Sever the Crown: Vampire Reverse Harem Complete Series

by Mysti Parker

  “No.” Charles’s eyes turned blood red. He pointed his finger like a knife at me, then abruptly stood and stuck the cigar in his mouth before he commenced pacing like a caged animal. Funny, considering I was the one in the cage, just lying there chilling out. Well, not exactly, but you get my drift.

  “Think about it. I look just like her. I mean, I’m good with disguises, but I’m not that good. This is no rubber mask. No wig or contacts, either. But I’m sure you already saw that for yourself.”

  That last thought made me shiver. He could have done anything to me when I was out cold. But my clothes were still intact, my lady bits still pleasantly sore from my time with Ashe. In fact, they ached again like they had when I’d first met Ashe, as if he were near.

  “Come closer. Look again if you don’t believe me. It’s not like I can do much about it.” Actually, I could feel everything now, and it was all I could do to lie still, especially when the symbols on my arm buzzed and burned in a fast rhythm. Ashe must be closing in.

  The old 60s song rang out in my head, “My Boyfriend’s Back”… And little Charlie Charles was gonna be in trouble.

  Charles turned toward me, shook his arm again like it had fallen asleep, and rubbed it through his coat again. Had he accidentally injected himself? Or had I bitten him in my drugged stupor? Would serve him right either way.

  He slowly approached the cage, squatted down about a foot from the bars. I looked right at him, batting my eyelashes and smiling with slightly puckered lips. It might have come off a little too much like Zoolander, but whatever.

  His eyes roamed all over my face, likely checking for makeup lines, seams, a nylon skull cap. Things I kept tucked away in Birdie’s trunk until I needed them. This close, I got a good look at his eyes. They were pretty for a kidnapper—a warm amber with flecks of dark brown. The frown he wore deepened the longer he looked. My arm (and lady bits) throbbed painfully. Ashe had to be very close.

  Now was my chance, while Mr. Pretty-Eyed Kidnapper was caught like a fly in the web of my mesmerizing gaze. I sprang up and grabbed the bars. I’d rip this cage up like a tin can and stab Charles with a twisted shard of metal.

  But instead, searing heat scorched my palms. The smell of burned skin invaded my nose. My fangs dropped involuntarily. I screamed and fell back onto the mattress, holding my shaking hands in front of me, and stared at my blistered and charred skin. It was worse than the sunburn I’d gotten when breaking Ashe out of jail. And hurt like a sumbitch times ten.

  Charles had already leapt back, standing there with the chair held toward me, legs first, like he was fending off a circus lion. He was afraid. That was one thing I had going for me.

  “Silver?” I groaned.

  “Of course. I’m not that stupid. Electrified too...for her pleasure.”

  The metal had been so tarnished, I hadn’t realized what it was. He approached again slowly and crouched down by the cage. His voice softened, as did his face. He looked almost regretful.

  “If you’re really Bronwen’s daughter, answer this question. What was her middle name?”

  “She didn’t have one. At least that’s what she told me.”

  His eyes narrowed a bit. “Lucky guess. Okay, then, here’s another. Where did she always want to go on vacation?”

  “What is this? Bank security questions?” At his insistent glare, I shrugged. “Fine. Disney World.”

  That time, his eyes went wide for a moment before they narrowed into his I am skeptical vampire frown. “Lots of people, and vampires, want to go there. I mean, we could go when the sun goes down, but who wants to spend all that money for a couple hours’ worth of cheesy?”

  “For hell’s sake. Are we done here?” I realized then that I could grab the mattress and use it as a kind of battering ram to break through the bars. Sometimes, I could just kick myself. Silly Wren.

