by Elena Lawson
Now good fucking luck holding me if you don’t plan to kill me.
“Kill you? Why on earth would I want to kill the last living pure-blooded Vocari?”
“You said you’d get out of my head!” I hissed.
He didn’t respond, and it took a moment for what he’d said to register in my head. The last…what?
“Vocari?”
Still, he remained silent. My mind raced. I didn’t understand. Vocari. I knew that word. It was the ancient term for vampire, wasn’t it? Ethan had used the word, too. Since vampires were just Vocari—that was what he’d said.
“You didn’t know,” the vampire called Azrael said, more a question than a statement of fact.
I shook my head. “I’m human.”
“Only partly…” he trailed off, drawing in a breath. “I hardly believed it myself when the filthy urchin came to me with what he saw. A human woman—he told me, with eyes like amber who moves like we do…a human woman who can compel a vampire.”
The one that got away. Damnit. I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass and now it had. Stupid mistake.
“I’d encountered this phenomenon only once before, but unfortunately the subject died,” the way he said subject make me shiver. Was that what I was now? Some sort of subject? To be poked and prodded and studied under bright lights?
“Say you’re right—say I am this Vocari thing. Why does it matter? What is it you want?”
The vampire sighed again—heavily this time. He leaned forward and placed his elbow on his knees. I dropped my gaze lower, but kept my eyes trained on his polished leather shoes, waiting for any sign of movement so I would be ready if he sprang up and tried to attack. “There is so much you don’t know,” he said. “So much for you to learn…”
With my heart still beating in my throat and an ache forming on the precipice of my skull, I jabbed the poker toward him. “Explain it,” I urged him, the stain of weaker emotion discoloring my voice. I needed to know.
Now—faced with the truth of what I was—now more than ever I felt I needed to hear it. The reason why I am the way I am. Why my mother and her mother back and back and back had this strange ability.
Why? What was the purpose?
What am I?
“Would it be enough to know that I believe your blood can reverse the effects of the curse?”
My brows drew together and I my hand flexed around the handle of the poker at the mention of my blood. Was that what he wanted from me? A drink? “I’m not following.”
“Your pure Vocari bloodline might be able to make a vampire able to withstand sunlight—it could make a vampire no longer a slave to thirst,” Azrael’s tone had changed. As he spoke it became strained and hopeful, filled with longing. “I’ve seen it once before. I know it’s possible. It may even be possible—with enough time and research—to reverse the effects permanently.”
I’ve never felt stronger. I haven’t had even a lick of thirst since, that was what Frost told Blake when I awoke in the condo. Could this Azrael person be right?
“I realize you’ve spent much of your adult life killing my kind.” You’d think he’d have sounded angry about that tidbit, but he didn’t. He stated it as though more impressed than anything. I didn’t know what to make of it. “But you also love three of them.”
My lips parted, but no words came out. I’d been about to deny it but found I couldn’t. It was true. I did love them. I’d loved them since I was eleven years old. They were my best friends. And now they were even more than that.
“What if I told you it was possible to undo what was done to them?”
My eyes welled and my throat burned. No—it wasn’t possible. Once changed, only the true death could end a vampire’s immortal life.
“What if I told you it was possible to give them true life again?”
I’d give anything for that. I didn’t dare say it aloud, not wanting him to know just how tightly he had me in his grasp with that offer. If it were even remotely possible, how could I not at least try?
What sort of friend would I be to them if I didn’t?
“All I ask of you is for you to remain under my protection—and for you to offer me your blood when I have need of it. In exchange, I will not harm you or those you love,” he paused, and I sensed a change in the air. My heartbeat slowed. “In exchange I can give you what you want most.”
My boys. He would give me my boy back. Whole. Alive.
My mind was racing, trying to take in everything he was saying. It all seemed so impossible. And fuck if it made any goddamned sense to me at all, but…
“Do we have an agreement?”
I tossed the metal poker onto the fur-covered bed and lifted my head, meeting the vampire’s gaze head-on. A sly grin spread over his features. His high cheekbones were heavily shadowed in the light of the fire. His lips full and twisted up at one side. The firelight tinted his hair with threads of copper and gold. The skin at the corners of his eyes was crinkled.
And when the log burning in the hearth split—a sizzling pop preceding the eruption of sparks from the ashes, the shadows beneath his brows came into startling clarity.
Eyes, bright and piercing, one brown and one blue.
Follow the story of The Black Rose in PROVOKE ME, The Last Vocari, Book 2!
Get it here: mybook.to/provokeme