Crown of Smoke and Blood Read online

Crawling now, drops of blood marked my path on the road to freedom. I smiled as each one fell from my face. Slid under my body as I continued on my journey.

  When my arms and legs gave out, I dragged myself. Fought for purchase with my bruised and bloody fingers. Cursed my weak body.

  Just as the world around me went from blue to a green the color of Scottish grass in the spring, my soul gave its final cry.

  My head bounced off the hard black ground before my consciousness deserted me.

  We are finally, truly free, the beast said inside me.

  Free.

  Chapter 2 – Koehn

  The scent of blood rose through the night like the sweetest perfume. Not the typical fare that pulsed and jumped with drugs. No. This was something else entirely. And it was delicious.

  Putting my nose to the air like a dog, I scent-tracked that singular aroma through the city. Prayed none of my brothers had found the delectable treat. Prayed none of them were even out tonight. Although I knew that was a pretty useless prayer.

  Moving too fast for the humans to see, I raced through the city. How I’d managed to catch the scent on a dreary night like this was anyone’s guess. But far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  I turned the last corner. Stopped dead in my tracks as I saw a lump on the ground about halfway down the street.

  On the right side of the street, a grouping of about six were walking. Their low chatter spoke of the mundanity of the human existence. They came to a halt as a herd. Arms raised and fingers pointing to my prize.

  “Hey! You okay?” some helpful idiot shouted from the sidewalk. A smaller group of men left their ladies on the curb and ventured out into the road.

  “Buddy! You good?” one of them called again.

  Well, shite. Slowing to human normal, I moved up towards the lump. Right now, I didn’t care about its gender, just the blood that was slowly pumping itself out onto the street to become unusable. Dead. Almost as dead as me.

  “I’ve got ‘em,” I called before the group of Good Samaritans could reach us. “There you are. I told you to wait by the car, not take a nap in the middle of the way.” I pitched my voice loud enough so the humans could hear me.

  “You need help?” one of them asked as they made it to my side.

  I shook my head. Squatting down, I rearranged the limbs on the lump. Felt a small part of me smile when I felt the curves of a woman instead of a man. Not that I would have been fussed. But drinking a woman held much more delight for me. The fact that I also felt the outline of at least three blades didn’t escape my notice either.

  “She’s trashed. I was paying the tab.” Reaching down, I got her up into my arms. Looked at the fellows. “But thanks for looking out.”

  They looked at me for a long moment. Indecision curling their features. I knew the subconscious parts of them were recognizing the predator I was. But they didn’t say anything. After some long stares, they merely nodded and moved back to their bigger group.

  “You might want to cut her off earlier next time. Passing out in the street is a good way to get dead, just in case you didn’t know,” one of the women called. I could hear the anger in her tone.

  “I’ll be sure to do that, toots. Thanks for the reminder.” My tone was bright. Almost…happy. Me. Happy.

  I shook my head, dismissing the notion. Happy wasn’t in my world. It had died with my mate almost two hundred years ago. The best I could hope for now was not actively angry.

  The lump in my arms moaned, drawing my attention back to her. Shifting my grip on her, I smiled again at the lines of her body under my fingers. She had enough curves to make a mountain switchback road jealous. And while she definitely wasn’t fat, she felt almost as light as a feather. Even to my greater strength, her weight was negligible. It was disconcerting. If I hadn’t had my hands on her, I wouldn’t have thought I held a human woman in my arms.

  Under the heavy black clothes she was wearing, I could smell her blood. In my head, the scent of her sparkled like a starry sky on a night with no moon. Never before had I had such a reaction to blood before. It was simply a life-giving liquid that allowed me to retain my undead existence.

  But hers…There were sufficient words in my vocabulary to describe it. But one thing was for certain: From the richness of the scent, she was riddled with enough holes to give Swiss cheese a run for its money. If I didn’t hurry, she would be dead. And I would forever regret not tasting her.

