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

by Lily Levi

  “Moon,” said Amun, moving towards the only opening in the cave and back through the corridor, his voice echoing against the rocks. If I made it out, I would find him again. He wouldn’t go far, but he would be safe. At least that is what I hoped and hope, fragile thing as it was, was the only thing I had anymore.

  Cain dropped his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have not been myself. I have not been myself for a long time, but can you remember me? From before, from long ago?” He spoke so eloquently that it nearly threw the fear from my shoulders, but no matter what words he chose to use, he would always be Cain.

  I gave him a hateful smile. “I remember the alley,” I said and balled my fists at the memory, unable to help myself. “I remember you as much as I’d like to forget you, but you won’t let me do it. None of you will.”

  He frowned at me and folded his hands in front of him. “I had commands,” he said.

  I crossed my arms and wished that he would’ve stepped closer to me and away from the cavern’s opening. As it stood, there was no safe way around him. “And what are your commands now?” I spat.

  “There aren’t any.” He unclasped his hands. “Not anymore, at least. Not right now. And so I’m here. To protect you.”

  I laughed at him. “Protect me? I’ve had enough of your protection - all of you.”

  “They want to hurt you, Serena.”

  I wanted nothing more than to scream at his words. Did he think I didn’t know that? There hadn’t been a day in my long life since the moment I realized what I was and what it meant that I didn’t understand they wanted to hurt me - even if I let myself pretend it wasn’t true - and he was one of them.

  “It’s a sick joke,” I said, instinctively reaching into my pocket for a cigarette, but the water would’ve ruined them. I dropped my hands to my side and searched what I could see of the cave behind him. I would need to find Amun again. It had been stupid to let him go.

  “You’re not here to kill me,” I said, suddenly exasperated and unwittingly feeling that small glimpse of hope that had led me to the very spot where I stood now. It was foolish and I hated myself for it, but it couldn’t be helped. What if he was telling the truth?

  His face softened further and his eyes glowed with a gentleness that didn’t seem to belong to him. “No,” he said. “I’m not here to kill you.”

  Someone laughed from the narrow cavern behind him and it wasn’t Amun.

  Cain turned just as four tall frames filled the dark space.

  “But we are,” said one of the figures.

  “Yes,” said another. “We are.” He stepped into the light of the grotto. I hardly recognized him, though if someone were to tell me that he had been there at the Deadmourn Mansion three years ago, I would not have questioned it.

  “Does this belong to you?” said a third. I recognized him vaguely from that fated night, though his name escaped me. He stepped into the frozen light and held Amun up by his shoulders for me to see.

  My mistake in letting him go plummeted down into the pit of my stomach. I had thought I was sending him off to safety in the dark of the cave.

  His white eyes rounded through his skull. “Moon!” he screamed, frantically reaching both arms out for me. “Moon!”

  Zane

  Darius walked with me in lockstep over the wet rocks and against the cliffside.“Do you ever wonder about us?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Never.” And that was the truth. Our affair had been short and never extended beyond silk sheets and the kind of biting that only a dark kind of passion allows. I had never thought much of a person or a creature after I was finished with them and they with me. I had never loved and I had never wanted to.

  “Besides,” I added, not turning to see his face as we walked. “You’re Nikolai’s pet now.”

  “Not nice, Zane,” he said, but the tone of his voice told me that he thought it was very nice indeed.

  A boy’s screams wailed out across the breaking waves.

  I rushed forward without needing to think about what should be done. If I had never loved, I certainly cared, albeit reluctantly.

  I bound over the rocks with renewed strength, Darius at my heels. I hadn’t known the boy long before he’d died, but his dry petulance had reminded me much of myself from when I had been a small thing like him - small, with a father of my own who had loved me in his way, in a warm home that had never housed my vampiric mother. He had wanted me to grow up under normal circumstances and to be like him.

