Born to Bite Bundle

by Hannah Howell

  “You would spend the rest of your life suffering for me?” she repeated.

  His frown deepened. “I would. But it matters not. We—”

  “I’m nae certain that’s at all flattering, but I will hold you to your word, Alder the White,” she said, cutting him off and rising from the bed. She walked to the center of the cellar, facing the giant slab of black stone.

  “Beatrix, what are you doing?” Alder asked from behind her, alarm sharpening his tone.

  The Levenach stretched out her arms to either side, her palms facing the stone. She could not answer Alder’s question because, in truth, she did not know what she was about to unleash on them both. But she trusted that the power that had brought Alder to her would not forsake them now.

  “Fosgail,” she commanded.

  Open.

  Chapter Twelve

  Alder’s body began a queer trembling as Beatrix stood with her back to him, her hands raised, her red hair tossed by an impossible breeze in the close space. At her commanding word, the black floor itself, made in part from shining black stone, began to crack and slide apart.

  Was the Levenach summoning hell for Alder? Something about her actions struck a fear in his heart colder than the vampire blood that coursed through his veins, and Alder wanted to flee.

  Instead, he stood. He would not leave Beatrix.

  As the gaping blackness that was the void beneath the stone widened, the candles in the corners of the cellar winked out, allowing first only night to flow from the crevasse, then shooting rays of silver light. Alder threw up a forearm to shield his eyes from the bright blades, sparkling like stars shooting across a midnight sky.

  Beatrix dropped her arms to her sides and stepped back one pace, then a pair, until she stood next to Alder. When she turned her face and looked up at him, he saw that Beatrix, too, was more than a little frightened of what she had done.

  “What is happening?” he asked.

  She swallowed. “I doona know.”

  Alder drew his arm across Beatrix’s shoulders and together they looked to the sparkling hole in the floor once more.

  The first phantasm swooped out of the black like a streaking swath of fog, whistling a circuit around the cellar walls, tossing both Alder’s and Beatrix’s hair—white and red, tangled together. She turned into him slightly, and gripped his sides with her fingers.

  The swirling apparition was soon joined by another, and another, and then what seemed an endless river of white erupted from the floor and turned the air in the cellar into a storm cloud, nearly deafening in its power. A cyclone of gauzy white, glowing, radiating energy and light, and seeming to push Alder and Beatrix even closer together.

  Then, as suddenly as the storm had formed, it ripped into separate sheets and fell to the stone floor like giant raindrops, splashing into hazy, white shapes of…

  People.

  In the blink of an eye, the cellar of the White Wolf Inn was choked with scores of the spectral images, standing five and six deep against the walls in some spots.

  Beatrix gasped beneath Alder’s arms and pushed away.

  “Da,” she choked, running to one of the ghostly figures.

  Although Alder could clearly see through their forms as if made of little more than smoke, the shimmery image that Beatrix ran to met her in a solid embrace.

  “Honey Bea,” Gerald Levenach said with a smile. “How foine it is to hold you once more.”

  “Oh, Da,” Beatrix cried, and began to sob against her spectral sire.

  Alder let his eyes skim over the crowd of figures openly staring at him, and he felt his fangs erupting behind his lips in instinctive fear.

  He recognized several of the faces. Even after one hundred years, he could not forget. These were the Levenachs of a century ago. The victims of the massacre.

  Alder’s judgment was at hand.

  “Is this him, then?” Gerald Levenach said to his daughter, and Alder forced his eyes away from the damning gazes of the ghosts in time to see Beatrix nod and swipe at her eyes.

  “He did it, Da, as was foretold—Laszlo le Morte is dead.”

  Gerald nodded and his eyes pinned Alder. “’Tis well. And what will bring the end of this evil, once and for all?”

  “He needs us, Da,” Beatrix said. “In order to regain his soul, he must drink of the Levenach’s lifeblood.”

  Gerald Levenach’s ghostly eyebrows rose. “Must he now?” He looked pointedly around the cellar at his otherworldly companions. “’Tis nae only up to me, Honey Bea.”

