“What? Ves, what are you going to do?”
“You’re not going to fucking Monte Carlo this time. Pack. A. Bag.” He shut the door between them and bellowed for Eddie.
Eddie wasn’t far. He must have been loitering just out of sight, knowing Ves would want him.
“Yes, boss?”
“I’m sorry to do this to you, but I need you to take her and go to the new house. Put her to work. I don’t give a shit what you make her do. Dig trenches, plaster ceilings. Whatever’s involved in getting the new place habitable.”
“Trenches, boss?” The wry tilt to Eddie’s lips had Ves barking out a laugh and rubbing an exasperated hand over his face.
“Fuck if I know what’s needed to make a place like that liveable.” He assessed Eddie and his complete lack of surprise. “You already knew I was going to ask this, didn’t you?”
“I suspected. Things with her were going to come to a head sooner or later. She’s been getting worse the last couple of years.”
“I can hear you,” Annette screamed at the pair of them from behind the shut door to her room. Something crashed into the door.
“Get packing, Annette, or you’ll go without anything,” Ves called back, struggling with his temper. He looked at Eddie apologetically.
Eddie waved the look off. “Don’t worry. I’ll manage.”
The door flew open behind Ves. “You won’t be managing me.” Her scornful gaze snapped to Ves. “Yeah, yeah. I’m packing,” she said and slammed the door again.
Ves sighed. “You go pack. I’ll watch over her until you’re ready to go.”
As much as he wanted to tan his sister’s behind, Ves couldn’t help the hefty measure of guilt mixed in with his anger. If he’d seen what was going on. If he’d said something to their parents sooner, maybe Annette wouldn’t be the way she was. But that was too many years ago to be able to change now, and he had to deal with things as the way they were.
Gods, Raff. I wish… A powerful urge to simply hold his mate and find peace in Raff’s arms swept through him.
A few more bangs and crashes within Annette’s room demanded his attention. Ves sighed and dry-scrubbed his face again, raking his fingers through his hair. Then he got his game face on and opened the door.
“There’s no one who’s going to pick up after you when you leave.”
Annette glared at him and stalked over to the bookcase and continued to glare at him pointedly while she righted it, collected the books from around the room, and returned them to the shelves. A couple were old and shed pages drifted on the floor. She picked them up and stacked them in a loose sheaf, leaving them on her dressing table. She shot him evil looks every so often as she fished a bag out of her walk-in wardrobe and began packing.
Chapter Five
Raff
“For fuck’s sake.” The phrase was fast becoming a favourite of Raff’s. Not so much that he liked it, but it was coming from him with increasing frequency. He sat on the roof of one of the outbuildings of the new coven house watching the goings-on in disbelief.
“Annie, come on. Ves sent you up here to work, not harass Allan’s staff. Please, do what he asked,” Eddie pleaded. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were relaxed, so it didn’t look like Annie was getting to him all that much.
“My brother is coven leader. You think I’m going to lug beams of wood, pots of paint, and whatever else around like a drone? You can think again,” she sneered. Annie’s back was to Raff, but he could hear every drop of disdain she poured into her words in her very loud voice. Vampire hearing wasn’t needed.
“I think that’s exactly what your coven leader brother sent you up here to do. You caused too much upset at home, so he sent you here to work and me to watch over you and make sure you didn’t cause any problems up here.”
“You think you’re my babysitter? Fuck that. I’m out of here.”
Raff watched for another few minutes while Eddie cajoled, pleaded, and outright begged Annie to “just do what she was supposed to do,” and get nowhere for his trouble. As Annie turned to stalk off down the long driveway, Raff jumped from one level of the roof, down to the next, then on down to the ground, and took the couple of paces away from the building necessary to bring him into her path.
“Another of my brother’s minions here to persuade me into whatever? Well, you can get out of my way because I’m leaving.” Annie looked down her very beautiful nose at Raff, which was a nice trick seeing as she was several inches shorter than he even in heels. She was gorgeous. Long black lashes surrounded eyes so dark brown they appeared black, too. The last time he’d seen her, her hair had been a very well dyed blond. Now it was a rich chestnut red, almost as intense in colour as the wolf-shifter Jase’s hair, only Jase’s was real.
