The Vampire's Spell_The Fae King
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINTEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Vampire’s Spell
The Fae King
Book 10
Lucy Lyons
© 2017
© Copyright 2017 by Persia Publishing - All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE 4
CHAPTER TWO 15
CHAPTER THREE 27
CHAPTER FOUR 35
CHAPTER FIVE 43
CHAPTER SIX 57
CHAPTER SEVEN 67
CHAPTER EIGHT 78
CHAPTER NINE 91
CHAPTER TEN 103
CHAPTER ELEVEN 117
CHAPTER TWELVE 131
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 141
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 157
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 171
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 187
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 197
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 206
CHAPTER NINTEEN 218
CHAPTER TWENTY 228
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 239
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 250
CHAPTER ONE
“Well, why do you want to be part of the Fae world anyway, Clay?” Caroline asked as she set down her coffee cup. Her baby, Ro, played in her stroller with the noisemaker that my mate, Ashlynn, and I had purchased at the toy store in the mall the day before.
I glanced at Ash from my seat as she returned from the ladies’ room, the sway of her hips catching the eye of every man and more than one woman as she sashayed back to us.
Caroline had the right to be skeptical of the Fae. For all their lukewarm assistance when we were in trouble, they were the first in line to ask, or rather demand that we put our lives on the line for them—all but Onyxis, the firstborn vampire, and, technically, Caroline’s liege. Onyxis was the queen of the Sluagh, the castoffs of the Fae. At least, that was according to the High Fae, even if they’d never refer to the Sluagthen—the Fae of the Sluagh—that way in their presence. I waited for my mate to join us before responding. Watching her smile light up as our eyes met, I lost my train of thought.
“Why do we want to be considered part of the Fae world?” I mused aloud but mostly to myself. I caught myself and glanced at Caroline, who laughed at me, mimicked by the sweet-as-taffy chortle of my infant goddaughter. Caroline could speak to my mind without words if she wanted, and with her training, I’d learned to as well. “Funny, you’re in my head so much now I’m thinking aloud because it’s a change of pace.”
She laughed again. “Liar. You think aloud because you’re splitting your thoughts about the conversation off from what you’re really thinking about, which, thankfully, stayed behind your shielding. Just be careful that it does. There are enemies who can read minds too, you know.” I nodded. I did know, mostly because our previous best friend had turned out to be the enemy she was speaking of. David still woke me up at night sometimes in nightmares that made me feel nothing like the man I’d become as I relived the horrors that I’d seen when our team “rescued” Caroline from the subbasement of the club she and her husband now owned. The prior master’s torture chamber had been cleaned up, but sometimes, when my security detail put me in the prison quarter, I could still picture the gore and smell the metallic tang of blood with the sweet, rancid underpinning of death.
Ashlynn’s smile faded at the look on my face, and I forced myself to grin, even though I knew she’d see through me. “Sorry, Ash. I got a little in my own head for a second.” I patted the chair next to me and she sat with a pout for me and a wink for our goddaughter, who cooed and reached chubby, little hands out to be picked up. “I want to go to Fairy to fight because I’ve seen what their king can do, and I have it on good authority that he got out of that little trap of ours, and it only took him a few months.” I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “It took his guard three months to find him with the best magic you and I could summon, including half the blood in my body,” I complained, but Caroline just scoffed at me and turned back to the little round face blinking up at her.
“Oh, I don’t think so, little one,” her mother purred. Baby Rowena’s smooth pale forehead furrowed, and she pushed out a cotton-candy bottom lip in a pout. “That doesn’t work on me, young lady, keep your wants to yourself, “Caroline continued, and I threw an extra level of mental shielding up I defense from my goddaughter’s telepathy, which was both adorable and insidious. Almost immediately, Ashlynn started to stand, reaching out for the baby and smiling. Caroline cursed under her breath and pulled down the shade on the stroller and the rune she’d drawn on it in the same herbal tincture we’d learned to combat Fairy glamour flashed to life, and the baby beneath it let out a frustrated howl.
Ashlynn paused, her hands outstretched over the table, and blinked slowly. “Goddamn it, you little monster,” she hissed. “Got me again, did you?” I covered a smirk with my hand, and my mate smacked me in the arm, obviously not fooled by my attempt at subtlety. Ashlynn wasn’t psychic, she was just a regular old alpha werewolf badass. Most of the time, it was enough to scare people straight. But Rowena had her godmother’s heart and a telepathic ability stronger than I’d ever felt before. Caroline opened the bonnet of the stroller and glared down at the baby, making Ashlynn smile with me.
