A low laugh crossed the line. "I haven't done anything... yet."
I could already feel the impending headache as I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes and blowing out a deep breath. "Diorra..." I moved over to the window in my office, looking out of it as if I expected Diorra to be standing outside of it. Fortunately, all I found was a couple of people walking by in the neighboring park.
"You always have the worst faith in me, Torr."
I let out a dry laugh. "That's because I've known you were evil since the moment you pushed me into a river when we were eight, even though you knew I couldn't swim."
Diorra's laughter was more genuine when it met my ears this time. "It was a funny sight, watching you struggle."
Despite the fact that I'd almost died because of the incident, I couldn't help the small amusement that bled into me at the memory. Times were much simpler back then, even if it didn't seem like it. Because while Diorra may have been mischievous back then, what she was now... I couldn't describe. But it certainly wasn't a law-abiding citizen.
"I know if you're calling me then something bad is about to happen." I let all of my amusement fade away. "And I'm hoping it doesn't have anything to do with Nishan's death." Deep down I knew it did, because the last time I'd spoken to Diorra had been right after her brother died.
"You mean his murder," she snapped.
I leaned my head against the glass of my window, letting its chill bring down the heat of anger I could already feel coming on. "Diorra."
"You told me to let the law handle it, but it's been months and they haven't done a damn thing. I'm done waiting, Torrence, and you should be at my side. If you were the one killed, Nishan would have helped me track down your killers."
"Except I understand that when you run with the wrong crowd, death becomes inevitable. You're not innocent, and neither was Nishan." As the words left my lips, movement behind one of the trees in the park caught my attention. I stared at the spot.
"You're always on that pedestal of yours, Torrence, but don't forget that I know you're not a saint, even if you think your badge makes you one."
I let out a grunt of irritation, not in the mood to argue with Diorra all day long. "What is the purpose of this call?" I asked her as a figure moved out from behind the tree. The shadows were deep, making the figure indistinguishable, but for some reason, I couldn't draw my attention away from it.
"I just called as a common courtesy to let you know I'm in town."
"What?"
"I'm in Hell's Point," she didn't bother to hide her agitation. "And I was just letting you know because I know how you get all pissy when I come to town without informing you."
"Because bodies tend to turn up when you appear, Diorra."
"Well, now you have your notice." The line went dead.
My jaw clenched, my skin warm in anger.
Of course Diorra picks the perfect time to pop back up. She's probably going to uproot all of Hell's Points looking for Nishan's killer, and I'll finally have no choice but to put my cousin down.
The angry rant in my head was abruptly cut off as the figure finally moved from out of the shadows by the tree.
Red, crimson on the end of black locks, captured my attention first before my gaze moved over the unmistakable scar. Snow fell onto the fabric of a thick black coat. Brown eyes met mine from yards away, and I swore one of them winked before the figure disappeared as quickly as it appeared.
I blinked, my breath catching in my throat for a moment.
Fuck.
Not only did I have to worry about whatever was brewing in Hell's Point and the arrival of my demented cousin, but I needed to keep track of a certain brown-eyed vampire that I most definitely shouldn't have fucked. Because I knew this wasn't the last I've seen of Ripley LaCroix.
Enjoyed this story? Be sure to leave a review! You can also pre-order Nowhere To Run, the first book in the Midnight Renegades series. You’ll get to learn more about Torrence’s cousin, Diorra, and Hell’s Point. Also, be on the look out for Addicted, Torrence and Croix’s full length stand-alone, early 2021.
About the Author
Quirah Casey is a young author with more dreams than she’s capable of handling, but that doesn’t keep her from trying to make them come true. She writes any and every genre of romance with characters of all races and sexualities. She rarely sleeps and she lives off of Starbucks. For some reason, people keep leaving their kids on her doorstep, and she keeps taking them in. Otherwise, there are no kids or fur babies in the picture for her. You can typically identify her from her huge, colorful afro, lip ring, shorts, leather jacket, and shit kickers that get her crazy looks in north Louisiana.
If you enjoy Quirah’s books, she would appreciate that you leave reviews on Amazon and anywhere else that you can. It helps get the word out about her books and motivates her on days when she needs it.
You can also join, Quirah’s Den, on Facebook to stay connected with her and find out about new releases and WIPS. If you want to contact Quirah directly, her email is open and so is her inbox on Facebook!
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Read more of Quirah’s Books
Chronicles Of The Throne Series
Warrior Princess
Stealing The Throne
Reclaiming The Throne
Betraying The Throne
Born For Ruin
* * *
DEADKREST Series
Before The Storm
DEADKREST
TEMPEST
* * *
Midnight Renegades
Nowhere To Run
* * *
Lady Jackie Chronicles
Lady Jackie
* * *
Stand-alones
Relapse (RH)
Touch And Go (M/F)
* * *
Prequels (RH series to come)
The Butcher
Touched By Lightning
Alien Book (Name TBD)
* * *
Alien Books (PYRE)
Taking Teagan
Stealing Saryah
PYRE
* * *
Anthologies
Heard It In A Love Song
Dhampir’s Wish
Blood Legacy Series - Christmas Special
Elise Hennessy
About Dhampir’s Wish
She has only one Christmas wish, to find her father.
