Maybe the crazy witch didn’t know he was a vampire, after all.
Calvin was unflappable. “Do you act as a solitary, or part of a coven?”
Judith knew those terms, at least: A solitary was someone who practiced alone. A coven was a full circle of thirteen. She, Meg, and Serena made a paltry three.
“Look at her,” Elizabeth said, throwing a wild glance at Judith. “She’s fine.”
The witch is going to get herself killed.
“Hey,” Judith said to get the woman’s attention. “He’s not leaving until you break the bond, and he’s dead serious about it.”
Like dead serious.
Elizabeth gave a little laugh. “So break it.”
“I don’t know how,” Judith said.
“Too bad, then.” Elizabeth smirked.
“Look, Lizzy.” Judith took a deep breath and then another. “I have no problem admitting that I don’t know what I’m doing. Anyone who watches the show knows I screw everything up. Luckily for me—not lucky for you, just me—Calvin came along. Turns out, he’s got a way with magic and has orders from on high to make sure I survive this. Now, I don’t know if you’re acting dumb or what, but it’s in your best interests to answer him fully and truthfully, or he will settle it once and for all.” No. They were past being vague. “He’ll hurt you.”
“My instructions are to kill you,” Calvin said.
Elizabeth went pale. “Whose instructions?”
“I don’t have leave to give you that information.”
“Well, it’s not Mr. Douglass,” Elizabeth said. “He was thrilled to have me on board yesterday.”
“As of this evening,” Calvin told her, “he’s changed his mind.”
Elizabeth folded her arms. “About his own show.”
“He’s been informed that it’s in his best interests,” Calvin said.
Judith held her breath, hopeful that Elizabeth had figured out she had no other options.
In a lightning-swift movement, Elizabeth planted her palm on Calvin’s forehead. When she pulled back, a smear of blood remained. “You will not harm me.”
Judith noticed that the thumbnail of Elizabeth’s right hand was long and sharp. Her left hand bore a long, diagonal scrape that dripped red. She must have scratched herself.
Um…?
“You belong to me, vampire,” she said.
Oh, shit. Elizabeth had known what he was.
Calvin looked over at Judith. The way his jaw flexed betrayed the anger under his cool demeanor. “I can see only one course of action. I’d send you outside, but I don’t want to tempt fate with a freak accident. Would it be too much to ask you to close your eyes?”
Judith grimaced at the scarlet smear across his forehead. “What she did…it didn’t work?”
In Judith’s peripheral vision, Elizabeth backed up a step, as if considering bolting. Could she outrun a vampire? Judith didn’t think so.
“Think about why it wouldn’t,” he said kindly.
“Blood.” It was the only thing he’d taught her.
“Yes,” he said.
Elizabeth backed up more, but Judith was sure Calvin noticed, and since he didn’t seem concerned, she concentrated on his question.
The witch had tried to use her noble blood on him, the vampire, but he had dragon’s blood inside. That nearly black, thick stuff that had healed the paper cut. Dragons, who had dominion over the earth…
Judith nodded. “I think I get it.”
He smiled at her. “I knew you would.”
Elizabeth was at the door on the other side of the room.
“Break the bond, Elizabeth,” Judith said.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Elizabeth said. The pitiful, plaintive way she said it made Judith almost want to egg him on. Why wouldn’t the witch cooperate when she obviously had no other options?
“Oh, I see,” Calvin said, with a note of realization in his voice. “She can’t break the bond. She tied it to her mark, which is the representation of herself, her own life.”
Elizabeth’s stony expression seemed to confirm his conclusion.
“There has to be a way,” Judith pleaded. “Maybe more of your”—she raised her eyebrows—“you know.” Dragon blood. “If it’s so potent, then it can hack her magic.”
Calvin shook his head. “Nothing can break—”
The way his gaze sharpened gave her hope, though his brow furrowed deeply, as if he didn’t like what had come to mind.