  Making sure the group of helpful humans had disappeared down the street, I zoomed off in the opposite direction. Keeping an eye out for any of the supernaturals that called my city home, I prayed she didn’t bleed out by the time I got her onto my property. Time was against me as it seemed with each step that she moaned and twitched in my arms. She was this close to convulsing.

  I poured on the speed as I kept track of her heartbeats. The beats were coming slower and slower, like a heavy train trying to go up a hill. It felt like I could feel each thud pressing against my hands and arms where I held her. She was slipping away even while I held her close.

  I stopped just inside the gates to my house. There were no streetlights here. No way any passersby could stumble upon us. I’d made sure to keep the sprawling city as far back as possible from my door.

  Settling the woman on the ground, I lifted a finger to my mouth and sliced my thumb on a fang. With a slight smile, I pushed my thumb to the woman’s mouth. Thrust it between her lips. With a muttered curse, I willed my blood to the cut. Forcing it from my body into hers, I healed her.

  I needed her to stay alive long enough for me to drink my fill of her. And that meant I had to heal her body so she would quit losing all of that delicious blood I wanted to feast on. The scent of her blood reached inside me, danced with my soul. Even calling myself ten kinds of fools for thinking such fanciful things, I couldn’t deny it.

  Taking a deep breath, needing that small part of her inside me, I shivered. Lust, desire, belonging…they swept through me like a tsunami. I inhaled again, but realized the scent of her blood began to diminish in the air around us.

  Her eyes flashed open. A pure golden amber that seemed to see into my rotten soul. As I watched, flames seemed to burst in their depths.

  She opened her jaw, sucked my digit deeper into the cavern of her mouth. Lust and barely restrained desire tripped through her gaze. Her tongue laved over my thumb. She pulled hard on the cut as she drank more of my blood into her body.

  I shifted against her as some kind of magic flooded through me. As if it were I who sucked on her essence, I could feel every single part of her. The rush of blood beneath the surface of her skin. The sizzling pop, pop, pop of electricity that arced between us. She felt exquisite and I needed more of her against me.

  I sank my free hand into her hair. Inky black and short enough to tease her cheeks. Jealous of my thumb, I sought to retrieve it so I could taste her. Lose myself in her flavor as she had done to me.

  But when I attempted to remove my thumb, her teeth closed hard and fast.

  Jolting to a stop, I peered down into her gaze as her teeth worried at the digit just past the first knuckle. Her pupils went to pinpricks as the scent of her blood no longer drenched the night.

  A low tugging sensation pulled on my dick. It felt like phantom fingers that searched out each spot that brought insane pleasure. And she knew each and every single one of them.

  My head tipped back as my body was assaulted. No longer the predator, I was her prey. And a willing sacrifice to her whims.

  Sweet saints, this woman must be a succubus. Or a goddess. Something definitely otherworldly. And she’d only touched me with her magic. Just as I was about to embarrass myself, those ghostly fingers vanished, leaving an icy burn in their absence. Instead of the pulsing heat of her, now there was nothing but vapors and crystals of frost.

  I lowered my head, tried to shove the floating feeling from my mind. She’d done something to me. Somehow turned my magic against me.


  Freeing my hand from her hair, I wrapped it around her throat and squeezed hard enough I felt her trachea bob and flex in the palm of my hand. “Let go of me.” I drilled my gaze into hers, forced every bit of persuasion I had into the order.

  The corners of her mouth ticked up as she flicked her tongue against the slice on my thumb once again.

  And if I don’t want to?

  I heard her husky voice in my head. She wiggled her eyebrows at me. The few puncture marks that had dotted her face closed as I watched.

  Glaring down at the woman, I frantically searched inside me where she’d broken through the mental barriers I’d perfected as a youngling. She shouldn’t have been able to break them. They were solid. Better than solid.

  There was no break. No damage. Nothing. From the inside, it appeared as if I was still all alone.

  She let my thumb drop from her mouth. Licked her lips. Her crimson-stained tongue pulled my attention.

  I was millimeters from her flesh when I stopped myself. My breath panted in her face. “What are you?”

  She smiled up at me. “Your accent is lovely.”

