Soul Merchant (Isabella Hush Series Book 5)

by Thea Atkinson

  The Soul Merchant

  Isabella Hush Series, Volume 5

  Thea Atkinson

  Published by Thea Atkinson, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE SOUL MERCHANT

  First edition. July 21, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Thea Atkinson.

  ISBN: 978-1393049555

  Written by Thea Atkinson.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MORE FROM THEA

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  "HE WOULDN'T GET CIRCUMCISED," said the woman sitting next to me at the bar. "So I dumped his sorry ass."

  I was perched atop a stool at Fayed's Rot Gut Tavern, a place I frequented, well, frequently, even though I'd recently discovered it was a bar for Kindred and not for humans.

  That didn't mean that humans like me didn't come in; it just meant they might not get out again.

  I was one of the few and fortunate exceptions; mostly because Fayed, a centuries' old vampire, had taken a shine to me. I didn't take that privilege lightly. I couldn't afford to.

  I had reason to be in a vampire bar just a couple hours after the sun set, and I had a burly protector from all things fangish in the form of the vampire owner, Fayed.

  The woman sitting next to me, on the other hand, was no doubt already living on borrowed time. She just didn't know it.

  While I still wasn't comfortable with the thought of vampires being a reality, let alone having their own bar, I was getting better at dealing with it all. I'd been thrust into the supernatural world whether I liked it or not. I had already managed to get into and out of more trouble than I cared to when it came to all things strange and unseemly, and that included the tavern.

  Fayed had alternately tolerated me, welcomed me, barred me, and welcomed me again.

  I might be safe here for now, but I didn't take it for granted.

  So, I lifted my glass of Rot Gut, a drink named for the tavern, and I waggled the stem of the glass at my companion so the crystal of absinthe at the bottom sparked a brilliant green in the incandescent lights.

  Because she wanted a response, I knew. Her tilted her gaze in my direction indicated exactly that. She even leaned back on her stool snuggling into the backrest, confident I would have something to say to her risqué confession.

  Trouble was, I was still racking my brains trying to come up with an explanation for why she really should hightail it out of the bar altogether. The dangers of the Rot Gut might be easy enough to miss if you were human, so she couldn't be blamed for hanging out here too long. But the risks were real, even if she was oblivious to them.

  I was afraid if she haunted the place for much longer this evening, she might end up haunting it for rest of her afterlife.

  So, while I worked out what exactly I should say to get her ass off the stool and out into the dark alley where she'd be much safer, I tilted my glass toward her in a mock toast.

  She was nursing a martini of some sort, her fourth in the last hour, even if this one had sat in her grip so long it had to have grown warm by now. She hung over it like a sad vulture. A sad, gorgeous vulture.

  She smelled of frankincense. Her long, black hair was ombre-dyed on the ends to a light mauve that had been curled into perfect beach waves, which she touched every now and then with fingernails done in French tips. When she wasn't adjusting her hair, she tapped the stem of the glass as though she hadn't really made her mind up about the man in question, no matter what she said.

  I dumped my drink back in one unceremonious swallow, all the better to excuse myself from commenting about her uncircumcised beau. I caught the absinthe crystal between my teeth as I considered just telling her to get the hell out of Dodge without any sophisticated preamble.

  She drummed her nails on the bar and watched me.

  "You meeting someone?" she said.

  "Yes."

  I thought about Maddox, who I was indeed, waiting for. He wasn't a vampire, but he was Kindred. If I had to describe him to a casual human acquaintance, I'd call him my new boss and owner of an estate auction house. I wouldn't say he owned a place called the Shadow Bazaar, or that he was the owner of an even shadier business he called Recollections. I would leave out the fact he was the kind of male that women would have fought to bear their children in the days of yore, when he'd been a mere man instead of an immortal.

  Hell no. I wouldn't even admit that to myself. That way lay madness.

  "My boss," I said. "I'm waiting for my boss."

  I'd already been waiting for Maddox for an hour, and was wondering when he'd finally deign to show his sorry ass. I might be relatively safe in Fayed's bar, but it was foolish to assume too much.

  "I didn't know ladies like us had bosses," she said. "But there you go. Progress marches on."

  She lifted her martini glass high over her head in a mock celebration of time and progress. Booze sloshed out over the edge and onto the floor.

  She snickered as though she thought my mention of a boss was a euphemism. I ignored her deep-throated chortle. She could think what she wanted so long as she left whole and alive.

  "It's pretty dark out there," I said, priming the conversational pump. "I hope nothing happened to him. Bad neighborhood and all."

  "I'm sure he's fine." She waved her long fingers at me.

  I placed the glass back onto the counter.

  "He's late."

  Fayed was busying himself adding a few droplets of blood to a glass of ale on the other side of the bar for a rotund, hairy looking man, who, if he was a vampire, lacked all the legendary charisma so enjoyed in fiction.

