Sever the Crown: Vampire Reverse Harem Complete Series

by Mysti Parker

  Fast, heavy footsteps echoed from a stairwell across the room. Narrow points of red light bounced along the walls. I sniffed the air – more human guards. About three of them from the sound of it.

  Zac started forward.

  I grabbed his arm. “No, I got this.”

  I zoomed ahead before he could stop me and met the guards halfway up the stairs. The rest of it went down in about five seconds.

  Here’s the slow-mo version:

  Fangs bared, I hissed like an angry cat. Human guard One froze dead in his tracks and pointed his gun at my head. His buddies, Two and Three, were going so fast, they rear-ended him, which knocked him off-balance. The gun went off, blowing out the emergency light above us.

  Glass rained down as I tore the gun away from him and drove it through his beer gut. Down went One. I kicked him aside. Two pointed his gun, but his arms shook so bad, the laser sight bounced all over the place. I yanked the gun from One’s gut like a redneck version of Excalibur and shot Two with it. Down went Two.

  Three hightailed it up the stairs, but I grabbed his leg and dug my fingers in. He shrieked and dropped his gun. It clattered down the steps as I reeled him in and flipped him over. This one would be dinner. I sank my fangs into his neck, ignoring his shrieks as I gulped down his life like he had probably chugged down beer.

  Something moved on the stairs below me. I sprang up and pounced. My hands were around Zac’s neck before I realized I had pinned him against the wall. His pulse beat like a war drum under my fingers.

  “Melody, it’s me.”

  I leaned in close, inhaling his warm, rapid breaths. “Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I obey my instincts?”

  “Because you need me. Alive.”

  Boy did he ever feel alive, his skin hot and sweaty beneath my palms. I pressed closer against his firm body until his racing heart thumped a seductive rhythm on my tits.

  Withdrawing enough to look into his eyes, I saw fear, mixed with longing and loneliness. It was like looking into a mirror. I wanted his blood so badly I could imagine its hot, metallic thickness flowing across my tongue and down my throat. But then the tattoo on my wrist shot a jolt of electricity up my arm and jarred me back into reality. I swallowed hard. Zac might have been an idiot to get involved with me, but he could be my only chance at bringing down the rest of my mother’s killers.

  The hunger subsided.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered and let him go. “I didn’t mean to.”

  He stood up straight and rubbed his neck, not meeting my gaze. “We don’t have time for– Get down!”

  I ducked. Zac fired a shot up the stairs. Another body tumbled, writhing and howling like an animal, like something not human. I looked down into yellow eyes, bared fangs, and a hole pouring thick, nearly black blood from his shoulder. He had on a uniform like the other guards, but he wasn’t like the other guards.

  “You’re a vampire,” I whispered.

  He hissed at me. “No shit, Sher—” and then his eyes went wide. “Bronwen? How the fuck are you alive? You won’t be for long when Queen Ravana finds out about this.”

  Hearing my mother’s name lifted all the hairs on the back of my neck. “How do you know my mother? Who’s Ravana?”

  “Mother? Holy shit! Bronwen had a kid?” He shook his head with a wheezy laugh. “Did you come here to kill him?”

  Kill him? Kill who?

  Another shot startled me. A hole oozed blood and molten silver from the vampire’s forehead.

  “Come on!” Zac went ahead, stepping over the first vampire I’d ever seen, besides my mother, stopping only to tear the ID from where it was clipped on the vampire’s belt loop.

  I followed, lost in a cloud of overwhelming confusion. “What did he mean, kill him? Kill who?”

  “Ravings of a mad vampire. Did you see his skin? I think he was a meth head.”

  “Vampires do meth?”

  “No, they drink blood from meth heads. Same effect.”

  We emerged onto the main floor where rows of silver-plated steel doors lined the walls. Jail cells, I guessed. Each door was inset with tiny windows. Shadows flashed by them. I looked at one such window as we passed.