  My brow furrowed as I tried to process her words. “Thank you.” No, damn it. She wouldn’t distract me so easily. “What are you?”

  Without warning, she leaned forward, pressed her lips to mine. Just a dream.

  Intense pressure squeezed my mind. Whittled me down into nothing as my world went to smoke. My brain swirling and floating, I was lifted into the air. My brain clicked off as I was lowered.

  **

  When I opened my eyes again, I was staring up at the sky as the first rays of sunshine lightened the clouds. It was beautiful. The pinks and creams darted across the sky. Puffy clouds dotted the atmosphere.

  There was something about this that was wrong. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. While I waited for my brain to clear, the heat started to rise within me. That too was welcome. I truly hated the cold. Since becoming a vampire, I’d missed the sun more than I’d thought possible.

  Sun. Vampire. Shite! Squinting against the deathly brightness, I tried to get my body to move. To twitch. To…anything. Getting fried into ashes wasn’t really how I saw this night ending.

  As the sun’s rays gilded the world around me, I fought to regain control of my body. But nothing was paying attention to my commands. I was nothing more than a log. A photosensitive log that was about to go to dust in less than five minutes if I couldn’t get my ass inside the confines of my sun-proofed house.

  Intense heat washed over me. As if the sun were baking me into fanged cookies, I could do nothing but lay on the grass and watch death come for me. It stalked me across the yard. A silent killer of the soulless beast I truly was.

  I gazed up at the sky in wonder. It had been two hundred and thirty-five years since I last saw the sun. Two hundred and thirty-five years of living in the dark. Two hundred and thirty-five years of being less than a shadow.

  At least you got to kiss a hot chick before you died, my mind offered.

  I rolled my eyes at myself. As if kissing hot women were some kind of prize. Besides, I didn’t even get to kiss her. Hell, I didn’t even get to taste her!

  Coulda been a dude, my mind fired back.

  I considered that. Had to give my brain that one. She coulda been a dude.

  As if I were laying in an incinerator that had just reached temperature, the sun sank into my skin under the black clothes. I was such a cliché. A vampire who wears black. Lurking in the shadows as he stalks his victims in the night.

  Not that there was a lot I could do about that now. Stalking was out of my current capabilities. Pinned by some unknown force, I could feel my flesh bubbling and rippling under my clothes. Like watching a pie’s filling bubble through the slots in the crust as it baked over the fire.

  Except I wasn’t full of berries. I mean, I had berries, but not that kind. I was nothing but a walking bag of supernatural blood and some kind of magic that allowed me to live forever when I should have died long ago.

  Memories washed over me as sweat beaded on my brow before it sizzled away an instant later. Annabeth’s face floated to my mind’s eye. Her long golden blonde hair. Her sparkling blue eyes. The devilishly sexy smile when I made her laugh.

  Annabeth had been my entire world. My everything. She’d been stolen from my arms. Ripped from my heart by a disease we now knew as tuberculosis. Her body had failed her. Failed both of us.

  My eyes teared up. I blamed it on the sun. The sun that was slowly killing me. Although, to be honest, I was a little pissed that it was taking this long. From everything I’d ever heard from others of my kind who’d witnessed such things, the sun’s effects were instantaneous. Not the slow death of being cooked alive like a lobster.

  Lobster. I missed lobster. I missed a lot of things from my human life. Food. The sun. And not this slow death kind of sun either. Shopping in stores. Thank the powers that be that online shopping had come to life in the last couple of decades. While I didn’t mind breaking and entering, I did enjoy getting to pick things out at my leisure.

  I coughed as my chest tightened. It felt like an old fat man was sitting on my lungs. Farting his filth into my nose. Rancid and putrid, the scent of decay seemed to envelope me from the inside out.

  Sweet shite, would this death never end? I shouted mentally. This was nothing short of torture, and I’d actually been tortured. It had wished to be this bad.

  My skin itched and bubbled. Danced and writhed on my body. My muscles yanked and pulled on my bones. It felt like I was going to break apart into a million tiny pieces.

