Melted By The Vampires: A Paranormal Menage Romance (2 page)

Nothing The Saints had told me had prepared me for all this.

The Saints were the vampire coven who'd enlisted me to take out the two vampire leaders of New Detroit. I'd been in love with one of The Saints, their leader, a vampire named Clark Maxwell. I'd been with him for two years before the nuclear disaster. Only now, in the present, Clark was their
former
leader, because he was dead. He'd been killed in some sort of a confrontation with Dedrick, the current leader of The Saints.

From what I'd heard and from what I'd been told, Clark had suspected Dedrick of plotting to kill him, so he'd tried to kill Dedrick first, and Dedrick had won. Which had all sounded about right to me. Even though I'd given my heart to Clark, I couldn't deny that he'd been paranoid and prone to violent rages. He'd never been violent with me, personally, but I'd seen it. I'd seen his wild, out-of-control rage.

Attacking Dedrick absolutely seemed like something he'd do, and when I'd heard that he'd been killed, I wasn’t able to stop myself from feeling that he'd deserved it. I hadn't even felt that bad. Which, naturally, troubled me. I loved Clark, as I'd told myself over and over, so I wasn’t able to figure out why I didn’t feel much pain at his loss.

That was no longer important. What
was
important was why I was in the situation I was currently in, facing two vampire leaders I was supposed to kill.

After the nuclear disaster that had just about destroyed the world, the Detroit-based witch coven I'd been a part of had felt free to step out of the shadows we'd been hiding in ever since the coven had been established hundreds of years earlier. After all, with half-man, half-animal shifters now roaming the earth, it didn't seem like witches should have to hide.

The vampires didn't feel they should have to hide any longer, either. There were two factions, same as in the present. So named because their home base had been a city called Saint Alexander, just outside of Detroit, The Saints had been the oldest vampire coven in the state, so old that no one even remembered when they'd first arrived, or even how the first of them had been made into a vampire. There was some lore about the first original vampire in North America having come from Bulgaria in the seventeenth century.

At the time of the nuclear disaster, the other vampire group in the area hadn't even had a name, and their numbers were small. Clark told me that they were unspeakably cruel, which was saying a lot, since Clark and his coven could be pretty cruel themselves. For this reason of unspeakable cruelty, Clark vowed to kill all the members of this smaller group.

But before he could, my own earth-shattering disaster had happened. My entire witch coven had been killed. All my sister-witches and our mother figure, Amelia, all gone. Slaughtered. All of them with their throats bitten out and their blood drained when I returned home from taking a simple brisk walk, a simple brisk walk that had saved my life.

For hours, I'd just sat among my family members' pale, still bodies in complete shock. We'd known that the vampires from the smaller group were a threat, but being that I'd had the protection of Clark, The Saints' leader, we didn’t think we’d ever be attacked. And we'd figured that if we ever were, our magic would be enough to defend ourselves with.

Because I was the strongest witch in the coven, stronger even than Amelia at this point, my magic would likely have been enough to turn back any and all vampires. But of course, I hadn't been there. I hadn't been there for the only real family I'd ever known. I'd been out for a bit of fresh air.

I started out in life as a regular girl, not knowing that I had any supernatural powers. My parents were meth addicts, and I grew up in a series of equally terrible foster homes until I ran away at sixteen. I quickly learned that the streets of Detroit were no place for a girl to wander alone, but I tried my best to make it, begging for spare change for food and sleeping in alleyways, always hidden behind dumpsters.

But one night, I'd been found by a man who wanted to add me to the group of prostitutes who worked for him. When I resisted, he tried to drag me away, but I fought, stunning myself by shooting a beam of silvery light from my palm while I was flailing around trying to hit him. This light knocked him unconscious, and that's when Amelia joined the scene, seeming to come out of nowhere.

She told me that she was a witch and demonstrated a few light tricks of her own. She and her coven worked within the city, using their supernatural gifts to protect as many women as they could from rapes, murders, and attacks. They usually didn't stumble into teenaged girls with latent powers in the course of their work, though. Amelia wanted to know if I'd like to join them. I did.

About seven years later, I'd become acquainted with Clark. Amelia hadn't known too much about The Saints and hadn't wanted me to get involved, but sparks had already flown, and my heart made me get involved anyway.

Two years after that, the nuclear disaster happened, decimating Detroit, essentially leveling it to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Maybe because of our supernatural powers, not a single witch in the coven was affected. None of us even got sick

.After my initial several hours of shock upon finding my entire coven dead, I wanted to die. I
tried
to die. I cut my wrists in an attempt to try to bleed to death, and when I wasn’t able to cut deep enough, I tried to use my own magic against myself, directing my silvery beams of light at my heart.

By this point, my beams of light were strong enough to instantly kill a grown man, which I did once when I came upon a man trying to stab a girl dressed in high heels, miniskirt, and a lacy red bra, even though she didn't look a day over twelve to me, not that it even mattered exactly how old she was.

My job was to protect all people, but especially women, regardless of age, and regardless of what they were doing out on the streets.

I knocked the attacking man unconscious at first, but he came right back around and immediately began stabbing the girl again, like some possessed, wild animal. I warned him to stop or I would kill him. And he hadn't, so I had. Amelia, whose strongest skill was free-flying through the air fast as lightning, literally, had soon arrived and had raced the near-dead young girl to the hospital, and she survived.