“You thought of something,” Judith said. “What?”
“Nothing can break the curse,” he said and looked up at Elizabeth. He took a deep breath, as if to overcome his reservations. “But she can alter it.”
“Alter it?”
“Alter its form,” he said. “The parameters, the conditions…”
Judith took a deep breath. “Like…like Sleeping Beauty and the last fairy? Not prick her finger and fall dead, but fall asleep.”
“The fae can’t do magic,” he said, “but yes. Something like that. She can impose a time frame.”
“But nothing would really change,” Elizabeth said from across the room. “It’s still me and that wannabe.”
Wannabe? No. She might mess up her spells, but she was a witch…and a damn popular one, if her market research for her cosmetics line was correct. And now she’d learned that witches, vampires, and Bloodkin had been watching, too, which was tacit consent that doing magic on a reality show was okay. Maybe she was being targeted for her celebrity. Good old fame and fortune. Elizabeth had been trying to get rid of her competition.
Calvin took a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from his forehead. “What changes, Ms. Watkins, is that we walk out of here and leave you unharmed.”
“Why would you do that?” Elizabeth asked. “The curse will just find her some other way.”
“Aha!” Judith jabbed a finger toward the woman. “You knew it was a curse.”
“I’ll be watching over her,” Calvin said.
Elizabeth shook her head. “But for how long?”
“You have until dawn because I only have until dawn,” he said. “If I am vigilant, and your curse fails, then it will double back on you.”
No, it would triple back. Judith knew that, too. The three-fold law. Whatever Elizabeth put out would come back to her times three.
Judith raised her eyebrows. “Her own curse would kill her?”
“Yes,” Calvin said and bowed his head slightly. “It’s the best I can do.”
“Oh, I’m good with it.” Judith nodded. “Seems very generous to me. Thank you.”
Elizabeth lifted her chin. “I won’t do it.”
“Then he’ll kill you now,” Judith shot back. “He gave you a choice, and that satisfies all my reservations about murder. So please, go ahead and refuse. You made your bed. Now you can go lie in it.”
“He’s a spider,” Elizabeth said. Then looked at him. “You’re a spider. I could step on you, and you’d be too dry to make a smear.”
Okay, now the witch had gone too far.
“I like spiders,” Judith told her. “I catch ’em and set them free outside.”
Elizabeth gave a short laugh. “You have no idea what he really is.”
“I don’t need to know because he’s not after me,” Judith said. “He’s after you. Impose a time frame on the curse, or he’ll end it now.”
Judith glanced over at him to see if he was cool with her threats and found a half-grin on his face, his sad eyes alight with wry amusement…and something else. The way he looked at her made her feel powerful.
“You’re okay with me hanging out with you tonight?” she asked him. She wanted to go on feeling this way, with this current zapping happily between them.
“I can’t think of a better way to spend the evening.”
Her life was threatened, and suddenly, she felt a little giddy.
“He’s going to feed on you, you know,” Elizabeth said.
Judith shr
ugged. “He had his chance already. I was bleeding all over everything. He’s not thirsty. Besides, I trust him.”
“Then you’re as stupid as you seem on TV.”
Judith didn’t feel stupid. She felt strangely energized, as if she’d finally crossed into the world where she belonged. Would she die? Maybe. But she would not go on like this, not knowing what she was really capable of.
“Then let’s throw down,” she said to Elizabeth. “One night. May the best witch win.”
Chapter 3
As the witch’s door slammed behind them, Calvin hoped he hadn’t made a mistake allowing Watkins to alter the curse. Worry gnawed at him. When was the last time he’d been scared? A century, at least. More. What did a vampire have to fear? Nothing.
The witch should’ve died. Quick and simple. If Judith hated him afterward, she’d be right to. She’d be safe to. Vampires weren’t to be trusted.
