Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More

by Mandy M. Roth

  “Can we, uh, restrain you some way?”

  Inhaling again, he said, “Nothing could hold me. I’m too old and too strong. I’ll let you know if you need to use the blade.”

  “I hate everything to do with opening letters. Just so you know.”

  He had no idea what she meant, and then he laughed—the initial paper cut on a letter and the makeshift blade he’d made out of a letter opener.

  “Ah, sweet Judith.” Another breath. “How did we come to this?”

  “Incredibly good luck.”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “You’re right. I have no regrets so far. But you must promise you’ll use the blade if I say so.”

  She nodded slowly. “I promise.”

  He’d expected a fight from her, but maybe she’d come to terms with the situation. She’d certainly been warned enough over the course of the night.

  “By the way, I have no regrets, either,” she said. “So far.”

  His yearning to be with her was more desperate than his thirst, but that would change. The air he sucked inside to speak was burning down his parched throat and searing his lungs.

  “You must take Lady Fane up on her offer of instruction,” he said. “She can be erratic and moody, but her knowledge of the Bloodkin world is deep. Watkins never told us if she had a coven.”

  “Crap. I’d forgotten about the coven.”

  Breath. “Lady Fane can help you discover it. Protect you, if need be. Really, she doesn’t mean to be cruel.”

  “Unless you go against her wishes.”

  He took a shallow breath to limit the burn. “Well, she’s accustomed to getting her way, but she is generous for a dragon. She will help you, but the help will come at a cost one way or another.”

  Everything had a cost. Even speaking.

  Judith sighed heavily, but he was relieved she didn’t try to belabor what he was trying to say with wishful thinking that they’d both survive the night.

  Silence fell, and he felt each increment of time moving just as much toward darkness as toward daylight. But a vampire’s existence was like that, in the crosshairs of life and death.

  Judith took the letter opener in hand—good girl—and sat back on the sofa. She’d put on another of his T-shirts but not the sweatpants. She tucked her pretty legs beneath her.

  “Did you know that Meg is writing a book?” she asked.

  From his dark corner, he just looked at her.

  “It’s pretty good, too,” she said. “At least, I think so. I’ve been sworn to secrecy, but I think she’d make an exception for you. While I am going to bank on my name recognition, she’s been submitting under a pseudonym. Seven rejections so far. I’ve offered to curse the editors—and seriously, there was one who deserved it—but she hasn’t taken me up on it. I’m excited for her. She’s doing what she really wants to do.”

  He held on to her voice, the easy conversation of it. Many years had passed since he’d had a friend. And Judith was already more than that.

  “And softy Serena finally adopted another cat, who she named Leo, but she still cries when anyone brings up Cookie. Leo will debut next season on the show, and Serena even demanded a contract for him. He gets…”

  Judith kept speaking, but her voice warped in and out as his senses heightened. He didn’t know how much time had passed, only that she’d discussed the cast and crew of Witching Wild in enough detail to comprise an insider’s book any fan would purchase.

  When his eyeteeth instinctively extended, he crab-walked up the wall to put as much distance from her as he could.

  She followed him with her gaze but kept talking as if nothing was the matter. It was a good act, but he could hear the uptick in her heartbeat.

  He inhaled to inflate his lungs. “You promised,” he reminded her.

  Still jabbering about the time she’d accidentally magicked some brownies—he’d seen that episode—she lifted the letter opener as if to say, Ready.

  The rain had stopped, but no gray light glimmered through the windows. Soon, all that remained of him would be thirst and intelligence. His heart had long since stopped pumping. He was dry and cruel inside.

  And she had so much blood—all of it sweet, like a vampire’s lemonade.

  It wasn’t fair how much blood she had.

  Hadn’t he done everything to help her? Now it was her turn to help him. Share a little. Just a taste.

  With the last of his breath, he said, “No more time, Judith. It has to be now. I’ve got no dragon blood left. My control is slipping.”

  He forced himself to be still on the wall, a proper spider, just before the smash.

