Seeking Serena (The Complete Series Books 1-5): Paranormal Vampire Reverse Harem

by Lily Levi

  I sat back in the cushioned chair and folded my arms. “Was a bottle uncorked just for you?”

  He set the glass on the table between us. “Must you be so bothersome? We find beauty where we can.” He waved his long fingers through the air as if to rewind what had been said. “Was it wise to let her go?” He raised his brows and looked off to the side as if he might find the answer in some shadowed corner of the bar. “She isn’t afraid anymore.”

  I took his glass from the table and swirled what was left of the dark wine. “She’s nonchalant,” I said. “I’m not sure she was ever afraid.”

  “Terrified,” said Ambrose. He took the glass back from me. “But now, no. Not anymore.” He eyed me for a time and I let him. The shadows of the dim bar pulsed around us.

  “Yes,” I said at last, sensing the question on his lips. Did the Master send you too? “He sent me as well, and others, I’m sure.”

  Ambrose broke his gaze from mine. “The Master knows what he does and why he does it,” he said, though he sounded more disappointed than convinced.

  I leaned forward over the table. “It’s a game, brother. He might’ve sent us as one.” I leaned back again. “He might’ve come himself. Why send us at all, in fact?”

  “Does it matter?” said Ambrose, though the words were bitter coming from his mouth. “The end result will be the same: We will know what she is and then she will be scoured from the earth and time will have never known her.”

  I took a long breath and was again glad that the Master did not lower himself to enter our minds. Not that it mattered. He could know us without knowing us at all.

  “Do you not see, Ambrose?” I asked. He did, of course. How could he not? “He views her as he viewed the lycanthropes, the demons, the fae. Fracturing species is a mere sport for him and nothing more. Can we believe this is somehow different?”

  Ambrose shrugged. “You did say it was a game.”

  I grit my teeth against his words. He was impossible. “Does it not bother you?” I asked.

  He considered me for a moment and then gave me another of his gentle shrugs. “Not in the least bit,” he said. “Though she fascinates me as well as I see she does you, if he wants her gone, she will be gone. After we finish our tasks, of course.”

  “The same task,” I reminded him. “And if we are both here, others may be as well.”

  Ambrose stood from the other side of the table and straightened his silver-threaded vest. “Certainly,” he said. “Of that I have no doubt.” He moved around the table and touched his hand gently to my shoulder. “May the best of us win,” he added, leaving me alone at the table with my thoughts and his empty glass of wine.

  I looked over the sparse gathering of people who remained at the bar. I would need to feed again soon, but there was no immediate rush. I watched the way they spoke to one another at the front of the bar, animated and full of a life that they had on such a short loan.

  Of everything there was to pity, I pitied them their short lives the most.

  I stood and placed a large, crisp bill on the table. Ambrose wouldn’t have paid. Others wouldn’t have paid either and I could understand their disregard. Still, short lives deserved certain pleasures. They had so few of them already.

  I passed through the bar and let myself eye the remaining women. On another night I would’ve taken one with me to have at my leisure, but this was not a night like others had been - long and dull of purpose.

  No. I would approach Serena once more and discover a way to keep the others from her until I had finished my reluctant task. If the Master wanted to know what she was, I was the best suited to discover it. Had I not tracked the odd wolves of Madagascar? Had I not studied the coupling habits of heaven’s discarded angels? Who understood better than I how to root out and then stamp out the growth of unwanted species?

  But was Serena Moon of that category or was the Master merely bored? Was it an extension of our game? We were to figure out how she’d survived that night in our mansion and then bring her to him, though he hadn’t specified whether she should be alive or dead when he received her in his parlor once more.

  I stepped out into the heat of the night and noted the young man lying flat against the cement.

  “Such short lives,” I whispered and stepped over his extended arm. “Such terribly short lives.”

  Serena

  I shut the door to the apartment and stood in the entryway shadows. I closed my eyes and listened for the pale breathing so close to me that it almost felt like my own breath.

