Page 5 of Call of the Blood

And it wasn’t her fault. It was all his.

Alexius went to his garden. Perhaps that needed his tending. He looked up at the gorgeous moon, full and bright. Some of his flowers only bloomed on good nights like this. He checked on them, but nothing seemed to need him. Not a single errant weed that somehow got tracked in as a seed on a shoe or the tiniest sign of wilting on any leaves or petals.

Grumbling, he left his garden and went to his office. The admin was all accounted for. Rupert and the others were efficient. There were no emails or other items for him to deal with. Everly was equally efficient at getting rid of anything there. Not that anything was coming. She barely had work to do because he had nothing for her now. They trained four nights a week. She fiddled with the electronics. He poked around in his garden. They watched shows, movies, and illegal videos of Broadway productions and concerts they couldn’t visit.

He would always give a generous donation to whatever organization he could after the illegal videos, but he didn’t stop consuming them. He was under house arrest when he had done nothing wrong, and he was slowly losing his mind being stuck in his house.

With her and her fiery hair, those waves looking soft and silky, begging for his fingers to run through them.

He growled at himself and locked himself in his office. He started pacing, a predator trapped in a cage that was much too small.

I have faced hunger before. I have overcome it.

But something had changed in him in New York, and this hunger was unlike any he had ever fought with. When he woke up in a rage, it had been because of her blood. He’d been enraged that someone had hurt her. It took him a few weeks to piece that together while they both healed from what happened at Isaiah’s estate. Every time he went back to the thought that Kallias was going to kill her, had already hurt her, he felt it boiling up once again, the dark rage, unfathomable and endless.

He took a deep breath, pulling himself back from the thought and feeling since he knew she was currently safe in her room, talking to her brother probably. He thought instead of what happened after the rage.

He remembered her brave expression in the face of his rage as he had turned toward her. Even in the deep end of his berserker nature, he had no intention of hurting her. He had been looking at her for more injuries. Looking for where the smell of her blood had come from to begin with.

His chest had hurt when he found the injury and knew it was worse than she was letting on, but she would live through it. That had been enough for his body to go back to the healing sleep he would never have been pulled from in any other circumstance.

All he had wanted was to pull her close and make sure nothing hurt her again. He collapsed on top of her instead.

I’m possibly the oldest vampire alive and the most efficient warrior of any of the ancients that are around or still alive… and a little redhead has gotten me soft enough to fall on the ground on top of her.

It wasn’t the way he had ever wanted to fall on her. He growled and hit a hand against the wall in frustration as a thousand thoughts entered his mind about how he really wanted her to be underneath him on the ground. To see all that blazing hair spread out over the floor.

Or his sheets.

Since New York, the attraction was stronger, as if his blood had decided to tell his heart and head they had no more power. He wanted. He craved. He was fucking hungry for a woman he couldn’t have, not if he had a scrap of honor in him.

He was on fire, and she was the source of the flame. His control was sketchier than it had been in centuries, harkening back to a time when he would have run to Jacob for help. But Jacob wasn’t there to help him anymore. He had to find his own ways to deal with the burning lust and hunger.

His fangs ached as he considered how blissful it would be to sink them into her soft skin again. A memory he tried to lock away—her in her bed, his fangs in the delicate flesh of her thigh, the sounds she made.

Stop thinking about it. Think of anything else. Isaiah and Jacob. Rupert.

I fucking hate being a vampire sometimes.

“I need to get us out of this house,” he said as he finally sat down at his desk once again. “Perhaps if I feed one appetite tonight, the other will leave me be…”

He prepared himself some blood and fed, nursing the glass until dawn, when he knew Rupert would check in with him.

Alexius finally decided to test out Everly’s newest addition to his security. He could now see all the security cameras from any screen in the house. He just needed to use a remote or keyboard to punch in the right code for the right app, and that pulled up every single one. He hadn’t been paying attention to the time and was a little surprised to see it was already dawn, the sun out on the property of his home.

And there was someone at the door. He frowned as Rupert took the visitor, who handed off a message with a wax seal.

“That’s going to be for me. And it won’t be Isaiah.” Alexius had a guess and figured out the zoom feature as Rupert stood there, holding the envelope while discussing something with the deliverer.

“Ah, the witches. They must have seen Everly and me out last night and decided it was time for me to introduce her.” He sighed and turned off the app, losing his view. He needed to start writing a response so Rupert could take it back up to the messenger.

A moment later, Rupert entered his office, unsurprised to see him.

“This is from⁠—“

“The coven, yes?” Alexius held out his left hand without looking up from the preliminary draft of his response.

“That’s right.” Rupert chuckled and handed it over. “You were playing around with the nice app for the cameras Everly set up, weren’t you?”