  She stood and approached so calmly that she must’ve prepared herself for this moment while she’d been telling him stories. And wasn’t it good that in the end, after so many years, each one running seamlessly into the next, that he got to decide when to finally die and who should release him from the web of his existence.

  No regrets.

  She held the blade.

  He patted his chest where his inert organ lay.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  With every shred of humanity she seemed to believe he had, he would.

  He saw her dart forward, smelled that earthy, driving scent that compelled him to feed. Then felt a wet hand on his forehead.

  She pointed at him with the blade while the palm of her free hand dripped red. “You will not harm me. You belong to me, vampire.”

  Three diagonal finger stripes stained Calvin’s forehead, and Judith knew that the symbol she’d made was her mark, simple and strong. If all the dragon blood was gone from his system, then her noble blood should be able to rule him. Elizabeth Watkins had showed her how.

  When he took a breath, something rattled inside him. It had to hurt.

  “You were planning that all along,” he said.

  “I learn fast, and I’m motivated.” In the rush of adrenaline, she hadn’t felt the actual cut across her palm, but now her hand throbbed as blood dripped through her fingers onto the floor.

  “But I’m thirsty.” His voice was a rasp, and he was now so thin, so gray that she could imagine the intensity of the craving within him.

  “You’ll survive,” she said.

  He lunged at her, and she stumbled back, but it seemed as if an invisible force had lashed him to the wall. He writhed in its grip. Her grip.

  “Okay, then.” Seemed like her magic had worked. Finally. She intended to keep the letter opener ready, just in case.

  “Your cut won’t heal until dawn,” he said roughly, but more like himself.

  Right. It’d be cursed like the paper cut. The scent of the blood had to be torturing him. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she did have to find a way to slow the bleeding.

  “Tourniquet,” he said.

  Some part of him was still trying to save her.

  “Good idea.” She found the T-shirt he’d ripped off her, bound her hand first, then using her teeth to pull a knot, rigged a band across her upper arm. Intermittently, she glanced at him. His eyes were changing. No more green. The pupils seemed larger, too.

  “Don’t trust me.” His voice was harsh.

  She nodded. He’d crossed a line, but he was still fighting. She’d take it from here. He’d done enough.

  With a flicker of light and a shudder from the refrigerator, the power came back on. All the soft corners made by the shadows sharpened, reality imposing itself on the murky world of magic. If anything, Calvin appeared more the spider than before, a pale gold one, and she could feel the connection to the other witch like some kind of feedback, a closed system that had paired them. The sensation had grown stronger, but Judith was no longer scared.

  “How about we try some television?” She sidestepped toward the sofa where his phone was sitting on the table. As she reached for the remote, she hit the mobile screen to check the time. Not long now.

  He wasn’t kidding when he said he had just about every channel. She settled on a British period
show that would take a year to get to the States. If only she could really enjoy it… Maybe another time, if she were lucky.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she observed Calvin make slow progress up and across the wall to settle into a creepy crouch in the corner where he couldn’t possibly see the screen but had an obstructed view of her. The really weird thing was that he was so still, so silent, that she’d catch herself relaxing in his presence, which was bad, considering how much blood was seeping out of her to tempt him.

  The throb extended from her hand to her armpit. She’d soaked through the bandage on her palm and had nearly soaked through a second wrapping made from the sweatpants Calvin had loaned her. A surge of desperation rose inside her, but Judith knew it didn’t come from her.

  For a strange, extended moment, her heartbeat seemed to double on itself, as if two people were joined. Dawn had to be coming, and with it either her death, or Elizabeth Watkins’.

  Judith inhaled deeply through her nose to brace for the moment the curse would triple back on Watkins. But Judith wasn’t sorry for her, not even a little. This challenge had been too close. One more thing she’d learned tonight: if she could go back in time, she would have stepped out of Calvin’s way so he could have killed Watkins quickly.

  Judith trembled, the tension in her chest gripping her. She looked up at the corner for Calvin, but suddenly, he was looming above her, thin and thirsty and crazy fast. His eyes were sunken, yet still so sad. And very, very frightening.

