The Vampire's Demise (Fatal Allure Book 15) Read online

  The Vampire’s Demise

  (Book Fifteen of the Fatal Allure Series)

  Martha Woods

  Contents

  FREE Gift For You!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  FREEBIE

  © 2019 - Romance Books 4 U

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  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For permissions contact: [email protected]

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  Chapter 1

  I have to tell you, the last time that I got knocked out I woke up with just the worst fucking headache I’ve had in at least a few months, not to mention the pain that comes from a broken nose. It’s hard to describe the throbbing until it happens to you, but once you experience it boy, you’ll really want to experience just about anything else. The last time I felt something about as bad as that would have to be when I got shot, if only for the fact that the throbbing was so similar and so bone-deep irritating.

  The reason I bring this up is because after getting knocked out again, this time by someone punching me in the temple hard enough to rattle my brain in my skull, I think that I’m going to have to go to a hospital to get myself checked out for any brain damage. It’s bad enough getting knocked out just once, but twice? That’s just asking for trouble, and I’ve dissected enough people to know that it is very capable of being lethal.

  Not that I’m in any condition right now to drag myself to a hospital, not if the blindfold over my eyes and the feeling of my boots dragging through the dirt was any indication, but I could at least try and plan for the future. What little future I may turn out to have at least. From the sounds of struggling I wasn’t alone either, and I have to admit that hearing Cara call someone a fucking asshole followed by the kind of grunt you only produce if someone kicks you in the balls was enough to put a smile on my face, at least one of us was still putting up a fight.

  As for why I wasn’t fighting, well, my arms had been bound behind my back, and on top of that my wrists and even fingers had been tied together, which ruled out just about any sort of spell or trick on my part. If I tried I was just as likely to burn a hole through my spine, which I know for a fact wouldn’t do much at all to help me run away. Much as I hated it, and as much as I desperately wanted to do otherwise, right now I was just going to have to sit here and smile while they dragged me off to God only knows where, to be held as some kind of trophy I’m betting.

  How fun.

  “Oh fuck you!” Cara shouted, feet dragging in the dirt and kicking out at whoever was trying to grab her, “You let me know that Amy is alright and I’ll do whatever you want, until then you get the fuck away from me!”

  “Cara…” I grunted, voice rough from my dry throat, “Cara I’m here, I’m alive. Just… don’t risk yourself, we can think about this later…”

  “Amy!” Her voice was thick with relief, which meant that she’d been blindfolded too, “I’m so sorry I just… I shouldn’t have gotten us into this!”

  “You didn’t get us into anything, this was all my fault.” I hung my head, looking around when all other sound ceased and we stopped moving. “Shh, something’s happening.”

  “I’m so glad that you’re taking responsibility for your own actions,” Said the voice of a woman, one that I recognized easily, “You’d be surprised at how many people don’t do that.”

  “Yeah, I can bet,” I spat, squinting up at them when they removed my blindfold, “I’m looking at one right now.”

  The matriarch of this little band of shifters chuckled, a deep throaty sound that I could almost feel in my own chest, “Not all of us make mistakes so easily, but when we do we make sure to rectify them. You were given the chance to do so many times, you didn’t, so here we are.”

  “I tried to do the right thing, don’t confuse that with whatever the hell it is that you’re doing.” They dragged me away before I could say anymore, dumping me into a small pit in the middle of a ring of trees, Cara joining me in a few moments as she kicked and shouted at them, before they dumped her right next to me. “You could be a little gentler! Fuckhead!”

  “You’ve really got a mouth on you today don’t you?” I snickered, shuffling myself backward until my back hit the wall of the pit, pushing myself up into a sitting position, “Did I miss anything while I was out? They didn’t touch you did they?”

  “Only to keep me moving, there wasn’t really any time to do anything else. We were walking for about an hour or two, I lost track of time, but we must have been going for a while if the sun’s started to come up already.”

  I looked up, seeing the first rays of light starting to peek through the trees. “That’s right… which rules out any of the vampires being able to look for us huh?”

  “Looks like it, the others probably wouldn’t be able to risk it in the daytime either, not when they’re not as experienced with the forest and these ones are.” She let out a breath, head thumping against the dirt as she looked up at me. “We screwed up, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, and no.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, I think that we could have done everything right and we still probably would have ended up here, I think maybe we’re just unlucky.”

  “That sounds about right.” Lifting her head up and crawling along with her shoulders, she joined me at my side and leaned against me. “I’m glad they didn’t kill you, I don’t know what I would have done then.”