  "Imagine," she said. "Refusing to have it done when I was at his beck and call."

  So we were back to that, it seemed. She huffed as though it was truly the most incongruous and unimaginable thing she could think of.

  Fayed must have heard her comment, because he glanced my way ever so subtly and his eyebrow lifted enough to indicate he was interested in my reply. A smirk rode his full lips, revealing the tip of one of his elongated canine teeth.

  Fangs, I told myself. Vampires called them fangs.

  I was still getting used to the idea that there were vampires and all sorts of other creatures big, small, good, and bad. Kindred, Maddox called them. Kindred was the word for humanoid creatures that were of this world but not human.

  My twenty-six years of humanity colored my view of things because most people, according to Maddox, had no idea there was a supernatural world seething benea
th their feet. Nine worlds to be exact, and most days, I dearly wished I hadn't either.

  There was a certain bliss in ignorance. I wasn't sure who had coined the phrase, but it fit perfectly.

  I was unabashedly and painfully human myself, despite some pretty awful events over the last couple of months.

  For instance, once upon a time, I'd thought the absinthe crystal in my drink was something they created by distilling the liquid until a hard chunk of chemical was left behind. I didn't even know if that was a possibility, and hadn't cared. But nope, I was wrong.

  Now, I knew that the crystal was created from magic. I wasn't sure what kind, and while I hoped it wasn't fae magic, I didn't want to know. Not really. When I'd drank the concoction in the past, I expected to hallucinate, but apparently, the servers only gave the human clientele–of which there were precious few–a placebo unless they were targets.

  They saved the real thing for Kindred who knew how to deal with the magic.

  The woman beside me downed her drink, a sanguine martini, I think she called it, and told me she'd had a hundred lovers in the last decade, and not one of them refused to be circumcised.

  "I'm celibate," I blurted out. "So it's not an issue for me."

  I didn't confess my current state of celibacy was involuntary, or that it was also attached to the fact that I'd murdered my ex-fiancé, Scottie, who had brutalized me in ways few women ever managed to escape from with her psyche intact. Made me sort of gun-shy to jump on that pony again.

  And yeah. Not even for the gorgeous Maddox. Who as it turns out, is actually celibate.

  Didn't matter that my ex-fiancé was going to kill me or worse. I'd taken Scottie out, and Maddox had cleaned up the mess after me. Wherever he put Scottie's body, whatever he'd done with it, I didn't want to know.

  It was bad enough knowing I was a murderer. Not just a thief and a runaway.

  A killer. That's what I was. That kind of truth does things to your psyche.

  And he, the man who wasn't a man, who had lived hundreds of years, who had conveniently cleaned up my mess, and who had centuries earlier taken vows of celibacy, had declared how badly he wanted me.

  Such is my life.

  So, I was broke, working for a man who wouldn't give me a job or a roll in the hay, and confused as hell with how I felt about it all.

  And he was late.

  The woman beside me waved Fayed over, and I pushed thoughts of Maddox aside for the time being.

  "Another," she said perfunctorily when Fayed laid his palms on the bar counter. She then shifted her attention to me.

  "Celibacy is for monks and nuns," she said in response to my comment as she inclined her gaze back in my direction. "No self-respecting woman—vampire or otherwise—would rob herself of an orgasm or two each night."

  Each night? I might have asked how she managed to keep up that pace, but found I was too insulted by her insinuation that I wasn't a self-respecting woman.

  "I didn't say I was sexless," I said, shifting on my barstool awkwardly.

  I winced, not entirely due to the way the spring on the outer edge of the stool bit into my thigh.

  "My small friend, if you have to do it on your own," she said. "You aren't owning your sexuality. Take what you want when you want."

  She pulled at the stem of the fresh martini glass as Fayed laid it down just within reach. "One for the China doll, too," she said. I could almost hear the smirk in her voice.

  Fayed avoided my eye altogether as he reached to clear my glass and replace it with another. "Isabella prefers absinthe to blood in her drinks." His smokey voice was full of innuendo.

  The woman reeled back on her stool and looked me full in the face.

  That's when it hit me like a cool breeze. Her earlier comment had gone right over my head.

  She was a vampire.

  And she thought I was too.

  "She's human," Fayed said, almost unnecessarily, judging by the flash of narrowed gaze and involuntary widening of the woman's nostrils as she studied me afresh. "I thought you understood that."

  "Human," she murmured with astonishment as she looked me over. I wasn't sure if the color I saw in her face was from embarrassment or the blood in her drink, but when it rose to her cheeks, I could really make out how pallid her complexion was.

  I don't know how I'd missed it before.

  It didn't make sense. I couldn't imagine what exactly circumcision entailed for a vampire, and I felt duped that Fayed let me sit here drinking with someone he knew I thought was human, but wasn't.