  “You better go…tuck yourself in,” she commanded from between gritted teeth.

  She blinked and the bedroom door was already closing. What was behind it was still a mystery.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks, but they didn’t belong to her, either. All her nerves seemed to sizzle, her blood pounded in her ears, a great, seemingly unending shudder racked her.

  At the first gray light in the window, all the clamoring in her body suddenly ceased. The throbbing in her arm eased to a prickle, and the built-up tension evaporated like dew under the sun. Though miles separated her from Elizabeth, Judith knew she was dead.

  She unwrapped the bloody sweatpants from around her hand and found the cut healed.

  The gray of the sky turned yellow, and birds had the gall to tweet like nothing bad had happened. Life went on. And, apparently, hers would, too.

  Calvin’s T-shirt was long enough to act as a short dress, and with her purse on her shoulder and her feet bare, she opened the front door to his little stone house to look out on the new day.

  In spite of the night’s rain showers, it reeked out there.

  A smallish red truck—the kind groundskeepers might drive—pulled up in front of the iron fence. From the stoop, she watched a man get out of the vehicle and come around the bed of the truck, which appeared to be full of garden tools.

  “Bad night?” he asked, surveying the dead bodies and then pulling a pitchfork from the truck.

  He didn’t seem remotely horrified.

  “Calvin kept me safe.” She hoped the man passed the fact along to everyone in that big house. She was alive and well.

  “He would. I’ve known Cal about, oh”—he scratched the back of his neck, as if to think—“a hundred and fifty years now. Not a bad fellow. Mellowed a lot since his change. Good at poker.”

  A hundred and fifty years?

  “Are you…human?” Judith asked.

  “Sure am. Long life is a benefit of Lady Fane’s service. You want me to drive you up to the house?”

  A very long life, if this man was any example. But then Calvin had said that Lady Fane took care of the people she loved. What a twisted world it was.

  “That would be great, thanks.” She hesitated and then turned slightly back toward the house. “He’s going to be thirsty when he wakes. Dangerously thirsty.”

  “Always is,” the man said. He used the pitchfork to clear a body out of the path of the gate. “Let me lay down the tarp, and then you can cross.”

  “So he’s going to be okay?”

  “We know what to do.” He reached into the back and pulled out a shiny blue pallet. When unfolded, it became a large plastic sheet. Her bare feet wouldn’t have to touch the muck.

  When they were inside the truck, she asked, “Will you give him a message for me?”

  “Sure.” He put the truck in gear and accelerated out through the copse of trees and onto the big green lawn.

  She searched for something meaningful to say, but her head swam from the lack of sleep, residual stress, and blood loss. Want to catch a movie?

  “Actually, I don’t know what to say.”

  “He won’t be up for a while. How about I give you his phone number, and you can leave a message yourself?”

  Lady Fane’s gaze flared with the fire of excitement. She sniffed at him—Calvin turned his head away—and then she focused her attention on his forehead. “That’s her blood. Did you taste her then?”

  The sun had set. When he’d cracked his dry lids, scraping them up over his sunken and gritty eyeballs, he’d found blood waiting—the chalice this time, so he knew Lady Fane was still unhappy that he’d broken his oath. The dead impaled on his fence had been cleared away—he’d already thanked Johnny with cash—and his mobile phone had contained a message from Judith that made him smug about the decision he’d already made.

  “No,” he said, sitting back in the armchair across from Lady Fane’s sofa. He put an ankle to knee, and sighed, happy. “She used blood magic to restrain me.”

  He hadn’t even considered that Judith might try such a thing: early in the evening, he would’ve assumed her blood would have the same effect as Elizabeth Watkins’ had—none; and later, after being drained by the dead Watkins had possessed, thinking clearly had been a struggle for him. All he’d known for sure was that he was thirsty, and that Judith could quench it.

  Lady Fane’s gaze narrowed. “But where did she learn to do such a thing?”

