by Lauren Dane
“Oh I meant to talk with you about that,” Aidan said. “Clearly, you don’t know about converting a witch. I didn’t know either,” he said smoothly.
“Know what?” Rhett asked suspiciously.
Lee laughed. “You’re gonna love this.”
“Well, the conversion has already started if you’ve taken her blood and she’s taken yours. Which she has at least once because you’ve both bonded with her. Apparently, just the exchange of blood begins the conversion between mate pairs of vampires and witches. Lee has begun to need small amounts of blood. She’s also got increased speed and strength and she can see better at night. In about five to ten years she’ll start to feel sensitive to light at high day and have to stay out of it in about twenty. Her aging has slowed down immeasurably.
“Each time she takes your blood, it will move her further along. There’s no need for full conversion if you don’t want to. It’s already happening, it’ll just take about twenty years before she needs as much blood as we do and can’t be out during the high day. I’m guessing Holly’s already got better speed and more strength.”
“Ah, and it also means you can get knocked up,” Lee added.
“What?” Holly turned to Rhett and Nate. “You said I couldn’t get pregnant!”
Rhett quickly put his hands up in defense. “I didn’t think you could. I didn’t know about this whole witch thing. But you’ve only taken our blood a few times. We’ll be careful now that we know. I’m assuming you want kids at some point?” Rhett asked.
“Okay, this is not a conversation for this moment.” Holly turned back to Aidan. “So essentially, I’m already on my way to vamphood and I could be knocked up? Surprise!”
Aidan laughed at her plucky attitude. “You’re a Charvez all right. I’ll get all of the documentation we’ve collected over the last three years to you. And please feel free to stay here with us as long as you need to. You’re welcome here.”
Lee put her hand in his and squeezed in appreciation. Holly smiled shyly in thanks. “Thank you.” She turned and took in everyone. “Thank you all for making me…us feel so welcome.”
“You can work in the shop and we can start your lessons. We’ll make sure you learn about your roots too,” Isolde said.
“Really? Great, because I need a job.”
Rhett narrowed his eyes at her, annoyed with her money issues. “You don’t need a job. You can have a job. It sounds like a great way to be with your family and learn about your roots, but you don’t need a job. You’re our wife, as such, everything we have is yours,” he said quietly in her ear.
Alex heard. “And, Holly, I have the portfolio outlining your inheritance. You certainly don’t need a job. Even without Rhett and Nate, you wouldn’t need a job.”
“We can talk about that later.” She still felt uneasy taking the money.
Rhett went with Aidan to talk with his business manager about finding a house in the area that would be vampire friendly and Nate stayed in the room as Isolde pulled out a deck of tarot cards.
“Okay, you won’t need these once you learn better focus, but while you’re learning, they’re an excellent way to get your head around the concept of grabbing threads of the future.” Isolde tapped the deck but Holly stayed her hand.
“Wait. I’ll be right back.” She jogged out of the room and returned shortly with her own deck. She told Isolde about the old woman and how she came by the cards and also about the vision she had of Lee when she looked at them before.
“That’s wonderful. I think the way the deck came to you was fated. I love how they connected you to us. We’ll use your deck.” Isolde paused for a moment before leaning and taking Holly’s hand. “I’d be honored if you called me either Grand-mére or Tante Isolde. I’m not your grandmother by blood but Elise was my sister and I’d love to be your grandmother in spirit as well as name. If you’re not comfortable, tante means aunt.”
Holly inclined her head, hiding her eyes. “You wouldn’t mind?”
“Chere, I mean it when I tell you that I love you like my own granddaughters. That you’ve come back to us after being gone so long, it’s a miracle. Far from minding, I’d love it.”
“Okay, Grand-mére.”
Isolde hugged Holly tight before returning to business. “Now, let’s see that deck.”
Holly laid out the cards in a way that she felt natural doing and Isolde watched her with a raised brow. The girl was a natural. Not a lick of training and she knew the spread without a prompt.
“Okay, good. Why don’t you just tell me what you think the cards are saying to you?”
Holly reached out to touch a card but her eyes slid closed and her head tipped back. Isolde stood up and put out a staying hand to Nate, who’d started to rush over.
Holly watched a tall, dark-haired man in a suit standing near a bank of windows. Another, younger, man stood with him and they both turned to look at her.
The scene shifted and she saw an elderly man with a cane. The head of the cane was a silver wolf with bared fangs. He narrowed his eyes at her and spoke and blood began to run out of her nose and ears.
The scene changed again and it was the old man slumped over in his chair.
The scene flipped and she saw her mother at fifteen, talking with a boy who was just a bit older. They were holding hands. The boy was gone then and the elderly man was there. He was angry. Her mother was crying.
She snapped upright and tears were streaming down her face.
“What is it? What did you see?” Isolde demanded.
Holly told her and they puzzled over it for some time.
“I think it was my father—the boy with my mother. I felt so much love between them. I can’t imagine that he just abandoned her.” Holly stood up and went to look out the window. “There’s just so much I don’t know about this whole thing!”