  And I had wanted the boy to live. But he’d died. Where I would’ve put him to rest, Serena had brought him back. I’d thought her foolish for it, of course. Grave walkers were nothing more than what their name implied, but there was something different about the boy. He could speak in as much as he could be expected to speak; and his motor reflexes went beyond walking. He was no longer the same strange boy in a raincoat on a plane, but I had to wonder if there wasn’t something left of him behind those white eyes.

  Serena had given me something to care aboutm and as much as I wanted to despise her for it, I couldn’t manage the bitterness it required. She was something else, truly. Perhaps something in her blood had changed the boy beyond a grave walker, a mere zombie. Perhaps not. Who was to say? But she’d given me something without knowing it and I wasn’t about to lose it.

  “There! There!” Darius yelled and I immediately saw what he saw.

  I made a headlong rush for the small opening in the side of the cliff.

  “Moon!” The echoes of the boy’s wails reached back out to me. Was it how my father had felt three hundred years ago when I’d screamed out for him beneath the Master’s grip? Did his ghost still remember the soft red glow of that twilight as well as I did?

  I rushed into the dark mouth of the cave without slowing.

  “Moon!” he cried, so close.

  How badly I wanted to yell out his name, not Amun, but the name his own parents had given him. I regretted not knowing and not asking. I hadn’t cared at the time.

  The cave grew darker the further we went and I was forced to slow down.

  “Nikolai is coming,” Darius said, clapping behind me. “I can feel him, oh yes, I can feel him, help is on the way-way-way. Are you jealous, my sweet Zane?”

  “Shut up,” I growled, picking my way between the shadowed rocks. “Listen.”

  Their voices carried back to us and Serena’s was not the least of them.

  “Drop him!” Serena’s demand echoed against the rocks and pushed me faster through the darkness.

  “Oh!” Darius cried out and I was almost glad to hear the sound of his stumbling.

  I left him and pressed my hand against the side of the cave wall to help guide me forward even as light entered the passageway once more.

  “Moon!” cried the boy. He was so close, so close.

  The rock corridor edged to the left and I followed it swiftly to its end where it opened out into a giant grotto, wet, cold, and full of what I had hoped I wouldn’t see.

  With their backs to me and their gaze on Serena, she met my eyes swiftly and then looked away, likely not wanting to give me away to them, which was just as well. They were five to my one.

  Mathias held the boy up by his shoulders and it took all of my willpower to stop from attacking him, but he wasn’t alone. Desmond, Felix, and Ivan formed an arc against Cain who was larger and stronger than any of them.

  Felix lunged at him and then lunged back. The others did the same, taunting him as if in swordplay, though he stood with his back to them, seemingly unafraid. “Turn on us, will you,” said Felix. “What were your plans, brother? Run away with Serena and start a family?”

  Ivan cackled. “Did you not think we would come looking for you?”

  “Cross us,” Desmond said. “And we cross you.”

  Cain stood still. “A pack of wolves to kill a lion,” he said with a quiet, determined poise that I had never once heard in his voice before.

  “Yes,” said Ma
thias, still holding the boy. “But the lion still dies.”

  Cain turned his head to Serena. “And which wolf will kill the lamb?” He moved with such swiftness between them and Serena that it took a moment to register what had happened. He looked at me, still standing in the archway of the cave.

  Are you on my side? His pale eyes shone and I knew it was what he wished he could ask.

  I gave him a quick nod and he looked away. I would not risk Cain’s wrath, as strong as he was, but I could not have imagined that he would be one to protect Serena. It was unfathomable. When she’d left the mansion that night, he’d been the first to salivate for more of her blood - and now?

  “Zane,” Darius whispered behind me.

  I pushed my hand against the front of his hard body to stop him from entering the open cavern.

  Ivan laughed at Cain’s question of the wolf and the boy wailed out again. I took the opportunity to turn back to Darius.

  “Go,” I whispered beneath my breath. “Find Ambrose.”

  “And Nikolai,” he breathed as if the name had intoxicated him upon saying it.