  “The other witch had attempted it earlier. Watkins.” It was the control Judith had exercised that was fascinating. It took either experience or innate power to overcome another living thing’s will, and she’d overcome him on her first try.

  He found it fascinating, freeing, and sexy as hell.

  “You’re too old to be caught by the likes of her,” Fane said, “no matter how promising she is.”

  “I was absolutely parched, and yet she did it.”

  “She wasn’t scared of you?”

  “She seemed”—he smiled to himself—“determined.”

  She would’ve had to be. Any doubt would’ve been her undoing. Hers and his.

  Lady Fane’s nostrils flared. “You have to tell me everything. Every detail.”

  No, he did not. He would not.

  “What about the dead the witch had possessed?” Fane asked. “Twelve bodies Johnny burned this morning. She wasn’t afraid of them either, was she?”

  Calvin merely smiled. Lady Fane needed very little encouragement when she got going.

  “Fearless,” she answered herself. “I’ve known it from the first episode. And so smart and pretty.”

  Not pretty. Beautiful, especially after he’d gotten to know her a little. Incomparably so, after spending a night with her.

  “And then you went inside the stone house.” Lady Fane purred. “Two lovers in a storm! You must tell me what she said and what you said. Did you kiss her? Of course, you kissed her. Remember, I liked her first. The first episode two years ago, didn’t I say how I liked her? I did, even though she knew nothing about anything important.” Lady Fane’s gaze locked on his. “Well…tell me.”

  “Lady Fane, no. What happened next is none of your business.” He would not allow the night to be anyone’s entertainment. The dragon knew the necessary details—the witch was dead, Judith was more powerful than they’d both believed, and he was smitten. It would have to be enough for her.

  Lady Fane pouted, disappointed. “And now she’s taken my Cal. I’d burn her up for it, e
xcept she argued with me—with me!—over whether or not you’re a person. Very childish of her, but then she’s a baby compared to me. Is it love? Tell me that at least.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “You know I won’t.”

  No threats could compel him. He hadn’t been afraid of Fane since before his change. After, there had been nothing left to fear; the worst had happened.

  “But you like her.”

  That he wouldn’t deny. “Very much.”

  “And she likes you.”

  He thought of her phone message, felt that smile spreading again. “Seems so.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  A hundred and eighty-two years old, and he felt the same as he had when he’d first set out from home to go to the city and make his fortune—anything was possible.

  “I’m moving into the city.”

  Lady Fane’s chin went up. “I wouldn’t have you back if you begged me.”

  That was a lie. Bloodkin had a very difficult time relinquishing anything from their hoards. She was letting him go again, this time for good. They both knew it.

  “I’m going to set myself up.” He’d called in a few favors. “Start a business.”

  Blood trade. He’d already decided that, too.

  “You’ll have to stick by her side,” Fane said. “That Watkins witch’s kin or coven might seek revenge.”

  “I’ve already started inquiries,” he told her.

  “Of course, you have.” Lady Fane looked at him thoughtfully.

  He knew this was goodbye.

  “When she comes to visit me,” she asked, “will you be coming with her?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Lady Fane was being very good now, but he wouldn’t put it past her to try to bring Judith under her wing. Trade one lost soul for another.

  He stood and buttoned his suit coat. Judith was waiting for him. Her message had sounded rehearsed, as if she had written it out and was reading from the page.

  I’m calling to check in on you. Hope you’re feeling better today. I’m good. Perfect, actually. Thank you again for everything you did, everything you risked. I was thinking… She’d paused for a deep breath …the show is encouraging me to pursue a new romantic interest next season, and I was wondering if you might consider dating a witch. Unfortunately, the situation is fraught with peril—I’m not in complete control of my magic, and Serena and Meg can be protective. Judith’s voice had sped up, as if she’d deviated from her script. They’re dying to meet you again. Not that I’ve said anything about what you are. I wouldn’t do that. But they’re insistent with their questions. It might be helpful for you to go out with us tonight—or soon, whenever you’re free—to put their fears at ease. And mine. Anyway… Judith paused, probably looking for her place again. I’d love to see you.