AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Instead, I told her the only thing I could. “Make your peace, Melinda, because you don’t want to end up where you’ll go if you don’t.”
She wailed, the screeching of a soul that few could hear and even fewer could survive. It made my ears want to bleed, so I grabbed my headphones and cranked up the music to cover it.
She’d be gone soon, since she only ever stayed for twenty minutes or so. I’d done this long enough to know which ones would cross over and which ones who would get stuck. Melinda?
She’d get stuck. She’d cling and try to bargain until the last moment, when she faded to nothing and ended up in purgatory. Even I didn’t like to think about that, about the place I’d glimpsed a handful of times that sent a creeping, gnawing terror through me.
The deep bass and rhythmic drumming drowned out her wailing, and I fell back to sleep. Eventually.
* * * *
A banging on my door at ten at night made me grit my teeth.
Really? Last night Melinda kept me up and now this?
Did the universe have a personal vendetta against my sleep? It didn’t matter who was there, I couldn’t be blamed for whatever I did. Even if it was the hottest stripper-gram I’d ever seen, I’d tell him to take his G-string on home and let me rest.
Dicks were nice and all, but at thirty-five, I’d realized sleep mattered more. Finding a willing cock was far easier than managing a full eight hours.
When I pulled open the front door, a dark-haired man stood there, his suit impeccable and his hands folded behind him like some regal prince.
It took a moment for me to realize I’d seen him before. We hadn’t ever spoken, but he’d been into the small occult store I spent time at. I doubted he’d noticed me—I didn’t tend to be the sort of person others spent a lot of time caring about. The sharp points of his fangs also told me exactlywhathe was.
“Ava Harlin?” he said, voice smooth and careful, my name a question. Maybe he didn’t remember he’d seen me before? “My name is Kase, and I am here at the behest of Lord Raymond Colter.”
And that was about the time I realized my night was going to get much, much worse, because Raymond Colter led the local vampire coven.
I’d avoided most of the supernatural world by treading along the outskirts like a mouse avoiding the trap. Others like myself—those who walked the line between human and supernatural—tended to leap right into a world they weren’t equipped for. Humans playing the games of immortals never went well for the human.
They ended up dead, which was a fate I’d rather avoid for as long as possible.
“What exactly does he want?”
Kase lifted one of his perfectly manicured eyebrows. “That isn’t for me to ask, and I’d suggest you not ask, either. All I know is that he sent me to collect you.”
I groaned, wishing Melinda would come back. She wasn’t great company, but it had to be better than vampires. The few I’d run into were always insufferable bores who thought far too much of themselves.
“Let me get dressed,” I muttered. Arguing with vampires was, in general, a bad idea.
“There isn’t time.”
I waved down at myself—my pink fluffy bath robe with cartoon penises on it over a pair of boy shorts and a tank top—both with a quip about books being better than boys. “I’m not well versed with vampire etiquette, but I’m thinking this might not be the best outfit to go meeting royalty, huh?”
Kase traced his gaze down my body impassively, a look so uninterested it offended. Sure, fucking a dead guy wasn’t my idea of a good time, but he could at least look as though I were slightly more appetizing than spoiled meat.
Though, at the same time…using ‘appetizing’ when talking about a vampire was probably a poor choice of terms.
“He won’t care. He made it clear time is of the essence, so this way.” Kase held his hand out toward a dark car parked in front of my house, someone else in the driver’s seat.
There wasn’t really a way to refuse that was there? I was pretty sure if I pushed any further, I’d end up gagged and tied, and while that might be wonderfully fun on my days off, I just didn’t think this vampire was a fan of safewords.
So instead, I followed his lead.
He sat up front with the driver, leaving me in the back alone.
Faint whispers rattled through the cab, and I did my best to ignore them. They were the echoes of ghosts who followed vampires around. When I’d still been young and full of optimism, I’d thought they were the whispers of the souls from the vampires themselves. Eventually I’d realized the truth—they were the whispers of theirvictims. Why those whispers never went away, I didn’t understand. They just kept growing into a chorus that followed the vampire everywhere, even though only I heard it.
The presence of so many whispers in the car said the two up front were not vampires I should trust.Like anything that eats people should be trusted.I’d sooner turn my back on a man-eating tiger than a vampire.
