The Vampire King (2 page)

Charles had never considered himself the settling down type. Malachi had known well enough. The two of them had roughly the same tastes when it came to women and how they should be treated, especially in the bedroom. However, little Evie presented a nuance to his existence that up until quite recently simply hadn’t been there.

She was a lovely thing, there was no denying that. Her thick brown hair was fine and soft and touched with honey-colored highlights that caught the hints gold in her brown eyes. She was small, but strong, with curves that made a man ache to dig his fingers in. And she was smart. It was her intelligence that intrigued him the most. Earlier in the month, he’d spent a bit of time in and out of her mind, listening in on the thoughts she thought were private. They were deep, sometimes intense, and undeniably different than what he was used to. There was an unidentifiable subtlety to her essence that fascinated him. He wouldn’t be able to put a name to it if he tried. Whatever it was, it captivated him.

It made sense. Where he’d been capable of reading her mind before, he could no longer do so now. His warlock magic didn’t work on her either. She’d grown stronger against his kind somehow. She was not at all like other humans.

And the way she tasted made his fangs throb in his gums at the mere memory.

According to the warlock seer, Evie Farrow was supposed to be the undoing of the vampire king. It
would
take a special woman to bring about the downfall of Roman D’Angelo.

Once he decided what the best and hence most painful course of action for D’Angelo would be, all Charles had had to do was hang back and wait. The seer assured him that Farrow and D’Angelo would meet. She’d been right. And, also just as the seer had claimed, the vampire king had fallen instantly and deeply in love with young Evelynne.

Now that Charles had witnessed Evie’s unwitting charms and even tasted her first-hand, he couldn’t blame his king. He was also beginning to believe that this plan might actually work. Evie Farrow could bring about
any
man’s downfall.

He’d originally planned to allow the two to fall in love – and then to kill the woman. It would be fast and brutal and the blow to D’Angelo would be immense. However, Roman D’Angelo had lost a loved one to death before. He’d gotten over it and he’d moved on.
This
would be so much worse. It would be so much better than killing her. The king would never recover.

Charles was going to enjoy teaching Evie the ropes once she’d made the transformation to vampire. She would need to feed. She would probably resist at first, but he’d learned how to deal with resistant women. That part would be fun. She would probably try to escape as well. Aided by the strength afforded to her by her newfound vampirism, she would attempt to run, to fly, and even to hide. It was something Charles could both count on and look forward to. Women were so much more enjoyable when they fought back.

Eventually, she would give in, and that would be the sweetest triumph of all. For when she did, Charles would have what the vampire king so desperately wanted for himself. The thing he wanted most of all. His queen would belong to another.

Charles might even have
her
kill
him
.

He smiled at that thought. Malachi Wraythe would be avenged. And Roman D’Angelo would be no more.

Chapter One

Three weeks earlier….

It was perhaps the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do, but Charles somehow managed to make it through the meeting without giving himself away. Across the long mahogany table, the Vampire King sat regal and tall, silent and still, ever the imposing figure of dark, steady calm. It made Charles sick. And this sickness would have singled him out to D’Angelo in a heartbeat if it hadn’t been for the spells Charles had cast prior to coming to the king’s mansion.

They were imperative. They were words and phrases and bits of power learned through his friendship with the late warlock king and over the course of ages. They’d taken aggravating years to perfect, but now, as he faced down his enemy, surrounded by minions to the throne, he was ever grateful he’d put in the effort that he had. The ring he wore on his right middle finger protected his thoughts. The medallion he wore around his neck and tucked beneath his button-up shirt protected his heartrate and the smell of cortisol and adrenaline that ran through his blood. Finally, the spell he’d cast upon himself before leaving his flat acted as a shield.

Vampires possessed the ability to use magic. Despite their dark heritage, most of them tended toward the kind of magic used by well-meaning witches in covens across the globe. However, Charles’ magic had always possessed a more unnatural bent. His talents leaned toward the warlock side of the spectrum. It was one of the reasons behind his camaraderie with Malachi Wraythe.

But such magic would not go over well with the Vampire King, who maintained a strict hold over his kingdom. He was the iron fist in the velvet glove that no vampire in their right mind would dare go up against.

Charles had little choice. He was what he was – had been born that way. Wraythe understood this. Long ago, he’d taken him under his wing and shown him the way. Malachi taught Charles everything he knew, and it was this forbidden knowledge that Charles’ many shields kept from his king’s incredible perception.

Of course… there was a chance that D’Angelo knew anyway.

D’Angelo knew
everything
. That was what they said.

The king’s eyes were more keen than any Charles had ever peered into. They were dark, the absence of light, as if all knowledge was sucked into them and hidden in fathomless depths, never to be released again. He had a way about him, a way of seeing things that weren’t quite there and hearing things that no one had yet said. Where magic was the sixth sense, Roman D’Angelo possessed a seventh.

Nothing escaped him.

This was how Charles knew that D’Angelo had played the primary role in Wraythe’s demise. D’Angelo had never liked the Warlock King. He’d forbidden his people from working with him and those closest to him. He didn’t like Wraythe’s daughter, the vampire princess, and it was well known in Offspring circles that D’Angelo had a particular problem with the way Wraythe had more or less enslaved his wife, the Akyri queen, Olivia.

Rumor was that D’Angelo was responsible for the vampire princess’s murder. Shortly afterward, when Wraythe himself was killed, Charles was on a mission personally assigned to him by D’Angelo. Why?

It was as if the Vampire King knew that Charles would attempt to interfere. But for this to be true, D’Angelo would also have to be aware of Charles and Wraythe’s friendship.

