Burning (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #1) (19 page)

“
Is Vlad lurking around?” Ambra asked.

“
I don’t see him, but I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“
I’m suspicious,” Daphne said. “This comes on the heels of, and I mean, right on the heels of the internet contact today with Kristen Sebastian.”

“
C’est vrais!
” Ambra said.
It’s true.

“
Merde!
” I said, picking up on a little of the local French.

“
What are the circumstances of you finding Gabrielle?” Lucas asked Corbin.

“
The wolves found her near the gate and raised a ruckus. I went to investigate and saw her lying in the snow with them circling her and closing in. They were going tear her apart. I ran interference and got her inside.”

“
How is she?” Ambra asked.

“
Bad shape.”

“
I’m amazed that she’s alive,” I said.

“
That’s just it,” Corbin said. “First, there are two things you should know. One, she’s been tortured. And, two, she’s a new vampire.”

“
Mon Dieu
,” Ambra said, going pale.

Mikhail crossed himself.

“Let’s think about this for a minute,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to compromise our security.”

I said, “Lucas, we’re trained vampire assassins. What can Gabby do against all of us at once?”

“She could kill us all in a heartbeat,” Daphne said. “Vlad created her. That means she’s like the queen of the evil vampires, the Morgan le Fay of the evil vampires, the Darth Vader of the—”

“—
Daphne. Stop. This is Gabrielle we’re talking about. She’s a sister in Sisterhood of the Scythe.”

“
Not anymore. Even though she was a vampire hunter, she’s now a vampire, so trust must be earned. Just like Samantha Moon, we need to take precautions,” Ambra said.

“
What do you all suggest?” I asked.

“
I know Gabrielle best. I’ll go get her from the gatehouse,” Ambra offered.

“
I’ll go, too. She was my brother’s fiancée. I owe it to him to—”

“
Hey,” Corbin said over the speakerphone. “She wants to say something.”

A weak voice that I barely recognized as Gabrielle said, “Just lock me up in my recording studio so I can still have something normal. In return for my care, you can study my physiology. I have enemy intel to share, and I have nowhere else on earth I can go. Please,” she added, “have mercy.”

Sounds of her weeping made it through the speaker...and it tore apart my heart. Samantha Moon was right. A vampire could work their way right into the castle using our compassion.

“
Vlad’s going to come here after you, Gabrielle,” Lucas said.

“
I need
sanctuary
. I’m not going to hurt anyone. I swear.
Please!
”

“
Just a moment.” I nodded at Lucas. He looked at the vampire hunter next to him, and soon we all nodded in agreement. Daphne was the last one to nod, which she did grudgingly.

Lucas said, “We are all in agreement that she can come in, but we need time to secure Gabrielle’s safe place in her recording studio and get some medical equipment set up in there, a hospital bed and such.” He looked at Griff. “Can you get a gurney and restraint straps and IVs, etc.?”

“Yes.” Griff paled. “I’m a doctor, but I know nothing about vampire biology.”

“
So noted,” Lucas said.

Corbin’s voice crackled through the speaker. “She just fainted, guys. She barely has a pulse—then again, I have no clue what a normal vampire pulse should be.”

“What the hell?” I said. “A vampire fainted? Is she faking it?”

Griff said, “Be careful, but gently lift her eyelid and see if she is unconscious.”

“Her eyes are rolled back. Bring the defibrillator,” Corbin voice said urgently. “I think she’s dying.”

Ambra said, “Corbin, this would be a good time to tie up the vampire.”

“With what?”

“
What else? Duct tape.”

Chapter Thirty-two

It seemed like it took forever for us to get to the Pinzgauer troop vehicle and drive down the snowy road to the gatehouse.

When we got there, Gabrielle Dubois was wrapped up inside of a blanket and duct-taped like a vampire burrito.

Corbin said, “My inner werewolf says this is a big fat trap.”

“It surely is.” Ambra met my eyes. “But then again, turnabout is fair play. We have to figure out how to keep her safe and use
her
to kill Vlad.”

“
Ambra? What are you talking about, using her to kill Vlad? She’s scared to death of him!”

“
He’s trying use her and so will we.”

“
In hundreds of years, no one has ever escaped Vlad Tepes,” Ambra said.

“
No one?” I asked.

“
No one,” she said firmly.

“
No one except Gabrielle Dubois, you mean.”

“
That should tell you something, Rand. Gabby might be brainwashed and then released at a pre-programmed time to do her worst. Because she was trained by us as a vampire hunter, she is so dangerous that she could wipe us all out in a single night.”

“
What should we do?” I asked.

“
First of all,” Ambra said, “we feed her.”

To be continued in:

Afterglow

Brotherhood of the Blade #2

Coming soon!

***

Reading Samples

Witchy Business

(The Witch Detectives #1)

by

Eve Paludan and Stuart Sharp

Witchy Business

Published by J.R. Rain Press

Copyright © 2013 by J.R. Rain Press

All rights reserved.

