Droshin wiped the tear from Jane’s cheek. “No need for that, be happy you’re back.”
Despite knowing what the spell would do and that he got off on the fight, Jane spoke her mind again. “You know that it’s adrenaline and hatred that makes my heart race. It’s not affection or desire. I hate you, and I hate what you’ve done to me and the others.”
The vampire looked surprised, brows knitting together as he gauged Jane’s expression.
Her punishment hit harder than the first time. Blood rushed to her sex. Jane shuddered as a tiny orgasm roiled through her body and ruined her undies.
Droshin smiled wide. “I can smell you, Little Bird.”
Jane ignored him. “How are the others?” She couldn’t make a move on Droshin until she knew the others were safe.
“They’re well. They have a lovely new room here.”
“May I see them?”
“Why?”
“I missed them.” True enough.
“You may. After we’ve gotten reacquainted.” Droshin took her hand and kissed the top of it, the barest brush of lips against skin. “You remember, don’t you, how good being with me was?”
Jane’s body reacted to the vampire’s touch the way it always did. Heat rose from within, flushing her cheeks and chest. Just the slightest touch from him made Jane’s mouth water, and her head go fuzzy, and another tiny orgasm rolled over her.
An even tinier whimper escaped Jane’s lips.
Droshin groaned deep in his throat. “I’ve missed you so, Jane.”
“Please,” Jane slurred, tongue heavy and thick with manufactured desire. “I’d like to see the others. Then you can have your way. Anything you want, anything. I’ll fight you, or worship you, whatever you desire. Just let me see my sisters.”
Jane had never referred to the other blood nymphs as sisters. But the word, carefully chosen even under the blanket of Droshin’s thrall, had the intended effect.
“Very well, Little Bird.” Droshin encircled Jane’s wrist and shimmered them to another part of his fortress.
With no sense of direction or layout of the structure, Jane could only use her senses as cues to their location. The air felt damp and cooler on her skin, and it smelled faintly of match heads.
Underground. Had to be.
Droshin opened the large rounded steel door with a thought, unseen mechanisms housed in the door clicking and sliding like clockwork as the heavy door creaked open.
A cold shudder ran through Jane’s body. It was the same door she’d spent six years behind.
Thirteen, not twelve nude women laid sleeping on a pile of plush blankets and pillows in the center of the room. Bathed in moonlight from the barred window the scene would have been sexy if it weren’t for the shackles around their ankles.
17
“See, they’re all the same as when you left, just as you’re the same girl. Now, take off your clothes, Little Bird. I want to have you in front of all your sisters,” Droshin’s mismatched eyes dilated with desire. He licked his full lips as Jane lifted her shirt.
It was a command she had to obey.
And oh, how she wanted to obey. To give herself over to the beautiful creature in front of her over and over. To stroke and pet and suck him or have him deep in her bringing her to one climax after another.
But Jane was still there, still fighting the thrall and as the shirt slipped over her head and fell to the floor, she opened her own clockwork tumbler, and let the demon’s power flood her being.
It was more power than she’d ever felt from the demon before.
Droshin noticed and sniffed the air.
“You’re wrong, Droshin. I’m not the same girl who left.”
And the vampire met her demon black gaze. “What is this?”
“Wake up ladies,” Jane said and floated off the ground. She was eye to eye with the monster, “you need to see this.”
Don’t toy with him, witch. Make your move before he-
But it was too late. Droshin put the pieces together and smothered Jane’s mind with a thicker, heavier thrall.
“Tricky, aren’t we, Little Bird? That’s OK, I love to see you struggle.”
Jane drowned in it. She sunk not just back to the floor, but to her knees as her eyes cleared back to pale green.
She crawled to him and crazed with manufactured lust, Jane took off her bra. The poison meant for her and the girls if they couldn’t escape fell to the ground, breaking open and settling into the cracks of the stone floor.
Jane didn’t notice. She wriggled out of her jeans and undies and stood so Droshin could delight in her return to him.
That was all she wanted now, to please him. “Please, my love,” Jane said with a quiet voice, “would you have me?”
Droshin groaned her name, wrapped a forearm around the small of her back and drew her close. “Tell me how much you want me.”
“More than anything.”
FIGHT IT, JANE! yelled the demon in her mind.
But she couldn’t. Jane wasn’t there. Not really. She was lost in a sea of thrall and white hot desire.
But a soft, tentative question from one of the girls somehow reached through the fog. “Jane? Is that you?”
Her mind cleared bit by bit and Jane, disgusted with herself for letting it get so far, took out her anger on Droshin.
Using a sizable chunk of the demon’s magic, she shoved the vampire away with both hands.
He flew into the door.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s me. I told you I’d come back for you. Everyone, get against the wall.” All thirteen of them ran to the opposite wall.
“What are you playing at, Little Bird? Do you think you can beat me?” Droshin laughed and closed the distance between them, towering over her. “I’m more powerful than you can imagine, even with the help of the nymph you’ve gotten to do your bidding. Do you think I’m stupid? Jane, come now. Do you really think I’d use The Nymph’s Curse if I wasn’t strong enough to beat the nymph should it escape? You’re smarter than that.”