  “I know what I would have done if I’d lost you, and I can tell you that it wouldn’t be pretty.” I looked around the edges of the pit, trying to hear any semblance of conversation and coming up with nothing, they’d dug the pit a good distance away from their camp it seemed. “It probably still won’t be pretty if I get the chance, but that’ll come later I think.”

  “You already set another one of them on fire, that was pretty cool,” She giggled, and for a moment I thought I had to be concerned before she shrugged, “You looked really awesome when you were fighting, I almost couldn’t believe it was you. All the stuff we went through in college together I thought I’d seen the craziest stuff that you could do, and here you are throwing fucking fireballs around the streets like you don’t even care. That’s pretty awesome.”

  “I’d probably feel more awesome if we hadn’t gotten caught because of it, I should have just grabbed us and boosted us up into the air or something, maybe we could have gotten away.”

  “And how exactly do you think we would have landed after you throw us fifty feet up into the air?”

  “Safely, hopefully. You can’t blame me for trying to be optimistic.”

  “No, I guess I can’t can I? Maybe I should have insisted on a different bar, but that bartender turned out to be kind of a big help.”

  I laughed, “He shot one of them without even asking a single question about it, yeah he was kind of a big help wasn’t he? Maybe not my first choice for a protector, but I’ll take it in a pinch.”

  Looking around at our impromptu living quarters, I wasn’t exactly liking what I was seeing. I was used to rooms, and beds, and some kind of toilet that wasn’t just a deeper hole dug into an already deep hole, which was exactly what I was seeing over in the corner. I had half a mind to try and break free and torch something just for the insult that this was, but for the sake of keeping my limbs intact I calmed myself down. How many other times have we gotten captured now? It’s got to me more than five now, it’s got to be. If we’re really going to continue this whole alliance thing then first things first we need to stop getting caught so much, it really isn’t a good image for us, and more specifically me.

  Yeah great idea everyone, making me the one who was in charge of making sure that no one dies and everything runs smoothly, how many people had been hurt and killed now because of the decisions that I’ve made? The fact that the hunters were able to weed out two traitors is kind of cancelled out by the fact that another three of them were killed the next day, all because I’d done something to anger some people that I’d never even heard of a month ago. What a fun turn of events this turned out to be, next time I’m just going to shift it all back to Joseph and tell him to deal with the fallout, I’m sick of this shit.

  “How long do you think it’ll take everyone to get organized?” Cara asked, and it was a very good question to be thinking about at this time. I wasn’t quite sure if I should tell her the truth or not, being that in a situation like this it was very important to not panic, but I had made a promise to not keep anythin
g from her. Plus, it was incredibly likely that she would find out sooner or later anyway.

  “Honestly?” I said, sighing out a breath and letting my head rest against the wall, “By now they might not even know that we’re gone, and if they have realized it then it would have been very recently. Probably take a few hours for everyone to get together and discuss where we could be, maybe make the beginnings of a plan, but they’re also going to have to deal with the fact that the vampires are trapped inside until dark.”

  “And then once they all get on the same page it’s not like there’s a big glowing sign above this camp…” Cara let her head fall, eyes closing not out of any form of distress more from… acceptance. “Great. We’re trapped out in the middle of nowhere with people who would just love to tear us apart, and we can’t even rely on a rescue anytime soon. This is just fantastic.”

  “Yeah you’re telling me, if it was just one of us we might have been able to slip away if we could get up there, but two is going to be nearly impossible to make it away silently. For now our best bet is to just stay here and hope that they don’t get too violent, maybe we’ll get lucky and Joseph and Christine will have some of the scouts out nearby.”

  “We’re not as stupid as you seem to think we are,” Came a voice from above us, and once I saw who it was I had to suppress the urge not to bust out laughing. It was impossible not to when I saw that the person talking to us had one less arm than was generally normal to have. “Once we’re finished here we’re going to be moving camps, that’s why you haven’t managed to get a bead on where we are. Even if they search near here, you’ll never be found unless we want you to.”

  “Well you could just let us go and be found you know,” I said, “I mean come on, you’ve already given us a hand before.”

  Cara snorted, I forgot that I told her the details of that little escapade. By the look on his face, he wasn’t too enthused about more people knowing what had happened, and the state that he had been in when we’d let him go. “You’d be best served to watch your tongue lady, just because they want you alive doesn’t mean that they need you in one piece, you hear me?”

  “Yeah, you would know after all. How are you feeling by the way? Is the pain getting better or worse?”