Cover design: David H. Doucot

Editors: Tracy Seybold and Phoebe Moore West

Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.

J.R. RAIN PRESENTS

Witchy Business

“What does your heart tell you?”

—
Samantha Moon in
Moon Dance

Chapter One

“
You look like something the werewolf dragged in,” said Rebecca.

“
Very funny!” I replied, brushing off clumps of bloody wolf hair from my filthy jeans and quilted bush jacket.

Rebecca was my liaison with the coven who kept me supplied with investigation jobs that utilized my unique talents. She leaned in and plucked a dead leaf from my hair then tossed it in the wastebasket by her desk. “It looks like you had quite the night camping out in the Highlands.”

“It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.”

“
I’m very impressed that you solved the case of the missing werewolf and got the ball rolling on an agreement to settle.”

“
It’s all taken care of, Rebecca. I got Ferguson Black’s statement and gave the edited version of it to the insurers. I got the victim’s statement, too. It’s dealt with.”

“
This was your first case involving a werewolf. Did Ferguson Black try to put the bite on you?”

I laughed. “Absolutely not.” Mostly because I’d used my talents to ensure that he didn’t. “By the time I finally found poor Fergie, he was lying in a ditch, covered in blood.”

“
His
blood?” The note of suspicion in Rebecca’s voice was typical. Part of her job was keeping an eye out for those supernatural beings who were potentially dangerous.

“
Of course it was his blood. He’d just been in a car accident.” Actually, Fergie had been so relieved to see me that—even stuck in his wolf form—he’d just wagged his tail and whined. I’d told him who I was and that I was there to help. After he’d finished licking my hands, I’d called in the Highland rescue service.

“
You still haven’t said how you ended up looking like…that,” Rebecca said with obvious distaste.

“
Because the weather was so bad last night, the rescue chopper couldn’t come right away, and I didn’t want them there before I could help Fergie to transform, anyway. We had to hunker down while the sky drizzled on us for the night.”

“
That explains the bad hair day and your wet doggy odor.”

“
Rebecca!”

“
Mea culpa.
So, what did you do with him all that time?” That question came with a smirk. Since when did Rebecca have a mischievous edge?

“
He was too big for me to carry out of there and his leg was badly broken, so I just worked on keeping him calm until after the moon set and he could transform again. As you may imagine, that was where the conversation paused for a bit.”

That was mostly because werewolves’ clothes didn’t transform with them as they changed, leaving me to spend the night in a ditch with a naked Scotsman.

“I can imagine,” Rebecca said.

“
I got to watch him transform, though.”

“
Ah, a learning experience.”

I shrugged. “You could put it like that. I didn’t know if I should run away or get out my iPad.”

Rebecca leaned forward. “
Did
you get any photos?”

“
No! I was just kidding about getting out my iPad. That would have been…rude. I mean, yes, I’d saved him, but to video him?”

“
I was thinking it might tell us more about the process,” Rebecca said. “How it works, what happens to the clothes. There’s too much we don’t know.”

That was the other part of Rebecca’s job, scouring my reports for details to take back to the coven. I wasn’t sure but the odds were that either Fergie’s clothes hadn’t survived the transformation, or he’d torn them off afterward. I did know that things had been pretty embarrassing for a moment or two when the rescue chopper came.

“So, you spent the night next to a naked man,” Rebecca said. “Did anything happen I should know about?”

“
Hardly.” I shook my head. Mostly Fergie and I had just talked. About what he was doing out there, about his work as a solicitor up in Thurso. I guessed that another woman might have been tempted by him. I’d just lent him my jacket to keep off the cold. “He was kind of sweet.”

“
He was an idiot, going out driving when he knew the moon was rising. What did he think would happen?”

“
His elderly mother had phoned, saying she had fallen and couldn’t get up. What was he supposed to do?” I countered. “He was trying to race to her house before the moon rose. He just didn’t quite make it.”

Rebecca sighed. “Causing a pile-up in the process. We’re just lucky you were there to contain it.”

“And that he wasn’t more seriously hurt. He could have been killed.”

“
But, Elle, werewolves don’t die, except from silver. And all that running about in the wilds…honestly, there are days when I wish supernatural creatures would
think
more.”

“
On
some
level, he was thinking. He got away from the accident and made sure no one found him. And after he transformed back into a man, he called his sister on my cell to go get their mother off the floor.” I paused. “I’m sure glad that I’m a witch and not a werewolf. I mean, they can’t control their powers.”

“
I know. But we do take care of them under our tolerance directive.”

I nodded. “It’s a good directive of the coven.” One I might have voted for, if I were high up enough in it to have a say in such decisions.

“Elle, are you positive that nothing about this case will be getting out? Publicly, I mean?” Rebecca asked, the way she’d asked practically every time I’d finished a job for the coven.

Then again, as my liaison with them, it was kind of her job to dog my steps and ensure that the details were contained. We didn’t want normal humans to find out more than they should, now did we?