  “I’ll not do it,” Alder said. “I love Beatrix. More than anyone I ever have in my mortal life or the unnatural one I have now. Better that you take me back into the depths with you than leave me, a monster, here alone with her. I will not damn her as I have been damned.”

  “Damn her? I should hope nae, if you love her as you say you do,” Gerald observed with amusement. “Our clan will decide, as it always has.”

  Alder did not understand the cryptic answer, but ignored it, dropping to his knees on the cellar floor. He now addressed the audience of spirits watching him keenly.

  “I have done your family a grave and ancient wrong, and for that I am sorry. My greed and my thirst for war when I was still a mortal man led to the massacre. I was turned into what I am by Laszlo le Morte, but he is no more. I have hunted him for a century, a slave, and soon I will be condemned to an eternity of hell. Perhaps only what I deserve. But I will not sacrifice the last Levenach, the most good and noble human I have known in all my many years, to save myself. I love her, and I will not do it. I ask not for your blessing, only for your forgiveness.”

  He turned to look at Beatrix; silvery tears ran down her cheeks. “I will say again to you, Beatrix: I love you. And I also ask you to forgive me for not being the man you deserve.”

  “There is nae need to ask my forgiveness, Alder,” she choked.

  Gerald Levenach turned his head to appraise his companions. “What say you, kin? What is your judgment upon this creature?”

  “Guilty,” one phantasm intoned in a grinding voice.

  “Guilty,” added another.

  “Aye, guilty.”

  And so it went, until all the spirits had voiced their damnation of Alder. When they were silent once more, he felt almost relief. He was guilty in their eyes. They would not allow him to take Beatrix.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “We’re all agreed then, White Wolf,” Gerald announced. “You are guilty.”

  “I am.”

  Gerald looked down at his daughter. “Let him be healed, Honey Bea. Give him the lifeblood.”

  “Truly, Da?” Beatrix whispered.

  Alder frowned, confused. “No.”

  Gerald continued as if Alder had become less substantial than the ghosts populating the cellar. “You have fulfilled your oath. May our family’s lifeblood sustain and protect you both. The highlands need you.”

  Beatrix threw her arms about her father’s neck. “I love you, Da.”

  The spirits standing along the walls began to howl. Alder did not understand what was happening, but the cellar had started to cant queerly to one side. He blinked, and his vision blurred.

  He blinked again and his eyes opened on blackness.

  “I love you, Honey Bea,” he heard Gerald Levenach call from the void.

  And then the whirlwind started once more, this time invisible in the endless pitch of the cellar, and Alder felt himself falling, falling….

  “Drink, Alder,” Beatrix whispered into his ear. It was still so black…but it was warm, and Beatrix was pressing her naked body against his own cold flesh.

  “No,” he mumbled, trying to turn his head away.

  “Aye, drink. You must. The sun will soon rise.”

  He could hear the first tentative calls of the forest birds, rousing from their nests and announcing the day. Alder could smell earth, the moldering leaves. He could feel the hard ground beneath his bare skin. Were they outside? But how h
ad Beatrix…

  “Alder, drink,” Beatrix insisted from the blackness again. “We have only moments.”

  If the sun rose upon him, touched his skin, Alder was finished. “I will not damn you,” he insisted, feeling with his every sharpened sense the impending sunrise. “Let me be destroyed.”

  “Do you love me or nae, Alder?” she asked urgently, her breath feathering his cheek.

  “More than my own soul.”

  “Then you must trust me. And you must drink now! Now!”

  Alder felt the hellacious burn on his skin, and as he opened his mouth in a hiss, his fangs springing free, a warm, thin liquid flooded his mouth.

  Beatrix pulled the cup away slowly, watching with frightened tears in her eyes as Alder writhed on the ground before the inn. She hoped she had not been too late.

  She stood, her legs feeling like limp ropes, and faced the rising sun, reaching its arms over the treetops as if to seize the man on the ground behind her, who thrashed and gasped.