Lady Fane had given him specific commands. Allowing that producer, Andrea, to live was one thing—she hadn’t known the letter was cursed—but Elizabeth Watkins? The fact that she breathed while still blood-bound to Judith was a stretch that Fane would not accept. And for what? So Judith wouldn’t see him kill?
The vanity of it was despicable. Because it was vanity, pure and simple. He liked the way Judith looked at him—not the female appreciation he often elicited, but the regard of equals.
“No second thoughts,” Judith said as she reached the top of the steps outside Elizabeth’s basement apartment, where he was sure the witch was plotting any and every way to make certain she lived through the night.
At his side, Judith jerked and tottered, pinwheeling her arms, but he caught her around her waist before she fell backward. He helped her to the sidewalk, and they discovered the cause of her lost balance: she’d broken a heel.
“I should’ve killed her,” he said.
“She’s killed herself,” Judith told him, rolling the heel between her fingers and then throwing it in a trashcan. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”
Thunder grumbled overhead, the low clouds flickering.
“Come on.” He urged her toward the car. She needed to get somewhere safe, somewhere fortified. And preferably before it started pouring. Luckily, he knew a place in the city, and he was owed favors. He just had to get her through one night.
As he shut her inside the vehicle, he checked his watch. It was past eleven o’clock. There were a little more than seven hours until dawn. He got inside and started the car, but he didn’t release the brake. Didn’t look at her face. He knew its expressions too well already, and in extreme close-up.
“I have no idea what form the danger will take,” he told her. “But make no mistake, the blood bond will allow her to reach you anywhere. You will do everything I say without hesitation or argument.”
“Got it. Yes. I won’t argue.”
“And if something happens, you must strive to live. You have the fight, power, and mind to do so.” He believed that. He’d seen it. Admired it.
“I swear I will do everything I can.”
“If I have to kill, I will.” No more hero. All spider.
She nodded. “Okay with me.”
“Then we’ll get through this.”
“Yes, we will,” she said. “And thank you again. Thank you for everything.”
“Thank me at dawn.”
He put the car in drive and was about to pull away from the curb when his mobile phone rang. The number came up on the car’s dashboard display, and he recognized it, though he would never program a name to go with it.
He picked up on handset only, of course. “How may I serve?”
“What’s she like?” Lady Fane asked, a dark richness to her voice.
One of the human servants had to have helped her place the call. She sounded too close to shifting to dragon form to have done it herself.
“Ms. Kress is sitting next to me now,” he told her, “and…she is just as she is on the show.”
“Then she’s as promising as she seems?” His lady sounded giddy.
Promising. Trust his lady to know the word for Judith Kress. The witch was new and untried but had so much potential, and the means within her to achieve it. What a rush to be with her when she took her first steps into real power.
“Yes, she is,” he said and started to pull out onto the road again. “And more.”
He slowed, waiting for a swarm of pedestrians to cross the street before turning onto Mass Ave again. He almost ran over a scrawny kid struggling with an enormous instrument—upright bass, he’d guess—in a black, padded case, probably headed to some after-hours jazz club.
“I want to meet her.” Lady Fane paused. “If you brought her here, do you think she could keep me a secret?”
He was surprised. Bloodkin rarely allowed outsiders anywhere near their hoards. “Yes, I believe so.”
He hadn’t even considered bringing Judith to Lady Fane’s estate, but it was the perfect place for her to spend the night. Nowhere would be safer.
“Then bring her.” And the call cut off.
Calvin listened to the silence for a moment, grappling with sudden disappointment—he wanted Judith to himself—then put down his phone in the center console. Though Judith looked at him expectantly, he didn’t speak again until he stopped at the next traffic light.
“My patroness would like to meet you.”
“Now?”
He nodded.
“Is she going to be mad at you?”
Mad. It seemed Judith had no problem naming his lady, either. But not mad as in angry. Mad as in losing her sanity.
