by Lucy Lyons
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 One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Vampire’s Spell
Alone with The Night:
Book 6
Lucy Lyons
© 2017
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© Copyright 2017 by Persia Publishing - All rights reserved.
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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 1
Bottom lip between my teeth, I leaned over the reflection pool and concentrated, pushing threads of power into the water and watching them wind together just beneath the surface. My magic coiled and sank to the bottom of the large silver basin in a glowing braid, until I was forced to blink against the glow emanating from the water.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Nick’s voice was close to my ear and his light breath tickled me, sending shivers down my spine. My concentration broken, the magic dissipated into the blessed water and the light faded from the basin, leaving behind only a faint glow and massive frustration from me.
“Not if you keep interrupting me, Nicholas. Do you want this additional shielding between us or not?”
“You know that I do.” His arms snaked around my waist and I chuckled despite myself. “But, what are we going to do when we can’t tell what the other is thinking? You keep enough secrets as it is.”
“First, I don’t keep secrets. I simply don’t blurt out everything and anything in mixed company, and we’re never alone. That’s easily solved by giving your entourage other jobs. Second, this shielding is because you don’t trust my new necromancy not to take priority over my loyalty to you. You asked for this, so stop interfering.”
“Why all the attitude? I’m not trying to stop you, I was just enjoying your butt as you bent over the reflection pool.” He held me tighter and I snuggled back against him.
“Just let me finish what you asked for, and you can enjoy my butt all you want,” I sighed dramatically. “I thought I was supposed to be the insecure one in this relationship.”
“That’s why we’re doing this. Too much of me is leaking over to you, and vice versa.”
“It is a little strange to have you acting jealous and biting your fingernails all the time.”
“I don’t bite my fingernails, wench,” he scoffed and I laughed.
“I know, I was just checking to make sure you were listening to me.”
He chuckled and kissed my neck, and the next thing I knew, I was on my back on the cold stone floor of the laboratory we’d set up for me to practice magic and learn new spells. I wrapped my legs around him and trembled with pleasure as he pressed me against the floor with the weight of his body, cradling my head in his hands and kissing my neck and nibbling on my jaw.
“You’re killing me, you know that?” I panted moving my hips against him. “This spell is hard, and even if I’m strong enough, Dominique wasn’t sure it would work. Most master vampires don’t want more shielding between them and their servants. We didn’t have precedence.”
“The spell isn’t the only thing that’s…” he started, but broke off and raised his head, listening to something beyond my human range of hearing. “Hold that thought, we’ve got company.” Effortlessly, he stood with me still clinging to him like a baby koala, my arms around his neck and my ankles locked behind his back.
“The bartenders are rebelling. You said you wanted to downplay the vampire aspect of the club, but instead, they want to up the ante and add a vampire burlesque show.” Rachel’s voice indicated that she’d gone a few rounds with the humans that worked for us before she bothered Nick with it.
“That’s a good idea.” Nick glared at me and I amended it as he set me down on my feet. “I mean, if we weren’t trying to be more mainstream, that would’ve been a good idea.”
Rachel wrinkled her nose at me and gave me a long look of her own.
“That doesn’t sound very much like the Catholic girl who came to me in tears because she accidentally saw her boyfriend naked for the first time and had impure thoughts,” she reminded me. I flinched and Nick chuckled.
“They were nowhere near as impure as mine were at the look of innocent shock on her face that melted into desire.” He smiled and Rachel’s look of distaste grew.
“You two need to figure out your boundaries. I like you both better when you stay in your lane, and I don’t have to hear about the love affair to change the world.” She spun on one heel and marched out the door as I glanced at Nick with my mouth hanging open.
“Is it just me, or is Rachel a little testy today?” He laughed and winked at me. “I’ll go take care of business. You go ahead and get in your training session if you want, it’ll free up some time for us later.”
I watched him follow Rachel and tried to ignore the relief that came with distance between us. Vampire masters and servants had been dancing the waltz between the bond between them and not losing their own identities for eons, but each p
air had to find their own way. My extraordinary growth of power when we bonded was great in most ways, but hell when it came to our relationship learning curve.