Later, Amelia and I read in the papers that the girl was only ten.

But despite the fact that my supernatural power could instantly fell a grown man, it hadn't worked on myself when I tried to use it to kill myself. Some iridescent shield of light just made the light coming from my palm bounce right off my chest every time.

Clark found me on the floor, in such misery and pain that I begged him to just kill me. I offered him one of my bleeding wrists to try to entice him drink from it to drain me dry, but he refused. He hadn't even seemed tempted. Once they'd been turned for ten or twenty years or so, most vampires were plenty strong enough to resist human blood if they wanted to, and Clark had been turned a century earlier.

Instead of giving in to my request for him to kill me, he'd told me that it was clear that the smaller group of vampires killed my coven family, and that what I should do was take revenge. He urged me to redirect my grief and pain to this end, saying that it would make me feel better in the end. I was sure I'd never feel "better," but the thought of revenge appealed to me, and so I agreed.

We'd worked out a plan where I'd infiltrate the smaller coven of vampires and then kill the two leaders with my supernatural powers. Clark said it would help us both meet our goals. I would get revenge, and he would finally have this smaller coven of vampires dealt with for good. Despite the fact that he and all The Saints were incredibly strong, they hadn't yet been able to kill the two leaders of the smaller coven.

Before Clark and I put our plan into action, he'd been killed by Dedrick, and Dedrick hadn't seemed very interested in having me kill the two leaders right then. He wanted to kill them himself, and he was confident that he could. But just in case, he wanted me to be his backup plan.

He wanted to first falsify papers saying that I'd been found fertile after the nuclear blast, even though the opposite was true. Then, I'd be frozen and left where the smaller coven of vampires would find me and claim me as their own, to thaw in a time of great need, which Dedrick figured could be anytime from a few years to a few hundred.

We figured that when I was thawed, I'd find myself in one of two scenarios. The first would be that I'd discover that Dedrick and The Saints had already killed the two smaller coven leaders and my services weren't needed. The second scenario would be that I'd awake from thawing to find that the two vampire leaders were still alive, and Dedrick hadn't been successful, even in all the years that I'd been frozen.

And, of course, this latter scenario had been the case. I awoke from thawing to discover that the two vampire leaders were not only still alive, but their formerly small coven was now large, just from a few things I’d heard while in the hospital, and from what I'd seen of the city of New Detroit out the window.

So, my revenge services were needed after all, which made me glad. At first, when Dedrick and I came up with our plan, I'd been hesitant because I hadn't wanted to just be the backup plan;
I
wanted to kill the two leaders. I wanted a chance at doing it
first
, before Dedrick.

However, there hadn't really been anything I could do.
He
was the leader of the largest and most powerful vampire coven at the time, and as badly as I'd wanted to take the first crack at killing the two smaller coven leaders, it wasn't like I could go toe-to-toe with Dedrick and his hundreds of vampires to claim that chance. I just had to settle for being the backup plan, and now I was thrilled that I was needed. I was finally going to have revenge on the two vampire leaders for them killing my coven family.

There was just one problem, though. My supernatural powers didn’t appear to have survived my freezing. Or they had, but were just taking some time to warm up. Or
something
. I wasn't really sure. All I knew was that I'd been trying to do my beam-of-light trick since the very first day I'd been thawed, but I'd had zero success.

It just wasn't happening. I hadn't been able to perform any of my minor powers, either, not that I really cared about
those
. It was with my silvery beams of light that I intended to use to kill my two targets.

Despite being a little anxious about recovering my powers, I really wasn't
too
worried yet. I figured I'd get them back in time, maybe within a couple of weeks. After all, being frozen and then thawed, I knew my body had been through a lot. It only made sense that whatever was inside me, that gave me my supernatural gifts, would need some time to return to full strength.

In the meantime, I just had to bide my time, gaining my two targets' trust so that they'd be absolutely blindsided when I finally killed them by directing beams of light at their heads, one right after the other. Beams of light that were certain to kill them. Ninety-nine percent, certain, anyway.

Usually, vampires could only be killed by being staked or stabbed through the heart and then decapitated. But, though it had been extremely rare throughout vampire history, vampires could also be killed by exceedingly powerful witches. And, maybe just a year before the nuclear disaster, I'd discovered this firsthand when I'd had to defend myself from a nomadic vampire who'd been visiting The Saints.

A fairly new vampire, he attacked me, not yet able to resist human blood, so I shot him with a beam of light, intending just to disable him, but instead, I'd killed him instantly. So, I was ninety-nine percent sure that taking out my two targets would be just as easy. Once I finally got my powers back, anyway. But at present, I was going to have to suffer. I couldn’t make my two targets completely powerless and was unable to even injure them, let alone kill them.

After the gray-eyed man stuck his boot in the door to keep me from closing it, I spent a long moment just gritting my teeth, trying to think of what choices I had and realizing I had none.

So, I opened my apartment door and then stepped aside to let them enter. "Just come right on in, then. You may as well, since you're not giving me a choice about the matter."

The gray-eyed man entered first and came to a stop, towering over me. "You're right about that. We're not. It's time the three of us talked and got acquainted."