by Aneesa Price
“Conall,” Yves indicated the other man across the table “is the first to agree to form an alliance with us. He is a man of vision and leadership, like me. The fae and shifters are sceptical. I think it is because they live so long in their own world, unlike us who are forced to co-exist amongst humans, that they do not see the threat. They do not see that we are all linked. We need to illustrate success from the first alliance, the alliance between witches and vampires. This should assist us in bringing the others on board.”
Blah, blah, blah bullshit. Anais’ bullshit detector was going off like crazy, what was his game? “That is very admirable Yves and so like you to think of us; to think so far ahead.” Anais played the agreeable dimwit that he thought her as and asked the only question he’d accept. “How can I help?”
Yves patted her head patronizingly like an indulging parent of a toddler. Anais checked to make sure the smile was still pasted on her face and forced a glimmer of eagerness and admiration into her eyes.
“You see, Conall, I told you that she was a good vampireress, one of the best.” Anais nearly expected him to pinch her cheeks and waited to hear what he required to illustrate the unity between vampires and witches. Had she known the request that would follow and its consequences, she would’ve gladly risked his displeasure rather than the events over the next few weeks.
Chapter 2
“Oh God, what are we going to do?” Anais groaned, laying her head in her hands, with her elbows propped on the oak table in the enormous plantation kitchen. Kicking off her shoes and tucking her feet beneath her in the oversized chairs that graced the one end of the exceptionally large twelve-foot table, she looked around at the kitchen as though she’d never seen it before in an effort to escape the overwhelming prospect Yves’ had presented her with the previous evening.
Except for the addition of modern appliances and the maintenance demanded by the passing years, the kitchen remained the same over the last hundred and seventy years. Functionality combined with aesthetics to create a kitchen that would make a head chef drool. State of the art culinary equipment enabled them to feed up to three hundred guests for a cocktail event and half that for a formal dinner. Yet it was a far cry from a restaurant kitchen. Warm Oregon pine contrasted with white-washed oak, calming soft green walls and glass-fronted cabinets. A hodgepodge of antique and modern dishes, while quirky joined forces with sophisticated décor to invited one into it. Yet it was Miss Suzette who made it the heart of the old plantation house and her vampire sisters who made it a home.
“This is a hot mess. Here, have some of Miss Suzette’s sweet tea, it is soul soothing.” Sophie handed Anais a tall glass of ice tea, watching her friend gulp it down.
Rose plonked one of the tankards, which she’d opted to keep as a souvenir from the previous night, in front of Anais. “Here, this is better.”
Anais took a sniff and pulled back. Phew, that was one hectic drink, “What is it?” She scrunched up her nose at Rose’s concoction.
Rose adopted a Russian accent to go with the drink, “Vurricane vor your vorries.” She was a wine connoisseur and maker of all thinks drinkable, alcoholic and non-alcoholic. She procured straight blood from sinners and made blood-infused cocktails for their vampire guests’ events and girl’s nights in of course.
“Huh?” Anais asked, confused. She really couldn’t deal with the banter right now.
“Looks like she’s trying to get you to drown your sorrows.” A silky smooth masculine voice, like warm honey, entered the kitchen.
Anais looked up and felt the familiar tingle in her middle that settled there whenever she saw Raulf. That was one hottie that got her hormones in a mess. She mentally sighed. She needed to get laid – badly. Her self-imposed celibacy was resulting in super-active hormonal activity and imagination. Testing, she looked at Raulf again. Yep, same feeling. Skin, the smooth brown of olive-tone kissed by being constantly outdoors, white flashed between the full, kissable lips and black, silky, straight hair that made her want to run her fingers through it. Add a pack of abs that made a grown woman drool and a gorgeously cute boyishness and you got the lust-inducing outside of their boy. Add a heart that was really mushy soft and a sweet nature and you got the perfectly hot and sensitive man. Man. Boy. It was hard to sometimes reconcile what she saw in front of her with the boy she’d seen grow up from a babe.
