Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3)
Read Saved By Blood (The By Blood Vampire Series Book 3) Online
Authors: Samantha Snow
SAVED
BY BLOOD
AN ADULT VAMPIRE ROMANCE
SAMANTHA SNOW
Copyright
©2016 by Samantha Snow
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
The night that a vampire saved her life was the night that Megan Wright's life changed completely.
Handsome vampire Philip Smith appeared to be thirty-something but he was really hundreds of years old. He knew better than to get involved in human disputes but when he sensed Megan being attacked by a group of men he knew he had no choice but to intervene and save her.
However, Megan was about to discover that under vampire law if your life is ever saved by a vampire then you owe that vampire your life.
Literally....
This is a very different type of vampire romance and not like any vampire book you will have ever read before. Download now, start reading and escape with this epic paranormal romance that takes you all across the globe and back!
CHAPTER ONE
“You’re just a brat, Philip. Always have been and always will be. I don’t even know why I let it surprise me anymore.”
Those words had been ringing in Phillip Smith’s ears for the whole day. Shit, sometimes he felt like they had been ringing in his head for his whole
life
. Or at least the life that he had led since his turning, and at this point that might as well be all there was.
It was all that he really recognized in himself, all he really had left. His turning had been, what, almost a hundred years ago now? More than a hundred? God, that hardly even seemed possible and yet he knew that it was true.
He had distinct memorabilia of each decade that had passed, relics that were tastefully and discreetly included into his massive mansion’s decor to serve as reminders. A nostalgic vampire, who would have thought? Not that he considered himself to be nostalgic. At least he would never have listed it as one of his predominant characteristics and it wasn’t really nostalgia that drove his need to have those relics.
It was more of a reminder of what kind of potential danger he could face. Societal change may have seemed rapid to the average person fumbling through his average life, but those trends became far more apparent when you had an eternity to spare. Philip knew from bitter experience that nothing existed in a vacuum and when the tide of change was in the wind it was very difficult to make it still again.
It didn’t matter the continent or the group of people. He had seen an idea take shape and gain power like a dangerous stone rolling down a hill and by the time that stone came to a crashing stop, there would be no discriminating between who would be hurt and who would be spared.
“You’re just a brat, Philip. Always have been and always will be.”
How many different times had he heard that? From how many different people? He couldn’t possibly begin to count, even if he had been feeling extra masochistic one day and taken it upon himself to give it a try.
Even when he had been a little boy, when he had still been human, he had heard things along those lines. From far back in his memory, in a place he did not often choose to visit, he could usually hear his nannies, but sometimes his parents (on the rare occasions when they had actually been home) saying things just like that to him. The opinion had been shared by most of the authority figures who’d had the misfortune of trying to control Philip as well as by almost every woman he had ever gotten involved with.
This last time, though, it had come from his sister Caroline. Sister by maker and chosen family, not by blood, but as far as he was concerned, she was at least as much real family as any he had been born into all of those decades ago. She knew more about him and she had been through more with him than any human sister could have.
Not that a human sister (if he had been blessed with one) wouldn’t have tried, but eternity was hard to compete with. He loved her and he knew she loved him, but at the moment, she was beyond pissed. It wasn’t the first time the two of them had been at odds and it was highly doubtful that it would be the last, but even for them, this last phone conversation had been bad.
Even thinking about it made him bare his teeth, an involuntary reaction he had when he was angry that he still struggled to get under control. Luckily for him, he had two things working in his favor that made it so that nobody even noticed the odd gesture.
First of all, it was dark out. The foot traffic he passed could see him by the light of the street lamps, but that in no way gave a clear picture of him and when he wanted to blend in, he happened to be very good at it.
The second thing working in his favor, and this one was probably the more important of the two, he was walking down a street in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans was a unique city, to be sure, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad. What it offered in spades was the ability to blend, even if you weren’t the most normal kind of a specimen.
Philip figured that was a large part of why so many vampires had chosen to make their lives there, or at least used it as a hub. He didn’t know many of his kind who stayed in one place indefinitely. Moving around was best. It helped to get rid of any suspicions over the fact that they did not age.
They were also prone to wanderlust, something which Philip himself had experienced often. When you had forever to live, it somehow made it so much easier to get bored by the things around you and travel was one of the easiest (if most extravagant) ways to deal with that. He had more than enough money to play with, so that wasn’t ever a problem, and he attracted as many or as few people to him to pass the evening hours away with an almost embarrassing ease.
That was also incredibly common amongst the vampire community. It all boiled down to just a couple of factors. There was something about the process of turning that made a person who may have only looked average become strikingly beautiful. Although Philip had never spoken it out loud, he had always wondered if it was the mortality of humans that kept them from looking as radiant as they had the potential for.
He knew that some, take Caroline for example, would have thought he was an idiot for thinking like that, but it seemed like it could make sense. Whatever the reason was, he had never met a vampire who wasn’t heartbreakingly attractive and that made it easy to get pretty much whatever they wanted from the people around them.
Then there was the power of persuasion vampires were gifted with, something else nobody had ever given Philip a real explanation for, but it was true. Maybe it was as simple as the years and years of experience they had with people from literally every possible walk of life, and maybe it was another one of those things that changed when they transitioned from human flesh to something that was both more and less.