“First of all, it’s not a nymph you shoved into us. It’s a goddamn demon, and guess what? This abandoned coal town? Not a coal town, it’s a fucking gateway to the demon realm, and the demon within me has access to all kinds of extra juice just from what’s seeping through the cracks. Just imagine if she actually tapped into it.”
It was all false. The demon felt more powerful, but Jane had no idea why. She’d made it all up.
Once a con, always a con.
Jane stepped forward, forcing Droshin back. “And lastly, my name is Jane Moretti, motherfucking Warrior Witch, not Little Bird.”
The shapes flashed behind Jane’s eyes so fast they blurred into one another. It didn’t matter, she didn’t need to see the spell, could feel the alchemy. It was a part of her.
She blasted him with concussive force, the same thing she’d used on Gunnar months before.
Droshin laughed and he deflected the wiggly waves of force with the lift of his finger.
“You’ll have to do much better than that.” Droshin slung a battle spell at Jane.
She waved it away with the same motion he used. The spell collided with the stone wall behind her, scorching the gray rocks.
“Scared yet?” Jane asked stepping forward, again forcing the vampire back. “I didn’t start with my best juice. You wanna know why? Because a part of me really wants to see the look on your face when you realize you’ve lost. I couldn’t just turn you inside out and summoned my sword to take your head right out of the gate. Then I wouldn’t get to enjoy it. And I so enjoy seeing you struggle.”
She waited until she saw it on his face. In his pretty, mismatched eyes.
“There it is.” Jane cooed. “I’ve waited six years to see that look on your face.”
Don’t waste time, witch! Finish him before-
But it was too late. While Jane monologued like an evil villain, Droshin had already figured out Jane’s weakness.
The other
girls.
“Come back to me,” he whispered to them and each one peeled themselves away from the wall to answer his call.
“No! What are you doing!” Jane yelled at both Droshin and the others.
You took too long! Stupid, stupid witch! Let me dispose of this monstrosity.
Jane felt the demon taking over her body. NO! She screamed in the demon’s mind. I HAVE to do this myself.
We will both die.
We’ll see about that, Jane said as she used a combination of her own magic and the demon’s to wrap the girls in a ward, keeping them from the brunt of Droshin’s extra thrall.
The girl’s heads cleared and they scrambled back against the wall.
“Leave them alone,” Jane growled, stepping forward.
“I don’t think I will,” he said, gathering energy in his left hand.
He aimed at the girls but Jane reached for more power and shielded them physically in glowing white haze of magic.
A delighted smile spread across Droshin’s features and Jane realized her mistake. But it was too late.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
Droshin released his power right into Jane, whose shields and wards were all focused on the others.
She took the blast with none of her own magic to buffer or diffuse it.
Jane was knocked backward twenty feet into the same far wall as the girls. As she flew back, head and shoulders colliding with the stone, she wondered if this was the end.
The collision ripped her breath away, and she heard the bones in her shoulder crack and crunch.
Jane slid down the wall.
But she wasn’t dead.
Sputtering and coughing blood Jane did a mental check on all her parts. Shoulders, fucked. Arms, legs, both good, but her torso which absorbed the majority of the blast, burned with every breath she took. And her head, Jane was certain she had a concussion. She tried to get back up, but she couldn’t get her legs under her. Her body slumped over, and Jane was face first on the stone ground.
Let me have your body, Jane. I will destroy him!
Shut. Up.
Jane focused on staying still. It hurt less and she wanted Droshin to think she was unconscious. Jane worked quickly, visualizing the transmutation spell in her mind.
Are you sure you want to use that one? asked the demon
Yes.
Jane couldn’t see it, but the demon smiled at her.
She’d chosen and assembled the most brutal transmutation the demon had shown her. It was complete except for one element. One shape - the effigy of the spell’s target - needed to be inverted before the spell was complete.
Jane held the spell in place and reached for more of the demon’s power. “Droshin, go to hell,” Jane said from the ground.
She inverted the shape and did exactly what she promised. Droshin screamed as his insides were pulled to the outside. Heart, organs, brain, all of it exposed. Beautiful smile and body, all now just a mess of sinew and bone. Jane floated herself off the ground and watched as she turned him inside out.
He screamed until he was fully inverted and unable to take another breath. Almost fully. Jane tweaked the spell so she could watch when Droshin realized he’d lost. Only the vampire’s eyes remained on the outside, a gory, disgusting mockery of the beauty he once had.
The vamp fell to his knees, writhing with the ache of suffocation. Unable to cast or scream or breathe, his lovely mismatched eyes bulged in horror, pleading with Jane to end it.
Jane smiled.
She summoned her katana through an alchemy circle and aimed it at Droshin’s neck.
With his insides exposed Jane could see exactly where she needed to strike to sever his head. Right between the vertebrae.
She raised the blade above her head and screamed as her broken bones protested.
Jane brought the blade down true and straight, with the help of the demon’s magic.
Droshin’s head hit the stone floor with a wet, solid thud.
