Such Violent Delights: A Holiday Paranormal Romance Anthology

by S. L. Jennings

  Kim Loraine was raised a Navy brat but spent most of her life growing up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. A proper Washingtonian, she's addicted to coffee, doesn't let a little rain ruin her day, and thinks the sun is a gift from God. When not chasing her three little minions around, Kim spends her time writing, reading, and binge watching Doctor Who.

  Get updates from Kim

  www.kimlorainewriter.com/newsletter

  Facebook:

  www.facebook.com/kimlorainewriter

  Join Kim’s Facebook Group

  www.facebook.com/groups/kimlorainebooks

  Instagram:

  www.instagram.com/kimlorainewriter

  Twitter:

  www.twitter.com/kimloraine2

  Bookbub:

  www.bookbub.com/authors/kim-loraine

  Book + Main:

  www.bookandmainbites.com/kimloraine

  Also by Kim Loraine

  The Siren Coven

  Eternal Desire (FREE)

  www.books2read.com/eternal-desire

  Cursed Heart

  www.books2read.com/cursed-heart

  The Excalibur Duet

  Wicked Temptation

  www.books2read.com/wickedtemptation

  Immortal Flame

  www.books2read.com/immortal-flame

  The Fallen Angel Trilogy

  Waking the Watcher

  www.books2read.com/wakingthewatcher

  Denying the Watcher

  www.books2read.com/denyingthewatcher

  Releasing the Watcher

  www.books2read.com/releasingthewatcher

  Author’s Note

  Hello beautiful reader,

  My story is a continuation from my Vein Chronicles series and it’s an exclusive sneak peek at the fourth installment in the series. But wait, if you haven’t read me or the series before, you don’t have to leave. Of course you can if you like, I’m not here to tell you what to do or what to read. I totally hate being told what to do, and we’re all rebels here, so you live your best badass life and I’ll support you.

  Though I would totally recommend you give this a read because I’m a little biased and my witch is totally kick ass. I’ve designed this story to be read as a standalone, so you’re not going to be confused if this is your first taste of my crazy paranormal world. There are a couple of spoilery bits in here, I consider the first two chapters ‘safe,’ so if you read those and think you’ll want to dive into the rest of the series, I’d stop at Chapter Two and start the series from the beginning. By no means do you have to do that if you’re just after a short read, I thought it would be best to warn you before you dive in, so you don’t get mad at me.

  Also, if you’re already somewhat acquainted with this sassy witch and her vampire bestie but haven’t read Eternity’s Awakening yet, I’m going to tell you to dive into that one first before you sink your teeth into this. Don’t worry, Sophie will wait. And you’ll thank me.

  For my new readers, if you like the flavor of this, you can always go back and start with Book One (Fatal Harmony) where you’ll get more information and snarky comments from all the characters mentioned in this story. If you want a more extensive introduction to Sophie and Conall, you can read my novella, Faults in Fate, before you read this and save this story for later. But as I said, you don’t have to if you just want a little snack, there’s a bite-sized version of my witch right here. You’re in control of this ride. Let’s get wild and I hope you have an awesome time!

  Anne

  xxx

  Chapter 1

  They had buried her.

  That much became apparent when Sophie slammed the heel of her palm against the top of the coffin and it didn’t give, like at all.

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  Then her hand went to the skin of her neck, the image of unrestrained agony coming with the slicing of her flesh. Not her own, though it had hurt a little getting her throat slit. On par with a bad Brazilian if she had to compare it to anything.

  Since Sophie had experienced bad Brazilians in her time—and had promptly cursed the woman doing the waxing—she was okay with her own pain.

  But it was not the memory of her own pain that sent agony down her spine into the space in her ribcage where her heart was now beating again.

  No, not her pain.

  Isla’s.

  Conall’s.

  Her hand paused at the smooth and healed skin, her neck not betraying an ounce of evidence of her grizzly death.

  Then again, she’d died more than once, and her skin always healed right as rain, better, if anything, so it wasn’t what made her hand pause.

  It was him.

  Her wolf.

  She started to scratch at the top of the coffin in desperation, calling up the power that had brought her back from the grave—as it had many times before—to take her back to her wolf.

  To take her back to her world.

  Which hopefully hadn’t ended in however long she’d been dead for.

  It was only after she had made all sorts of inner badass declarations of love and revenge and tried to call up the new power she’d snatched from the depths of the grave that she realized the Catch-22.

  Or more aptly, her Witch-22.

  Sophie was a witch, after all. One of the best she knew.

  She had magic, enough to bring her back from the grave. And she got more juice with every time she died. It was humming through her, electrifying all of her nerve endings. She could feel it. Taste its bitterness. Its strength. But she couldn’t use it.

  Not yet.

  Sometimes she could snap her eyes open and her magic snapped back like an elastic band and she could set about cursing whoever murdered her in the first place. Other times it took a second. She didn’t know if it related to the amount of time she’d been dead, or the manner in which she died, or how much caffeine she’d consumed on the last day of her life. It wasn’t exactly an exact science.

