Sever the Crown: Vampire Reverse Harem Complete Series

by Mysti Parker

  Not my concern. Neither was my ringing cell at the moment.

  The fire escape opened into an alley that reeked of sweaty garbage and pee. Two large blue dumpsters sat against the opposite brick wall on either side of a closed metal door. About ten feet to the left near the alley entrance sat a parked black van that might as well have had Free Candy scrawled along the sides. The few windows it had were painted black.

  “Chip?” I hissed into the alley, at a complete loss of how ghosts actually worked. Could he hear me through the library walls? “Where is she?”

  I hurtled off the fire escape balcony toward the metal door opposite me. Locked. When I turned, Chip’s bluish form appeared in the open window of the fire escape above me. He pointed toward the van, but then his eyes widened.

  “Ashe! Behind you!”

  I didn’t even have a chance to look. Something hard rammed into my back. Pain fired to all points of my body hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. The black van swam behind them, so close but seeming to grow farther away.

  No. They couldn’t take Wren from me, but my muscles weren’t cooperating to do much about it. I seemed to be folding in on myself, crumpling to the pockmarked alley filled with puddles I sure hoped were just rainwater.

  “Well, this is sure something,” a male voice said from behind me. Familiar, especially his zero-fucks-given tone. When he circled around me, his dusty leather fedora confirmed it, as did the arrogant twist of his mouth he always wore.

  He was the vampire I’d hired to keep tabs on Jessica and make sure she never saw Devin again. The vampire who’d sent me the photo of Jessica and Devin together with the date stamp of a week ago, which now appeared to be inaccurate, at least according to Jessica. This couldn’t be a coincidence that he was here, now, reducing me to uselessness with a stun gun while he stole Wren away.

  “Charles Fucking Ford,” I spat through clenched teeth, fighting to control the spasms still rioting through me.

  His alligator boots came to a stop inches from my head, the same murky green color as the band around his fedora. He wore tan pants and a brick-red, button-up shirt rolled up his forearms. An expert no-questions-asked freelancer/lady-killer, so I’d heard, but I hoped with all my might that last part was figurative.

  Over his head and to the left, Chip appeared in the window of the library and began to frantically unscrew the fire escape from the brick wall, his ghostly face scrunched in concentration. I could guess what the little ghost had planned. Impressive, especially if it worked. Best to keep Charles’s attention on me so he wouldn’t see it coming.

  After hitching up his thick leather belt with two holsters stuffed with a stun gun and a real gun, Charles squatted down in front of me. “I know, I know. Dick move, huh? It turns out there are always people who can pay better, and those people become my new best friends. Much better than my old best friends.”

  “The picture,” I ground out.

  “Was a fake. Taken from years ago and then doctored with last weeks’ date. So easy, I did it while in between some girl’s legs. Someone really wanted to drag you into the spotlight and see what you would do to Devin, and they paid better than you did.”

  “Queen Ravana hired you.”

  “You’re not as stupid as you look. She offered quite a pretty penny for you.” He clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough to revive the fading electrical pulses to near-screaming. “So sorry that it came to this.”

  I groaned, the loose gravel knifing into the side of my face while my body shuddered. “Let her go and take me instead.”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “No can do. Not to mention your girl is a dead ringer for former Queen Bronwen. I’m sure Queen Ravana will be just as curious as I am about that.”

  I bared my teeth and fought to get my arms underneath me to pull myself up enough to chomp out his eyeballs and spit them down his throat. But I only managed to burrow myself deeper into the gravel. I’d have to keep talking to distract him. “The queen will kill her.”

  “That’s the thing about mercenaries. We don’t have morals or”—he shuddered—“feelings.”

  I glanced up, and then grinned. “You’re about to feel something.”

  With a long groan, the fire escape platform broke free from the wall and plummeted on a direct path towards Charles’s head. He whirled then hurtled out of the way just in time and fell back on his ass, his hand keeping his fedora on his head as he went.