“I can’t tell if she’s more . . . evil, or more adorable when she refuses to accept ‘no’ as an answer,” Ashlynn sighed. She reached for the baby again and Caroline started to lower the magically shielded carriage cover. “No, I’m OK. I just wanted to hold her. After all, with the upcoming battle with the Fae, I don’t know when I’ll get to hold another baby.”
Caroline smiled and shook her head. I knew she was worried that the more contact Ro had with Ashlynn or anyone who couldn’t shield against her unheard-of power, the more control Ro would get. I gazed down at her and felt her frustration, her need to be held, and I forced my hands back in to my lap before I could reach for her. Ever the observant mother, Caroline immediately pulled the cover down again, even though I tried to tell her I was fine. Suddenly, the bonnet scorched, and as I watched, the rune flared to life again, and burned out of the fabric.
“Wow,” Ashlynn gasped. “When did she start doing that?” Caroline grabbed Ro out of the seat while I soaked my cloth napkin and threw it on to the blackened, curling edges of the burnout.
“Right about now, as a matter of fact,” Caroline confessed quietly as the people at neighboring tables crowded around us to make sure the baby was safe. I called for the check as Caroline fended off well-wishers and concerned fellow diners who all offered her advice, including one persistent man who wouldn’t leave until she took his business card and promised to contact him when she was “ready to sue” the stroller manufacturer. Tab paid, my mate and I ushered Caroline to the fleet car from club Pulse. It was one of the Escalades her husband, my boss, kept on site for those of his clan who didn’t use a car enough to bother owning one. As for myself, I preferred the Tesla coupe my second employer bought me. Then again, this lunch was specifically scheduled to talk me out of trying to sneak into Fairy with the Red Daggers, the queen’s own guard.
“She really is the queen of the light court, isn’t she?” Caroline asked, picking up on my thoughts as we sat in the car, Ashlynn in the back with Rowena, happily playing peekaboo with her while we talked.
“Yeah, she is. I always thought the queen of the fairies would be tall and willowy and strong, like the movies, you know?” I asked as I pulled into traffic and headed back down toward the dock and club Pulse.
Caroline patted my hand and glanced back into the backseat. “The Fae hid from humans because our mortality came with the gift of propagation,” she reminded me. “We just out-bred them, until they couldn’t control us any longer. Then we stopped believing in them.”
“And then they faded because we refused them their power.” I watched the streetlights go by as I drove in silence for a bit. “I wonder what Maria would’ve looked like if she’d stayed in Fairy with her husband and kept her old name,” I mused aloud, and behind me Ashlynn huffed.
“She’d be that perfect creature you were just talking about, and I’d have a lot more to worry about in the looks she keeps giving you.” I laughed at my mate and glanced at her in t
he rearview mirror, shaking my head slightly. We were a perfectly mated pair in every way, from physically to metaphysically. There was no way that the queen could stir the wolf in me or hunt with me, even if I could draw another form out of her as I did my wolves.
We were a different breed, and even if I hadn’t loved Ashlynn, or wanted her so badly I didn’t dare think of it unless we were alone because of my lack of self-control, we would still be a mated pair for life. And werewolves were a long-lived bunch. Then again, we had nothing on the Fae, some of whom had seen two thousand years to my thirty.
“We’re going to let Maria sneak us into Fairy, if the mound will open its doors to us. Then, we’re going to help her usurp her crazy-as-shit husband and hopefully make her also insane son, less so.” I took a breath and glanced at Caroline in the passenger seat. “We’re also doing it for free.”
“Because you’re also crazy.”
In the backseat, Ashlynn scoffed. “Says the woman who was willing to give up everything she knew and betray her people for a love affair, and dragged her friends and strangers like me into a war we never asked for, fighting both the humans we wolves were hiding from and vampires we had never believed existed outside scary stories told to keep the wolves from straying too far from the pack.”
Caroline didn’t respond, but Rowena started to fuss and Ashlynn turned her attention back to our goddaughter instead of continuing the argument. My mate wasn’t wrong either. I’d always been there for my best friend, and once I was alpha, that meant my pack was at her beck and call too.
That’s why we were going to Fairy. We wanted our freedom, but freedom comes at a price. For shifters and vampires, that meant we had to gain the knowledge of when and how the Fae would attack, and the power to fight back against creatures who had once been considered gods.
The only sounds in the car for the remainder of the ride was Ashlynn’s soft cooing, and Rowena’s irritated fussing, but I couldn’t tell if it was due to her mothers’ irritation, or her own impending nap time. Strangely, the fussing and subsequent calming of the baby by Ashlynn seemed to cool the tempers of both women. By the time I pulled into a stall in the underground parking behind Pulse, the tension and power that each of the women had been leaking had been reigned in, until the only uncontrolled power in the vehicle came from little Ro. Next to me, I could feel the vibrations from the shield her mother was extending over her to prevent her from causing inadvertent harm.