  “No. One more. There was an old song she used to sing when she was scared as a little girl. What was it?”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and smiled, transported back to the day we had to sleep in a mausoleum in the middle of January. I remembered racing across the graveyard just before sunrise, her picking me up because I was too tired and cold to run anymore. We were relatively immune to cold, but that kind of cold threatened to freeze us solid. We huddled together in the dark cavern filled with long-dead corpses, wrapped in a tarp she had ripped from over a freshly dug grave. I shivered so much, I thought my fangs would break. She said we were playing “Race the Sun” to see how close we could get to sunrise before having to hide away again. Now I know her enemies must have been closing in or she wouldn’t have risked us getting torched by the sun. The next night, she was killed. But for that one morning, wrapped in my mother’s arms, I felt safe and loved, and had fallen asleep to the sound of her softly singing.

  Eyes still closed, I said, “She didn’t just sing it when she was a little girl. She sang it to me, too.” I swallowed hard, allowing the lyrics to surface from where I’d buried them in my subconscious. Then I sang, “The time has come, to be brave, to be who you’re meant to be. The day is done, the dark will come, and you will find the strength you need.”

  I opened my eyes to find Charles’s gaze locked on mine, glossy as though my song had brought him to tears.

  “That was beautiful,” he whispered.

  “Do you believe me now?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  My fingers twitched. I was tempted to reach for him. Not to hurt him, but to touch him, to feel his cool skin and the roughness of his stubble. Again, he rubbed his arm and shook it then rose to his feet. The symbols on my arm tingled, sending electrical surges through my body.

  “What the-?” I ignored my hands—they were already healing anyway—and looked down to examine the symbols on my arm.

  “What is it?” he asked, heading for the cage door with his key.

  Before I could get a good look at the symbols, the squeal of crunching metal drew my attention to the back wall of the room. A door that I hadn’t noticed before was suddenly ripped from its hinges and thrown behind an enraged Ashe and a very inconvenienced Zac.

  In a blur, Ashe propelled straight into Charles, knocking him onto a workbench. They slid across it and off the other side with a thud, along with wrenches and rasps and screws that clanked, rattled, and tinkled as they hit the concrete floor.

  I shot to my feet, almost grabbing the cage bars again and frustrated as hell when I remembered they were silver. “Stop, Ashe! Don’t kill him! Zac, do something!”

  He aimed his gun at the blurry mass of vampires rolling across the floor like two tomcats high on PCP.

  “No! Don’t shoot!” He wasn’t listening. Ashe wasn’t listening either. As soon as Zac had a clear shot, he’d take it. If Charles hesitated at all, Ashe would rip his head off.

  Charles must have gotten the upper hand. One good side kick sent Ashe flying across the room. Zac took the shot, but Charles had already blurred back into Ashe. And they were at it again, throwing punches and kicks like an MMA fight gone berserk.

  “Damn it!” Was this what it was like being a mother to a bunch of boys? It was enough to make me want to schedule a hysterectomy. I grabbed up the mattress, held it in front of me, and backed up as far as I could. Then I charged. The hinges on the cage snapped, as did the lock. The door sailed through the air and slammed into a table saw. It must have hit the switch because the saw roared to life.

  I flung the mattress aside and zipped past Zac, who was aiming his gun once again. Nope. I ripped the weapon from his hands, tossed it out of reach, and went for the brawling vampires. Somehow, I managed to get between them and struck out with both fists (and a nice scary battle cry, I might add). Ashe flew one way and Charles went the other. Both hit the floor and slid a few feet through the sawdust.

  I’d moved so fast, Zac was still staring at his hand, his eyes wide until he looked up at me an
d did a double take. “Wren, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you.” I turned and pointed at Ashe and Charles in turn. “Or you. Or you.”

  Ashe shot to his feet and was at my side in the blink of an eye. I kept him at arm’s length with a hand on his chest. Charles got up slowly, his eyes darting from Ashe to Zac. He backed up and stood a respectable, and safer, distance from us.

  “Just tell me you’re okay,” Ashe said, his voice shaking and eyes still red with slow-dying rage.

  “I’m okay. Charles isn’t a threat.”

  “What do you mean he’s not a threat?” Zac bellowed. Having found his gun, he racked the slide and held it down toward the floor with both hands, ready to fire if Charles so much as moved an inch in my direction.

