Faith Everly
Fresh Blood
Copyright © 2020 by Faith Everly
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First edition
For my husband,
who has always treated me
like a queen.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
About the Author
Foreword
Also by Faith Everly:
Handymen Special
Fixer Upper
Full House
The Complete Handyman Series Box Set
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Preface
Paris, 1523
“Aurelia!” Old Magda pounded against the door until it shook, her voice rising above the thumping of her fist. “Aurelia! They’re coming!”
The vampire wrapped her most precious possession in layers of thick fur to ward against the cold. Her hands trembled as she did.
Though it was not the cold causing them to do so.
How many years had it been since true fear had struck her to the core? Not since she’d come into her power, certainly.
Now, she knew her life was in its final moments.
How many lives had she brought to an end?
And how many times had she given even a moment’s thought to those lives? To how the people she drained struggled in their hearts, knowing they were breathing their last?
Knowing how helpless they were?
Never. She had never thought of them. Not once.
And if she had, would she have felt pity? Certainly not. If her victims were foolish enough to fall to her…
“Aurelia!”
Magda’s shouting brought her back to the present moment, adding speed to her already swift movements. She ran to the door, her precious one pressed to her breast.
“Take her.” She passed the squirming bundle of fur to the old one. “Please, protect her.”
“I shall.” The women clasped hands. “I will protect her with my life.”
“Shield her from them. Use all of your power. All of your skill. They must never, ever know who she is.”
“I swear it.” Magda parted the furs just enough to steal a glimpse at the creamy skin. The smooth, untroubled brow. Blonde fringe resting against plump cheeks.
Aurelia’s chest tightened to the point of making it difficult to breathe. Love deeper than anything she’d ever known in all the centuries of her life filled her, drowned her.
“I love you so.” She pressed a kiss against that soft head. “Be safe. Be well. Live long, my darling one.”
“You must go.” Magda wept softly. “Now. You might still get away from them.”
Aurelia patted her friend’s wrinkled cheek. “You know better than that. You saw this unfold days ago. You knew they’d learned about Jacob. You knew they would take him. It all unfolded as you knew it would. Nothing we do can circumvent what is meant to be.”
“You must try.”
Aurelia stood tall, lifting her chin. She’d ruled for three centuries and had brought her kind to their greatest strength, their greatest power and stability. She would not cower.
She would not leave her truest friend and the only living creature to whom she would entrust her precious child with the memory of her cowering, weeping. Let Magda remember her as being fearless.
Love had brought her to this moment, and she refused to regret it.
“Go, please.” Aurelia feasted her eyes upon her daughter once more before all but shoving Magda away from her chamber door. The seer would take the tunnels beneath the castle, she knew.
She closed the door, then barred it. As if that would make the slightest difference. Yet it might result in an extra moment before her assassins would know the child had escaped. Every extra moment counted now.
She’d not yet finished shrugging into her fur-trimmed robes when feet pounded against the stone floors outside the chamber door. Her golden crown was already affixed atop her golden head, blood-red rubies dripping from it. Sparkling as they ever had.
She would go to her death looking every inch the Blood Queen she was born to be.
And in her final moments, she knew, only one face would appear before her. The laughing green eyes, the soft curls she’d inherited from her mother.
Aurelia faced her assassins with pride. Dignity. Knowing she’d given her life for one far more worthwhile than her own.
The door broke inward.
A familiar figure strode into the room. He bore the same regal appearance as ever, though Aurelia noted the delight dancing across his finely-chiseled features.
“You did not attempt to flee,” Lucian noted. “Perhaps the first wise decision you’ve made in these many months.”
She offered no response. This was what he’d craved all along. To eliminate her. To take her place. Little wonder he appeared so triumphant.
Instead of snarling, cursing him, accusing him, she merely smiled.
Knowing more than he did. Knowing he would never replace her so long as her daughter lived, and her daughter’s daughter.
Knowing she had won.
Sofia, my love. Live long.
One
SOPHIE
The thing about a getaway to the woods is actually having to be in the woods.
This was an actual, honest-to-God thought that ran through my head as I unpacked my rust bucket and ran everything up to the cabin I hadn’t stayed in since the world ended.
Why? Because during the thirty-foot trip from the trunk to the front door, I must’ve been bitten by a dozen mosquitoes.
Did mosquitoes have a communication system? Was there an email sent around to all mosquitoes in the area, telling them to save their appetite since I’d booked the family cabin for the first time in ten years? Were they lined up days in advance the way people did for Black Friday sales?
Good thing I’d packed the bug spray and bite cream. Little bastards.