  “Eternal Mother, I thank you for your bounty,” she choked. “The legend is fulfilled. Blood for blood, right for wrong. Let peace come over your land and peoples, and we will guard it well. Bind and banish the evil, as my man pours out his sacrifice on this sacred ground. I, too, make my own sacrifice.”

  Beatrix emptied the cup of the remaining water from the Levenach well onto the dirt. It pitted the loose soil and turned it into a siphon, spiraling deep into the earth with a whisper and a shudder.

  Behind her, Alder screamed, and his cry echoed one hundred years of pain and remorse.

  The sun burst over the Leamhan forest like a fire-ball, tenfold as bright, burning Beatrix’s already watering eyes. The morning wind took up a march through the clearing, moaning with the satisfied voices of her ancestors, the final trumpeting end of a century of evil, come full circle at last.

  And then all was very, very still.

  She stood for a long moment facing the wood, too frightened of turning and seeing Alder’s body lying in a pool of nothing. Perhaps she had been too late, they had all been too late.

  “Beatrix?”

  At his weak and pleading whisper, she spun.

  Alder lay nude on the ground, staring up at the streaked sky with wide eyes. She rushed to him and dropped to her knees at his side.

  “Alder,” she choked, running her fingertips down his cheek. His skin, once so white it nearly glowed, was now pinkening, his black eyes lightening before her disbelieving gaze to a blue that reflected the morning sky above them.

  He turned his head to look at her, and those blue eyes roamed her face wondrously. “You’re still alive,” he whispered.

  Beatrix nodded. “And so are you.”

  “But…your lifeblood?”

  “It was in the well, Alder. The lifeblood of the Levenach clan is the blessed water that has protected my family these many years. You only needed permission to take from it.”

  Alder huffed a laugh. “Well water?”

  “Magic well water,” Beatrix clarified.

  Alder’s chuckle deepened. “I’m alive,” he said, and held his palms before his eyes, turning his hands front to back. “Truly…alive.”

  Beatrix also laughed, and when she saw Alder’s teeth—white and even—her heart clenched.

  He was alive, and he was mortal once more.

  Alder suddenly shot up into a sitting position. He seized Beatrix by her shoulders, turned her onto his lap, and kissed her, his mouth warm and wet and aggressive.

  In but a blink, her desire for him was raging, and she drew her arms about his naked body.

  He pulled his mouth away from hers and stared into her eyes. “I want a family with you,” he announced.

  She laughed. “Very well.”

  He dropped his lips to hers once more, but only for a moment. “And you will marry me.”

  “Straightaway.”

  He turned her onto her back in the dirt and she shrieked with laughter.

  “Are you cold?” he asked. “Shall we go inside?”

  Beatrix shook her head and then framed Alder’s face with her palms. “I’m nae cold, and I doona want to wait.”

  Alder grinned. “Neither do I.”

  And in that clearing on that morn, a new dynasty was planted, a magical and wide-branching tree that would grow and spread to protect not only the Leamhnaigh, but all of the highlands.

  The following summer, the first white witch of the Leamhan forest was born.

  LAIRD OF MIDNIGHT

  Victoria Dahl

  This story is for my boys, who are not impressed with love

  stories but might be impressed with vampires.

  Chapter One

  Larmuir, Scotland—1595

  He was back again.

  The man. Every eye in the inn slid away from him as soon as his foot crossed the threshold. Kenna watched him mark each face with his gaze before he made his way toward the table in the farthest corner. Not one other person had dared to sit there since the man’s first appearance five nights before.

  The MacLain, Cousin Angus had called him, his voice a whisper of warning. When Kenna had asked questions, Angus had shaken his head and stared hard at the ground.

  But others had whispered. The last of his clan, they’d said. A curse handed down by the Devil himself. The MacLain’s great-grandfather had killed his whole family, and been punished in turn. Each MacLain chief could have one son and nothing more. No daughters. Not even a wife. Just a son delivered of a banshee woman whose ghostly form was torn apart in the violence of the birth. When the son came of age, the father died. The solitude of the MacLain men was inescapable.

