Chapter Twenty-five

“Do you know them?” I ask Lucas, not sure if I should be on the defense just yet or not.

“No, nor do I know why they are here. Stay inside and let me handle it.”

“But there’s three of them.” I grab the hem of his shirt, not wanting him to go outside with unfair odds.

“They are young,” he tells me, not needing to explain how he’s at the advantage. The older a vampire is, the stronger and more powerful they become.

“I’m still coming with you. There are vampires who live in Throne Hill. Maybe they came to me for magical help or something.”

Lucas frowns. “Or something sounds about right.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and takes a step back. “Stay in the house.”

I let out a breath as he speeds away, and turn to Binx and Pandora. “Shadow around them. I’m getting my favorite wooden stake.” I go to dash up the stairs and stop, hearing one of the vampires talking.

“Lucas King,” he snarls. “We’ve been looking for you.”

Shit. This doesn’t sound good. I take two stairs at a time, running into my room and over to my weapons chest. I grab the first stake I find, even though it’s not my favorite one with the cool bloodstain, and run back down, joining Lucas on the porch.

The three vampires are standing right outside the circle I’ve cast on the house, and I’m not entirely sure if they can sense it or not.

“That little British bitch you’ve got,” another vampire starts and Lucas flashes forward, grabbing the vampire by the throat and lifting him into the air. Fangs drawn, he looks terrifying.

“If you laid a finger on her I will tear you apart limb from limb,” Lucas growls, and I know it’s not a threat. He really will do it.

Another vamp circles around, charging at Lucas. He’s fast, but Binx is faster. He shadows right at him, shoving him into the wall of magic guarding the house against the unwanted. The vampire screams as magic sizzles through him, no different really than being pushed into an electric fence. Well, one with enough juice to stop an elephant.

“What the fuck?” the last vampire standing cries. His hair is slicked back and he’s wearing a leather jacket, looking so cliché it annoys me. The vampire shoved into my magical defense system slumps to the ground, knocked out cold. Binx and Pandora shadow around the other vampire and he snarls, slashing his fangs through the air as he charges at Pandora. In spirit form, my familiars are only corporeal when they want to be. And right now, Pandora very much wants to be the shadow she’s appearing as.

The vampire goes straight through her, and his hand collides with the wall of magic. He snatches it back, shaking his fingers from the pain. Lucas is still holding the other vampire up in the air as if he weighs nothing. It thrashes and claws at Lucas’s hand, tearing open his skin only to have it heal in a matter of seconds.

“Where is she?” Lucas demands and shoves the vampire onto the ground. The other makes a move to run away. I throw out my hand, hitting him with a ball of blue energy. Holding my hand out, I keep the energy burning through him, enough to keep him pinned to the ground but not enough to kill him.

Lucas looks over his shoulder at me, eyes narrowed with rage. Then he turns back to the vampire, biting him hard in the throat. Blood pours from the vampire’s neck and it reaches up, desperately trying to stop the bleeding.

Can vampires bleed to death? I don’t think so, but he sure is acting panicked. Though even if he doesn’t die, that still looks painful.

“Keep him still,” I tell my familiars, and lower my hand, letting the last of the magic fizzle out of the vampire in the leather jacket. Conjuring up another string of magic, I stand beside Lucas. The red magic in my hand illuminates his face, and it’s only then I fully appreciate the beauty in his rage.

The vampires are talking about Eliza, and the mere suggestion that they harmed her has him ready to rip them apart.

“If you hurt her,” Lucas growls and the vampire under his grasp gags and chokes on his own blood. He presses a hand over his neck, trying to push his skin together so it will heal.

“Sh…sh…she…” the bleeding vampire gasps. Another few seconds pass before he’s healed enough to talk. “She’s alive.”

“She better fucking be,” Lucas growls.

“We…we just talked,” he pants out.

“Let’s call her and find out,” I say a little apprehensively, feeling a bit like I’m playing with fire getting in between Lucas and the other vampires. But this is my yard and he’s my boyfriend.

Besides, I could conjure up an energy ball bright enough to scorch these undead motherfuckers if I wanted to. And I’m pretty sure my familiars will enjoy ripping them apart just as much as Lucas will.

Moving fast, Lucas stands and pins the vampire to the ground with his foot. The vampire tries to get away but is no match for Lucas’s strength. He takes his phone from his pocket and calls Eliza. A few seconds pass and I can see the stress and fear in his eyes. He’s not in love with her, but he loves her. She’s his family…his daughter, in a sense.

And then she answers. Lucas talks to her in another language again, and his face relaxes. A minute later, he puts the phone on speaker and sets it on the ground.

“You weren’t very nice to her, were you?” he asks the vampire, pulling him up onto his feet. “You mess with my child and you mess with me.” Without warning, he punches his hand through the vampire’s chest and pulls out his heart. I gasp, hand going to my mouth as my own heart skips a beat.

