Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Pirate’s Curse
The Berkano Vampire Collection – Division 1
Leigh Anderson
Rebecca Hamilton
Fallen Sorcery
Copyright
Pirate’s Curse: The Berkano Vampire Collection – Division 1 © October 2017 Leigh Anderson & Rebecca Hamilton
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Description
Once upon a time, a vampire and a witch fell in love, and that love fractured the world. Now divided into sixteen isolated Divisions, the world is an unstable and dangerous place.
In the Division of NOLA, Catheryn Beauregard fears her burgeoning magical powers. Hiding as just another slave in the home of the Hoodoo Queen, Catheryn hopes her simplistic powers will go unnoticed. And her plan seems to be working…until the Hoodoo House is attacked by a ruthless band of vampire pirates.
Captain Rainier Dulocke and his crew need humans to feed on. In an act of desperation, they beset the Hoodoo House and take ten slaves to sustain them. Rainier takes a girl named Catheryn for himself, but her blood is giving him terrible side effects. Still, he refuses to give her up. Even when the Hoodoo Queen demands her return.
The NOLA Division is in danger. The waters are rising. Food is running out. And the Hoodoo Queen is about to destroy everything that’s left if the pirates don’t meet her request. Now Catheryn must choose who will die: the humans who sold her, the witches who bought her, or vampires who stole her. If she fails to decide, everyone could die.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About Leigh Anderson
About Rebecca Hamilton
Chapter 1
Don’t breathe, Catheryn thought. If you breathe, you’re dead.
From her place in the closet, she could see the flicker of torchlight as the pirates ran back and forth through the house. The vampire pirates. The most dangerous creatures she knew of. They needed human blood to live. Her blood. The blood of her fellow slaves. But what were they doing here? In the Hoodoo House? She was supposed to be safe here. The Hoodoo Queen was a powerful woman. Surely she could fight them off. All Catheryn had to do was be quiet. Be still. Don’t breathe.
Catheryn clenched and flexed her fingers. There were no weapons in the closet. If someone found her, she would have no way to defend herself. She looked at her hands and willed them to do…something. Anything.
This closet was her safe place. A small nook under the stairs she often visited when she wanted to be alone, to collect her thoughts. To practice her budding magic. She had already been hiding in the closet before the pirates arrived. Though this time, she hadn’t been planning on coming out.
Because this time, she hadn’t hidden away to work on her magic. She’d hidden because she’d screwed up. One of the other witches had caught her. There had been a struggle. The knife…
Catheryn held her hand over her mouth. She had fled to the closet, unsure of what to do. She had been afraid of what would happen to her once the Hoodoo Queen found out what she had done. Now, her fear of the pirates far surpassed her fear of the queen. The queen might simply punish her. Maybe sell her to another owner. But the pirates? They would kill her. They would suck her blood until her heart stilled.
Come on, she said to herself as she held her hands in front of her. Work!
She had no idea just what kind of magic she possessed, if she was even a real witch or not. She always thought she was a normal human. Until she realized that sometimes things just…happened. A spark here, a chair inching to the side there. Did she really have any magic powers at all? Or was it all in her head? Was some of the magic from the witches in the Hoodoo House rubbing off on her? Was it all just a coincidence? She didn’t know. But as the sounds of screams and fighting grew stronger and louder, for the first time she hoped she would have some way to fight back if she were discovered. Some inkling of magic. Or even full-blown magic powers. Only the witches would survive this night, she was sure.
“Hey! Check over there!” barked one of the pirates.
Her breath hitched in her throat, and she stepped deeper into the closet, pressing herself firmly against the back wall. Through the slats in the door, the orange torchlight burned brightly. They were close.
A shadow moved past. He was going to find her.
“Save me!” she whispered to herself.
The pirate opened the door. “Got ya!”
Catheryn shrieked as a panel she didn’t know existed opened behind her and she fell. She screamed as she fell down the hole, holding her arms around her head to protect it. Her elbows and knees banged painfully against the walls of the narrow tunnel, and she landed with a thud on the wooden floor so hard it knocked the wind out of her.
“What’s this?” asked a male voice. “Dinner from above?”
Several voices laughed.