At least they distracted me with their biting and blood sucking. I was too busy trying to get everything inside before I was bled dry to get all caught up in feelings and emotions and such. It wasn’t until I had the door locked behind me and the lights flipped on that it all came back.
Not that it had very far to travel to come back to me. Not like the memories of that last trip weren’t always in the back of my head. Waiting to spring out from the darkness and surprise me when I was lying in bed or taking a shower or going on a run.
Running was one of my many coping mechanisms against the darkness in my head. It was supposed to help me handle the mess. Instead, a clear head gave my memories plenty of room to rush in and settle down.
“You can do this, Sophie Strickland,” I whispered to myself. “You can live through anything.”
It didn’t help that nothing
in the rustic cabin had changed. The same simple, serviceable furniture. An old slip-covered sofa. Two rocking chairs positioned in front of a fireplace I wouldn’t need in early summer. A kitchen just beyond the living room with an old-fashioned stove and farm sink.
Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom with a deep tub and creaky plumbing. I didn’t want to go up there yet with all that creaking and groaning. Good thing I had a white noise app on my phone.
Some people liked going to sleep with the sounds of nature all around them. I might’ve liked it, too, if it wasn’t for the bathroom sounding like a ghost got trapped in the pipes.
Once I got over the shock to my system, being there again after all those years—and alone, too, which was another big difference—I noticed something.
A scent.
Sniffing the air, I walked around the small first floor. I picked books out of the hand-crafted bookshelves at random, holding them up to my nose. No, it wasn’t musty books I smelled.
The fridge was empty except for a box of baking soda. That wasn’t the culprit. The oven and stove were clean. So was the sink. I just about stuck my nose down the drain, but I didn’t smell anything offensive down there.
What the hell was it? It reminded me of musty balls and spoiled meat and stale farts.
No choice but to go upstairs, and to my dismay the smell got stronger. Wasn’t it just my fucking luck? I got up the nerve to come out to the place where my parents were brutally slaughtered in the interest of healing old wounds or whatever my ex-therapist called it, and this was what greeted me.
“Don’t be the bathroom. Don’t be the toilet. Oh, God, please.” I nudged the door open, standing as far from it as possible, with my fingers and toes crossed against the possibility of backed-up pipes spewing sewage all over the place.
That wasn’t the case. I let out a huge sigh of relief, practically doubled over with my hands on my knees. There were a lot of things in life I could deal with, and I mean a lot, but poop water? No, thank you. I’d just as soon go out and have a bloodsucking jamboree with the mosquitoes than deal with that.
Aside from a bare light bulb casting a horrible glare over the white-tiled room, everything looked fine. I made a mental note to get a dimmer bulb so as not to blind myself.
Or scare the hell out of myself, depending. Walking past the mirror over the sink was a reminder of the importance of good lighting. My already pale skin took on a sallow tone, and my green eyes looked haunted when framed by dark circles.
Well. Maybe that wasn’t so much a trick of the light. I hadn’t exactly gotten a ton of sleep over the two or three nights before heading out for my little getaway.
What kind of sociopath would sleep well before revisiting the place where they’d lost their parents in the most horrific way?
Then again, what kind of sociopath would go back there in the first place?
I snickered at my reflection while examining the bug bites now popping up all over my neck, shoulders and arms. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered when I noticed one right at my hairline, just beneath the first wispy bits of curly, blonde fuzz on my forehead. I hadn’t even felt that little bastard up there.
This wasn’t getting me anywhere. I flipped off the lights and blinked away the bright spots in front of my eyes before going to the smaller of the two bedrooms. Under the bed, in the closet, I even lifted the mattress away from the box spring to take a look. Nothing.
That left the master bedroom.
Why were my palms so sweaty? It wasn’t like they died in the bedroom.
“Fuck it.” I marched across the narrow hall and flung the door open.
A bed covered in a sweet, hand-stitched quilt. A rocking chair by the window. A cedar chest, an armoire. Everything was just the way I remembered it.
Except for the lack of a couple in the bed, of course.
Funny how it hadn’t occurred to me until right then and there that I should take the bigger of the two rooms for myself. I had assumed I’d use the smaller room, the one I’d always stayed in during the ten summers my parents and I had spent in the cabin in upstate Pennsylvania.
There was no reason not to enjoy a queen-sized bed now.
Shaking myself to clear the unhappy memories, I pulled my phone from my pocket. Something wasn’t adding up. There was definitely a smell lingering in the air. “Hey, Larry? It’s Sophie Strickland.”