  A pair of yellow eyes appeared suddenly, which scared the shit out of me, even though I knew very well that these were my “people,” if you could call them that. As we crept along the hallway, more eyes followed us from every window. Pleas and shocked cries echoed from within the cells.

  “It’s her! It’s Bronwen.”

  “My queen! Get me out of here, would ya’?”

  “She gonna fuck Ravana up!”

  We were coming up on another corridor that crossed the one we were in. That could pose a big risk for ambush. But my distracted mind was still trying to make some sense of the nonsensical. Apparently they thought I was my mother and a queen. Maybe they were all druggies, but I’d heard another name twice.

  “Who’s Ravana?” I whispered to Zac.

  He held a finger to his lips and blocked my way with his other arm. “We have company.”

  From the left came a blur of movement. Zac couldn’t get a shot off in time. A vampire guard tackled him, throwing him to the floor. Zac’s head banged against the concrete.

  I grabbed the vampire’s collar and belt before he could deliver a lethal bite and threw him against a cell door with a clang that echoed through the building and vibrated the floor. He shrieked as his arm made contact with the silver door. I glanced at Zac, who appeared to be out cold, hopefully not dead.

  The vampire rolled to a crouch and sprang at me then knocked me to my back. But I didn’t give him a chance to pin my arms and legs. I kicked and threw him over my head, directly into another guard who had just emerged from the other corridor.

  Flipping to all fours, I stayed between them and Zac, who was slowly coming around, and gave them a full-fanged hiss. It wasn’t an act like before. This hiss came from somewhere deep and dark and instinctual.

  They started forward again but suddenly froze, their yellow eyes widening, glowing with a mix of shock and fear.

  One of them got control of his senses enough to whisper, “It’s… No, it can’t be. Queen Bronwen? Is it really you?”

  Two shots rang out. They fell limp to the floor, silver bubbling from the holes in their chests. They melted into gooey globs of flesh a second later. I turned to see Zac sitting up, gun still aimed as though they might spring back to unlife any second.

  I jumped to my feet. “Why did you kill them? We could have gotten information from them.”

  “Trust me. You don’t want them alive. They’re not on your side.” He slowly got to his feet, wincing as he rubbed the back of his head.

  “What are you not telling me? I swear I will rip your balls off and make you choke on ‘em if you’re hiding some—” But before I could carry out immediate castration, my symbol lit up like a Christmas tree. Energy zinged up my arm, pulling me forward to the last door on the right of the main corridor.

  Zac followed. I peered into the window, careful not to touch the door. I could see nothing but total darkness. No sounds from within either.

  “You think he’s in there?” Zac asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. Can you open it?”

  “Let’s see if this works.” Zac touched the first vampire guard’s ID on a red laser scanner by the cell door. It slid open leisurely like we were about to step into a Walmart.

  The dim emergency lights did little to illuminate the pitch darkness. My night vision revealed a cot with a crumpled blanket and pillow, a bloody cloth and a cool blue shape hunched in the far corner. Almost like…a man?

  “Ashe?” I whispered.

  A head lifted, and copper-colored eyes locked on mine.

  “Is that your name? Are you Ashe?”

  He answered with a full-fanged snarl and hurled himself at us. I zipped in to block him, punching him in the chest with the heel of my hand. He flew back onto the cot, legs flying over his head, and toppled off the o
ther side.

  A tiny groan followed. “Ow.”

  I ran inside, now afraid I’d killed this vampire I didn’t know but had to find. The two symbols on my arm stopped buzzing and instead turned to a steady warm sensation that flowed over my cold skin like a towel fresh from the dryer.

  I spent a millisecond too long basking in that warmth. When I looked back up, he was right beside me. In a blur, he picked me up and threw me down onto the cot. The springs under the terrible mattress screeched at the injustice. I saw movement from the corner of my eye. Zac pointed his gun right at Ashe’s head.

  “No! Don’t!” I looked back up into the face of this stranger with beautiful copper eyes, full lips, and short sandy-brown hair. He wasn’t hurting me, just staring at my face as though he’d never seen anything like me before.