“I know, chere. We’ve gone over and over it for so very long. And with the information you’ve given us, it’s even more strange. She was loved, she knew this. Yes, she was young and pregnant but we loved her and she loved us. That couldn’t have changed overnight. I know she wouldn’t have just walked away like that without a reason. People just don’t make such big changes all of a sudden.” Isolde looked sad as she spoke.
“There’s someone out there,” Em said quietly and Nate grabbed Holly and pulled her away from the window.
“Who?” Nate demanded and Jax went on high alert.
“I don’t know. Just someone not usually there. He doesn’t belong here.” Em closed her eyes and stood nearer to the front door but Con made sure she was away from any windows.
“Wizard,” Em said with a nod. “Yes, wizard. I remember the feeling.”
Jax started to move toward the door but Alex put out an arm to stay him. “No. You can’t fight that kind of magic with physical strength. We don’t know what’s going on just yet anyway.”
Lee sat in the middle of the large area rug and Holly noticed for the first time that there was a magical circle woven into the pattern. Alex came toward Lee to join her but suddenly the glass blew inward, showering into the room. Turning, Holly threw out her hand as strange words came from her mouth—that strange fluid language she’d spoken earlier—and the glass shot back into place.
Magic began to collect thick in the air with static intensity as she continued to speak. Alex held out his hand and joined it with hers, forming a circuit of power as their power flowed outward.
A series of loud pops sounded and suddenly it was silent again. Holly slumped to her knees and Alex held her against his body, pulling her away from the window, handing her to Rhett. While Rhett sat with her on the bench in the hallway, Nate paced. He desperately needed to go outside to hunt down whoever it was that hurt Holly and kill him but Aidan stood near the door with Jax and they spoke in hushed tones with Con and Alex.
“Honey, are you all right? Do we need to get you to a hospital?” Rhett asked, amazed at how calm his voice sounded when he was screaming inside in panicked fear over he
r wellbeing.
Looking up at him, she nodded. “I’m okay. Let me sit up.”
He looked at her dubiously and she sighed. “I promise, I really feel better but I need to sit up.”
He helped her sit up but kept her against him. “What was that?”
“That was wizard magic being performed by a witch,” Alex said as he approached.
“What? I thought you said that other than simple spells that witches couldn’t do wizard spells,” Lee said as she handed Holly a glass of water.
“They can’t. Or couldn’t until today. I don’t know how. But not only did Holly perform wizard magic but it was high level wizard magic. As in my level of strength. That popping you heard? It was trap spells being unraveled and dissolved. Nearly impossible for nine out of ten wizards.”
“It’s all clear out there,” Con said as he shimmered back into the room. “Stinks of wizards using blood magic though, according to the missus.”
Em smiled at him for a moment and then turned back to Alex and Holly. “Yes. The same way it felt when we went into your grandfather’s house.”
“It was my grandfather’s people?”
“No. Or it could be, but I don’t know would be a more accurate answer. I can just feel the stench of the magic—dark magic—and that it was wizard magic. It doesn’t give off anything that enables me to say who exactly it was.”
“And they broke through these wards,” Aidan said, face grim.
“A demon couldn’t break through, how come a wizard can?” Lee asked Em.
“I don’t know. Unless he knew the spells that created the wards somehow, or had some other back door through them. I’ll look into it tonight. The positive is that he couldn’t physically enter the yard much less the house. He used his magic to cut through the wards and I think the spell blew out the glass but I don’t think any real harmful magic could have breached the house at all,” Em said.
“This isn’t about anyone else. It’s about Holly, I know it,” Nate said.
“We don’t know that. The guy who broke in said something about hating the Charvezes,” Aidan said.
“Yes, but every single attack, every single vision of some injury, has been focused on Holly. He may hate the Charvezes but it’s Holly he wants to kill. We’ve got to figure out why.” Nate’s mouth was set in a grim line.
“I agree. It just feels that way. The more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to Elena. This has to have something to do with her and why she left,” Isolde said.
“You three will come to our house tonight. No one knows where it is and it’s warded with Faerie magic,” Con said and Nate and Rhett nodded.
* * * * *
For the next week they worked on building up Holly’s skills as a seer. Isolde was continually amazed that for a woman who hadn’t been trained—worse, had actively been taught to avoid her magic—Holly was a natural. More than that, she was powerful. Her unique set of gifts meant that she not only had foresight but that she also had snatches of powerful visions of the past.
No further attacks had been made on her or on Lee’s house and they’d found a house in the Garden District, not too very far from Lee. It was a large antebellum Greek revival home on Chestnut Street and Holly loved that she was in a triangle of family, with the Lafayette Cemetery closing the loop. Apparently, the Charvezes had a large family plot there and Holly felt that the Charvezes who’d passed on, including her grandmother, were there keeping an eye on her. Another feature of the home that Holly loved was the sky blue ceiling in the gallery. Like the one at Lee’s, it was apparently common in Garden District homes and believed to keep evil spirits away. To Holly, it felt more open and spacious because it looked like the sky.
It had an office for Rhett’s business and several extra bedrooms for Nate to convert to an office for himself and his consulting business if he wanted to pursue that as well.