“Yes.” He was going to have to confess that he’d set aside her explicit commands. Judith’s life was still being threatened, and he’d had the opportunity to see her safe. “But she loves me, in her way. And she’s very fond of you. So just be yourself and I have no doubt the meeting will go well.”
And it would be good, he sternly told himself, for Judith to be introduced to a Bloodkin. She needed to know who wielded the power of the world. Lady Fane was predisposed to like her because of her obsession with Witching Wild, and Judith could do far worse than to have Fane, even at her worst, as a protector.
“What’s she like?” Judith asked.
He sighed. “Old and powerful, but with the curiosity of a child.” Belatedly, he added, “Beautiful, too.” He’d long since stopped noticing that aspect of her; instead, paying attention to the shifts under her skin that signaled fire.
“How did you, um…”
“Come to serve her?” It was so long ago and so muddied in his memory that it seemed like fiction now.
He’d been the son of a farmer, off to New York City to seek a richer, more exciting life. He’d taken one too many risks building his wealth and had drawn the attention of a Bloodkin.
“Business meeting. I was set to make a small fortune, and she liked how I looked, so she decided to keep me. To stave off the ravages of time, she turned me.”
He’d wanted more of everything—time, wealth, power—so he’d welcomed the change. Humility had come swiftly after.
Judith was quiet for a while. “Are you two…?”
“Am I too what?” he asked.
She gave a short, uncomfortable laugh. “Are you and your patroness, you know, together?”
He looked over at her, confused, and then comprehension dawned. “Ah. No.” It was his turn to laugh uncomfortably. “Never. She surrounds herself with things she likes to look at.” Treasures of one kind or another, even people sometimes. “It’s a Bloodkin predilection.”
“Oh.” Judith had a light, pleased note in her voice.
He felt his eyebrows lifting in surprise.
Had Judith Kress just checked to see if he was…single? That’s how people spoke nowadays, though he’d never attributed the term single to himself. The only term that mattered was vampire.
Because he wanted Judith, too. Yes, even if it endangered her. And that right there was the inconstancy and
inevitable betrayal of a vampire made manifest.
“You are interesting to look at,” she finally said.
“Interesting?” He was an angel or a monster. Nothing in between.
“You make me want to cry.”
He had no idea what to say to that. He didn’t think she meant that she pitied him, and that was enough.
“Do you get out much?” she asked.
He sighed. “Not often.”
“Can you? I mean, do you get days off? Can you go out?”
He liked her interest too much, but it made him feel hungrier and more alive, which meant it was time to end it.
“Anytime I wish. My patroness doesn’t hold me captive. I am not her slave. In fact, I spent the better part of the 1920s on my own. I couldn’t manage the thirst, and since I’m so recognizable, I couldn’t prey in one place for very long. Prey as in hunt, not pray to commune with God. To my knowledge, none of my victims were willing.”
He let her digest that. His victims deserved her tears, not him.
“Must’ve been hard for you.”
“It was quite easy to kill,” he told her.
Back then, he would’ve easily traded her life for a reprieve from the dehydration that had stopped his heart, his breath, and had emaciated him to the point he became stringy and taut enough to evoke a spider’s body. But today, fed as he was with dragon blood, he didn’t even need to concentrate to seem like a man. It just came naturally.
“There are blood banks now,” she said.
“And there are shortages.” Mostly caused by vampires.
“Do you have money? I bet you could pay donors for it.”
“Anyone with a lot of time has money.” His small fortune wasn’t small anymore. It helped that he’d been privy to Bloodkin interests. On paper, he was worth quite a lot. In reality, he was as low as any dark creature who had ever crawled the earth. His handling of Judith was proof.
Why had he allowed that other witch to live?
“What about animal blood? Or synthetic blood? Or—”
“Judith, peace.” There were too many questions in his mind.
“I’m sorry.”
He glanced over at her. Her skin glowed softly red in the reflected brake lights of the car in front of them. “You mean well.”
Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More Page 5