The carcass burst into flames.
“We’ve got to go, NOW!” Jane said to the women and prepared to magic them out of their shackles.
But there was no need. They fell away as the monster who’d put them on burned away. “Do any of you know how to get out of here,” asked Jane.
They collectively shook their heads. “He shimmered us here.”
“Alright then, we’ve just gotta figure it out. Everyone stay together.” Jane led the former blood nymphs out of their cell.
18
They’re naked and have no shoes, the demon said when Jane led them to yet another dead end in the endless maze of rooms and hallways.
And?
If you do find your way out, which I doubt highly, how do you expect them to walk through the woods?
It might not be the forest. It was illusion, remember?
Yes, witch but the point still remains. They have to get to the vehicle in bare feet, which they aren’t all going to fit into.
Shit. I hadn’t thought of that.
If you allow it, I can transport all of you outside of this place, to the safety of your friends.
Why the fuck didn’t you say anything before now?
To do so, I need your body.
Fuck. Jane looked at the women, at the dead end she’d lead them to and sighed. Fine.
“Ladies, I’m gonna get us outta here, but I can’t do it alone. Please, don’t be scared.”
If you hurt them, I’ll kill us both.
I would never.
Oh, and easy coming out, OK? I’m already broken, but this ripping holes through me shit needs to end.
Of course, witch.
And Jane was gone.
The demon wrapped her tentacles around the women, who were in too much shock to be phased by the grey-skinned demon encircling them. With a though she shimmered everyone out of the fortress.
“Holy fuck!” Xan said when the demon appeared in front of the SUV with thirteen naked women. She hopped out of the car, along with Theron and Zora, who handed blankets to everyone.
“This is yours,” said the demon. She handed Xan her necklace, then her skin sloughed away and Jane stood naked and shoeless with all the other former blood nymphs.
Xan flicked her wrist and charmed the SUV into a ridiculous SUV stretch limo. “Everyone in,” she said. We’re getting the fuck out of here.
19
As she waited on one under-caffeinated person after another Jane noticed how different the energy was in The Circle.
The girls were free; the magic was free and settled, and people seemed happier.
“How am I supposed to drink this?” a nasty customer said to Jane.
Most of them at least.
“I assure you, ma’am, it’s perfectly fine.” Jane’s Ouroboros tattoo danced around her elbow. Not because it was time to feed, but because the demon liked teasing her for not exploding the nasty customers with magic.
“It’s NOT fine. You need to fix it. And don’t let that new guy make my drink. YOU need to do it, Jane.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jane rubbed her elbow trying to calm the tingly, wiggly sensations.
A few weeks ago, Jane wouldn’t have been able to handle such a rude customer. She would have told her off and probably gotten sent to the bar to make drinks for the rest of her shift. But when Frankie hired everyone back, she made Jane a day shift manager.
Jane couldn’t figure out why. But she knew she couldn’t go off on customers anymore.
Jane still hated coffee, but she liked the few hundred extra bucks it put in her pocket every other week. Money was a great motivator, especially when it came to handling surly customers.
Jane tossed the perfectly good, albeit sloppy frappuccino, and made the woman another. She piled the whipped cream higher than normal and was extra careful drizzling on the caramel and chocolate.
“There.” Jane handed the woman her new, perfect frap.
The woman nodded, then put the dome lid from her first, reject
ed frap on top of her drink, smashing all the whipped cream and drizzle down into a swirly mess. She left the store quite content to sip on a drink she’d made even messier than the first.
“Idiot,” Jane said under her breath.
The women were free, most back with their loved ones, some choosing to stay in The Circle, one even at Theron’s until they figured things out.
The magic Gunnar locked away had settled, and things were starting to feel like normal.
And Jane was back to being a purple-haired and pierced badass witch. With a side of demon.
The End
Here’s the next one in The Circle Series:
The Garrison
What do a gypsy, fae, and a witch with a side a demon have in common?
Nothing.
Except the punishment The Garrison is about to levy on them for - get this - setting thirteen blood nymphs free and killing the vamp who enslaved them.
Jane's still dealing with the injuries Droshin inflicted. Zora's still grieving her dead beloved, and Xan, well, she's got shit going on NO ONE could have guessed at. And now they're forced to set aside not only their differences, their personal lives too, and conquer the task The Garrison is forcing on them.
We get to see The Morrigan (creepy fucker) again, and FINALLY figure out what the hell is up with Jake and his pack.
Find me on my socials:
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/naomilscudder/
Twitter https://twitter.com/NLScudder
If you liked this book leave a review - it’s like sending me chocolates.
And I fucking love chocolate.
Curious about Zora and Amari’s relationship? Wanna get to know Zora a little better? Not sure? Here’s an excerpt from Zora’s Story.
Sex Magic
There were three stages of enthrallment, and this woman was dangerously close to the first.
"Oh, you're pregnant!" The words were out before I realized I'd said them. Shit.
The neighbor I never gave more than a begrudging hello, whose name I didn't know, stopped mid-step.
Jane The Nymph: The Boxed Set (The Circle Series Book 2) Page 14