And it was for this reason that despite the precautions Charles had taken before coming to the mandatory meeting of the members of the king’s court, he now sat down a polished wooden table from the enigmatic, powerful man and feared that D’Angelo knew something anyway. That he could read his thoughts.

And that he would realize Charles planned on killing him.

“Mr. Ward,” D’Angelo suddenly spoke softly, his incredibly charismatic voice carrying the power of ages behind it.

Charles almost jumped. But that would have been too obvious, so instead, he licked his lips and attempted to meet his king’s gaze. It was nearly impossible. There was no gaze on Earth like D’Angelo’s.

They’d been discussing the werewolf community and the effects of the reversal of a four-thousand-year-old werewolf curse. Up until a few weeks ago, male werewolves had held all of the cards in their particular society. They were the ones with superhuman strength, the ability to heal from most wounds, an aging rate that was half to one-third that of mortals and much more. Each male werewolf alpha was born with a certain power that set him apart from the others. But their female kin possessed none of these traits or abilities. Most detrimental was the fact that female werewolves were not capable of producing werewolf children. Because of this, male wolves had been forced to hunt down special women, women who could produce werewolf children – women known as dormants. These dormants had become essential to werewolf survival.

Until now. Several weeks earlier, with the death of Malachi Wraythe and a sacrifice made by a dormant now known throughout supernatural circles as the “Curse Breaker,” came the end of the black-magic curse that had forced the powers of werewolf females into nonexistence. Now the women were just as strong as the men in every possible way. More importantly, werewolf females were suddenly revealing that they were a few weeks pregnant.

These sudden and intensely imperative changes were having major repercussions that spread like shockwaves across the supernatural societies of the world. The population of viable werewolves had basically doubled overnight. Where there had been perhaps five thousand, there were now ten.

The vampire hierarchy, also known as the “Court,” had joined in this meeting in order to discuss what should be done on their end to deal with these changes and the havoc they were wreaking.

“Two hundred women in New York suddenly woke up and had the powers their brothers or fathers have always had,” said one of the men at the table. He had shoulder-length dark blond hair, incredibly broad shoulders, and piercing blue eyes. His name was Saxon, and though there was no human position like his, the closest comparison would be to say that he was the general in D’Angelo’s vampire army.

“You can imagine what kind of an effect that had,” Saxon finished. Charles could feel that the Vampire King’s eyes were still trained on him and had yet to focus on Saxon. D’Angelo was suspicious of something, and that suspicion was nearly palpable.

“You don’t have to imagine it,” said another vampire at the table. She had bright red hair that had been cut into a razored bob, a small up-turned nose, and pretty, fairy-like features. Her name was Samantha, and to Charles’ knowledge, she was the single most brilliant techno geek carrying vampire blood. She was also the youngest vampire he knew of, at just twenty-five human years. “I’ve been scrubbing YouTube of impromptu videos for the last three days. A fist fight in a high school parking lot saw a rather mousy young woman nearly break the neck of her much larger opponent with a single punch. And don’t get me started on the sudden sightings of wolves where they’re supposed to be extinct.”

“It’s actually much more complicated,” said another woman at the table. She was older than the red-head, perhaps forty to forty-five, and starkly beautiful. Her thick black hair fell in waves over her shoulders and down her back. Her green eyes were piercing and highly intelligent. Her broad lips were seductive and perfect. She looked pointedly at each of the individuals at the table before she went on. “Many female born werewolves who have grown up without powers and never believing they would
have
powers have married mortal men and have given birth to mortal children.” She paused, allowed this information to sink in, and then continued. “They’re now having to somehow break the news of their real ancestry to their husbands, who might at any moment catch their wives performing incredible feats of strength or even flashing into wolf form.”

“There’s also the matter of beta wolves,” chimed in yet another vampire. Charles turned to look at him. David Cade was a soft-spoken man with the looks of a movie star and the brain of an eccentric genius. He was shy and perhaps overly sensitive and mostly kept to himself, and Charles was fairly certain that he was one of D’Angelo’s most trusted bosom companions. He was also deceiving. He may have been on the quiet side, but Charles knew that Cade could take charge of a situation with incredible speed and acumen.

“Beta werewolves who had never planned on having werewolf children because they couldn’t win a dormant for a mate are now capable of having werewolf children of their own,” Cade said softly, his intelligent, bright hazel eyes looking down at the table as he spoke. “What are they going to tell their mortal wives?”

“That’s the least of our worries,” Saxon said, though his tone was not disrespectful, only concerned. “If enough female-borns mess up in public to expose the werewolf population for what it truly is, it paves the way for the exposure of every other supernatural race on the planet. Hunters will have a field day with us
all
then.”

“They’re certainly having a field day
now
,” said Samantha. “If we thought that Gabriel Phelan was as bad as it could get, we were dead wrong. The Hunters’ new leader is ten times worse and apparently he’s backed by some kind of magic. He’s been able to organize the Hunters like never before and their numbers are growing, not dwindling. They’re listening in on police scanners and following ‘wolf’ sightings to their targets, among other things.” Sam shook her head and sat back in her chair. “The blood bath continues.”

“These issues and more are being dealt with by members of the werewolf community as we speak,” D’Angelo said, his calm and low voice once more overriding everything else in the room. “And the
way
in which said issues are dealt with will have an undeniable effect upon not only their community, but ours.” D’Angelo leaned forward, folded his hands on the table, and allowed his presence to be truly felt. “It can be safely assumed that werewolves will be much stronger players in the game now. Whether they are allies or opponents is up to us.”