  “I know you’re there,” I said, unwavering. “But please don’t speak.”

  It was Ambrose or it was Theron. Perhaps it was Cain or Pollux, having followed me from the alley, or maybe it was another of Master Deadmourn’s spawn all together. It didn’t matter who it was, though, not really. They all wanted the same thing, but all I wanted was a single moment in which to think without their twisted words rising through me.

  I’d spent years running from them. I’d bounded across oceans to lose them, though I couldn’t have said if they followed me. I’d broken their game and the Master had assured me in less words that it wasn’t over.

  I’d been afraid when I thought I wasn’t. Ambrose had been right about that, at least. But if they were coming for me, they could have me. I was nothing anymore. I was empty and no number of men could fill me. No blood tasted as good as I remembered. I was tired, bored, and full of waiting.

  I wasn’t Serena Moon anymore, not really. I’d died in Deadmourn Mansion even though I’d walked out alive.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said at last, perhaps feeling that he’d waited long enough. It was another of the thirteen. “Do you remember me?”

  I opened my eyes and searched for his frame in the dark.

  He stepped forward and his pale eyes flickered sadly in the dim light from the kitchen window. “Orlando,” he said. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” I said and moved past him.

  “The others will be looking for you,” he said and followed me into the hot, moonlit bedroom.

  I shrugged, sat, and crossed my legs on the bed and took out another cigarette. “Is that so?” I said. “What news.”

  He stared at me. “They’ve found you already, then.”

  “Sure have,” I said, flicking the ash to the floor. “But looks like you’re the only one with me now.” I inhaled the smoke slowly and then exhaled it out towards him. “Look,” I said “I knew you were coming for me. I’ve known it. So now you’re here, most of you, anyway. I get the feeling you want to kill me, but none of you are doing it.” I took another long drag from the cigarette. “So why don’t you tell me what the hell your issue is.”

  Orlando reached out his hand for my cigarette.

  I eyed him and then gave it to him. I lit another.

  “Thanks,” he said and we smoked quietly for a time. He eyed me with a softness that irked me, with a kind of care that shouldn’t belong to him or anyone like him.

  “They don’t want to kill you,” he said, breaking the stillness between us. “Not yet, that is. The truth is, you weren’t supposed to survive that night. We bit you. We ate you. Thirteen of us, can you imagine? Your blood courses through my veins even now.”

  Can you imagine?

  Of course I could imagine. I was there.

  I watched him and held my tongue against the hateful words that wanted so desperately to fly out from my mouth and sting him wherever they could.

  “Even the Master didn’t foresee it.” His brow shifted at his own words. “Or perhaps he did. Either way, you’re not… you’re not…”

  “Supposed to be alive,” I finished for him. “I know. You think I don’t know that?”

  “You’re not a vampire, or you are, but you’re something else, too,” he said. “Or alive, that’s right, you’re certainly not supposed to be alive.”

  I uncrossed my legs and set my eyes on the closet door behind him. “I’m a vampire, honey, trust
me.”

  He shook his head at me. “A different breed, perhaps, but not like the rest. The Master, he wants to know what you are and I believe he wants what you carry.” He dropped his shoulders, as though he’d given up some great secret.

  I flicked the cigarette and chewed thoughtfully on my fingernail. “And pray tell,” I said, dropping my hand. “What do I ‘carry’?”

  Not wasting a moment, Orlando knelt in front of me and took my hand in his. “You must believe that it’s very possible that you carry our child. Mine perhaps, or another’s, but it’s there all the same.”

  I laughed so loud and so freely that he was forced to drop my hand and move back to his feet. It was true that vampiric gestation took a modicum of years and so it was possible that I’d conceived a child that night in the mansion with them, blindfolded as I was, but the mere thought of it was ludicrous at best.

  “I doubt that,” I said, catching my breath. Still, I found myself centering my attention away from him and down into my belly. If I truly were carrying their spawn, it might explain the incessant hunger. What mother, sister, or friend did I have to share the aches of an impending child with?