  I pushed back against him. “Go, now. Hurry.”

  Relief swept me as he turned to leave without another word. As insane as he was, he would know the seriousness of it. It was his own life in the balance - and Nikolai’s too. If they killed Serena, the game was through and so were we.

  I pressed my hand against the rocks and desperately wished that the others were further away from the opening where I stood. I might’ve made a run into the grotto and grabbed Serena from behind Cain. Mathias would’ve dropped the boy, forgetting him altogether in favor of the ultimate prize.

  Ivan took a single step forward towards Cain and the others followed. “You left us before you could hear our finalized agreement,” he said.

  Cain only stared at them, but even from so far back I could see how the cogs turned in his eyes. He was calculating who to kill first and how to do it without getting killed himself. I knew the look well. We’d hunted together when we were younger, but that was before he’d lost himself in violent rapture to the Master’s will.

  “We’ll destroy her together,” Ivan continued. “As one. A middle ground, if you will. No more Serena, no more game. The four of us will have the throne if it works.”

  “It would’ve been five if you’d followed your better senses,” Mathias said. The boy struggled in his arms and he shook him to make him stop. “By and by, what are you doing with this thing?”

  “He’s nothing to you,” said Serena, breaking her silence. “Let him go.”

  Cain extended his arm in front of her to keep her from moving any closer to the others.

  “Move, Cain,” said Ivan. “Step aside and we’ll let you join us, how does that sound?”

  Cain stared down at him. “No,” he said, his voice deep and dark. He would not be moved.

  I held my hand out in front of me as a signal for him to continue to stay put and hoped that he would understand why.

  He glanced briefly at me.

  Wait, I mouthed, though even as I said it a new, heavy thought entered my heart.

  I could join them if they’d let me. They would need me when the others came. I could kill her just as well as any of them. The game would end. The Master would force the others to their knees in front of me. It would finally be done. But did I want to take the Master’s place? I didn’t want to die, surely, but did I want to rule? It was something I had not considered. The day had seemed so far away that he would decide to leave the earth and one of his heirs should take his place.

  But now here it was. And here we were.

  “Moon!” cried the boy. He reached out for her and my heart ached with a new sharpness at the sight of it. He was a child, reaching for his mother; he was just like me, reaching for my father.

  No, I would not kill the thing he loved. I would save her and I would save him, grave walker or not.

  When the plane went down, I’d failed him.

  I would not fail him again.

  Amun

  There is no ‘I’ that sees. No eye that sees. There is no ‘I’. No eyes to see. I can’t see things like I used to, but I see them all the same.

  He shakes me like I am nothing and there is an ‘I’. I’m a boy. I was a boy, too. I’m older now and younger, too. I always knew I would be this way, but I hadn’t known how it would feel.

  Bad - it feels bad.

  I howl at the moon. I yell for her.

  She looks at me and says without saying that she wants to cry because she’s tired and doesn’t want to play anymore. She wants to cry because she doesn’t have a cigarette. She wants to cry because she almost always loves someone but then she can’t.

  She doesn’t know what I know.

  Her love blossoms like a black rose. Others have black roses for her too, but they are bad things. Bad things love her because she is a bad thing, too.

  She is a very bad thing but she tries hard not to be bad. I am supposed to tell her to try harder. She is supposed to let them kill her, it doesn’t matter who. I have listened to the demon Adramelech and I have seen what happens when she lives.

  Things fall apart. Her head must go from her body for the good of all things.

  Serena, lamb of the world, you must die.

  Serena

  I stood still, unsure of where to go or what to say, or if there was anything to be done at all. I was outnumbered and I always had been.

  My mind jumped to Ambrose with Nikolai and the lesser vampires. The thought of him hurt or dead pained me more sharply than I’d expected. If drinking his blood had allowed me to sense him wherever he was, I might’ve known if he was dead or alive. But I couldn’t sense things the same way that they could.