Dhampir Charlotte Smith has been searching for her father for centuries. Part of her doubts that he’s still alive after countless inquiries and increasingly half-hearted searches. She finds new urgency as she falls for her patrol partner Armando and starts imagining a future with him. But Armando is a pureblooded vampire, and her mind is full of the real consequences of a union between them, where she will grow old and he simply won’t.
Armando wants Charlotte to give him a chance and so he enlists the one thing she hasn’t tried: magic. He seeks out a fae that can help him find her father and begins an adventure of a lifetime. For Charlotte isn’t just his coworker, she’s his lifemate, his one-and-only.
It’s time he proved it to her.
Chapter 1
Charlotte
Charlotte clicked the heater down one notch and waited for her side of the car to cool. She was at the point where the heat was one click in between too toasty or weak enough to allow the chill of a New York winter deep into her bones.
“We done yet?” she grumbled to her partner, Armando Nizzola, who tapped the wheel to the rhythm of a sappy pop song playing over the radio.
He glanced to the analog clock on the dash, which clearly read 2:54 AM. “You tell me, amica,” he answered with that rolling Italian accent of his.
Charlotte liked the way he spoke his vowels. And that, amongst other things, was how she knew she was falling for him. But it wasn’t
the quick, lightning-laced plummet of a lifemate’s near-instant adoration for a perfect other half. Her attraction to him was an unplanned belly flop into a pristine pool. It made ripples. It had consequences.
Apparently, she was at the part of her patrol where she became a poet.
“I see it. One more hour,” she sighed. The two of them were enforcers, a type of police for vampires. They sat watching a busy hub for supernatural activity, but unlike most nights, this one was whisper silent.
“Why so grumpy tonight?” He flashed one of his carefree, luminous smiles that did funny things to her insides. Despite being a Master vampire well into his two hundreds, he still bore a tan from his Mediterranean home to contrast his pearly whites perfectly.
“I’ve been stuck in this car with you for too long,” she said.
He tisked. “Starting to sound like my uncle already. ‘Can’t wait to get a break from your voice,’ he would say.”
“Like he’d ever say that.”
“He did! But we also never took breaks, so…” He shrugged with his palms up.
“You miss him?” she asked. His uncle Julian had finally retired from street duty. Despite being a ranking member in their coven and personal friends with the leader, he’d insisted on being on the front lines of various coven wars and conflicts. Now he was a combat instructor and enjoying the good life with Charlotte’s best friend, Olivia.
“I miss not having his responsibilities,” Armando said cheerfully.
“You don’t like the sound of Head Enforcer Nizzola?” she teased, getting the same cringe from him that always accompanied the title, like it barely belonged to him. He hid his reaction, the chin tuck and shoulder lift that made him look like a retreating turtle, from most people. But here in the middle of a light snowfall on their last patrol before the new year, he did the turtle tuck for her eyes alone. “Maybe you need conditioning. Should I just follow you around calling you that?”
“Please don’t.” He sounded embarrassed, but no blush followed. She’d never seen him blush.
Just vampire things, she thought. She could still blush under her dark complexion.
She blew out a sigh. “Truth is, I am grumpy tonight,” she said, familiar frustration bubbling up in her chest. “I got a lead on my father.”
Armando snapped upright. “You did?”
“Yeah…” She affected an uncaring shrug. “I’ve been looking for him again. Got a tip from one of my old Coven Rosas friends that they’d met a vamp named Darius down in Pittsburgh.”
His smile was fading as he caught her tone. “Not the right one?”
“Nah. I got ahold of his social media. Definitely not the right guy.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said, which she nodded to.
Silence hung between them.
Charlotte knew three things about her father: he was a vampire, his first name was Darius, and he had vitiligo. Such a distinctive combination of factors should’ve made him easier to find, yet she was nearing a hundred herself with nothing to show for her searches.
He’s probably dead, she told herself. It happened a lot to vampires. The older ones picked each other off in the culminations of centuries-old plots or grudges that could span multiple immortals’ existences…or just did it out of sheer boredom. The death of a coven master in particular caused infighting and chaos that could make them implode like a black hole. At any point, her father could’ve been a bystander of such pointless violence.
Despite that, she still searched. She still hoped.
“I just wish I could find him. That would be the perfect Christmas present,” she said with a sigh.
Armando considered with a thoughtful tilt of his mouth before snapping his fingers. “Oh, what do you want for Christmas?”
She slanted an eyebrow. “It’s in, like, four days.”
“I still have four days to get you something, then!”