  Orlando took up the end of his cigarette again. “I’ve been around longer than you have or will ever be, particularly if you refuse to listen. I know what I know because I watch and I listen. You are almost certainly with child. I can sense it.”

  I folded my legs again. “So what do you want? My belly?”

  He shook his head at me, seemingly exhausted. “It’s not what I want. It’s what they want. They want to know why you’re still alive but they’re not going to kill you to figure it out.” He moved away from me and dropped the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray at the head of the bed. “The Master is also going to want the child. He knows it’s there. He knows most things.”

  I stood up from the foot of the bed. “I don’t believe you,” I said, but the truth was that I couldn’t help but wonder. Why would Master Deadmourn let me go along with my decrepit life if there weren’t some other plan for me or something more that I might offer him?

  “You don’t have to believe me,” he said, stepping closer. “But whether you do or don’t won’t change what will happen.”

  I forced my mind up from my belly and back to him. “Let me get this straight. I survive that night in Deadmourn Mansion and your tradition is broken.”

  “Tradition,” he said. “Yes.”

  “And now, three years later, the Master has sent his fools to collect what he believes is rightfully his and maybe even yours.” I considered my own words. “And on top of this, he believes I’m not quite a vampire, that I’m something else, and he wants to know what that something else is before he lets you kill me, is that it?”

  “Yes,” he said, softly, sadly.

  I laughed again. “Three years,” I said. “Three fucking years of waiting for you, for all of you. Torture, but ah, here we are at long last, aren’t we?”

  Orlando frowned at this. “The Master carries a distorted view of time, as you can imagine, though not as distorted as it is for us.”

  I lit another cigarette and the shaking of my hands surprised me. “Don’t mind me,” I mumbled, cigarette between my lips. “I’m just hunted by thirteen spawn heirs to the dark throne and the master of the goddamn underworld. Oh, and apparently I’m pregnant, which is insane, but all right, I’ll give it to you. It’s possible.”

  Orlando folded his pale hands in front of him and rocked back on his heels. “I’m not hunting you, Serena, if that’s what you think.”

  I blew a cloud of thick smoke between us. “Then what are you doing here?”

  He opened his palms to me in the same way Ambrose had. “I’m here to save you.” His pale eyes pulsed with a strange passion that I hadn’t noticed before. “Let me save you, Serena. Let me try. I’m not as strong as the others. I haven’t fed as much as they have. When the time comes to choose a new master, I’m not sure how long I’ll survive against them. I’m strong, but they’re stronger. Much stronger. But I want to try to help you. I don’t want to have lived for nothing. And if you are carrying my child, though the odds are small, I would do anything for it. For you.”

  I stood from the bed and moved from the bedroom into the unlit kitchen. “You’re desperate for some meaning in your long, impossibly damned life,” I said. “That’s all.” I reached for the bottle of vodka in the top cupboard, but my fingers only grazed the glass.

  Orlando stepped forward and pulled it down for me. He pressed the bottle into my hands and we held it together, face to face. “Aren’t we all?” he asked.

  I examined his face through the thin shadows, gaunt and handsome as it was. “Looking for meaning?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, raising a hand to my cheek. His smile spread as if he’d been on the verge of some terrible joke. “Damned.”

  Orlando

  I kissed her. I couldn’t help myself from doing it and why should I have? She was the epitome of all things unholy and forbidden, though it was obvious she didn’t know this about herself. She didn’t know why she survived that night with us - oh, how we feasted - and her curiosity fell wildly short.

  It was strange. She’d resigned herself to her fate when she came to us all those years ago, and having escaped it, she’d resigned herself yet again. It almost seemed that she was loathe to take control of her long, dark life.

  I pushed my tongue into her sweet mouth and was not surprised when she took it. She was lonely, exhausted, unfulfilled by her short dalliances with worthless mortal men, but most of all, Serena Moon was confused.