“Sophie.” The longtime caretaker greeted me with a tone I knew too well. Sympathy. Maybe even pity. It curdled my blood. “Have you arrived at the cabin?”
“I have, and that’s why I’m calling. Something stinks around here. Have there been any other guests?”
“God, no! You know how serious I take the agreement your dad and I made up all those years ago. So long as your folks’ estate kept paying for the cabin, I maintained it but never, you know, let other people stay there.”
My bullshit meter was legendary. I could smell a lie coming a mile away.
It wasn’t that the man was telling a lie, either. Not exactly.
But his voice shook a little. Just enough for me to notice.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked while going back downstairs. My voice echoed off the pine walls and floorboards. “Because it smells like somebody or something has been in here. Either human or animal, though there isn’t any damage, so…”
“I take good care of that cabin.”
I rolled my eyes. Heaven help a bruised male ego. “I know you do. Anybody can see that. It doesn’t mean somebody hasn’t been sneaking around under your nose. I mean, how often do you come up here to check on the place? Once a week? Twice a month? Anything could happen.”
He sighed, and I wondered if he even came up that frequently. Not that it really mattered so long as the cabin my father had arranged to keep in the family name stayed standing and free of major damage.
But still. He was being sketchy, and I didn’t much care for it.
“It’s been a little crazy lately,” he finally admitted in a much weaker voice than before. “There’s been this huge tourism boon and I have so many other cabins to look after. Some big summit in the area at one of the fancy lodges. I guess not everybody can afford to stay there, so all my properties are booked solid and I’m going nuts. Let me send a guy out to take a look around, make sure you don’t have a family of raccoons living under you.”
I hadn’t even thought about that. It made the most sense of anything I’d come up with so far. “Thanks. I’d appreciate that.” Then, I added, “And thanks for keeping the place looking nice and for coming in and plugging in the fridge before I got here. That means a lot.”
“Plugging in the fridge—oh, sure. Right. No problem. Your dad was a great guy. It’s the least I can do.”
When we got off the phone, I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d sounded confused at the fridge comment. Maybe I overthought things, but I doubted anybody would’ve missed how confused Larry sounded. Did he outsource little tasks like that? Probably. He was only one person and could only do so much on his own.
It didn’t matter. The screens in the windows were intact, so I didn’t worry about leaving the windows open to air the place out.
After bringing my things to the master bedroom—weird, I would have to get used to being in there—it occurred to me that the smell inside the cabin had been one more distraction to help me avoid facing the enormity of what was all around me.
It was a good thing my phone rang then, or else I might’ve started getting all weird and emotional. I didn’t like emotion.
Which totally made my coming to the cabin all alone such a super great idea, especially on the heels of a nasty breakup. I was a real genius.
Poppy’s voice made it better. “Tell me you made it there alive, since I’ve been chewing my nails to shit over here waiting for you to call.”
“Sorry,” I winced, sitting on the bed. “Yeah, guess I forgot. Things happened when I first got here. But it’s all good. I’m safe. Itchy, but safe.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t disagree. But this is supposed to be a healing thing, right? So I guess I can handle a few bites.” Talking about them made me remember the bite ointment in my bag. I pulled it out and dabbed some on each offensive area while we talked.
“How are you feeling?”
“Glad the drive is over. A little annoyed.”
“Bug bites?”
“More than that. I think Larry has either had people coming in here without telling me, or he’s been turning a blind eye to it and covering their tracks when they leave.” Just saying those words out loud made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
My instincts were never off. Something was definitely going on.
“Did they trash the place?”
“No. It looks great.”
“Then what’s the worry?”
“Uh, for starters, having whoever it is come back while I’m here,” I snickered. “Duh.”
“Duh yourself. Like you couldn’t kick anybody’s ass. Don’t tell me you didn’t bring your bat.”
“It’s already next to the bed.” I glanced at it, propped up against the nightstand. That, plus years of self-defense and kickboxing training, left me feeling more confident.
“I’d hate to be the dumb sonofabitch who thinks they can take you on,” she laughed. I could almost see her sitting in her studio, all paint-covered, surrounded by canvases that might never see the light of day. Poppy didn’t paint for the money. She did it for the love of painting.
Living off the trust fund set up by her filthy rich grandparents didn’t hurt things.
Her laughter died down. “You’re okay, though? I mean, really okay?”
“Yeah. I’m really okay.”
And I almost believed it, too, even though the back of my neck tingled like crazy. And not from mosquito bites.
It felt like I was being watched.
Two
SOPHIE
New Blood Page 1