Typical Armando, she thought, fighting to keep a serious face. In truth, she hadn’t gotten him a gift yet either. She’d been too busy listening to her two friends’ angst over what to buy their significantly older immortal mates, considering both men had everything they wanted already. Add in her search for her father, and it’d just slipped her mind.
“You know, whatever. Carve me something.” Woodcraft was his hobby after all. “How about you? What do you want?” she asked.
His lips lifted. “Same. Whatever. Unless you have something cool and magical lying around?”
“If I had something fae made, I’d be keeping it,” she said. So, they were in the same boat. Given that they weren’t even a couple, she shouldn’t have a drop in her chest from sudden anxiety, belatedly realizing she had the same problem as her friends. What could she buy Armando that he didn’t already have?
“The boss is throwing a Christmas Eve party.” Armando’s voice drew her out of her thoughts. “Do you want to go with me?”
Her heart beat like a bird fluttering against its cage. “Like, as friends?”
From the look in his eyes, his thoughts may have slid along the same lines as hers. “It could be a date instead,” he offered.
No, it really couldn’t. She’d said it before, and she’d say it again if his expression didn’t betray that he already understood nothing had changed yet. His chocolate brown eyes simmered to the brim with emotion. “I don’t care what you are, amica. Give a man a chance,” he murmured. “Dhampirs still live a long time.”
“I’m just not ready yet.” She repeated the same line she’d been saying for over a year. She couldn’t go into a relationship with a vampire knowing that, as a dhampir, she was slowly aging. It’d taken a hundred years to look like she was in her youthful early thirties, where they matched in energy and appearance. The first hundred years for a half-vampire were the time when they could most easily pretend to be immortal. But add on another hundred years, and she’d be slowing down and visibly aging. A hundred more, and she’d be perpetually elderly until something finally took her down.
She’d decided ever since her actual twenties that she would avoid anything too complicated with a vampire. They lived too long and changed too little—could she really rely on one to take care of her when she entered the extended twilight of her life?
But that thought was cold and lonely when Armando was right there, sadness hunching his shoulders. She clicked the heater back up a notch. “I’m really trying to find him,” she said to his profile.
Things would be so different if she found her father, the source of the vampirism in her. He was the only person who could turn her fully. Her body simply wouldn’t respond to anyone else attempting the ritual with her—and she’d tried.
Armando rested his forehead against the window. “I know it’s a wild thought, but have you tried magic?”
“To find him?”
“Yeah. Or maybe something fancy to turn you without his blood,” he said, a glimmer of an idea in his eyes.
“I was going to try Grandma soon,” she admitted.
“Grandma likes me more. Let me talk to her first.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” he echoed at a higher pitch, laughing when she swatted his shoulder. “Too easy. Don’t be jealous, I just have a way with ladies. Even six-thousand-year-old ones.”
“I thought it was five thousand,” she said.
“The age changes every time. I don’t think she knows for sure.” He shook his head at the thought. “Wouldn’t that be something, though, if we found your father by Christmas?”
Her heart twisted wistfully. “It’d be a wish come true.”
Chapter 2
Armando
Armando went to see Grandma with his heart in his throat. He and Charlotte had started calling her thus when they’d realized the ancient fae had future sight and could divine every moment they called her by her real name, Izell Firebrand.
They gossiped about Grandma a lot.
For all her status as the eldest fae alive and savior of the known supernatural wo
rld, to Armando and Charlotte, she put off crotchety old grandmother vibes on steroids. It was part of the charm. Their unit was often recalled at the whim of Izell and her mundane needs. Their boss bent over backward to keep Izell happy.
“Armando, take me in your box to the book vendor,” was her favorite request. He and Charlotte would wait in the car for her to buy armfuls of glossy paperbacks.
But that wasn’t where it stopped. “Armando, help me program this box,” Izell asked of her phone.
“Armando, I need to visit the box store.”
“Which one?” he would ask, because most stores were vaguely box shaped.
Izell would wave impatiently. “The one that sells food in boxes. Why is everything in boxes on Earth? I swear mortals will evolve to have corners.”
He shook his head as he pulled up at her house on the outskirts of town, alone. Charlotte’s scent still lingered in the car, a festive cinnamon and pumpkin. A lot of girls walked around smelling like a pumpkin spice latte, but Charlotte could really pull it off. He was still catching his breath from their earlier conversation.
Charlotte had pushed him away from the d-word for over a year now. No dating; they were partners. She didn’t date vampires. She was afraid of aging while her partner stayed the same. He tried to navigate around every excuse while accepting her boundaries. The lady didn’t want to date, fine. But there was one small problem.
She was his lifemate.
He didn’t mention it, because he knew she couldn’t sense it. For a vampire, meeting a lifemate was about as subtle as a punch in the face. He’d known it the instant they’d met. She had to notice they had great chemistry, but for whatever reason, that wasn’t enough. Keeping the lifemate connection to himself, he feared a new rebuff if he told that truth out loud.
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