  “I can explain,” he said quietly. “See, I was supposed to—”

  Motorcycle engines growled outside on the gravel drive, getting louder the closer they came.

  Charles zipped to the dirty window of the garage door and peeked out, ignoring Zac, who instantly aimed the gun at him. “You have to go. Take Wren and hurry!”

  “Who is it, and why can’t I have the pleasure of ripping their throats out?” I asked.

  “Because you’re not strong enough yet.” He turned toward us, anger reddening his eyes. “I said, take her and go! Out the back, just get her the fuck out of here. I’ll handle this. Go!”

  “No! We can fight them!” I tried to go to him, but Ashe threw his arms around me.

  He and Zac pushed me toward the back door, while Charles locked eyes with me one last time before they forced me outside and into the back seat of Birdie, where Ashe pinned me down.

  Charles’s horrendous scream sliced through my eardrums and stabbed my heart before the car door closed and drowned it out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ashe

  Rage, the searing kind that coiled across my shoulders and set my fangs on edge, continued to chew a hole through me miles after we left Charles and his woodshop. Part of me wanted to go back and tear Charles’s throat out, slowly, until his head rolled free. Even though Wren sat next to me in the back seat of her car, completely unscathed—physically at least—he’d hurt her. Terrified her. I could still see the relief shining bright in her eyes at being away from him, could feel it in her death grip on my hand. Though she sat straight and stiffly alert, I could feel her body trembling through her leather jacket.

  But while part of me wanted to go back and make sure he was dead, another part was just plain confused. Story of my life lately. Why had he had a sudden change of heart and let her go as soon as he heard motorcycle engines? I could still hear his screams echoing in my ears, the sound of his pain a strange mix of therapeutic and gut-churning.

  A shudder raced down Wren’s body, her side pressed tightly to mine. She must’ve been hearing the same echo.

  I squeezed her hand tighter and traced little circles into the backs of her knuckles in an attempt to soothe her. And me.

  “Are you all right?” I must’ve asked that same question about fifty times.

  She nodded and offered a brief smile. Yeah, not sure I was buying it, but I’d do my best to give her the space she needed until she was all right.

  “I’m fine. But what about him?” she asked.

  “What about him? If he’s not dead, he’ll wish he was if I see him again.”

  “But I…” She rubbed her arm through the jacket. “Never mind.”

  I couldn’t begin to know why she’d show that loser any mercy. Her heart was certainly more forgiving than mine. Maybe whatever he’d injected her with had affected her judgement.

  “We’ve had a hell of the last few days,” I said. “You’d think we’d be dead by now.”

  Wren’s lips firmed as she stared hard out the window at the layers of fog. “Not even close.”

  Zac flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror. “It’ll be sunrise soon. There’s a motel about five miles up the highway.”

  “Or you could stop driving like an old man and get us to Brightwell,” I said, scanning the horizon. A strip of dark blue had begun to creep into the night, as slow as the thick fog blanketing the road, but we still had time, and that was me being conservative. Still, I couldn’t blame the guy for being overly cautious.

  “It’s your funeral,” he shot back. “I’m driving the speed limit for a reason, you know.”

  “I know.” I sighed into the breeze flowing in through the open window and pushed my fingers through my hair. “But it won’t be anyone’s funeral today, thanks to you.”

  He looked almost just as stunned as I felt at my good-enough thank you. He’d saved the day several times, but I still didn’t like how he looked at Wren when he thought no one was looking. It reminded me way too much of how I probably looked at Wren.

  “Wren?” he said. “You think we should go on to Brightwell?”

  She turned to me, miscalculating how close my face was to hers, and brushing her lips against my chin in the process. Her mouth parted as her gaze dipped down, and when her eyes traced back up again, the symbol at my wrist heated and pulsed.

  “You got a place to stay in Brightwell without any Ednas in a kitchen who’ll rat us out?” she asked, and then licked her lips.

  I followed the movement, and from the stirring in my jeans, so did my dick. “As a matter of fact, I do, and it’s not too far from where I need to meet my sister.”