  Part of the platform had caught at an angle on the opposite building’s wall, and the ladder hung free like a pendulum, back and forth, creaking like a rusty swing.

  I ticked my gaze up to Chip in the window, but he was nowhere in sight. Hopefully he had more up his ghostly sleeves.

  “What the hell was that?” Charles demanded from a few feet away, his gaze on the swinging ladder between us.

  “Give me back the girl,” I growled.

  “Look, I already explained to you my methods.” Charles hauled himself to his feet and started toward me, keeping an eye on the ladder so it wouldn’t hit him. “I go where the money is, and for this size of paycheck, I’m taking you and the girl with me.”

  The ladder stilled right in front of him, pulling him up short, but it didn’t seem to be because of Chip. He’d vanished.

  Silence stretched over the alley, as well as a bone-deep chill. A sudden wind picked up the trash on the ground and skipped it over the wet gravel toward Charles.

  He looked up.

  Something monstrous clambered down the ladder with a loud roar straight for him. Something Chip-shaped, but also not. Nightmare-fuel with dead black eyes and three-feet-long fangs in the same pattern as Chip’s missing teeth. He hurtled toward Charles’s upturned face and wide eyes, and then shot right into him. Charles’s mouth hung open as his face took on the same bluish hue as Chip. His eyes widened even more, and he let out a weird squawk. Then all color completely leached from his face as Chip reappeared behind Charles with the same loud roar.

  Chip surged through Charles, turning him even bluer, which seemed to freeze Charles to the ground. He held completely still while Chip vanished into the air.

  Now was my chance to get up and get to Wren. I needed to get up. But I couldn’t. I had no control over my body.

  Charles began to move then, slowly, and then as if he’d stepped out of an iceberg, he shook it off. Looking even more dead than normal, Charles staggered toward his van without a backward glance, dove behind the wheel, cranked the engine, and then peeled out of there.

  Taking Wren with him to the queen who would definitely kill her once she realized Wren was far from dead.

  Helplessness just about swallowed me whole. I wanted to scream, chase after them, anything more than what I was currently doing.

  Chip appeared in front of me back in his little boy form, one hand on the ladder, his shoulders slumped and shaking. “I thought that bad man was just playing with us at first. This is all my fault.”

  “I’ll get her back,” I growled, and it was more of a vow to myself than to him.

  With one clumsy, painful finger wiggle at a time, I finally dragged my phone from my pocket and immediately dropped half of it into the puddle next to my nose. Cursing, I flipped it out, spraying my mouth with whatever liquid it happened to be. Never mind the gross factor. The five-second rule had to apply to phones in questionable water too. It really, really had to.

  With a combination of my nose and fingers, I dialed Zac at the hotel and about lost consciousness at the flood of relief when it connected.

  “What happened?” Zac answered.

  “He took Wren.” It hurt to say it, because that made it true. But it also focused my mind on something other than the pain in my body as I forced myself into a sitting position.

  “Fuck, Ashe. Who took Wren?”

  Eventually, I stood on my own two feet, glaring after the van. “A dead man.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wren

  I opened my eyes to darkness and cigar smok
e but finally gathered enough streetlight through the windshield to see a silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat of whatever van he’d used to kidnap me. He was driving like a crazy person, taking every turn on what seemed like two wheels. My head bounced around on the bare metal floor of the van. Apparently, my life had devolved into being tossed around in vehicles with bad drivers in my quest to be queen of the south or whatever.

  I tried to sit up or roll over but couldn’t. At first, I thought I was tied down, but my legs and arms, even my fingers and toes, wouldn’t cooperate with my nervous system. I couldn’t feel much of anything from the neck down.

  Fuck my undead life.

  It didn’t seem to be daylight yet, so either I hadn’t been out for long or we’d been driving a really long time. Homing in on the craptastic driver, I could only see a cool blue heat signature. Not human. Lovely. Yet another vampire who’d crawled out of the woodwork to complicate shit.

  His eyes flicked upward, their reflection in the rearview mirror meeting mine. “Well now, looks like somebody’s awake.”