  Closing my eyes against the sting of the giant fiery ball in the sky, I prayed for death. Prayed that some beneficent god would finally strike me down. Maybe my prayers would finally be answered this time.

  That would be a first.

  A sardonic laugh sounded in my mind. That the only one of my prayers to be answered would be the one I sent heavenward on my deathbed would fit neatly in with the kind of luck my life had been filled with. If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.

  The light shifted behind my lids. As if a giant cloud had drifted in front of the fiery ball of death and lessened its rays, I felt a slight dampening of the pure agony writhing through me.

  Pulling back one of my eyelids, I saw a fuzzy form standing over me. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked slightly familiar.

  “Koehn?”

  I wanted to smile. Wanted to shout. But not even my mouth would work. Just my eyelids.

  “Koehn, what the hell are ye doing out here, mate?” Tavis asked. He shimmied off his coat. Laid it over my face.

  That’s when the world started moving beneath me.

  Tavis grunted and panted as he tried to lift my stiff body. Tavis was a big man, but he wasn’t prepared for how heavy I was. When I tumbled back to the ground, face first, he huffed a laugh. “Sorry ‘bout that, mate.” He hooked his hands around my ankles and started tugging me away.

  It was when he was bouncing my head up a set of steps that I realized I was laying on the ground at the base of my own steps. How the hell had that happened? The last thing I remember was being moved, by a small slip of a woman. All she’d done was put me closer to the porch?

  Another question raced through my mind. Well, two actually. Where was the girl from last night? And why the hell wasn’t I dead?!

  A rush of cool air washed over my body.

  “Ye weigh a bloody ton, mate.” Tavis heaved as he got me rolled over again. “What the hell do ye eat? And where, by the gods, do ye put it all?” He looked me up and down, a quizzical look on his face.

  I was still mute. The prison in which I found myself was even worse than I first thought. Not just stuck in a body that wouldn’t cooperate, I was also stuck inside my mind. No way to communicate. No way to tell him I wasn’t dead or that I was trying to be an arsehole for not responding to him.

  He leaned down, got in my face. “Ye in there?”

&
nbsp; I lowered my lids. Please don’t let this be the only thing I can do.

  When I opened my eyes again, he was smiling.

  Hell, I was smiling...on the inside.

  “Well, that’s good, at least. What the feck happened?”

  I blinked twice. Cursed the woman I’d saved last night with all of the fire within me. This had to be her fault. That was the only logical conclusion I could draw. Everything had been fine until I shoved my thumb in her mouth.

  That’s when all of this started.

  Her mouth. The mouth I would have been fine to see wrapped around my cock.

  I shuddered mentally. If I was stuck like this and all she’d done was sucked my thumb in her mouth, I’m not sure I would want to witness the damage she could do had it been my dick between her lips.

  “Well, let’s get ye inside,” Tavis said.

  At the bottom of my vision, I saw him turn to the door. Punch in the security code on the door lock. Sent a prayer of thanks to whoever wasn’t really listening that I didn’t need to have keys to enter my home anymore. I loved new technology. Made a point to stay up on the latest trends and gadgets. Growing up in the early 1800s had made me ever so grateful for the advancements of human ingenuity.

  Tavis got the door open and turned back for me. With nothing to do but repeat the earlier humiliation, he grabbed my ankles and tugged me off the porch.

  My head thunked and thumped over the threshold. Even from inside my head, it sounded like someone smashing a melon onto the floor. The cool interior of my home was like a favorite lover. Each touch of cool air was a caress against my charred body.

  Tavis dropped my feet. Stepped around me and shut the front door.

  As soon as the door shut, I felt the pressure inside my body release. I sucked in a greedy breath as my limbs started dancing of their own volition.

  Tavis jerked around, his eyes wide. “What the feck, mate?” He shoved back into the closed door, fear easy to read on his face.

  “That’s exactly what I want to know,” I yelled up at him. Or tried to yell. I sounded like a chronic smoker with advanced emphysema. I’d never smoked a day in my life, and I sure as hell better not be stuck with a rasp for the rest of my undead years.