  Mostly because she flunked science.

  But there was a staleness to the air inside the coffin that told her she’d been out for longer than she ever had been. And she was filled with power that was on pause until she came fully...alive, for lack of a better word.

  Magic coursed through her, more she’d ever felt, but she couldn’t use it. It was like being behind the wheel of a Ferrari with a fucking tire clamp on.

  Every time her heart stopped, her lungs failed, she bled out, and she got all dead for a hot minute—she got more power, that was true.

  She got other things too.

  Every time she was marked with death, every time she came back, she didn’t come alone. She brought something with her. Something ancient. Something that lurked in the grave.

  She gained power, she gained knowledge, she gained life.

  But she left some things in the underworld, more of them with every return trip. She imagined they’d need like a broom closet for her down there soon.

  Because every time she came back, she lost a little of the witch, and more importantly, the woman she had been before. Which sucked because, in her humble opinion, the woman she was before she died was pretty fucking kick-ass.

  But dying did not kick ass. Therefore shit went down during the whole resurrection process that so wasn’t cool.

  It messed with her hair more often than not. Almost definitely ruined a kick-ass pair of boots. And ruined her night.

  But other stuff happened.

  She usually lost a good blow dry, a better pair of shoes, but she also gained something else she totally didn’t count on.

  She brought more of the grave back with her.

  More death.

  Because they were here, in this coffin with her, the dead.

  They were grasping at her innards, clawing up her throat, battling not only for control but for utter destruction.

  And she had that now. A hunger for more than just tacos—though they would be great too—a hunger for blood.

  Flesh.

  She was ravenous
for the remains of the world to lay tattered and broken at her feet.

  And this time it was more than just PMS.

  With every death she came back, which was good.

  But she brought a little more of that hunger with her each time.

  And that wasn’t good.

  Like at all.

  But she was used to it.

  She had a handle on it.

  Okay, she sort of maybe had a handle on it.

  There was that time where she almost kind of ended the world.

  And herself.

  And more importantly, a wolf that she was kind of in love with.

  Wait.

  She squinted against the darkness of her coffin.

  She was meant to be mad at that particular wolf.

  Mad because he had neglected to tell her that he was the rightful king of all of the werewolves.

  That’s something you share with someone you’re fucking. Someone you’re getting all intense and clingy with.

  And not only did he keep that information from her, he only shared it when forced. And he did so in front of her best friend and her best friend’s then-boytoy-now-hubby.

  It was embarrassing, to say the least. Embarrassing not because of the audience—though that wasn’t fucking great either—but because Sophie was idiot enough to let herself trust the wolf.

  To let herself fall in love with him.

  And he made a fool out of her.

  Lied to her about crucial parts of his identity.

  Sure, she didn’t quite tell him everything about her powers. Like how she could die and come back to some semblance of life.

  How she brought a little more death back with her every time.

  How she was terrified of what would happen when she stopped being able to control whatever it was that was growing inside of her.

  But she had a really good reason for lying.

  Christ on a cracker, she hadn’t even told Isla, her vampire bestie that she could come back from the dead.

  Plus, one of her favorite double standards was that women could be madder at men over keeping secrets while keeping many of their own.

  Conall’s secret was pretty fucking bad. Bad enough for her to throw him roughly thirty stories out Isla’s apartment window. But not so bad that she didn’t make sure he slowed enough not to die on impact.

  Heck, he only broke a handful of bones. And he was a wolf so he would’ve healed completely in a few days. If not a few hours.

  He had broken a very important organ of Sophie’s. One that didn’t heal completely in hours.

  Or days.

  One that had stopped beating and then started again and was still broken.

  So throwing him out the window was being kind, all things considered.

  She had only sent a few curses his way after that.

  Nothing to kill him.

  But enough to fuck up his attempts to get anywhere fucking near her.

  A woman scorned and all that.

  “Fuck,” she hissed in the dim and creepy silence that existed inside a coffin.

  She wasn’t claustrophobic, which was good since it wouldn’t do her well to start freaking out about the fact she could barely move, she’d run out of air soon, there was at least six feet of dirt packed above her and she really needed to pee.

  “Come on,” she hissed at the magic inside her. She pretended she didn’t hear the low whisper that came from somewhere new. Somewhere dark.

  Chapter 2

  She’d been trying to call up her magic for what felt like hours. Of course it wasn’t hours since she likely didn’t have hours of oxygen left. A comforting thought.

  Her body was in a kind of limbo, trying to adjust to the foreign powers fighting for room, for control inside her. More accurately, she had to fight for control, fight not to be swallowed by whatever—or whoever—she’d brought back from the dead.

  Other than herself, of course.

  Which was why she’d kept her ability to come back from the dead secret from her vampire bestie, the werewolf and everyone else for that matter.