She opened her eyes, her heart pounding in her chest. She was lying in front of booted feet. Slowly, she lifted her gaze, taking in a man who towered over her. He wore the dark blue and gold threaded coat of a naval officer, which was most certainly stolen. His hand rested on the hilt of a large cutlass, still in its scabbard.
<
br /> This man was not concerned about the battle raging around him. He held himself with surety that his men would do the job he had set them to. His shirt fell slightly open, revealing a broad chest. She dared to look at his face, which she would almost consider handsome had she not been in fear for her life. He was clean-shaven with long hair tied loosely behind him. He was Caucasian, which was a rarity for this part of the world, though all vampires—no matter their race—had an unnatural paleness to them.
Naturally, he’d topped his head with a large tricorn hat. Most pirates were as obsessed with the fanciful pirate tales of old, no matter how inaccurate, as everyone else was back before the Rift…from before the world was ripped asunder.
“She sure looks yummy, cap’n,” one of the other men said.
To her side, a truly odiferous man with scraggly hair and missing and crooked teeth practically slobbered over the idea of sucking her blood.
“Take her away, Mathis,” the captain said, waving his hand dismissively. “Put her with the others.”
She stood quickly as the man named Mathis lunged toward her.
“Stop!” she yelled, holding her hand flat in front of her.
For a moment—the briefest moment—she thought he froze. Or maybe it was simply the flight mode she felt herself in, because she turned and darted away so quickly the captain the other pirates around her did not have time to react. She slipped past them, up the stairs, and out the back door. Once at the top, she paused, glancing back to the house and out to woods beyond. She could run for her life…but no. She ground her teeth together and tamped down the urge to flee. She had to help the others.
She darted through the yard, weaving around witches fighting with pirates, either party too busy with one another to concern themselves with her. Fire and lightning shot from the witches’ hands as the pirates slashed at them with swords and shot them with guns.
Usually witches would have the upper hand against vampires. Magic was more powerful than mundane weapons, after all. But there were so many pirates. More than Catheryn had ever seen. Enough so that the witches struggled to hold the pirates back.
But Catheryn couldn’t think about that. She had to help the other humans—the slaves like her. The closest thing she had to family, and who the pirates had surely come here to pillage.
Unfortunately for humans, vampires could only survive on human blood. Witch blood was deadly to them. And unfortunately for her, The Hoodoo Queen she lived with owned a stable of human slaves. That was why the vampires were here. If Catheryn could help the humans escape, they would be safe, and the vampires would leave.
But as Catheryn approached the slave quarters, she realized she was too late. Vampires already surrounded it. Of course… That is the first place the vampires would have gone.
Some of the vampires had already given into their cravings and were feeding on the slaves. Some of the slaves were already dead or dying. As much as Catheryn wanted to help, she was no hero. They were beyond her saving. She needed to find the other slaves—the ones who still had a chance.
Sneaking around the back of the slave quarters, she slipped inside the quarters through a small opening between some of the boards.
“Catheryn!” gasped one of the slaves. An older woman. “What are you doing here, child? You need to get away!”
“The house is surrounded,” Catheryn said. “I fear the Hoodoo Queen isn’t going to be able to hold them back. We need to escape.”
“How?” another slave asked. “I can’t fit through there. And where will we go if the pirates have us surrounded?”
“We’re going to be killed!”
“What are we going to do?”
The slaves were in a panic. She probably shouldn’t have said so much so soon. But they were right. Where would they go? And if the vampires didn’t find them and drain them, they would just be recaptured by the Hoodoo Queen and dragged back to slavery anyway. What was the point?
Not dying. Not dying is the point.
Right, she told herself. They needed to at least try. She was a survivor. She had to be—at least until she found her sister. Eva could still be out there, somewhere. So Catheryn had to survive, even if only for her. So that someday they might find one another again.
Catheryn walked to the front of the slave quarters where several people were guarding the door, trying to keep the vampires from breaking in. Raising her hands, she chanted, “Protect us!”
Nothing happened.
“What are you doing, Catheryn, you daft girl?” asked one of the men holding the door closed.
Catheryn tried again. “Help us!”
Again, nothing happened.