Blood spurts out, spraying Lucas’s face. He squeezes the heart, crushing it with his bare hand. “And that, asshole, is unforgivable.” The vampire starts to sizzle, burning from the inside out. That’s the way vampires die, regardless of how you kill them. The insides ignite and the outside—their skin, some muscle and tendons, and whatever clothes they were wearing at the time—melt into a messy puddle of ash and body parts on the ground. It’s startling every time to watch them be reduced to nothing but smoldering goo.

“Holy shit,” I wheeze. “I didn’t know you could kill a vampire that way.”

Lucas drops the charred heart to the ground and steps on it. He turns to me, shrugging. “The more you know.”

I blink, still too startled to move. But then the vampire who was knocked unconscious starts to wake up. I conjure a ball of blue energy and throw it at him. It hits him square in the chest and he explodes.

“Oops,” I say, wincing. “I didn’t mean to do that. I…I guess he was still too weakened by the other energy blast.”

“What didn’t the witch-bitch mean to do?” Eliza’s voice comes from Lucas’s phone.

“Now, be nice,” Lucas tells her, picking up the phone with his non-bloody hand. “She just did what I was about to do.” He says something else to her in French before hanging up.

“But this one,” he starts, going over to the vampire in the leather jacket my familiars are keeping pinned to the ground. “This one we’ll keep for questioning.”

Binx and Pandora back off when Lucas draws near. He picks up the vampire, hitting him hard in the temple and knocking him out.

“Sorry about this,” he tells me, wiping his bloody hand on the vampire’s shirt.

“What is this?” I ask, shaking my head.

“Vampire business.”

“Oh, come on.” I cross my arms. “You pulled me away from astral projection for vampire business?”

Lucas sighs, tossing the unconscious vampire over his shoulder. “I told you not all vampires want to abide by the Vampire Council’s new rules and regulations. They make doing business difficult when we’re supposed to honor contracts and follow guidelines. And these vampires are working for another older vampire who’s been trying to make things difficult for any vampire who follows the VC’s rules. They’ve been going around causing a lot of trouble. No one’s been able to get close to their leader, but I think I have a way now.” He looks at me with a smile. “Do you have any chains?”

“Chains?”

“To hold him? I’m keeping him alive for questioning.”

“I can do you one better.” I wave my hand for him to follow me to the shed. I conjure up another energy ball so I can see, digging around past my lawn mower for a spool of nylon rope that’s next to an industrial roll of Duct Tape.

“Vampires can tear through this,” Lucas says, raising one eyebrow.

“Not after I enchant it.”

“Why do you have so much rope?”

I snip off a long piece with garden sheers and look up with a smirk. “You think you’re the only one who knocks out and ties up your enemies?”

*

I fold the tarp in half and staple it over the vent on the wall of the shed. “That’s as light-tight as this place will get,” I say, stepping back. “Should we test it?”

“Go in, shut the door, and conjure an energy ball,” Lucas tells me. “If I can see light from the outside, we’ll know it needs more work.”

Nodding, I pull the shed door shut, wait a beat, and then close my eyes, conjuring a ball of bright white energy. I hold it for a few seconds and then push the shed door open.

“Did we seal it up good enough?” I ask.

“Yeah. Good enough.” Lucas shrugs. “Throw a tarp over him to be safe.” He picks up the vampire who’s still unconscious and tosses him on the shed floor. His arms are bound behind his back, legs tied together, and Lucas gagged him so he won’t go causing a scene tomorrow during the day. The plan is to take him back to Chicago with Lucas at sunset tomorrow, after making him wait out his sentencing in my shed.

The vampires roughed up Eliza, but she’s healed and is more annoyed her hair got messed up than anything. She’s the one who told them where Lucas was, and I can tell he’s unhappy about it. Her life didn’t seem to actually be in danger, and I think Lucas knows as well as I do that she sent them here with the intention of interrupting us. We haven’t spoken much since we started getting the shed ready to hold a vampire prisoner during the day, and I get the feeling he doesn’t want to go into it anyway.

I shut the shed, hold up my hand and seal it with magic. “No one’s getting in or out without me,” I tell Lucas, stepping back and crossing my arms over my chest.

“Well, this was an eventful night,” I sigh. “You did bring extra clothes, right?”

“I did. I’ll get them.” He goes to his car as I walk up the steps of the back porch. Binx and Pandora are both there, sitting on the porch railing. Pandora is giving me the stink-eye, and she doesn’t have to shift into shadow form to tell me what she’s thinking.

“I know,” I agree with a sigh. “But I have my own magical baggage to deal with. I can’t hold this against him. And besides, we learned something new. If all else fails, reach inside a vampire’s chest cavity and pull out and crush their heart.”

