Vampire's Kiss

  Vampire’s Kiss

  Mina Carter

  New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Mina Carter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Also by Mina Carter

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  He fucking hated vampires. He wanted to kill them all. Every last fucking one of them. Tear their disgusting spines out of their dead bodies and watch them burn to ash. Rip their heads off and revel in their screams as they ran from him, knowing there was no escape. No mercy. There was nothing for them but fire and death at his hands.

  There was just one problem.

  He was their leader. Their earl.

  And he still wanted to kill every last one of them.

  Zane leaned his chin on the back of his hand and sighed as he watched the antics of his courtiers from his place at the head of the room. The “court” itself was an old warehouse, the windows boarded up to stop the sunlight and the interior filled with a mishmash of furniture culled from elsewhere. Antique couches shared space with plastic chairs from fast food joints, and elegant drapes hung from rusted overhead beams.

  Candles burned everywhere, casting a warm glow over scenes that belonged in a horror movie as his men entertained themselves with their blood slaves. Zane’s gaze slid from one vamp, his blood slave bent over his arm as he ripped at her neck, to a threesome on the next couch. Pale asses flashed in unison as they fucked her at the same time, cocks buried deeply in her cunt and ass with their fangs in both sides of her throat.

  He sighed again and rubbed his forehead. Fuck. Some days he needed eye-bleach. A gallon of it. There were some things a guy just couldn’t unsee, and Gregori’s naked ass flashing in that obscene way was one of them.

  Leaning his head back, he let his eyes drift out of focus and tried to shut the sounds of revelry out. At one time he would have joined in. Not just joined in but led it… gloried in the depravity, seeking ever more sick and twisted pleasures until even vampire-kind uttered his name in hushed whispers.

  Now? It sickened him.

  Perhaps he was getting old?

  Opening his eyes again, he looked around the room. No, he wasn’t getting old. At just over fifty, he should have been barely a child for a vampire, but he wasn’t just any vamp. Most vampires were of the bitten kind, the whole blood deal… drink my blood and live forever. At least that’s what most sires promised when they turned their blood slaves to vampires.

  What they didn’t tell them about were the years of being literally the bottom rung of the ladder. Years of being everyone who was stronger’s bitch. Years of scheming and plotting to raise your status in the court. Most younglings didn’t survive their first ten decade, let alone the century needed to become at least halfway powerful.

  Zane hadn’t needed a century.

  Born a vampire, power had flowed through his veins from the moment he’d opened his eyes. By the time he could walk, he’d been able to control all the blood slaves at court, regardless of who they called master. Even those belonging to his father, a vampire earl with more than seven centuries under his belt.

  But he wasn’t just a vampire. Something else, something darker, lurked in his dead blood, just out of sight and elusive as fuck when he tried to pin it down. A dark rage that was disgusted at the creatures around him. A blackness in his soul that wanted nothing more than to dispatch them all into whatever purgatory awaited vampires when they died. It wasn’t heaven or hell, that was for sure. He didn’t know what it was.

  He’d seen countless humans die, those the vamps decided were just food rather than blood slaves. He’d watched their souls separate and move on. They were silver and so beautiful. The sight always took his breath away. Vampires on the other hand, had bright turquoise souls, if they could be called that, but they weren’t beautiful. They were too bright and garish… all that glittered was definitely not gold. They were pretty on the outside but when he looked closely, he could see the tendrils of corruption reaching out from within.

  None of the other vampires could see the souls. He’d asked once when he was a child, innocent in his wonder as one of his father’s lieutenants had torn out the throat of a young woman who’d refused to become a blood slave. Of all the victims of the court, she alone stood out among the legions the court had killed over the years.

  Tiny and slender, she’d been so beautiful even the memory made his dead heart ache. As the man he was now, he knew exactly why she’d been marked…she’d have made any vampire a stunning eternal bride. But even through the pain and depravity they’d put her through, the look in her eyes had remained unwavering. She welcomed death with open arms and a soft smile on her lips, her last breath coinciding with the silver of her soul separating from her earthly body. Even as just a child, he’d been fascinated, asking his father what she was. The entire court had gone silent, watching him with terror, and his father had beaten him until the floor had run black with his blood.

  He’d never mentioned seeing souls again. But he had remembered that young woman. In his child’s mind she came to represent his mother, the mother no one would speak to him about, and his father had allowed her to be killed. Of course, when he’d grown, he’d realized that wasn’t the case… His mother had been a creature with more blood on her hands than any vampire… but the memory of that young woman had remained with him.

  For all those he’d killed, at least he remembered the one purely innocent soul.

  “Earl Zane! Earl! My Lord… My Lord!”

  The call from the back of the room got his attention, and Zane looked up as a young vampire pushed through the debauchery to kneel in front of him. He wasn’t highly ranked, just a foot soldier, but his gaze was clear and unwavering when he looked up.

  “What is it…” Zane searched his memory for the man’s name. “Lucien?”

  “It’s Vaughn, My Lord. He’s caught something in one of the devil’s traps down in the eastside derelicts… I think it’s a…” He paused, color mounting on his cheeks.