“What’s the matter, Annie? Don’t recognise me? I’ll give you a hint. I’ll never be one of Ves’s minions.” Raff ignored the tiny voice inside him which asked if he was ever planning on being anything to Ves at all.
Annie stilled. “So, you do remember his name. Well, well, well. And there I thought you had no interest in anything to do with us or our coven.”
“No interest in being his mate and no interest in the coven are very different things, especially when the coven is moving so close to my pack.”
She cocked her head. “Feeling territorial?”
“Not especially. More protective. I’ve met you before, remember.”
“Oh? And you think I’m going to cause problems for your pretty little pack?” She smiled, teeth flashing white between bloodred lips.
“I think you cause problems everywhere you go. Why else would he send you up here to…how did you put it? Lug beams of wood, pots of paint, and whatever else around like a drone. Want to hear something else I think?”
“What?”
Raff grinned, though there was no humour in it, only intent. “I think you’re going to get on and do it. You’ve been coddled enough. Everyone gives in to you because you’re Ves’s sister and you’ll throw a bitch-fit if they don’t. Well, bitch away, because I’m not giving in. You’re going to pick up that lumber you were pointed at and take it where you were told.”
“Not a chance.” Annie shifted her weight on the balls of her feet, moving just enough for Raff to see she was readying herself for a fight.
“Is the princess worried about breaking a nail?”
Annie hissed, baring the fangs her teeth had lengthened into. “Says the pretty boy.”
“Bring it, princess.”
Annie leapt at him. Raff knocked her aside easily, grabbed her as he did so, and flung her to the ground. She was up and at him again before he could blink, but he swept her legs out from under her, knocking her flying. Again, she was up and at him. He let things continue in the same vein for a couple of minutes before he decided enough was enough and, following her to the ground, pinned her in place. She struggled underneath him, snarling and spitting like an angry cat.
“Are you done?”
“Fine,” she said, going limp. The moment he relaxed his hold, she threw him off, jumped up, and ran.
Raff sighed, then jumped up himself and raced after her. Taking her down again, this time he was careful to keep a hold of her arm when she sagged under him. “Nice try. You’re gonna do it if I have to stand over you and make you pick up every damn item. I’m not having you disrupt the people here trying to do honest work. They’re good people. People you could learn a lot from. Now get your arse up and get to work.” As he said the last words, he hauled her to her feet and stared blandly back into the venomous glare she tried to give him.
It wasn’t until Annie yanked her arm from his grip and stomped in the direction of the truck piled high with lumber and metal poles that Raff realised the rest of the work going on had come to a halt and he and Annie had acquired an audience.
Eddie had pulled his phone out. He tapped the screen, then put the phone to his ear just as Annie and Raff passed him. Raff shot him a death glare to
rival the one Annie had attempted on him. “Don’t you dare tell Ves about this.”
“What are you all standing around for? Get back to work,” Sol’s voice called from a doorway somewhere off to the left. Raff ignored him, not looking away from Eddie.
“Oh, hey, boss man. Yeah, things are fine here.” Raff held Eddie’s gaze while the other man talked into the phone. “No, no problems. No, just called to check in. No, she’s behaving.” Ahead of Raff, Annie hissed. Raff imagined himself aiming a kick at her backside and sending her back onto the gravel. “No, nothing. Okay, boss. Yup, we’ll see you in a few days.” Eddie hung up. Raff looked away and heard Eddie exhale as he did so. “Why are you doing this if you don’t want him to know about it?”
“I’m not doing it to help him out.” Raff gestured at the people who were now getting on with their jobs again. “Like I said to her, these are good people. They work hard. They don’t need a spoiled bitch disrupting things and getting in the way.”
“Nice work, by the way.”
“She’s a vampire, same as us. She’s not going to break from a bit of a scrap. If she won’t work, she needs to be made to. She gets away with far too much.”
