AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know. You don’t do long-term.”
“I don’t. And your bar is everything to you.”
She smiled faintly. “I don’t date vampires anyway, you know that. Just humans.”
Jude sighed. “Gotta go. I’ve got a wraith-pair to take down and dawn’s about fifteen minutes away.”
~ ~ ~
Hannah didn’t want to be so completely hooked into Jude right now, but the way he’d talked to Longeness had done something to her. Jude wasn’t a simple man by any stretch. She might have been able to shove her interest in him aside if he showed indifference to those around him. Instead, he’d asked about Longeness’s very pregnant wife.
She also knew that a long time ago, over a hundred years now, Jude had been married. He’d even had a daughter, but both had died in an Invictus attack. Her email loop had given her a lot of information she wouldn’t have had otherwise. She knew they’d perished in his peach orchard on Castle Island, next to the house the couple had built together. Her throat grew tight every time she thought about his loss.
But Jude had never remarried and from that time, he’d kept his relationships on a love-em-and-leave-em basis, yet one more reason she needed to keep her distance and ignore what had become a fairly relentless drive toward him.
Jude made a move to slip past her into the hall, but she caught his arm. “Jude?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
He smiled. “I always am.”
Was she imagining things, or had he leaned toward her as if to kiss her.
And she would have let him.
Yep, she had it bad.
But he huffed a quick sigh, and turned up the hall, heading toward the bar. The daytime communication staff would arrive in about three hours, and her staff had already cleaned up and gone home for the night.
She signed off on the loop and added an auto-responder to her email that any emergency communication could be routed through her cell phone. Usually, Sandy came in at this hour to take over, but she had a dentist’s appointment so Hannah would be on call until about ten. But like hell she wasn’t going to walk down to the nearby dock and watch Jude launch into the air. She was worried now because something didn’t feel right.
Moving up the hall toward the bar, she pressed a hand to her chest. She was more anxious about things than she realized because right now her heart felt squeezed tight. She hurried past the horse-shoe shaped bar and a couple dozen tables and chairs toward the entrance. Once there, she stared through the large, stained glass, front door but couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Jude hadn’t reached the Sound at all, but fought a wraith-pair not fifty feet from the Gold Rush near the dock.
And the strangest thing of all was that she suddenly felt an overwhelming need to help him. Yet, Jude was one of the most powerful men in all of the Nine Realms, so in what possible situation would he ever need her help?
Chapter Two
Flashes of blue battle energy left Jude’s palms in steady pulses as the Invictus pair answered with their red strikes.
Hannah had never seen a wraith before or a full-on battle. She’d visited Kellcasse a number of times, but the Invictus, thank God, hadn’t shown up.
Her body felt oddly flushed as she watched. Her skin was warm and her hands tingled, as though she was getting ready for something, but for what she had no idea. And strangely, she felt an inexplicable connection to Jude because of these sensations.
Slowly, she opened the door. Jude fought both the wraith and the vampire at the same time – a bonded wraith-pair – levitating, then flying back and forth in quick slashes to avoid being struck. He had some kind of blue shield in front of him as well. It moved with him as he whipped through the air.
The vampire wore battle leathers like Jude’s but short boots. His black hair jerked around in lank, beaded strands, and he had a heavy scruff on his face. He held a dagger in his left hand, as if hoping for an opening.
The wraith was a wispy-looking creature, a woman, who wore what looked like a gown of floating red strips of gauze-like fabric. Her limbs appeared elongated, her lips dark, the whites of her eyes yellow.
But it was the shrieking that distressed Hannah the most, a piercing cry that made her cover her ears. The wraith’s mate was Guard-sized but still not as big as Jude, but then few Guardsmen she’d met could compete with his mass.
The wraith suddenly flew straight up, then met Hannah’s gaze. In a swift streak of movement, she headed straight for Hannah with an intense expression that made Hannah think the wraith had come for her. Why would that ever be true?
Dread assaulted her.