  Zane hissed through his teeth in irritation. “Come on. Spit it out. What is it?”

  “A Valkyrie, My Lord. I think it’s a Valkyrie.”

  “Tove, you are a fucking idiot.”

  In my defense, I wasn’t always an idiot, but considering I went and managed to get myself caught in a devil’s trap of all things…yeah, I was a fucking idiot.

  With a sigh, I gave up hammering at the magical barrier that had me trapped in what was possibly the shittiest derelict apartment block imaginable and started to pay attention to my surroundings. Broken windows, check. Floorboards covered with the detritus of years of abandonment, check. Ratty sleeping bag and paraphernalia of an addict in the corner, check. Oh…actually, the addict was still there, wrapped in the bag, but he’d long since shuffled off this mortal coil. Long enough ago that the stink of decayed flesh was over and done with. Crap, I really should have noticed there was a body in the room.

  Yeah, yeah…I know what you’re going to say. If a nice girl like me is going to wander around down and out places like this, I really should be paying more attention, shouldn’t I?

  But I wasn’t. Nice that is.

  I was just about as far from nice as it was possible to get and far from needing to be worried when wandering around places that were the natural haunts of druggies and the general dregs of soci
ety. They needed to watch their step around me. Body armor wouldn’t go amiss either, but really? If I was gunning for them, there wasn’t much on this planet that would stop me. Armor would just delay the inevitable.

  Like this trap was delaying the inevitable for the Legere demon I’d been tracking. Bastard things were fast as fuck and twice as nasty, but I wasn’t interested in the thing for its social skills. The Legere were not just murdering SOBs. They also did something far worse…

  They stole the soul of each of their kills, taking them to whatever higher demon they served. The one I was tracking had been almost fully laden when I ran across its trail. It was about ready to head downstairs to offload its cargo. And since at least one of those souls was mine, I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  Well, the soul wasn’t mine mine. Not my personal one, anyway.

  You see… I’m a Valkyrie. I collect the souls of the worthy and send them to the halls of Valhalla. Yeah… all that shit exists. Heaven, hell, purgatory… all religions, all stories… they’re all true in some form or another. Although, if you ask me, Valhalla sounds a lot like heaven or the Elysian Fields or whatever you want to call it, but who am I to judge? I just get told which souls are going up.

  Well, I would have, if I hadn’t gotten stuck in a fucking child’s play devil’s trap. If the rest of the sisterhood found out I’d been caught so easily… Le sigh. My life fucking sucked.

  Now that I was concentrating more, I could easily pick out the crude design painted on the ceiling above me. Crap. I rubbed my eyes, trying to dislodge the hangover from hell. Currently I had a throat as rough as a badger’s arse and what felt like a bad tempered woodpecker hammering on the back of my skull.

  Served me right for drinking with a Reaper last night. But what’s a girl to do? Us psychopomps had to stick together, and apart from my sisters, there weren’t many drinking partners out there who could keep up with me. Since I couldn’t die, not until Odin punched my number, alcohol poisoning wasn’t an issue.

  Good thing, really, since I was fairly sure we’d ended up drinking engine degreaser or something by the end of the night. The last thing I needed was to end up in a human hospital trying to explain what sort of paranormal I was. I mean, yeah, paras were like totally out of the closet and had been for years, but even so… some of us were a shit-ton rarer than others.

  I checked out the edge of my magical cage by the simple act of placing my hands against the barrier and moving around until I’d come full circle. I looked like some sort of demented mime but I didn’t care. Finding out the extent of my confinement and its shape was far more important. Okay, I was in a circle. My gaze lifted and for a moment I allowed my vision to shift, pulling power from my soul to see what could not be seen with my mortal eyes.

  The circle was drawn in blood. Great. A trap powered by blood magic. Things just got better and better today, didn’t they?

  My brow furrowed as I rifled through my knowledge of devil’s traps. Circles were simple entrapments, able to contain the average cross-roads demon but not much more. It shouldn’t have been able to hold me, that was for sure, since, one, I’m far more powerful than most demons, and two, I’m not a demon. But somehow, here I was, stuck in a frigging circle of a devil’s trap. Did I mention I’m not a fucking demon? So what was a demon trap doing holding me? Subconsciously, my hand lifted to the hidden side of my face. But as soon as I caught myself, I yanked it back down. I’d been cleared of contamination so we weren’t going there… no way, no how.

  A sense of the air moving made me spin around, and my gaze locked onto the shadows in the corner of the room. Though I may walk and talk human, I’m anything but. So the vampire trying to shroud itself in darkness was easy to spot.

  “Here kitty, kitty, kitty…” I crooned, putting an edge of compulsion in my voice as I beckoned. That’s the interesting thing about psychopomps. On a normal day, we act as guides for the souls of the dead. On a bad day or just simply piss us off, and we’re pretty good at the making dead part too. Creatures that are already dead, like vampires, normally know to give us a wide fucking berth since a hint of compulsion can send them running out to meet the dawn. No soul, dead body… call it a clean-up operation. You’re welcome. I charge by the hour. Good at clearing rats as well. That’s not one of my official duties. I just fucking hate rats.