  And Theron, what of him? I hadn’t waited to find out. The opportunities to escape them - any of them - had been few and far between. I’d taken the chance when it flashed in front of me and I hadn’t thought twice about it.

  But I would know where they were soon enough. Darius’s happy yells bounded all about us. They were coming. All of them.

  “The brigade! The brigade!” Darius’s cry hit against the rocks. “A million of us and more!” I could hear the shuffling of their feet in the dark beyond the grotto. Their light breathing masked together into a single heavy breath that left room for nothing else.

  My heart folded in on itself. They were coming for me. Before I ran, I had heard Darius tell Theron that they didn’t want me dead, but was it true? What could be believed anymore?

  I looked to Zane at the mouth of the corridor for some kind of reassurance, but he turned his back, leaving me alone again with the others. But I’d always been alone, hadn’t I?

  “Ivan,” said the one who held Amun above the ground, forcing his little legs to dangle. “We do it now.” He dropped Amun and the boy made a slow line for me. “It’s time.”

  Ivan nodded. His face lined itself with a strange anticipation. “All right,” he said. His pale eyes turned on me. They flashed and took on a new, more violent sheen, but behind their dark glow, hesitation lingered. “But first, my generosity overwhelms me.” He looked up at Cain. “Join us again, brother.”

  “No,” said Cain and before I could register even that one word alone, his large hand had pressed itself forcefully into my chest and my back was against the cavern floor.

  Stunned, I watched as Cain swung both great arms outward, catching the crook of Ivan’s neck and against the shoulder of the one who had temporarily held Amun hostage.

  They crumpled beneath him, four to one. Their primal cries and the slicing of teeth and nails against pale flesh filled the cavern.

  I grabbed for Amun’s wrist and struggled backwards away from them even as their cold blood spattered against the rocks beside me. They ripped and tore at each other, brother against brother. I watched silently as their primal urges overtook the dark alliances that had been made between them.

  I picked Amun up from the ground and frantic
ally searched the cavern once more for a second escape, but there was simply nowhere else to go.

  “Serena!” Zane reappeared at the cavern’s opening with Darius at his side. They watched the bloody shredding in front of them for only a moment before refocusing on me. I wished silently that they would’ve joined them in tearing each other apart, but they skirted around their brothers with no notice from them at all.

  “My, my!” cried Darius, rushing forward. “Cain, you make a pretty weapon! I knew you would, oh, I knew it.”

  Cain rose from the midst of them with one large hand around Ivan’s throat. He looked at me, set his large jaw, and crushed his teeth into the middle of Ivan’s face. The other three paused for only a moment and then turned on Cain together, full of bestial fury.

  Zane tugged at my arm and loosened my grip around Amun. The boy dropped to the ground, but Zane only pulled me harder away.

  “Wait!” I cried and pulled back against his fierce grip.

  Zane turned. “Get him,” he growled and Darius moved to sweep Amun up from the ground.

  “Is he yours?” asked Darius.

  Zane’s grip on my arm loosened and I pulled myself away from him.

  “Serena!” someone called.

  I turned, heart unexpectedly rising. I knew the voice and I knew it well. “Ambrose,” I whispered.

  He stood between Theron, Nikolai, and the monstrous black dog, blocking the only way out. They watched the black mass of Cain and the others, fighting, ripping, shredding. The emotionless faces of the Icelandic nest wavered in the shadows behind them. I could only wonder how far back they filled the rocky corridor with their hungering bodies. Likely more than half of them still waited next to the sea.

  Waited for me. The thought chilled me and I pushed it away. Gauter, their leader, had said he wanted me dead and I could only imagine his nest felt the same as he did. ‘Moon scythe’, they’d called me. It was madness, surely, but frightening all the same. Still, there was no use being afraid. There had never been a use for it when my fate never changed.

  “Did you hear me, Zane?” said Darius, a flat grin splitting his face. “I asked you if this thing is yours.”