Raulf’s grin became even cockier than it usually was. “Like what you see?”
“Oh go away Raulf. I’m not in the mood.” Anais barked at him, embarrassed at being found ogling. Raulf was technically available and seemed interested but to her, any non-plutonic relationship with him would feel like incest. He was practically family and Miss Suzette’s nephew. As much as she loved him, he was like a younger, naughty brother. Or great-great-great nephew, she thought, considering her age.
Raulf dramatically smacked a hand to his chest. “Aah, you hurt me.” He came to stand behind her after finishing his round of hugs and pecks to the others. He dropped one on her cheek, “A kiss to make it better.”
“Oh, buzz off, you moron!” She smacked his hands away playfully as he faked another grab. It’d always been like this between her and Raulf. He was a die-hard flirt so he lavished them all with light-hearted praise and caresses. With her there had always seemed to be a bit more flirting, which she attributed to the special relationship she held with Miss Suzette and the rest of Pinot family.
Pulling her back against him, with just the chair separating them, he started kneading the knots that had gathered in the muscles of her back.
“Okay. You can stay as long as you carry on with what you’re doing there.” Anais automatically tipped her neck to the side to allow him better access to the especially large knots embedded between her collar bones and shoulders. Pain followed relief as he worked on loosening the physical evidence of her distress. She nearly purred in delight. It felt good to have warm, caring hands on her. Yep, she needed to seriously consider getting laid.
“Your shoulders are like rocks.” His face reflected genuine concern. “What’s going on, Anais? From what I heard, y’all had a huge success last night. You should be celebrating, not having a het.”
“Our security’s been compromised, Raulf. We need to figure out what to do.” Anais responded. Raulf didn’t have to ask what she meant. He knew their secrets and they knew his. He understood how important it was to keep that knowledge within their circle.
“Not yet,” V, or Veronique, piped in. V was more than a brunette bombshell and a modern, vampire version of a superhero, she was the logical, serious kick-ass one, hence her allocation to the role of head of security for their business. “It hasn’t been compromised… yet.”
At Raulf’s enquiring gaze, V explained, “Yves has requested or ordered, however you want to look at it,” V contemplated the semantics and then hurried on at Raulf’s impatient expression, “he wants Anais to be the diplomatic assignee in the first formal alliance between the Vampire Council and Witches.”
Raulf was puzzled. For as long as he knew them and that had been his whole life, they’d lived under the radar of the human and supernatural communities. “Why would Yves give that responsibility to Anais? Not that I don’t think that she’s capable of doing whatever he threw her way, I just didn’t think that he realised that she was capable. He’s always been a bit self-righteous and chauvinistic.”
“We can’t figure it out either. There’s more intrigue here than in a drawn out soap opera.” Marie observed, suddenly feeling the need for sustenance, took a long sip of the vurricane, which remained untouched in front of Anais.
“Y’all are over-thinking it.” Miss Suzette added while stirring the cush-cush, a traditional Cajun breakfast of browned cornmeal made the same way her grandmamma used to. The table was set with bowls to dish it up and sugar and milk to have with it. Time for her to rest her old bones and she took her place at the table. She settled down to chat with her girls and her favorite nephew. “Could be that he’s ch
osen our Anais because he thinks that she’s incapable of doing a good job. There’s a reason he wants that witch to see the vampire world through the eyes of a pretty, relatively wealthy butterfly, which is what he thinks Anais is.”
Rose, or Rosella, disagreed, shaking her head and making the red mass of curls, tied up with a bandana in the heat, bob. “Yves is a creep but he doesn’t strike me as nefarious.” Their youngest vampire sister, she was an exotic creation in the way found and made in New Orleans. The Spanish contribution to her legacy was evident in her name only. The rest was all Irish denoted by eyes as green as the hills of her fore-father’s homeland and hair as red as her power that was fire.
