dragged and sparked along behind a pair of horses that had gone insane.
A mother cried out, pushed herself up from the ground, and dove for her son. Roman was in the mother’s mind; he knew her thoughts and could have controlled her, but not without great effort. A desperate mother trying to protect her child was the most difficult kind of mind to subjugate. He held back, watching with a growing sense of unease.
The child rolled, reached up, and the mother had him. They ran for the safety of cars nearby as the horses bucked and the carriage went flying. BANG. It smacked into a nearby car, smashing the headlight and breaking the windshield. And then the horses were running again.
And Roman saw where they were headed.
Oh God, he heard. The voice was unmistakable. It was smooth and a little husky. It was familiar and somehow precious. His vision focused, zoomed in. There at the other end of the parking lot and directly in the horses’ crazed path stood the angel from his dreams.
He’d never seen all of her before. He’d only seen her eyes. He’d only felt the spirit of her, strong and special. He’d only heard her speak unintelligible words that were both indistinct and maddeningly beautiful. He’d only ever sensed the desperation in her.
Desperation she was now feeling very strongly.
Roman couldn’t control the minds of non-human animals. If he could have, he would have done so. Instead, he moved.
Offspring possessed immense, incredible, mind-blowing speed. The stronger of his kind could move in such a way that they seemed to blur to the humans around them. Roman’s body disappeared from all natural sight in that moment – and reappeared before his dream angel, directly in-between her and the horses.
The past assaulted him and he stared it down. He saw it in the eyes of the spooked animals and heard it in the thrum of their hooves. And the strange thing was, he hadn’t been there the morning Ophelia had been run over. He hadn’t even been able to bring himself to lift the lid and peer into her coffin at the funeral. Yet, there he was, living her demise all over again.
Behind him, he heard the wo
man gasp.
Evelynne. He caught her name, ripped it from her vast, compelling mind, and memorized it in the same instant that he spun, grabbed her around the waist, and took her to the skies. The air erupted around him, casting itself into a vicious wind that propelled him upward and held him aloft. In his arms, Evelynne went stiff.
At once he was flooding her with his power, sending her into a deep hypnosis. But even as he worked, he noticed things. It was disturbing. He’d never been bothered by mortal things before. He’d never experienced the weakness of human distraction. But he noted the way she felt beneath his palms, beneath his fingertips. She was soft and yielding and warm. She filled him with the urge to hold her tighter – to squeeze her to him.
He heard her heartbeat, monitored it as it slowed from its break-neck pace to the even rhythm of trance, and to him it sounded like a lullaby. Confounding. His own pulse beat in time with the thoughts in her head as if they were the harmony, and his heart the drum.
The gold ring around her dark irises struck him with some kind of spiritual solidarity. They looked like a promise, freely given, and called out for some like commitment of the eternal kind.
He wanted to give it. Right there, in the dark cold night, with the scent of her cherry blossoms all around him, he wanted to pledge his soul.
And he didn’t even know her, this stranger from his dreams.
Yes you do.
The moment pulled at him and begged to be further explored. He was in her head, and it was a strange place filled with alluring passageways and countless tributaries of creativity that he itched to go down. There was also something different there, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was like a light at the end of a long tunnel or an object moving in his periphery vision. He couldn’t place it, and it would take time to do so.
But there were injured mortals below them, and a host of memories to erase. Reality tugged at him, relentless in its desire to go on. There was nothing for it.
Roman returned to the Earth, his form and that of Evelynne’s like descending angels – his considerably darker than hers.
When he touched down, Jaxon was beside him in an instant. “My Lord?” he questioned softly, respectfully. He looked from his king to the woman in his arms, his calm eyes taking in her small form and the way he clutched her to him so protectively. Roman couldn’t blame the man for wondering.
Evelynne’s soft hair brushed Roman’s face as the wind caught it and blew a few strands about her like a halo. The cherry blossom scent grew stronger.
She radiated heat where his hands so strongly gripped her small waist. Her right breast pressed temptingly against his left bicep, and quite suddenly, Roman had the incredibly strong urge to hold on forever. She was precious and vulnerable.
And essential.
In front of them, Jaxon continued to look on with questions in his eyes. The world behind them waited to resume its pace, and the Vampire King was not himself. He was draining himself holding onto all of their human minds for so long, suspending them in that mental bubble of time, but he barely noticed and he couldn’t have cared. Evelynne’s small, curvy body seemed to pulse with absolute life and even power. It was as if she could forever sustain the strength he needed to use his magic – just by being close to him like this.
“Jaxon,” Roman finally forced himself to speak. “Take her.” It was an order much more difficult than it should have been. “Put her in the car and keep her under, but be gentle.” His look meant business, but there was no doubt that Jaxon could tell all on his own that Roman’s feelings toward the woman were, for lack of a better term, very deep.
“Yes, My Lord,” Jaxon replied respectfully as he slowly moved forward and almost lovingly put his arms around Evelynne’s hypnotized form.
“I will see to the others,” Roman continued. “There are injuries.”