I turned back to the reflecting pool. Maybe Nicholas was right, and I just needed to go train for a bit, burn off the tension and some extra steam and the spell my old mentor, Dominique and I had worked out over our encrypted email server would do its job.
Nicholas had sort of proposed to me while he was riding the high of our last victory against eternal death and damnation. Three weeks later, he’d done a better job of it, candles, dinner, the whole nine yards. Then he’d had all my things moved into what was now our room, and turned my old room into the ultimate training room.
We’d left the amazing bathroom alone apart from the shower, creating stalls along the shower wall to create three separate spa-like showers for when others trained with me. My hope was that I’d get more vampires and shifters into my new studio and we’d all have something to learn.
Colette, my second, had begun training with me. She was skilled with swords, but had never practiced hand-to-hand combat, always relying on her supernatural strength and speed to win fights. Now that we’d been attacked by elders of the council, who were undeniably stronger than any of us, she wanted to learn anything I could teach her, starting with Krav Maga, a middle eastern martial arts form.
“Ah, Krav Maga, the new yoga,” Fin, our head of security and my sometimes bodyguard, quipped as he walked out of the shower with a towel around his waist.
I knew the towel was because he’d heard me come in. The shifters were the least modest of our clan, always needing to be reminded to wear clothes in mixed company. Of course, “mixed company” meant me. No one else seemed to mind that people were wandering around with their naughty bits out. And since no one around seemed to be pairing off, I was beginning to suspect the problem was all in my dirty, dirty Catholic mind.
Colette saved me from my self-reflection and tossed me a kendo stick. We practiced barefoot on the mats for almost thirty minutes, until I finally began to fatigue and she got one sold blow in across my back. Red hot pain bloomed like a thousand wasp stings and I coughed out a choked laugh as I staggered away.
“I’m surprised that it didn’t shatter from your strength,” I gasped, turning to face her again. She held up the broken kendo stick with a sheepish look on her face and I laughed again, bent over my knees to brace myself. “that explains why it feels like you just flayed the skin off my back.”
“Sorry, Caroline. Really. You took it like a champ, though.” She glanced to the side as she tossed the broken bamboo stick out of the practice ring, and I used her distraction to switch fighting styles again.
I lunged at her and lashed out with a foot, catching her just under her ribs. She flew across the mat and landed with a grunt, then sprang back to her feet and attacked in earnest. Her fists came at me so fast I couldn’t block every punch, and a solid strike to the temple made me grateful that Nicholas had demanded we wear protective gear.
She switched things up again and fell back into a judo stance, giving me a second to catch my breath. I mirrored her and waited for her to attack, which she did the second that I blinked, moving so fast that I didn’t even brace as she scooped me up and threw me down on the mat. My arms went around her and I landed full on my back, my head bouncing painfully and the breath rushing from my lungs in a big whoosh of air.
I lay there, not breathing, as my body tried to remember how to fill my lungs, and Colette pulled my headgear off and started mouth to mouth, as if she’d stopped my heart. Once they inflated, my lungs worked on their own again, and I pushed weakly at Colette until she back up, still straddling me.
“I’m okay, Colette. Not dead…yet.”
“Oh, God, please don’t tell Nicholas I made you stop breathing. I didn’t think you were that fragile, I swear.” Her face, normally the pale white of marble, was tinged almost green from fear.
“I’m not. You just knocked the wind out of me, and my lungs needed to catch up. It’s good in a real fight, unless you’re the recipient.” I panted and closed my eyes, not bothering to shove her off me as I waited for my heart to stop pounding in my ears.
The room went quiet and the air pressure changed, charged with electricity or magic that I hadn’t expected. Colette shifted on top of me and I opened my eyes, expecting her to get off me. Instead, her face was close to mine, eyes half-lidded and dreamy. My pulse started to pick up again as she leant in close, the smell of mint on her breath and the musk perfume she wore filling my nostrils. I put my gloved hands against her shoulders to keep her from pressing her body against mine, but she was so much stronger than I was my elbows gave out and before I could figure out how to stop her, she was pressed the full length of my body, her lips pressed to mine.