  I moved my hands from the bottle of vodka just as she did the same. It shattered against the cheap linoleum floor at our feet and drew a reclined groan from Serena’s mouth and into my throat.

  I pulled away from her. “I’ll buy you a thousand more bottles of that vile piss,” I said and pressed my hands against either side of her face to keep her from looking down and away from me. “Not that you should be having it at all.”

  Pregnant. It was difficult to tell if she believed me, but she would be wise to discard my words. She wouldn’t, of course. The way she lapped her tongue against mine told me she wanted what I said to be true. If only Ambrose had the foresight to think of something so clever. I was almost surprised that he hadn’t.

  He’d been near her, of course. I could still smell him, blood oranges and a strange twist of dead earth. I could only hope that he watched me take what we all wanted. He craved her as much as the rest of us, perhaps more, and it was terribly sweet to know he would lose to me in more ways that one.

  I ran my fingers up through her dark, knotted hair and pressed my mouth harder onto hers. She was so entirely delectable, and tasted even better than I remembered.

  Master Deadmourn wanted her and I would deliver her. I liked to dream that he would give her to me as my ragdoll to feast on for eternity, but who could say? His intentions were as shaded from us as was most else about him, but for all his power and age, he couldn’t hope to hide everything from us - or at least not from me.

  Discover what she is. Bring her to me.

  And the unsaid: Tread lightly around your brothers.

  It was a game. He didn’t care what she was, he only wanted to watch us stalk her and compete with one another for an answer that didn’t have any value. What did it matter what she was? She’d survived us, so she was resilient if anything, but even resilience dies.

  No, the true prize would be had in returning her to him.

  But not forcefully. He wouldn’t like that. The Master was a creature of ancient charm. He wanted to see who could play the game as well as he could himself, were he still one of us.

  Serena had ruined our game before and made us seem weak. I suspected this was the Master’s coy way of letting us redeem ourselves, that was all.

  Nothing more and nothing less.

  I nuzzled my face into her neck and let my teeth graze the skin where I had bitten her that ni
ght. My body clamoured to bite her again and taste her sweet, life-giving blood, better than the blood of any mortal.

  But I wouldn’t let myself, not yet. I needed her trust more than anything else. I would walk with her, hand-in-hand, up through the gates of Deadmourn Mansion and straight into the Master’s parlor where she would sit as prettily as the night she’d first arrived.

  It would be a masterful show.

  She moved her mouth up to my ear and drew me back into the kitchen with her.

  “Fuck me,” she growled.

  I needed no more. I lifted her up and she wrapped her long legs around me. I could instantly feel her heated need through the tight crotch of her pants.

  “You want it,” I said. “Oh, you really fucking want it.”

  She pressed her teeth to my neck and I gave her the moan she was searching for.

  “Bite me,” I dared her. “Go on, taste me. You think you can hurt me? You can’t.”

  She wasted no time in slicing her razored teeth into my skin. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let a woman bite me in sport and the slick feel of my own blood leaving my veins to rush into a wet, wanting mouth set my cold body aflame.

  “You’re mine,” I growled, even as she drank. It didn’t matter how much she feasted. She would be destroyed either way.

  She released her teeth from my neck and the pressure eased where she had bitten through my skin so eagerly. “Then take me if I’m yours,” she said.

  She didn’t need to ask a third time.

  I moved her back into the dingy bedroom and dropped her down onto the bed.

  Her eyes glowered up at me and I wasted no time in lowering myself between her legs. I undid her black belt and leather pants with the swift skill that could only be had after a lifetime of fucking. I’d had them all, but Serena was the only one I wanted again. How could I resist her?

  I pressed my mouth into the sweet spot between her thighs. They quivered at the touch of my tongue against her and my own need grew.

  “Yes,” she moaned.

  I would have her. She would be mine in more ways than one, although by the desperate moans that escaped her lips, she already was.