“Catheryn!” another slave called to her. “Help me! Come bar the door.”
Catheryn looked around for something that could help. She grabbed a chair and ran over to brace the door.
But it didn’t work.
With a large boom, the door splintered open, and the people closest to it were sent flying backward, including Catheryn. The pirates must have used an explosive device to break through. A man next to her screamed as he clawed at a large piece of wood sticking out of his eye. A woman to her right lay dead, a shard of wood sticking out of her chest like a stake.
Like a stake!
Catheryn’s brain was in a daze, and everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, but that thought shot her into motion. She touched her head, her chest, and realized that she was uninjured. She shook herself out of her dizziness and reached for the chair she had been holding earlier. It had been smashed into many pieces, so she grabbed a loose chair leg and stood, brandishing it like a bat.
As the smoke cleared, the man she had seen earlier—the vampire pirate captain—stepped forward.
“Round them up!” he said.
The other slaves screamed, running to escape as the pirates descended on them like a plague of locusts.
Catheryn’s heart raced, but she steeled herself as she stepped forward.
“You’ll not hurt them!” she called out.
Of course, she could not stop him, and he would probably kill her. But if she could distract him, even for a moment, maybe some of the other slaves could escape.
The pirate captain locked eyes with her. “There you are,” he said. “I was wondering where you ran off to.”
Mathis stepped toward her, but the captain stopped him.
“No,” he said. “She’s mine.”
Mathis shrugged and turned his attention on another hapless girl who was trying to escape. But Catheryn couldn’t focus on her right now. Vampires were fast—notoriously fast. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the captain for even a moment if she hoped to survive.
Who was she kidding? She wasn’t going to survive this. He was a vampire. A pirate. A skilled fighter and a bloodthirsty monster. She was going to die.
At least she would go down fighting.
The pirate assumed a proper swordsman’s stance, and Catheryn stepped forward. Her foot brushed against something, and she reached down without taking her eyes off the pirate to pick it up. It was another piece of wood. She held it and the chair leg in front of her like a cross.
“Be gone, demon!” she yelled.
The pirate smirked. “Oh my. Whatever will I do?”
His smirk turned into a hearty laugh as he stepped forward quickly, so quickly it was if he had transported several feet closer to her. He flicked his sword and knocked the piece of wood out of her hand.
Now standing before him with only the chair leg for protection, she turned to the side, mimicking the way the pirate stood, and held the chair leg like a sword. It was too heavy and awkward to hold in such a manner, much less to be wielded effectively, but at least she was doing something.
The pirate advanced on her and slashed with his sword. She held up the chair leg to block him, but the impact of metal against thick wood reverberated through her. He hacked at her again, and again. Each time, she held the chair leg up, but she was forced to step back to
keep from losing her balance and falling. He would soon hack through her only weapon, and then she would be dead.
He raised his sword with a smile on his face. He was toying with her. He could have disarmed her easily, but he was enjoying the fight, like a cat playing with a mouse before the prey became a meal. He mustn’t have thought Catheryn actually posed a threat to him. Could she use that to her advantage?
As he lunged toward her one last time, she yelled, “Freeze!”
And he did, for just a moment. Just long enough for her to spin out of his path and whack his arm with the chair leg.
The pirate groaned and dropped his sword. He looked at her and glared. She wacked him with the chair leg again, right on his shoulder. He again yelled out, his face contorting with pain.
The other humans saw what was happening, that Catheryn was actually beating the pirate captain with a stick, and it seemed to bolster them. All at once, they turned on their pirate tormentors. The pirates seemed stunned that the humans would dare defy them.
Catheryn felt herself smile as she raised her chair leg to hit the captain again, but she had let down her guard. Her moment of confidence had cost her the upper hand. As she swung, he reached up with his other arm and grabbed the chair leg firmly. He ripped it from her hands and threw it aside. Catheryn took a step back, but the pirate grabbed her around the throat.
“I am going to make sure you live to regret that,” he said with a growl.
He opened his mouth, baring his sharp, cruel fangs. He was going to bite her—was going to eat her—right here and now. This was it.
Pirate's Curse: Division 1: The Berkano Vampire Collection Page 1