  Nothing happened for a long moment, the creature as still as a statue. But then, with a soft tremor that ran through its body, the vampire slid out of the shadows.

  “Well now, aren’t you a pretty little thing?” I kept my voice light like I was speaking to a nervous animal as it crept forward. And it was pretty. It had the appearance of a youth in his late teens with pale, smooth skin un-riddled with acne. But I suppose if you’re going to trade your soul you needed some perks (well, other than immortality, but, take it from me…living forever? It can get pretty fucking monotonous).

  The vampire moved farther forward, straightening as it did, and I realized it was taller than I’d first thought. Not really a problem, but it did mean I was going to get a crick in my neck looking up at the damn thing. Moonlight fell across its face and I frowned again. All my instincts said it was young, perhaps not turned more than a decade. The scent of dead blood swirling around it and the black drops falling from its wrist onto the floorboards told me it had used its own blood to power the circle that surrounded me.

  Interesting. Even with the addition of dead blood, I should have been able to bust out of this thing as though it was no more than a paper bag. A wet one at that.

  “So, handsome, you gonna tell me how you managed to draw a trap strong enough to hold something like me?”

  The order in my voice had brought the thing right to the edge of the circle. I watched with a smile on my face but murder in my heart. As soon as it stepped in here with me, it was fucking toast. Literally. Vamps had a bad habit of bursting into flames when you ripped their non-beating hearts out.

  Just one little step. Come on, handsome, you know you want to. I concealed my eagerness as he seemed to debate taking that last step. Just one more, that was all I needed. Then it was vamp flambé and the circle would dissolve, leaving me free to go after that Legere and release the souls it carried. Some weren’t mine, but in the absence of another Guide, I was quite happy to get them out of the demon’s clutches and send them on their way up.

  “STOP RIGHT THERE, VAUGHN!” a male voice boomed, making us both spin around.

  The speaker stood in the doorway, fury radiating from every line of his big frame. Dark energy filled the room and my lips curled back from my teeth instinctively. A vampire, and not a baby like the one behind me. No, this one was far older and more powerful. Actually, from the feel of the power crawling over my skin, he was probably the most powerful example of his kind I’d come across.

  “Now, you didn’t have to do that…” I chided, throwing in a pout for good measure. “I nearly had him.”

  “Oh, I’m quite aware you did, but as he’s somewhat useful to me, I don’t fancy replacing him when you rip his heart out,” big, bad vamp said, stepping forward so the moonlight fell over his face.

  And fuck me, he was beautiful…

  Lucien had been right. Vaughn had managed to trap a Valkyrie.

  His breath caught in his throat when she stuck her hands on her hips and pouted at him. Small and curvy, she was not at all what he’d expected a Valkyrie to look like. But at the same time, the crackle of power in the air and the easy way she’d ensnared Vaughn with her eyes and voice told him that was exactly what she was.

  “Pffft.” She wriggled her fingers dismissively. “I’m sure a big lad like you can easily find another baby vamp to do your bidding.”

  “Good minions are hard to come by, especially ones that were spell-slingers in their former lives,” he answered, watching as she flittered closer to the edge of the circle.

  He’d turned Vaughn himself, bonding him with blood and death, so the blood the spell caster had used was partial
ly his. What was that old phrase? Send a snake to catch a snake?

  That thought disappeared as he watched her. Her hair was dark, black or brown… he couldn’t tell in this light… and fell loosely to her shoulders, covering one half of a delicate, elfin face that screamed paranormal blood. The eye he could see was feline-set, the light color washed out by moonlight. Her lips were full and kissable, the pout tempting him to step into the circle with her…

  “Ohhhh, no you don’t, sweetheart.” He broke eye contact and stepped back, realizing with surprise that she’d almost managed to pull even him under her sway. Fuck. She shouldn’t have been able to do that.

  “Spoilsport.” She gave him another pout but then chuckled, watching him with a keen gaze. “So, big boy, you got me in a cage. Way to go. Wanna tell me how your little pet managed that? Vampire blood isn’t anywhere near strong enough to keep me in here.”

  Her expression changed, all humor disappearing. In an instant she went from tiny and cute to tiny, cute and very, very dangerous. “In fact, there is only one thing powerful enough to trap me… Valkyrie blood.” Within a heartbeat, she was right up against the edge of the circle, her movements almost too fast to be seen, even for him. Her visible eye bored into his. “And if you and your court are feeding from one of my sisters, you’d better fucking hope I never get out of here.”

  Zane folded his arms over his chest, rubbing his jaw as he considered her. She was right, of course, only Valkyrie blood could trap one. But she was wrong in her assumption. He didn’t have one of her sisters captive…

  “You’re so pretty that I hope you don’t either.” He turned, catching Vaughn’s gaze. “Can you put the same enchantment on some cuffs? Move her?”

  “Wait…what?” The woman in the circle snorted. “You seriously think I’m just going to let you or him stroll in here and put cuffs on me? Really? You’d be crispy duck before you’d finished the step.”