“You’ll break your fingers trying,” Binx says, shadowing into the house. Shaking my head, I go in, toss the wooden stake onto the kitchen table and open the fridge. I’m not really hungry, but comfort food sounds good right about now. And at the thought of food, both Binx and Pandora act very cat-like and rub against my legs, meowing, until I give in and tell them I’ll cook up some meat.

“What do you want tonight?” I ask them. “Chicken? Beef?”

They want chicken, and I grab the butter from the fridge right as Lucas comes back inside, holding clean clothes.

“You have vampire blood on your face,” I tell him, closing the fridge. He goes past me and upstairs to the bathroom to clean himself up. I get the chicken in the frying pan and am seasoning it when he comes back down.

“Want to go see a movie?” he asks, and I stop what I’m doing to stare at him. Go out and see a movie? Like we didn’t just find out a demon crawled out of Hell and three vampires didn’t come all the way here from Chicago to try and start shit.

I blink. Why the hell not?

“Sure. It’s late, though. I’m not sure what’s playing around here. We’d have to go to the next town over. Or I could make popcorn and we can watch something on N*****x.”

“As long as I’m with you, I don’t care what we’re doing.” He smiles, and it’s then I realize his fangs are still drawn. Have they been the whole time we were putting the vampire in the shed? I either didn’t notice or I’m getting used to it.

“The idea of staying home does sound nice.” I flip the chicken over and add a bit more seasoning. My familiars can eat raw meat, obviously since they hunt for their food most nights, but they appreciate it when I cook. And if I’m being honest, I like spoiling them.

Turning down the burner, I grab my popcorn maker out and set it on the island counter…which reminds me I never wiped anything down after Lucas fucked me good and hard on it. Moving the popcorn maker to the small section of counter space I have between the fridge and the sink I get out a bottle of disinfectant and spray everything down.

“Would you like some help?” Lucas asks, coming up behind me. He grabs me around the waist with one hand and takes the spray bottle with the other.

“That’d be nice. Just, uh, spray everything down and then wipe it up.”

He kisses my neck, lips going to the two bite marks and sending a shiver down my spine. I start with the popcorn while Lucas cleans, and then dish up the chicken for my familiars.

Once the kitchen is cleaner, we take the popcorn and go into the living room and I groan, seeing the salt and candles on the floor. I set the popcorn down and drop down to my knees, picking up the candles. Lucas sweeps up all the salt and moves the furniture back. We really do make a good team.

“Finally,” I say, sitting on the couch next to him. I grab the popcorn and shove a handful in my mouth. Lucas picks the movie and I cover us both us with a blanket. “You can stay the night,” I tell him, then feel a little awkward. “I mean, if you want to. I know my house isn’t light-tight like yours, but I already thought of a spell to seal my window in my bedroom.”

“I want to stay with you.” He takes my hand in his and extends my arm. “You’re safer that way.”

“I do feel safe around you.” I take another bite of popcorn and set the bowl down. Lucas traces the veins on my arm, stopping at the one inside my elbow, right at the place doctors usually take blood from. “Are you—” I start and then stop myself.

“Yes,” Lucas tells me, mouth already going to my arm. I tense a bit and he stops, looking up and retracting his fangs. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m a little ticklish there. And I’m scared it will hurt.”

“I’ve fed off you before,” he says, not trying to convince me it won’t hurt. Because it will.

“Yeah, but those were, uh, all kind of erotic experiences.” My cheeks flush a tad at the thought of his head between my thighs the first time he sank his fangs into me.

“I could make this erotic.” He slides his hand along my thigh. “I did assume you were tired, though.”

“I am.”

Lucas slips both arms around me, brings me into his lap, and kisses me, soft and gentle. Then he brings my head down against his chest, stroking my hair until I’m relaxed. We lay down together, and I move, extending my arm for him.

“I want you to drink me,” I say softly.

“As long as you’re ready,” he replies just as quiet.

I move my head up and down, and he sinks his fangs in only a second later. I feel my blood spill out into his mouth. He licks the blood, fingers wrapping around my arm, keeping it tight against his face. Then he starts to drink my blood, and the sensation of my blood being sucked out is weird, and suddenly I’m afraid of passing out because I’m thinking about it leaving my veins.

I close my eyes and move one hand to the back of Lucas’s head, raking my fingers through his messy hair. He groans from my touch and takes his mouth off me, licking around the wounds.

“Breathe,” he tells me, clamping his hand over the bite marks. I exhale and lean against him. “You taste so fucking good, Callie.”

Hearing his words sends a wave of heat through me, even though I’m exhausted. He keeps his hand over my arm, applying pressure so the puncture wounds clot and start to scab over. I’m going to have to make a healing balm to get rid of the vampire track marks all over my body.

I cuddle up with Lucas, feeling safe and comfortable in his embrace. It doesn’t take long before I fall asleep…only to be woken about an hour later.

“Callie.” Lucas’s hand is on my shoulder, and he’s sitting up, eyes wide. “Something just fell down your fireplace.”