Eddie smiled ruefully. “I guess we got in the habit of coddling her. Thank you for…not.”
“Why does she do it? Acting out because of something or spoiled for far too long?”
“Personally, I think she’s bored and entitled, and Ves has gotten used to giving in to her whims to avoid trouble. She’s been that way as long as I’ve known her. Admittedly she’s got worse in the last um…three years.”
That was since he had met Ves. Raff pushed the ever-present thoughts of Ves to the back of his mind once more. Annie had failed to emerge back around from the side of the building where she had taken the first lot of metal poles. “Well, whatever it is, I’m not going to let her get away with it here. I’ll see you later.” He set off at a jog to see where she had gotten to.
* * * *
A couple of hours later, Raff headed back to Blue Gables. He had the night shift on watch, something he shared that evening with someone he hadn’t expected.
“Evening, Little Bit. What are you doing here?”
Kedi glanced up. He pushed the folder he’d been reading farther back on the desk. It was open about a third of the way through the sizable chunk of paper it contained. “Hey, Raff. Andre wanted to take Bradley out for an extra run, so he asked around to see if anyone would take his shift here.”
Raff wondered how to pose his next question. “And you said yes? You don’t normally…”
“No. I’m not looking for a full-time job here, but I’m nearly twenty now, and I figured I should start taking the odd shift like the rest of the adults in the pack. I want to know how all the pack security works. Alerts I should know, that kinda thing. He said I’d be okay just sitting here and watching the camera feeds and reading this until he got back, or you arrived.” That was probably more words than Raff had heard the kid say in all the three years he’d known him.
Raff briefly wondered why Andre hadn’t said anything to him. They usually worked closely together, with Andre being so protective. Having Andre hover over him drove Raff nuts half the time, and the rest he never wanted to be out of the other vampire’s sight. Like Kedi, Raff had things he’d rather forget about and never wanted to risk them happening again.
“Okay then, let’s get started.”
He spent a couple of hours showing Kedi the ropes and taking him along on the usual security sweeps he had to do. Andre appeared at one point, and Raff waved him back out to go spend some more time with his mate.
“Hey, Raff?”
“Yeah?”
They had just completed the latest round and were in the kitchen. Kedi was waiting on the kettle, and Raff had pulled his mug out of the warmer. Kedi eyed Raff’s mug with its dark red contents and made a face.
“Are we gonna need that for the kids?”
“Come again?”
“The vampire kids, at the school. I’ve been helping out there sometimes, with Charlie, since I completed my A levels.”
“What vampire kids? I didn’t think there were any in Ves’s coven.” Raff led the way back to the security office as they talked. They both sat, and Raff checked through the monitors.
“I don’t think there are any now, but apparently one of the women in the coven is pregnant, and there’s a family who applied to join. They have a boy who’s nearly ten.”
“Oh. Well, no. We go through…vampire puberty I guess, sometime in our mid to late teens. A short while after regular puberty. We start needing to drink blood and get increasingly sensitive to sunlight until we can’t go out in it at all. Our senses and strength and stuff all increase then, too. Until then, we’re pretty much human.”
“But, I’ve seen you out in the daytime.”
“When we get to around a hundred, we start being able to go out in it again. Even before that, it’s not like we’re going to spontaneously combust if a single ray hits us, it just hurts. Like, a lot. It still isn’t fantastic being in direct sun now, but it’s more uncomfortable than truly painful. If we’re injured or haven’t had enough blood lately, it’s worse.”
“Huh. So, will the vamp kids be going to a regular secondary school?”
“Probably not. We tend to be homeschooled once we reach secondary school age. We’re even more varied in age when we go through our change than shifters having their first shift. It would be hard to dodge all the questions that would crop up about where the kid had disappeared to, why they could no longer see their friends, why those friends could no longer come over. Jess’s school is already set up, so we won’t have to go through all the usual setup with the local educational authority and as a bonus, any friendships made while they’re there will be able to continue once they start the change. It’ll be good to be able to send them to Jess’s place for the time they would be at primary school and to be around all the shifter children.” Raff smiled to himself, remembering some of the havoc he and his friends had created. “Vamp kids are few and usually far between. It isn’t common for us to have many peers. The six of us were lucky to have each other.” A pang went through him at the thought of the three who were no longer with them.