  He growled, looking like he was about half a second from leaping down into the pit with us before someone called his name, giving us one last look of loathing before he sauntered off to handle whatever task they had given him. What a shame, we were just starting to get to know each other.

  “So that’s your plan for laying low?” Cara asked, “Make sure to antagonize every single person that comes around to have a word with us?”

  “Can you blame me? Come on Cara, how long have you known me now? When had my mouth ever not gotten us in trouble?” I shook my head, flicking the hair out of my eyes. “I’m not going to act the scared little girl for them, they’ll have to earn it to make me act like that. Until then I’m going to let them know exactly what I think of them.”

  “That’s cool, that’s cool,” She said, popping her lips, “At least until they come down here and torture us half to death, that won’t be so cool. But at least we’ll know that we’ve done our job of annoying them the whole time, that might make it worth it.”

  “See? Now you’re getting it!” God I wish I had at least one hand free, my head was really starting to kill me and I wanted to just run my hand down my face, something to let me get some semblance of feeling back in my face that wasn’t a dull throb, this really wasn’t a good time. Cara at least seemed to realize what was happening, inviting me to lean my head on her shoulder and take a few minutes to myself to relax, an offer that I gladly took her up on. Sure I’d been passed out for a few hours, but when you’ve been knocked out that doesn’t really count as rest, if anything you wake up more tired than you were before. Now while I could easily go thirty, forty hours without sleep if I needed to, and I had many times in the past, those were under normal conditions where I had access to coffee, aspirin, and a distinct lack of head injuries. Take those first two away and give me the third and I’m not going to be able to do much for any longer than twenty. And I’d already been up for quite a while before we went out drinking, the events of the last few days and the worries that came with them not lending themselves well to a restful night of sleep, I tossed and turned so much during the night that I was waking up more tired than ever.

  But they say that care is one of the best medicines, and a friend’s shoulder does make for an excellent pillow, so within about ten seconds of laying my head down and closing my eyes I was out completely, drifting into the black realm of deep sleep that you only ever reached when you were in a state of total exhaustion. Little did I know, I wasn’t alone in that.

  “Hello?” I called out, looking around the dark void that I found myself floating in, arms and legs feeling like they were pushing through molasses, “Is anyone there?”

  “Well, I am at least,” Cara replied, pushing through the black curtain and standing in front of me, expression on her face still one of wonder that she could actually bring us here, “I thought that we should talk more, and I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone else. And what if they heard what we were talking about as well, that wouldn’t be a good idea right?”

  “No, that would be just about the direct opposite of good, good thinking on your part.” Looking around though, I was finding the complete lack of anything to be more distracting than if we were in the middle of a crowded street. Well, no better time than now to practice. “Hey Cara, have you gotten the chance to screw around with this?”

  “Not yet, really the only time that I did was when I talked to you the other night, other than that I haven’t really talked to anyone in the same way. Why’s that?”

  “What would happen if you imagined another place other than this void? Like… a cafe, or my apartment, something that we can actually sit in and talk instead of floating around.”

  She thought to herself, hand over her mouth as she considered the options and how exactly to do it, but all of a sudden the surroundings changed so fast and my body dropped like a rock against a carpeted floor, the familiar art of my apartment staring down at me as though judging me for my clumsiness. “Oh! How’d you do that?”

  “I just thought about it,” She said, looking around in alarm herself, “This is so weird, it looks exactly like your apartment!”

  “You even got the useless fruit bowl right,” I said, dusting myself off and looking at the oranges and bananas that I kept putting off eating. I knew this wasn’t really my apartment, everything just seemed slightly off and swimming slightly, like an out of focus photograph, but the fact that she conjured the image completely out of nowhere was room enough for celebration. My friend, the witch.

  “Well uh…” She was fishing for something to say next, and she wasn’t alone in that. “What do you want to talk about? I was so focused on if we could actually do this that I didn’t think about why we would do this.”

  “A good place to start would probably be if you have any idea on how we’re going to get out of here other than waiting to be rescued. I know I said that might be our only option, but I was mostly saying that in case anyone else heard it.”

  Cara rubbed the back of her neck, pulling out a chair and having a seat. “You’re the tactical genius out of the two of us, I don’t really know anything about what to do in a situation like this. You could probably give the worst idea that anyone has ever come up with and I’d probably agree with it just because it was you who said it.”

  “Well, don’t go ahead and do that just yet, I’ve still got to come up with something. What we need to do is go through all our options first, of which we have very little, and see if we can think of something that we can do from there. Otherwise we really will just have to wait and see if they can find us before our hosts start removing fingers just because they can.”