  My mind struggled to find something not stupid to say. I mean, what the fuck do you say to a vampire you’ve just sprung from jail? A vampire who might kill you or fuck you, and more disturbingly, knowing you’d let him do either without a fight?

  Chapter Six

  Ashe

  Uh, what the fuck just happened? One minute, I was lying on my lumpy bed in my cell, listening to the fading sounds of some huge fight somewhere in the jail, and the next, I was getting punched in the chest by the most stunningly beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And she looked familiar, like Queen Bronwen. But Queen Bronwen was dead, and I was here in part because the police thought I killed her with a silver net. So this couldn’t be Bronwen.

  But as soon as I saw her, the painful, sizzling heat on my wrist morphed into a warm tingle that took over my entire body like a steady hum. Need, sharper than any thirst I’d ever felt, coursed through me, as well as a powerful urge to protect her.

  I threw her on the bed because I…well, I needed to see her underneath me. My dick made me do strange things sometimes, especially right now, pressed against her inner thigh, harder than I’d ever been. She stared up at me through the messy bangs of her short, very blonde hair, her eyes a pale green even though she moved like a vampire. Contacts, I guessed later, because right then I was thinking about wild monkey sex.

  Heat grew between her legs as she shifted, her body fitting to mine perfectly. My hips twitched forward on their own to feel her soft curves wrap around me a little tighter, and her full lips parted. A vixen-like grin spread across her mouth as she brought her hand to my ass and squeezed.

  “How about you let me finish rescuing you before we get to that, inmate,” she said, her voice like whiskey and smoke.

  Someone cleared their throat behind us. “Best idea I’ve heard yet,” an irritated male voice said.

  As if I’d been dunked headfirst into a holy-water-filled bathtub, I tore myself off of her and stumbled into the opposite wall of my cell. Sweet Vampire Jesus, that whole encounter on the cot must’ve only lasted about five seconds, but I’d been humping the hot girl while some guy—a DBD from the smell of him—with dark hair, red eyes that appeared to be contacts, a chin dimple, and a big-ass gun looked on, while I was still in jail. Not my best day ever.

  Loud voices sounded from down the hall. The three of us stared at each other in the panicked split-second it took before we sprang into action. I dove for the bed, volunteering myself to hide the woman with my whole body. But she rolled from the mattress and slid underneath the bed in a way that made me think she did this kind of thing every day. The guy was already closing the door of my cell and then folded himself into the corner.

  Quick footsteps echoed closer. For someone who’d been accused of two murders, who’d actually planned a murder from beginning to end, funny that I didn’t know if I could stomach witnessing a bloody one in the confines of my cell.

  More shouts. More footsteps. Even closer.

  As long as I protected the woman underneath my bed, I would do what I had to do though.

  Metal clanged as the footsteps came closer. It sounded like they were beating on the cell doors and likely peering inside the glass windows at the top. If they did, we were screwed. I wrenched the scratchy blanket out from under me and threw part of it over the edge of the bed to cover the woman.

  Bang. Bang. Pause. “What the fuck?”

  My jail cell exploded with action, a thousand moving parts at once. The door burst open. A flood of guards poured in, guns drawn and loaded with silver-tipped bullets. The chin-dimple guy in the corner rounded on them, a distraction that would last only seconds.

  I lunged off the bed to stand in front of it, but the woman had already shot out from underneath it. Her pale green eyes narrowed into lethal slits as she flashed toward the guards. Shots rang out. Bullets zinged between the metal walls, sparking as they made contact. My confused-as-hell body screamed at me to simultaneously run, to drop to the ground, to stand perfectly still. We had to get out of this deathtrap.

  But the woman… She kicked and punched with expert skill, each strike perfectly placed and timed. Enough to incapacitate before she delivered the final blow—a broken neck. Bodies piled up around her, most from her doing, but the guy swung the butt of his big-ass gun to drop several too.

  Until no one was left standing except them. And me, staring like a jackass with my mouth hanging to my shins.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The woman turned and grinned. “Your new best friends. Ready to get out of here?”