She made a small sound of pain and need that pierced my heart with grief for her loneliness, and something inside me snapped. My hard-won self-control gave over to my magic, and the necromancy we’d awakened inside me recognized Colette as mine, as a thing of death. Still trapped beneath her, I saw the magic that animated her in my mind and my death magic reached out and drank her in.
Terrified of what I was doing, I struggled harder, but she only tried to deepen the kiss, letting me drain the very life out of her in her need for flesh to flesh contact. I gathered up raw energy inside me and pushed out with my magic, and Colette flew backwards across the room, landing flat on her back and lying there as if she was stunned.
The power boost instantly energized me and I sprang to my feet, ready to fight again. Colette was slower clambering up from the floor, and she wavered on her feet and fell back to her knees.
Nick burst through the door with Fin and Jeremy on his heels. Colette lunged toward me again and Nick grabbed her and held her as she first whimpered, then raged at him to let her go, to let her come back to me.
“What did you do to her, Caroline?” He fumed as he handed her over to the wererats. They escorted her out of the room and the door shut behind them with a bang, making me jump.
“She had me pinned, then she kissed me. I wasn’t strong enough to push her off, but before I realized what was happening, she’d attracted the necromancy in my magic. I didn’t know that could happen, or I wouldn’t have been alone with her,” I snapped. I was pacing the floor with my hands tugging at my hair. “I drank her lifeforce, Nicholas,” I hissed. “Like a goddamned vampire. Worse, she loved it, and what you burst in on, was her trying to get back to me when I threw her across the room to save her bloody life.”
Nick didn’t answer, but looked at me, long and hard, as if weighing his options. He was still standing silent in the center of the practice mats when Fin walked back in.
“I don’t know what you did in here, Caroline, but there is some funky magical you-know-what going on with all the vampires. Call me crazy, but I think that forced abstinence of yours is about to back fire in a nuclear bomb kind of way, Nicholas.” Fin left quickly after a sharp glare from my love, his boss and technically, his master.
“Forced abstinence?” I asked. “Why the hell would we force anyone to abstain? We don’t anymore, so lift the ban for everyone.”
“The ban was set in place once we consummated our relationship. Our sexual energy has been leaking out over the clan, increasing appetites, decreasing common sense…” he sighed, “I didn’t know what else to do. I feed off their energy, like libido, as much as I do blood. I could never have stayed true to you alone if that sharing continued.”
“Wait.” I stopped pacing and pointed both index fingers at him. “You forced everyone we love to feel what we’re feeling when we make love, then not do anything about it, and you did it because it’s too hard for you to be monogamous?” I threw up my hands and dropped them in frustration, then raised them again as I envisioned throttling him. “This is one of those things that you should file under, ‘stuff I should’ve told Caroline before I linked us for all eternity, Nick.”
“Which is wh
y we need that shielding spell. I’ll leave you to it, because I apparently can’t stop touching you long enough to let you work, and we can’t have this happening again.” He started toward the door and turned around. “I’ll see if we can’t get Colette right again, but I’ll be assigning you another lieutenant while we figure out if she’s safe to come back to you.”
I nodded silently in agreement, wishing I could simply replace all the vampires in my persona entourage with shifters, and prevent the possibility of hurting another vampire altogether.
“I’m sorry Nick. I truly had no idea that I could be a vampire to vampires.”
“Yeah, well, I guess now we know why they put all the necromancers to death, don’t we?” he replied with a sigh. My stomach dropped and the room closed in on me.
“What?” I managed to gasp. We’d just learned that the elders of the council had figured out how to sever their ties to their human servants, and visions of me burning at the stake, danced through my head.
“Just fix the shielding before the remainder of the council come for us. If they know you’re a necromancer, they won’t rest until you and I are dead. No matter how justified we were in killing their brethren.”
Nick strode from the room and left me with my jaw on the floor and bile in my throat. I’d felt pressure before to strengthen our shields against accidental invasion by the others in the quartet of power between vampire, witch, wererat, and werewolf. But, that had been when it was to avoid the embarrassment of psychically joining each other in the shower, or losing the taste for our favorite foods, replaced by someone else’s.