  The strong southern drawl reminded me of a dollar-hungry televangelist. “Where’d you get that accent? Dumbfuck, Georgia?”

  “Try South Carolina.”

  “No difference.”

  He chuckled, a deep rumbling sound that wasn’t terrible.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “You first.”

  “Since you obviously have the upper hand, with me lying here limp as a withered dick, how about you throw me a bone? It would be mighty kind of you, sir,” I added in my best Scarlett O’Hara voice.

  “All right, then. I’m Charles. And you are?”

  “Melody Songsmith.”

  “I call bullshit on that one. And we’re here.”

  “Where’s here, Charlie?”

  “Don’t call me Charlie,” he spat.

  What was up with that?

  “Don’t you worry your pretty imposter head now, darlin’. You won’t be here long.” Charles Don’t Call Me Charlie resumed his charming southern drawl.

  My eye twitched. Darlin’? As soon as I could get my limbs working again, I’d show him how much of a darlin’ I could be.

  “How about you don’t call me darlin’, and I won’t call you Charlie. Deal?”

  He shrugged. The van came to a stop. The soon to be a headless Charles got out. A few seconds later, he opened the rear doors of the van and dragged me out feet first. Thankfully, he didn’t let my head smash onto the concrete. Instead, he eased it down gently, then dragged me none-too-gently through a fine layer of sawdust across the floor of what looked to be a woodshop. Extension cords hung from the rafters, swinging in the breeze like vipers waiting for their chance to strike.

  My head bumped across a threshold and onto the scratchy AstroTurf of a smaller room. Charles dropped my feet, which landed with a numb thud, and opened a squeaky door to a cage as tall as a man and about twice as wide. I still couldn’t see him clearly, except for an Indiana Jones kind of hat and a cigar dangling from his mouth.

  “Seriously? A cage? I won’t make a good pet.”

  “You’re not a pet. You’re a paycheck.”

  “You running some kind of vampire sex trafficking ring?”

  “Nope.” Charles scooped me up, tossed me over his shoulder like a bag of kitty litter, and walked into the cage. As he shifted my weight to put me down, I bared my fangs and bit down into his shoulder.

  His cigar fell from his mouth as he cried out and tore me away, dropping me onto a musty-smelling mattress. “Damn it, you ruined my trench coat.”

  I spit out the shredded piece of said coat. The tough leather had only allowed my teeth to graze his skin. Traces of his blood lingered on my fangs. I licked it off, the taste of which was immediately intoxicating, like the best fucking wine I’d ever had. Were all vampires this yummy? Then I recalled the vampires I’d killed in the jail and Edna’s Itchen.

  No, they were pretty damn gross, come to think of it.

  He bent to pick up his cigar, the end of which was now bent and smoldering. He started to stick it in his mouth, then growled and dropped it, squishing it under his boot. Thanks to the filtered security light coming in from the dirty windows in the overhead door, I got a better look at him. He had wide-set dark eyes, a confidently solid nose, and a chin dimple that wasn’t nearly as impressive as Zac’s but still worth a good lick or two.

  But as he towered over me and my limp-as-a-wet-dishrag body, a touch of fear prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. It had been a very long time since I had been this vulnerable. In fact, I’d never been quite this vulnerable before. I wasn’t a maiden-in-distress kind of girl, but I kept watching the still-open overhead door and listening in hopes that Zac or Ashe would come storming in and waste this guy’s ass.

  I willed my voice to be steady and converted my fear to the sharp tone of anger. “If you’re planning on raping me, you better damn well kill me.”

  Charles grinned. “You think I’d stoop that low?”

  “I may be wrong, but a man who paralyzes a woman and takes her to a remote building then tosses her onto a nasty mattress kind of screams sex offender.”

  Charles waved a hand at me, rolling his eyes before he ducked slightly and stepped out of the cage. He closed the door and turned a key in the lock. After closing the overhead door, he dragged a metal chair across the concrete floor. The legs screeched a high-pitched wail that could deafen a dead man. I gritted my teeth and turned my head as far away as I could, which wasn’t very damn far, thanks to the numb rest of me.