  He must have read the sense of betrayal on my face because he shot me an apologetic look. I stared back, still wrestling with the knowledge that my companion was a vampire and expected her lovers to get a procedure done that obviously wouldn't take or would have to be done repeatedly.

  "Circumcision for a vampire," Fayed explained as he drummed his fingers on the bar counter. "Involves the teeth."

  He coughed into his hand.

  I stared at him, astounded.

  "Are you embarrassed?" I said, not sure what it could possibly involve that made him blush too, but I found the idea delightfully funny.

  The woman reached across the bar to grip his wrist.

  "Oh, Fayed," she said with such a pitying tone that I couldn't help chuckling out loud into my glass. "Don't tell me you're not circumcised. Your poor lover."

  Fayed rocked back on his heels and pulled his wrist from his grip. "My lovers don't complain, unlike you, Cleo."

  She spun to face me on the stool and for a moment, I thought she might explain the concept, but then I caught something different in her expression. Something that hadn't been there before but that I'd seen plenty in Scottie's face when he was feeling especially amorous.

  "So," she said with a predatory note in her voice that wasn't there before. "You're human."

  The tiniest tip of her tongue darted out the corner of her mouth. Like she was mulling something over. Something she found incredibly exciting but taboo.

  Then the pity and sympathy she'd shown for my state of celibacy all but dissolved from her expression.

  In its place was something more feral.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CLEO MUST HAVE DECIDED she would forgo that extra martini and snack on the real thing, and she made no bones about her desires. It rode her features the way lust does. It's unmistakable. You don't need to hear someone say they want you when they want you that badly.

  I felt for the floor with my feet because I had a feeling I'd be needing them on solid footing in a moment or two.

  Fayed must have seen it too, because in a heartbeat, he leaned over the bar to put his body between us. His back was to me and his shoulders made a mountain of rust-colored gabardine that undulated over the muscles in his back.

  "She's protected here." he said to Cleo. "You've been drinking with her for an hour. I thought you'd guessed she wasn't vampire."

  He reached for my arm and settled his fingers around my elbow. Urgency made his grip rough. He yanked at me, hard enough that I almost fell off the stool. It clunked as it wobbled against the wood. I had to brace myself against the bar to keep my ribs from jamming into the edge.

  Cleo stood when she noted his obvious unease, but it wasn't because she felt she'd done anything wrong. Quite the contrary. A sense of indignity coiled about her demeanor. She was shorter than I'd thought. Her figure was full but petite. Even so, she had a regal bearing, one that indicated she wasn't used to being denied.

  I fully expected Fayed to defer to her under that direct and commanding gaze. It certainly seemed as though his every fiber wanted to. I laid a hand on his shoulder, doing my best to tug my arm away from his iron grip as I did so. I needed to be free if I had to bolt.

  He was a friend, but the way his shoulders trembled beneath my palms told me he might not be friend enough to resist her.

  "I should have guessed," Cleo said, scanning him with that unblinking and penetrating gaze. "The way you've been watching us
from the side of your eye."

  She directed her stunning gaze at me over his back. I felt my legs start to sag beneath it.

  "You want her," she said to him.

  "She's already mine," he intoned. "When she's here, she's mine. I thought you guessed that."

  Despite the tension in the air, I wasn't sure I liked that statement of proprietorship.

  "Hello?" I said, jamming my index finger into the meat of his shoulder. "I'm not some meat sandwich wrapped in jeans and Spandex. I'm probably the only thing in this bar that isn't yours. I'm nobody's possession."

  Maybe it was stupid to argue the point right then, but after Scottie, I'd decided I wouldn't be anyone's possession ever again.

  Fayed didn't look at me, but I felt his body tighten at my words. It had affected him all right.

  "You don't know how it works, Isabella," he said without looking at me and shrugging off my probing fingers. "But I can assure you, when you are in my bar, you are under my protection. So, yes. Mine."

  That last word was said with a ferocious bite, then he moved so quickly I didn't realize what he was doing, until I felt his grip beneath my arms and I was plucked from the stool so easily I might have been a flower in a vase. He retreated to his side of the bar, pulling me with him as he went.

  My torso didn't even fetch up against the lip of the bar. I felt weightless in his grip, until my boot caught up on the edge and lodged there.

  I was stuck for a few breathless seconds until it wormed itself free of my foot. My boot fell to the floor with a thunk as Cleo pushed her sanguine martini aside almost too calmly. The sound it made as it slid down the surface of the bar would be one I knew I'd hear in my nightmares for weeks.

  "If you've claimed her, why isn't your scent of possession on her?" she demanded of Fayed. "She has no brand either."

  She swept my throat with a piercing eye, no doubt looking for pinprick scars that would indicate I'd been fed from. Seeing none, she inhaled deeply. "She doesn't even smell human."

  "Fae magic," he said. "She walks in the door, she's cloaked. No Kindred might know she's human unless she's revealed."