All Philip knew was that it was a hell of a lot easier to get his way with humans than it was with other vampires. That was something that he normally didn’t care about one way or another, except for times like tonight, when he had to have conversations he didn’t want to have. Caroline had called and told him she needed to come for a little visit to “hash things out” and when he hadn’t seemed immediately thrilled, she had lost her shit.
That was when he had thought again about how nice it would be if he could just lower his voice, speak in a soothing tone, and get her to come around to the idea that she didn’t really want to come and see him, after all.
But that wasn’t possible with Caroline and if he had even tried it with her she would have sensed his bullshit coming from a mile away and so instead he had just hung up the phone. No goodbye, no fighting back, just hung up the phone. He was pretty sick and tired of being called a brat. He was pretty much done with that.
“No, please, you don’t have to do this.”
Philip stopped, his movements so smooth and silent that none of the people bustling by him seemed to notice that he was still there. Although, now that he pulled his thoughts away from his own annoyances and really looked at his surroundings, he saw that there were hardly any people out and about to notice him in the first place.
While he was busy brooding he had moved much further away from his normal stomping grounds than he had meant to and the neighborhood he was in now didn’t exactly look friendly. Lucky for him, he knew that he wasn’t in any danger, at least not from any people.
There was always the chance of some young asshole vampire trying to pick a fight just to prove a point, which was something some of the stupider vampires did after being changed, in order to make themselves a reputation, assuming that they survived. Then there was the shifter community, who also tended to gravitate towards New Orleans for its willingness to embrace the strange.
The shifters weren’t usually a problem, though. Their groups and the vampire groups didn’t mix and didn’t want to mix. It wasn’t even so much a matter of dislike at this point. It was more that they knew they didn’t play well together. So while Philip did take a minute or two to make sure he wasn’t facing an enemy he hadn’t noticed yet, he wasn’t really expecting to find anything.
Whatever was going on to make that female voice sound so upset didn’t look like it was going to impact him at all, which meant that he could go ahead and be on his merry way.
“Please! You don’t have to! I won’t tell anybody, just take whatever you want. Only, let me go.”
Philip had started walking again after assessing his surroundings, but now he stopped again, his head cocked to one side and his beautiful brow furrowed in concentration. It wasn’t like he hadn’t ever heard a mugging or an attack going on before.
Jesus, if a person believed that was possible, having lived for as long as Philip had, that person would have to be too naive to live. But there was something about this one that made him stop and listen. The part of him that had gotten very good at self-preservation was calling him a jackass and telling him to keep moving if he knew what was good for him, but Philip had never been very good at taking direction, and that included from himself.
So he didn’t keep moving. In this case, the part of him that was always just a little bit too curious won out and he stayed rooted to where he was. His hearing was exceptional (all of the senses were much better for vampires than they were for people) and it didn’t take more than a moment for him to figure out exactly what was happening.
The girl who was begging to be spared sounded like she was on the smaller side and from the sound of it she was being harassed by three different men. It was despicable, yes, that much was for sure. But Philip had a policy about stepping into any kind of situation that didn’t involve him.
The policy was simple and had been carefully crafted from the experiences he had amassed over the past century. What was the policy? Don’t get involved. Plain, simple, no exceptions. Getting involved was a very good way to find yourself in trouble and that wasn’t something he wanted; at least not that brand of trouble.
In the end, Philip had decided that the risks of playing the Good Samaritan outweighed the benefits and so he just didn’t do it. So, if that was the case, what exactly was he doing? Why was he still standing there listening to the impending crime unfold?
“Aw, that’s it sugar. Go ahead and beg. I like it when they beg.”
“Wait, just wait!”
“You see that, Max? She thinks she’s still got a chance of calling the shots here. Ain’t that cute?”
“Downright fucking adorable, if you ask me. You know what I think is the funniest part?”
“No, can’t say that I do but I would sure love for you to tell me.”
“Her offering us her stuff. See, here’s how it’s going to go, sweetheart. We are going to take your stuff, as much of it as we feel like taking, but not until we’re good and ready. We want to play for a little while. No sense in letting a pretty thing like you get away without giving you a proper workout. You catch my drift?”
The girl let out a strangled sounding sob and Philip bared his teeth again, this time remaining completely unconscious of the fact that he was doing it. They were baiting her, teasing her like they were playing a game of cat and mouse. Games like that had never appealed to Philip.
They were the kinds of games where only one party enjoyed themselves and Philip was always a fan of as many people having a good time as possible (provided that it didn’t get in his way). This girl was in a three on one situation and she was terrified. At this point he was close enough to feel her terrified heart beating frantically in her chest.
He could hear that because, despite his written in stone policy, he had moved closer and closer to the alley way where all of the commotion was coming from. He stood as still as a stone and listened in macabre fascination. It was like he was engaged in some kind of interactive theater instead of what he was actually doing, which was standing by with gross voyeurism while a woman was being attacked.
He could have just kept going the way he was, too. He could have stood there and listened to the entire thing happening without every batting an eyelash or lifting a finger to help her. Perhaps when the attack was done and the brutal men either left her for dead or let her go (depending on their particular brand of stupid) he would follow them to see what they would do next.