  There was no way I could say no. If they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t be offering to bust me out. At least, I hoped.

  “Melody. Ashe,” the chin-dimple guy behind her said gruffly, kneeling by one of the dropped guards. “Get a guard’s uniform on. It’ll help us get out of here faster.”

  “And put this on,” the woman—Melody—said and threw something furry and alive at me.

  I caught it. A cat? Nope. And not alive either. It was a curly brown wig. “Good plan.”

  “I thought so.” Nodding, she began unbuttoning a guard’s bloodied shirt.

  They knew my name. Knew I was in trouble and needed to get out. “Why me?” I asked them. “Why are you here for me?”

  Melody stood with the guard’s shirt and shrugged into it, hiding all of her plentiful curves tucked inside her black tank top and black pants. She had a rose vine tattoo that climbed all the way up one shoulder and another tattoo on her wrist. A circle with a single diamond shape stretching from the center outward. Just like mine. Well, that was weird. That must have been where the tingling had come from, and the tattoo had just...appeared.

  Her mouth opened and shut a few times as her agile fingers worked the shirt buttons shut, as if maybe she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing here. “We’re here for you because you have answers?”

  “I have questions.”

  Chin Dimple threw me a shirt and pants with a no-nonsense, I-will-stake-you-with-a-toothpick look. “You have one second to put those on.”

  The blood donor had balls, I’d give him that. He’d waltzed into a vampire jail as tonight’s buffet and didn’t seem to give a fuck. But again, why? And why for me?

  Melody threw him a wig with longer dark hair than he already had. Then she put on a sandy brown one over her platinum hair. She looked like she’d blend in with her disguise, but she was still just as gorgeous as before.

  I dressed quickly and wigged myself, seeing that the other two were already done, then bent to retrieve one of the fallen weapons.

  “You ever shot one of those before?” Dimple asked, peering out the cell door.

  The gun felt heavy and strange in my hands. “Never.”

  “Just don’t shoot me or Melody, and you’ll be good.” Another glance down the hallway, and then, “Let’s go.”

  The three of us strode out the open door. The other two flanked me as if I were as valuable as gold or something. The other inmates had their faces pressed to the windows in their doors to see what was going on.

  “What’s happening out there?” one demanded.

  “Hey, talk to us, assholes,” another shouted.
r />   The three of us kept our gazes stuck to the floor. As soon as we could, we swung left down a different hallway, leaving the other inmates behind. We walked at a steady clip, but I itched to run as fast as I could.

  “Ashe.” Melody’s wrist bumped into mine, and a wild energy crashed through my skin at the contact. “If we see someone coming, you can’t look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  She grinned. “Like you’re about to taste freedom. Look pissed or something.”

  Out of nowhere, Dimple’s gun smacked me in the back of the head. “There,” he growled. “Now he looks pissed.”

  “The fuck?” Before I could throat punch him, the doors at the end of the hallway banged open.

  Vampire guards poured through. One of them eyed us and then pointed in the direction he was heading.

  “With me,” he barked. “Now.”

  He swept next to Dimple, grabbed his sleeve, and shoved him in the direction he wanted him to go. Dimple looked back and met our gazes, his “oh” expression connecting with Melody’s hissed “shit.”

  The guy grabbed the back of Dimple’s neck and shoved him again. “Move it! Security breach 0204. One man, one woman. Let’s act like we care.”

  The other guards moved in behind them, but the rough guy was starting to look back in our direction, likely to yell at us to join in the fun too. Melody was already taking my hand and steering us through a stairway door, just in time.

  “It’s okay. He knows the plan. He’ll be there.” Melody’s grip tightened in mine as we descended the stairs.

  “Be where?”

  “In a getaway van outside.”

  I glanced at the shaded windows as we passed them, at the soft light slipping underneath the cracks. It would be daylight soon, the perfect time for a break from vampire jail since vampires couldn’t run out into the sun to give chase. But not so perfect if you didn’t have a getaway driver.