If there had been a werewolf nearby or if the Healer had been in the vicinity, they would have helped those who had been hurt. Thousands of humans everywhere who believed they’d been in accidents only to miraculously walk away from them without so much as a scratch were actually the secret beneficiaries of supernatural aid. They would never know that they’d received a taste of werewolf blood or that Dannai Caige, the Healer, had laid her hands on them to cure them of their wounds. They knew what the supernatural world wanted them to know – only that they were very lucky.
But werewolves were hard to come by, despite the turning of the curse recently, and the Healer was only one woman, so ninety-nine percent of the time, it was up to humans to help humans.
“Make certain that the medics arrive,” Roman instructed. Jaxon would give them a call while Roman took care of the more difficult business of setting everything right and erasing people’s memories.
The servant nodded. “I will, sir.” But he gave the king a look that was part reassurance and part gently beseeching. Roman frowned. He looked down – and then realized that he hadn’t freely released Evelynne from his hold.
Evie, he thought. That was what her friends and family called her. It danced through his mind like a butterfly. He stared at his own hand where it still held possessively to Evie’s wrist. His gaze narrowed on it as if the appendage were no longer under his control. And then, as he felt the fangs behind his lips lengthen, he let her go. It nearly hurt to do so.
“I’ll see that she’s safe My Lord,” Jax reassured once more as he again wrapped his arms gently around Evelynne and led her toward the waiting limousine. She went without question and without a fight; Roman’s power made sure of that. Her striking gaze was unseeing and her lips were parted slightly. She was submissive and subdued in his vampire trance, and Roman felt an uncomfortable stirring as he watched another man handle her, no matter how careful that handling might be.
Jaxon tucked Evie into the back of the limo, and Roman shut his eyes, cursing inwardly. There was a royal mess behind him that needed tending to, and he’d wasted an inordinate amount of time. All because of this stranger who had come to him in his dreams.
The Vampire King had no idea what it could mean. He had no clue as to what part this woman was going to play in his life or why she affected him the way she did. But he would find out.
As he turned and almost ruthlessly infiltrated the minds of every human on the accident scene, Evelynne Grace Farrow was all he could think about.
Chapter Four
Jason Alberich felt the weight of inordinate amounts of magic press in around him as his form began to materialize in the dark abandoned alley several blocks down from the designated meeting area. He wasn’t even at the hotel yet, and already he could tell that more power had gathered in New York than he’d ever before encountered.
The meeting would be held at six p.m., just after sunset. Jason casually brushed his hand over the lapel of his black sports coat and then exited the alley. There were probably ten thousand different ways he could have come to the meeting, ten thousand different first impressions he could have made. However, he was one of the Thirteen now. Once a member, a member for life. There was no point in being anything but himself.
New York was cold in December. He’d known it would be so and he’d taken the trouble to cast a protective spell upon himself to keep the worst of it at bay. Even so, his breath steamed the air as he made his way down the busy sidewalk.
The feeling of heady power grew stronger and the crowd got thicker when he entered a more heavily populated area of the city. At points, it seemed he was working against the flow, an individual man weaving through an ocean of faces. Each had a look of stark concentration, and none were smiling. He knew that the cold had something to do with it; the streets were part wet and part frozen, and the combination was painful. But there was more to it than a natural disdain of the weather. These people were headed somewhere for some purpose and needed to be there by some time, and it was miserably clear that they’d rather be doing something else.
This was where they usually were, here on these streets, no mat
ter what the season. And that meant that this was how they spent the majority of their lives. A humongous fraction of their precious, short existence spent in misery and disappointment. For what?
It was perplexing to Jason and always had been. He’d never denied himself the things that made him happy. Perhaps it was that willingness to take life by the balls and make it your slave that cast a wizard into a warlock’s darker colors. If that was the case, then so be it. He was a warlock through and through.
“It’s better than being unhappy,” he muttered to himself.
“Does that mean you’re finally happy then, Jason?” came an all-too-familiar voice.
Jason stopped in his tracks and stared down at the woman who looked like a cross between a dwarf and an elf and who had, until recently, been an elder in his coven. She stood in the middle of the flow of bodies, and for all the world, it seemed as though they moved around her like water, affording her and Jason a wide girth and a generous bubble of space in a place where there wasn’t much to spare.
“Lalura.” The shock of seeing her there so suddenly moved through him, wore off quickly, and was replaced at once by wariness. Lalura’s question seemed too on the spot to have been born of his single spoken sentence. It was as if she’d been following along with his thoughts. “Are you reading my mind now?” he asked, not at all sure that he’d be surprised if she was. She was a very unpredictable and exceedingly ancient witch.
Lalura Chantelle waved her hand dismissively and rolled her eyes. “Gods, no. That would really be the shits. I can only imagine what kinds of nonsense I would be pulling off of all of these people. New York,” she said with a shake of her head, “is not a place you want to be reading people’s minds.”
The rest of the world ignored them, continuing to flow around them like an oblivious river.
“Why are you here?” Jason asked.
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