  “Okay,” she said, and my symbol flamed hotter.

  Zac pressed on the gas and sped us toward where the cops and Queen Ravana’s minions would likely still be swarming the city to find me. But Jessica was there, too, and hopefully a few more answers that just might clear my name.

  A vampire could sure hope.

  The rumble of the car and the constant pulse at my wrist lulled me into a state of almost painful arousal. It was like our symbols were working to distract us from what had happened. Vampire Jesus, was it working. Wren squirmed in her seat next to me while her hand massaged the inside of my thigh. I could smell her sweet arousal as it filled the cab of the car, making me harder, making me want to grind against her. I wanted a bed so I could spread her wide, though, and a lot less of an audience, too.

  When we made it there—with plenty of time to spare before sunrise, thank you very much—I guided Zac toward the rich neighborhood in Brightwell built around a small lake only about two miles from where I lived. Each three-story house had a private deck and beach in the back, and pruned hedges and fingerprint-free windows in the front.

  Wren let out a low whistle as she made out the passing houses through the fog. “You live here?”

  “No,” I said, leaning forward in my seat to find what I was looking for.

  “Oh.” A crease formed on her forehead when she glanced over her shoulder at me. “So…we’re here to measure our jealousy levels? Because I gotta say, color me unimpressed. I prefer small and cozy to this size.” She squeezed my hand and winked. “In terms of houses, that is.”

  I snorted a laugh, but it quickly faded. We weren’t here so I could impress her. Far from it. I hated large, gaudy houses, too, but it impressed me that Wren, a real queen, felt the same way. It didn’t surprise me, seeing as how she’d grown up hiding in secret rooms in library basements and the like; it just… I don’t know. Made her even more deserving of the title, more than I already thought she was? Made her more real and humble and therefore worthier than Queen Ravana who was rumored to literally run her many servants into early graves?

  Wren would never do that. She was tough and lethal when she needed to be, but when she wasn’t fighting for her life or someone else’s, she was just Wren. Wren with an almost shy smile like the one she wore now, and soft curves pressed up next to me…

  When a familiar house came into view over her head, I somehow tore my gaze from hers. “Zac. There. Turn your headlights off.”

  He did, and the fog closed in around us. Then he stopped and had to back up because we’d passed right by the house due
to my Wren-trance. That was a tricky thing to snap out of.

  With my vampiric sight, I guided Zac down a paved drive that ran parallel to the side of the house. I wasn’t sure how shitty human eyesight was at night in the fog, but he trusted my lead enough to not question me. When he stopped, I hopped out to search for the key that would unlock the back gate. It wasn’t hard since I’d been the one to put it inside the fake sprinkler head. After I unlocked the gate and climbed back into the car, both Zac and Wren were looking at me like I had a bit of flesh hanging from a fang.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re going to have to tell us how you know this place so well,” Wren said. “Does a vampire version of Mrs. Robinson live here? Do you have a sugar momma?”

  A sound almost like a laugh came from Zac as he pulled forward through the open gate, but that couldn’t be right. The guy had one emotion—contempt. I must’ve been hearing things.

  I clasped Wren’s hand and scooted her closer to me. “No sugar mommas, just friendly vampires. I worked for this family in high school doing yard work and some cleaning while they traveled. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it—their last name isn’t Robinson. It’s Anderson.”

  She nodded. “That’s good.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Damn right.”

  “You have no reason to be.” And she really didn’t. I was the one who should feel jealous of the four other guys who would complete her royal harem, who would touch her, taste her, and I was jealous. So to hear that she was, too, of an imaginary sugar momma shocked me, just one of a series of surprising jolts I’d had since I met her. It was weird and I couldn’t explain it right, but it made me feel…important. Like I was so much more than an escaped prisoner accused of two murders I didn’t commit.

  Like I mattered to a true queen. Her first, and for now only, mate.

  That was some pretty heavy shit, enough to pull me into yet another Wren-trance. She drew me in further with her smile, the way her lips moved when she said something to Zac.