“He’s a sexist jackass,” Marie agreed, shaking her head a bit too vigorously. Her voice was unusually high in pitch, an indication that the vurricane was alleviating her stress. “But, he makes logical sense with this move but I don’t think he has the balls to be truly nefarious. Do you think old vampires have balls or prunes?” Marie asked, starting to giggle uncontrollably.
“Okay, let’s replace that vurricane with some coffee.” Sophie felt Marie’s mood start to shift courtesy of the huge amounts of alcohol diluting the blood in the drink and smiled at their youngest sister. Anais and Raulf were chuckling softly, Marie’s giggles were infectious.
Marie’s eyes glowed red when Sophie took the tankard of vurricane away, replacing it with a strong cup of coffee. Temper flashed. She looked as though she would take a bite out of Sophie. Literally.
“Oh stuff it, Marie!” Sophie snapped. “We have to figure out how to deal this. And it is always the one’s you don’t think have the guts that surprise you. If you’d lay off the vurricanes you’d consider that.” It was so unusual for Sophie to lose her temper that Marie calmed down. Fire sizzled out into ash and tempers simmered down. Remarkably, Sophie was still fuming, her color unusually pink. It seems as though they’d switched places, Anais observed.
“I love a good girl fight ladies, and would gladly haul in some buckets of mud and a blow up little pool for y’all to slide around in, pulling each other’s hair and clothes off.” Raulf wanted them to get pissed at him, so they could get over the irritation that they were taking out on each other and work things through. “But I think that y’all are a bit tired after last night and wouldn’t be able to entertain me well enough.” Their look of outrage and irritation was even worth the knock to the back of the head that Miss Suzette gave him.
“Show some respect, boy.” His aunt scolded in the way that reminded him that some things never changed. “We raised you better than that.”
Raulf rubbed the sting away and looked down demurely in mock apology but his twitching lips gave him away. He’d scoped out his aunts position before he teased them and she had been well on the other side of the table, she sure could move fast. “Sorry ladies,” he murmured and sat down in the chair next to Anais.
“Merci, Raulf.” Anais had always been well tuned to him and had figured out what he was doing. “You wade through the excess of oestrogen in this house and remind us to act our age in an infantile way; one of the many reasons why we love you.” She flashed him a grateful smile and turned to the rest of them who were now all sitting attentively at the table, watching the spectacle with interest, as though they hadn’t been part of it. Typical.
They were right; this was not how Yves saw her - level-headed, a manager of a business and the head of her family. He saw fluff and while it had irritated her in the beginning, she’d begun to appreciate his opinion of her later in life as it gave her the distance from him that she needed to live her life freely.
Anais looked at them, smiling in appreciation. “We’re very lucky to have each other and I appreciate the support. Even though Yves has given me the directive, it never once crossed any of your minds that it is only my problem. And I feel the same way about you.” She cleared her throat. “Now, down to business. Looking around at us, I was reminded that we’re not just five vampire women, a Cajun cook and a handsome swamp rat.” Anais grinned at Raulf’s scowl. “Unlike others of our kind, we’ve formed a bond of family and that is our secret weapon. They will not see our powers, they will not see us as a unit and this arrogant ignorance will mean that they’ll underestimate us and our lack of ignorance about them will mean that we can anticipate their moves. Our main concern, the threat, is disclosure. So, we have to keep our powers and Raulf a secret, so let’s discuss that.” Anais saw Marie staring from her to Miss Suzette. Ah, their little one was worried about their mama. Anais’s lips curved at the sentiment. “I don’t think we need to worry about Miss Suzette. Voodoo is a widely accepted eccentricity to ignorant tourists visiting our part of the land and it might peak the witches’ curiosity. Even so, it is not an uncommon practice in these parts and that would suffice as explanation.”