Caroline climbed out of the car and turned back to me, leaning on the seat so she could see Ashlynn in the back as well. “I will still give you all the support I can, but as you can see, I have my hands full with the adorable witch of the west coast, and I won’t be able to join you.”
“No problem, Caroline,” I replied. I glanced at Ashlynn and back at my friend. “The biggest thing you could do for us now, is find the magic that will make us immune to as many forms of Fairy glamor as possible. The Fae are not our friends, and we aren’t going in blind.
Ashlynn scoffed, “But they will try to blind us.” I nodded and Caroline agreed.
“Send Henny over and I’ll pick her brain about Ro and have her help me create a stronger blend for your infiltration into Fairy.” She paused and added, “Nick should be part of this, you know.”
But we both already knew he couldn’t be, not without upsetting his own queen. Onyxis had supported us as shifters because her vampires were also created by giving humans magic. But she drew the line at letting them continue to involve themselves with the fight between the king and queen of the light court.
The queen of the Sluagh was waiting to see who won, and what the casualties were on both sides before she decided her next move. Like the former Venatores hunter who had become her human servant, Onyxis had fifty possible next moves for every subtle shift in power, and I didn’t trust any of them, despite her stated affection for shifters. She was a nearly immortal creature, and to the rest of her kind, we were just humans with stolen magic in us. Eventually, she would want to return home as a rightful queen in Fairy, and if we didn’t fit the narrative, I was sure she had plans for us as well.
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CHAPTER TWO
Ashlynn didn’t say anything as I drove into the state park to our pack retreat, a long house the size of a McMansion—according to the former alpha—and a few cabins scattered over the acreage procured for the pack by a wealthy wolf who had willed the land to the dummy non-profit the pack held for human legal issues. The non-profit, called Humans for Canidae, the Latin name for anything in the canine species, was used as a shield for any land we acquired for wolf packs, treating the land as protected for natural wolves, which of course, it was.
In fact, we’d somehow adopted a natural wolf pack after we’d received wild magic from a dying Fae shifter and let the magic loose on the forest—and the city, but with much different results). The wolves had gone from respecting us enough to keep their distance, to hanging around at the fire pit with the pack during our full moon celebrations, and participating in our hunts.
They were part of the reason we were willing to take part in the fight. A werewolf pack had never before engaged natural wolves on a level of trust and kinship. They were family now, as much as any human family with cousins who they looked out for. The wild magic had brought them to us, and if the King won the tug of war over Fae magic, we might not lose just the magic, but the lives of anything the magic had touched, human or otherwise.
As always, the matriarch of the wolf pack came forward to greet us, pressing her nose into our palms in turn and then giving a quick lick of the fingers to let us know she remembered us. The matriarch belonged to Ashlynn, and no one else, but as the alpha of the werewolves, she tolerated me as long as Ashlynn wasn’t shouting at me. During our last fight, she’d gone so far as to take a sizeable chunk of flesh out of my ass, which had my mate sitting on the floor laughing while I was forced to change to heal it before I bled all over the floor.
Even now, I surreptitiously glanced down to see judgement staring back at me from her black eyes. “She likes you just fine, Clay, but she’d love you if you helped her find a new mate. She’s lonely since he was killed, and you make her jealous.”
“No, I make her hungry,” I retorted, and Ashlynn’s laughter lilted on the breeze as I stalked toward the cabin that our human witch, Henrietta, shared with her husband, another Venatores defector and my former teacher at the Venatores lamiae school for vampire hunters. It had been like any other Catholic school, with the addition of weapons training and a healthy dose of propaganda about the hidden evils of the world.
I’d bought in, wholeheartedly, until the Venatores had turned me into a werewolf as they experimented with ways to create super soldiers for their cause. Professor Eldritch had left in part because of me and Caroline because he was the closest thing either of us had to a father and he protected us. But mostly, he’d left because we gave him a reason to walk away, and back to his estranged wife.
Looking at the two of them together, I revised my thoughts about his loyalty to those of us the Venatores had betrayed. He was here for her, and only her. For Henny’s part, his devotion agreed with her, and she glowed like a young girl in love for the first time, not a hundred-year-old witch with her middle-aged, potbellied husband.
The professor waved as I approached and Henny stood up from her weeding, brushing the dirt off her hands and smiling at me. “What’s up, Clay?” Eldritch started without preamble. “You look like Caroline made you pay for lunch.” I laughed at his quip and shrugged my shoulders.