  Finally, the eardrum gouging stopped when he straddled the chair backwards, his elbows draped across the chair back. Removing his gloves, he drawled at me, “A little bird told me you’re trying to impersonate a queen. Want to tell me about that…Wren?”

  “Not particularly.” Lovely. He knew my name. Our little rebel trio must’ve been making waves in the vampire community. That could be bad. Why had I ever agreed to this madness?

  He pulled another cigar from his coat, then tossed his hat onto a nearby workbench. His messy chestnut-brown hair hung in his eyes before he shook it back. After striking a match on his boot, he lit the cigar and puffed, then let the smoke roll from his mouth.

  “Those will kill you, you know,” I added, wishing him dead, but in vain.

  “Funny.”

  His chuckle triggered a flutter in my fingers. My fingers! Whatever he’d injected was starting to wear off. I had to lie still, though, until it wore off enough for me to bust out of here. The cage was fully boxed in, and from the looks of it, bolted onto the floor.

  “I figure we have less than an hour until the Fangaway wears off and less than that before your buyers arrive. You might want to practice your bullshit story on me before they get here. They’re not nearly as tolerant of lies as I am.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and laughed, shaking my head before I looked straight at him. “Fangaway? What the fuck is that? Sounds like a dentist anesthetic.”

  The smirk he’d been wearing slid into a frown, and he looked away. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “You really drugged me with a dentist anesthetic? What did you do, steal it when they were getting your Ninja Turtles toothbrush?” I laughed again, rolling my head to stare at the ceiling, my eyes searching for good hand and foot holds, and if I were lucky, a skylight. I couldn’t fly, but I could jump like a jack rabbit and climb like a spider monkey. But no dice. Solid sheet-metal roof.

  He hung his head, knocked some ashes from the cigar. “It was a Batman toothbrush,” he mumbled. When he looked up, he wore a lopsided grin that did nice things to his face.

  And then he went and ruined it with a hateful scowl again.

  “You’re stalling,” he said. “I’ll ask again, who are you? Because you look a whole lot like somebody that ought to be dead.”

  “Do I? And who would that be?”

  “You tell me. All I know is that there’s a big ol’ bounty on your head, and
the ones offering it are not nearly so merciful as I am.”

  “So Ravana’s caught wind of me already?”

  “Damn right. And what I’d really like to know is, why are you impersonating her dead sister?”

  My legs and arms began to tingle. I could move a few toes within the privacy of my boots. “I’m not impersonating anyone.”

  “You’re not fooling anyone. The old queen and her… They’re dead.” He shook one of his arms as though shaking off a fly, then rubbed it through his coat. “You look a hell of a lot like a dead queen. So why are you with a human guard dog and the vampire accused of that queen’s murder?”

  I’d have to choose my words carefully. Just how much did this guy know? Probably more than I did. I still didn’t know if I could trust Zac or Ashe or anyone for that matter. But the good thing was I could finally feel the damp mattress under my hands.

  Ignoring the gross factor, I kept still, but sensation was returning quickly all along my body. “Would it help if I told you that I had no idea she was a queen until yesterday?”

  “Who do you mean? Ravana?”

  “No. Bronwen.”

  “So, you did know her.”

  “I did.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  The mere accusation sent a fiery heat into my fingers, which I curled into fists to keep from breaking through the cage. I still had a bit of unparalyzing left to do. Until then, I had to weigh the risks of honesty over lies. On one hand, if I convinced him I was Bronwen’s daughter, he might drug me again so he could turn me over to Ravana quicker. Then again, if Zac and Ashe managed to get here in time to break me out, that knowledge could leave Ravana quaking in her heels. I decided to take the risk.

  “Would you kill your own mother?” I asked.

  His smirk slid away for a moment into open-mouthed shock. Then he huffed a laugh. “Nice try. Bronwen’s daughter died along with her.”

  “Unless I had a sister I didn’t know about, I’m afraid you are mistaken, sir.”