Raulf put his glass of mint iced tea to his mouth and drank deep, Adam’s apple bobbing in rhythm to his gulping; very few people drank liquids elegantly in this heat. He endorsed Anais’ observations. “That’s a fair statement. Voodoo and Catholicism is a way of life here, especially in the bayou.” Raulf looked at his aunt, voodoo beads and a cross swung from her, in sync, spiritually and physically. Miss Suzette was mortal and from a long line of voodoo priestesses who did good, not harm, with their gifts and who believed that voodoo was God’s gift to them help others. Miss Suzette, like her mother, grandmother and maternal predecessors, was considered as family and by default at first, so was Raulf. As long as the vampiresses did no harm, the voodoo women from the family would work for and with them. Raulf, being unusual himself, found solace in the familiarity that was his family in this house. Bayou born and bred knew how to live with the unusual and how to keep secrets; they usually had some of their own anyway.
“And as for me,” Raulf continued, “I’m not going to stay away just because some witch is visiting y’all. That would be cowardice. I can disguise my wolf from them.”
Miss Suzette nodded her agreement. “Your alpha is distinct but you know how to control your power but there’s no harm in adding some additional magick to cover it up.” She looked at her girls next to her who were busy guzzling their own tea. “Rose, V and I will work on something for you after breakfast. I think we’ll need the elements of witches, magick he’s probably familiar with and the magick he knows nothing of, my voodoo.”
“That takes care of Raulf. What do we do about us?” enquired V.
“Same thing,” answered Anais, “we use magick to disguise the witch power in y’all. We can’t explain how we can walk in the sun, need to eat food and basically act human. He’s spent some time with Yves and who knows else, so the best I can come up with is for us to pretend to be normal vampires while they’re staying here. We have the wedding tomorrow to prepare for and execute, which thankfully, despite being crazy-busy, has given us an excuse to delay the witches’ immediate descent onto the plantation so we don’t need to play nocturnal until then. But it also means that we’ll have to rely heavily on Miss Suzette and the human staff for events after that.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Miss Suzette offered consolation. “I’ve seen y’all run so many of these do’s that it won’t be trouble at all to step in for y’all.”
“Great.” Rose acquiesced. “I can do some research to see if I can find out anything about this Conall O’Leary.” Rose would do her part with her mad computer skills. During one of her ‘sabbaticals’ from the plantation she’d pretended to be a computer science student at an Ivy League university and can hack with the best of them. “And since we’re in agreement to use our magick to help us in this situation, maybe Miss Suzette, V and I can reinforce the wards and put up some new ones.” Because one never assumed the use of someone else’s gift, she looked at the other two ladies who both indicated their support.
Anais looked at Marie speculatively, “Marie, do you think we can ask the ghosts for help?” Marie, as a necromancer, had power over the dead (gratefully not the undead) and included their resi
dent ghosts as part of her circle of friends.
“I can do that. You know they can’t fight, right?” Marie enquired. At Anais’ nod she continued, “But they can act as an alarm. They’ve been living happily here for some time and we’ve never asked them for anything so I don’t foresee resistance from them.”
“And that leaves Sophie and I free to figure out how we’re going to run the business without stepping into sunlight and to get the accommodation ready for Conall and his guards.” Anais concluded. “And we’ll see to the final details of tomorrow’s wedding.”
“Wait,” Raulf stopped her as she was about to get up from the table. Concern and protectiveness etched into his face. “What is this about accommodation? Surely you’re not thinking of putting them up? That will definitely let the wolf out of the bag!”
“Of course not! We’re not idiots!” Anais rolled her eyes at him. “We’re putting them in the refurbished slave quarters that we use for unexpected human guests.”
“Cool.” Raulf felt that it was still too close for comfort. “Then there’s space for me here.”
Raulf made it a fact, not a request, irritating Anais. There was an over-abundance of attractive, domineering men ordering her about lately. “And why would you think that?”
“Because I’m movin’ in.” Raulf countered.
“I repeat,” Anais gritted her teeth, let a bit of sarcasm roll out, “why would you think that?”
Realising that cockiness wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he changed tactics. “Look, I know that y’all are powerful vampires and can take care of yourselves. I respect that. I can help though – I’ll be an extra eye looking out for you. You’re like family, I want to help. Please.”