“I didn’t have any friends growing up. Just me and my sisters.”
That was the first time Raff had heard anything about Kedi having a sister, let alone more than one. As far as he knew, Kedi never spoke of his past. “Hmmm?” He didn’t want to push the boy for fear of making him withdraw again.
Kedi stared down at his mug without really seeing it, lifting the tea bag by its tag, dunking it up and down into the small amount of liquid that was left. “Yeah, we had each other though. Mum and Dad—” His voice broke on the last word. He cleared his throat and began again. “Mum and Dad were on the road a lot. We had tutors who went with us when we were on the road with them and official guardians when we stayed home. When Mum and Dad died, the estate paid for the tutors and other people to look after us. Mum’s sister came to live with us, but she wasn’t all that interested. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“Do you want to find out?” Estate? Tutors? Why had his parents travelled so much?
“Ha! Do I? I’ve spent the last three years trying to figure that out. My sisters were killed that night, and Mum and Dad were gone months before I was taken. Aunt Tina always resented Mum and never let me or the girls forget it.”
“She resented her?” Something started niggling at Raff, ringing a bell in the back of his brain.
“Mum was better than Aunt Tina at…pretty much everything. Mum’s parents didn’t want either of them going into music. They were why she let me and my sisters learn whatever instruments we wanted from a young age. Aunt Tina wanted to sing, too, but she didn’t have Mum’s talent. Mum met Dad on the road in the early days of her career, and Aunt Tina was jealous of that, too. Then when she moved in, she took it out on us, stopping our lessons, saying we s
hould concentrate on our studies.” Kedi was still playing with the tea bag.
Raff’s mind churned, trying to remember whatever it was that bugged him. “Did you keep practising in private?”
“Mum would have had a fit if she knew what our aunt had done. It would have been worse if she found out we stopped practising altogether. Of course, we kept going. Well, Calli and I did. Chori was only seven when Mum and Dad died. She didn’t have the nerve to stand up to Aunt Tina. Then a few months later, she was dead. I don’t know if she would have ever taken it up again.”
Something clicked. “Wait. Calli and Chori. Calliope and Terpsichore? Holy shit! Kediah Winter?”
“Kediah Wyndham. But, yes. I used to be.”
“Holy…shit…” Raff repeated, shaking his head. “Does Perry know? Who you really are? Didn’t they have to know your real name to adopt you?”
Awareness flooded Kedi’s face, quickly followed by terror, and he snapped his head up to look at Raff. “No. Please, you can’t tell him. Not even Charlie knows. I gave them a different name, and Daniel worked a bit of tech magic and made it look official, but it never went through the courts like it should. Please, you can’t say anything.”
“Hey, relax. I’d never break a confidence, not unless someone was in danger, and this endangers no one. Although, you might consider telling them yourself at some point. You’re over eighteen now. It’s not like you could get taken away.”
Kedi sagged back into his chair. “I suppose.” He sighed. “Thank you. Why did I tell you all that?”
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone you don’t know all that well?” Raff shrugged. Perry had said the same thing once when they’d been talking.
“Yeah. Well, you’re pretty easy to talk to. Thanks for listening, anyway. It felt good to tell someone, get it all off my chest, you know?”
“Anytime, Kedi. And you’re welcome.”
They didn’t talk much for the rest of the shift, but Raff had a lot to think about. Kedi seemed lighter, and it had felt good to be able to help him, even if all he’d done was lend the boy an ear. It was hard to believe the boy he had known for a few years now was Kediah Winter, oldest child of married megastars Brant Winter and Cherry Lopez. There wouldn’t be many people world-wide who didn’t know their story. Something else was nibbling at the back of Raff’s brain, but he had other things to think about.
Trusting His Vampire Lord Page 4