Tulane had a night program that she could attend to finish her degree and she was able to transfer all of her credits from the University of Washington without a problem. Roy was sorry to see her go but was happy that she’d found her family. When escrow closed on the house Con and Em would help move their things from Seattle to New Orleans and the house in Seattle would be put on the market.
Holly was ready to start working at The Grove but Nate and Rhett were concerned about her being out in the daytime without their protection so Con agreed to shimmer her directly into the shop every day and home just before sunset. That way she’d always be in places that were protected.
All of the details were ways of working things out, ways of figuring out who she and the guys were in relation to each other and to the family at large. After that brief period of struggle at the beginning, Rhett and Aidan got on quite well and Nate, Con and Alex all began to create a friendship. Holly belonged to something and as she learned more about her family, she learned more about herself.
Despite the stress of feeling under siege, she also began to achieve a level of normalcy with Rhett and Nate. She began to relax once she realized that they were hers forever and once she relaxed they did too.
On the evening after escrow was due to close they all decided to venture out to have dinner to celebrate. They decided on Commander’s Palace because it was close to home and the power of Lafayette Cemetery was there to draw on if necessary.
Chapter Eight
Holly had been rushing all afternoon. They’d moved into the house the evening before and she’d been changing furniture around to make it all just the way she liked it. She’d never had a place anywhere near that large before. The furnishings that Rhett and Nate had, combined with the things inherited from her grandmother, filled the house and made it feel like home.
Her men just patiently smiled at her and moved couches and chairs over and over until she found the way she wanted them. That made her as happy as the house did. Rhett and Nate’s never-ending well of patience and love for her, the way they took care of her and went out of their way to be sure she was happy—Holly had never experienced such a thing before. They made her feel special and cherished.
And she wanted that for them too. She tried to do special things for each one of them, to carve out time for them to let them know just how much they meant to her.
She’d never felt totally at home in Em and Con’s house, no matter how welcome she knew they were. Same with Lee’s house. Even when she’d lived with Nate and Rhett in Seattle, it had always felt a bit like she was a guest.
But this house was different. They were building a home in it. Her books lined the shelves along with Rhett’s and Nate’s. The painting that Aidan had given her hung over their fireplace—their non-working fireplace. She’d been interested to find out the quirks of New Orleans like how most fireplaces weren’t functional in the older houses. Simone, the Charvez cousin she’d become closest to over the month she’d been in New Orleans, had given her a whole series of framed pictures of the family over their history, complete with the one on the mantle that featured their generation—Holly, Lee, Em, Simone, Eric, Niall and Peter.
“Holly, have you seen my shaving kit?” Nate asked as he came into the room wearing only a towel.
As always, his nearness dried her mouth up and turned her knees to jelly. He’d fed and had that glow about him that she’d come to notice vampires get afterward. She’d been so happy to note that all of their donors in New Orleans had been male.
“I told you earlier when you asked me that I put it in your bathroom,” she said, trying not to look at him for too long.
“You did?” he asked lazily.
She spun and took him in, noticing too late that he’d baited her.
“You seem awfully stressed out, sweetness,” he said in that dangerously velvet voice that slid down her spine and made things tighten low in her belly.
“I have things to do, Nate. Stop it.” The words came from her lips but no one, herself included, believed them.
He stalked toward her. “Is that so? Well, yo
u know what always de-stresses you?” He looked at the room and got a slow smile on his face. “Drop your jeans, undo your hair and bend over the arm of the couch.”
“Nate…” she started to say but in a flash he was against her.
“Are you going to disobey me?” he said in her ear and she closed her eyes and couldn’t stop the smile on her face.
“And if I did?” she said, teasing him.
“Oh, sweetness, it’s been too long since you’ve had a handprint on that sweet little ass of yours, hasn’t it?” And as he finished the sentence he ripped the T-shirt she had on down the middle.
“Oh god.” She quickly shucked her jeans and reached up to let her hair down, letting it flow over her shoulders and arms the way she knew he liked. Moving to the couch, she bent over it and looked back at him over her shoulder, watching as he let the towel drop. Oh yeah, he was interested.
He traced his fingertips over the curve of her ass and then dipped down into the well of her sex and slowly slid into her. She arched back into his hand and let out a cry of dismay when he pulled back. The cry turned into a yelp when he laid an open-handed slap to her ass and then another and yet another.
The flesh began to warm and the vibrations of his perfectly placed strikes began to travel upward to her clit. As always, she was amazed that it could feel so damned good to be spanked.
“Ah, I should have known,” Rhett said dryly as he entered the room. “Damn, look at that pretty pink ass.” Approaching, he bent over and blew across her heated flesh until she squirmed.
“Oh please, someone needs to fuck me and now!” she pleaded. She’d been on the Pill long enough for it to count and she really, really wanted someone inside of her.
Relief pulled a long groan from deep in her belly as Nate pushed his cock into her. Until he pulled all of the way out.
“No, I think you need to suck my cock for a while and then I’ll fuck you.” A smile hinted at the corners of Nate’s mouth as he waited for her reaction. After a few moments he stood up and tossed a pillow to the floor for her to kneel on.