  For five days Kenna had pieced together these whispers, hungry to know why others seemed so frightened of him. He looked powerful, to be sure. Wide shoulders and muscled arms, and eyes that carefully measured each man in the room, as if he were walking into battle instead of sampling the ale.

  He was neither handsome nor ugly, she thought as he shifted his chair to face the door. But his eyes…his eyes could capture souls. They were the pale green of drying leaves, cool and removed.

  A hand closed over her breast. “Bah!” Kenna barked and slapped the head of the man closest to her. An explosion of laughter erupted from the table as the man protested his innocence.

  “By God, she’s bonny,” the man next to him sighed.

  “Keep your hands to yourself, peasants.”

  They all laughed, taking none of the offense she’d intended. She was a peasant now, too. Or something even lower. The local serving wench. The woman who brought the peasants their ale.

  The inn was growing more crowded. Peat smoke mixed with burning fat from the spit, thickening the air with an acrid haze. Already, it had grown busy enough that she would no longer be able to defend herself. Once her hands were crowded with the handles of heavy tankards, there’d be no batting away the eager fingers of the patrons. They’d caress her breasts and slap her arse and even sneak an occasional hand up her leg.

  Kenna wanted to slump with weariness. She wanted to retrieve her next load of ale and dump it over the heads of the nearest drinkers. She wanted to spit and scream and drive them all away.

  But it was either tolerate the hands that groped her bottom or starve. And she was done with starving.

  “Wench!” a red-faced man called, jowls quivering with the movement of his jaw.

  Kenna ignored him and carried her last tankard toward the far corner. The MacLain might be cursed by the Devil, but his corner was peaceful, and he never tried to pinch any part of her.

  In truth, she liked being close to him. He was…dignified. Charming in a quiet way, like the gentlemen of her youth had been. Whether he was in league with dark forces or not, the MacLain was a gentleman, and she felt pulled toward him, as if he carried a scent of her childhood home.

  “Sir,” she murmured as she slid the ale across his table.

  He inclined his head. His strong brow cast a shadow over his eyes.

&
nbsp; “Will you take supper this evening? We’ve bean stew and a leg of venison.”

  “I will,” he answered. He rarely spoke, and Kenna found herself leaning slightly forward at the sound of those two words.

  “And some bread perhaps?” she asked, as if there were any question she would bring it.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She didn’t move. For just a moment, Kenna stood in front of him, waiting for him to say more and knowing he wouldn’t. But then his wide mouth quirked up into a crooked smile. At the sight of that smile, she lost her nerve and spun away.

  What was it she wanted him to say? Would you honor me with a stroll about the inn, lass? She knew full well how a stroll about the inn with a serving wench would end.

  “Fool,” she muttered and made herself keep moving even when she heard MacLain call out, “Wait.”

  She had no time for mooning about, staring at a man who could offer her nothing more than a tumble. She was busy and tired, but she didn’t mind that so much. If only the men would keep their hands to themselves.

  “Kenna!” Angus shouted from behind a barrel he was tapping. “Stop hitting the men!”

  “They’ve no right to put their hands on me.”

  “’Course they do. Don’t act so proud.”

  “I am your cousin’s widow,” she hissed. “How can you suggest such a thing?”

  “I’m well aware whose widow you are. Why do you think I haven’t sent you abovestairs with anyone? ’Tis not for lack of offers.”

  Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. “Well, thank you for your kind consideration, cousin. And you needn’t worry over the men. My resistance is free entertainment for them.”

  “I know that. God’s bones, I’m trying to help. If you stop fighting, Kenna, they won’t be so rough with you. All they want is a tickle.”

  A tickle. Yes, just a friendly rub or curious squeeze. And if a hand slipped beneath her skirts on occasion, what did that take away from her?

  Kenna picked up the heavy tray of trenchers and turned slowly back to the smoky room.