  Sophie knew that it wasn’t a common—or uncommon—occurrence, even in the supernatural community.

  Most everyone in the aforementioned community had this nifty little quality to live forever if someone didn’t chop off their heads—someone usually being Isla or herself—but they had one thing in common with those pesky mortals.

  Death was death.

  No takebacks.

  Certainly no comebacks.

  The first time it had happened, Sophie was surprised, to say the least.

  Not just because she woke up in an alley.

  She’d woken up in alleys after benders before.

  But this time was different.

  This wasn’t a bender.

  No.

  She was drugged, for a start.

  Hence someone as weak as a fucking mortal being able to subdue her enough to drag her into an alley and strangle her.

  Plus, she didn’t have a handle on her magic back then.

  Okay, she might have been totally wasted at the time, drowning her sorrows because she had been locked in the basement of the mansion yet again for casting spells that scared her coven. Only because they were spells even the most senior of witches couldn’t cast.

  Sophie was still a teenager, and the fact she was stronger than them, both in magic and mind meant they punished her.

  Regularly.

  They were the only family that she had, and they liked to see her in pain because they hated her power.

  She knew she needed to escape, but she also knew she had to play it smart. The Council could sequester a young, troublesome and powerful witch. And that witch was never seen again.

  The thought of being trapped and controlled by anyone turned Sophie’s stomach.

  Which was why her stomach was full of whisky on the night of her death and not much else since they’d starved her for days.

  So the human was able to drug her...do things and then strangle her.

  And she had died.

  She knew she had.

  There was no mistaking death. Certainly not when you were giving it out. There was something that drained from a being’s aura. From their eyes. One didn’t need to be in touch with magic in order to see, in order to feel such things.

  And death certainly wasn’t subtle when you were experiencing it. Sophie felt it all. The panic. The pain. The anger. The fear.

  All the people that said there was a moment of peace that came just before death were fucking liars trying to make it palatable for humans who had to face the inevitability of it.

  There was no peace in death.

  Only the truest form of chaos and a terror that could not be reproduced.

  Something that should never be reproduced or re-experienced. There was a reason people—human and immortal—only died once. Because death was something that couldn’t be survived more than once.

  Sophie had both reproduced and re-experienced that feeling.

  That fear.

  Sophie had gone through it four—no, now five—times.

  She’d been strangled.

  Drowned.

  Ran through with a fucking sword.

  Hit with a death spell.

  And then, most recently, had her throat slit.

  None of these were pleasurable experiences.

  Or normal, even in the most abnormal of circles.

  So ever since she’d woken up in a dirty alley almost a century ago, tarnished and stained with the grave, she’d told no one.

  At first, because she had no one to tell.

  Definitely not the witches at her coven, who were actively looking for a reason to sequester her, to lock her away with other witches who threatened the order with unusual powers.

  At this point, she hadn’t run into Isla and didn’t have friends. She had no family. No one to look out for her.

  She was the one who had to look out for herself.

  So she
’d picked herself up from the grave, dusted herself off the best she could, washing off the outside dirt and learned to live with—to welcome—the inside dirt.

  For a long time, she pretended some ancient and foreign power didn’t come back from the grave. That it wasn’t that...thing that was responsible for her growing powers that were almost unheard of. She told herself it was because she was a kick-ass witch and that was that.

  She managed to pretend for a little while.

  But then the more she died, the more she brought back.

  And she couldn’t pretend anymore.

  So she tried to research what the fuck was going on.

  There was not much literature on Grave Witches. As in zilch. Likely because the Council made it that way.

  Grave Witches were little more than a rumor, whisperings about sisters who had practiced death magic, forbidden magic. Sisters who tarnished and deformed the gifts that nature had bestowed upon them. Grave Witches were the epitome of evil. And the Council took swift and brutal care of those who practiced black magic.

  Sophie didn’t fancy her secrets being discovered by a coven that she was increasingly suspicious of. And not just because they’d tortured her as a teenager. She could get over that.

  She could not get over the fact they told her what to do.

  Sophie did not do well with rules.

  Or threats, which began to come frequently when Sophie stopped following the rules.

  So her secret became one of necessity and survival. She had been meaning to gather evidence on what was going on with her and the power inside her, she really had.

  But things got busy.

  She met Isla.

  They almost started a couple of world wars. Exploded demons for fun. Slept with other demons for more fun.

  Went shoe shopping.

  Then Isla had a death curse put upon her.

  And fell in love with a slayer.

  Which triggered a prophecy that signaled the end of the world.

  Sophie met a wolf that followed her and also gave mind-blowing orgasms.

  And then she had to keep busy pretending she wasn’t falling in love with him. And that was becoming more all-encompassing than the fact she was no longer in control of her power. Than the fact that there was a death growing inside her every time she came back from the grave. That her powers were growing and that she was gaining knowledge of things she shouldn’t know about...