AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Who’s there?” I called out again, knowing that this time, it wasn’t just a critter.
The full moon reflected in a puddle on the ground, and I cringed as I stepped over it, thinking it was possible a werewolf hadn’t gotten out of the city tonight. That a beast was here, eyeing me, lurking—waiting for the opportunity to take me down as a midnight snack. The only way to describe the discomfort in the air was with one word: predatory.
I continued forward, breathing a sigh of relief when the door to my apartment complex came into view between a couple of dirty garbage bins. That was when I saw him.
He was tall, taller than most men—even men who called themselves Little Hank and Chopstix. The man was broad shouldered, dark-eyed, midnight-haired. The word I’d been thinking still fit when I saw the look in his eyes: predatory.
“Don’t you know a pretty thing like you shouldn’t be walking along dark alleys at night?” The man’s eyes glittered as he stepped out from the shadows. “You never know who might be lurking in the shadows.”
The man’s eyes were almost black, and it was only as he got within spitting distance that I realized there was a hint of slate-gray in them. The moonlight turned those flecks of gray into bits of reflected starlight. It was startling, but not so startling that I couldn’t recognize how much it fit the rest of him. This person was otherworldly handsome in that dangerous, alluring sort of way.
My stomach sank. There was no way this man was a human.
He was a vampire.
I pulled the bottle of wine out of my bag and held it before me. “Don’t take a step closer, or I’ll—”
“Hit me with your wine bottle?” The vampire gave a delicious, frightening smirk.
I tensed, feeling the reluctant pull of magic building inside of me. I tamped it down just as hard as I could. It was my general rule to ignore the call to be a witch, to ignore the tugs of magic that had been growing stronger and stronger as my thirtieth birthday approached.
As much as it was tempting to want to use magic now to protect myself, I knew better. A girl couldn’t go from ignoring magic for a couple of decades to brandishing it about like Hermione Granger. It just didn’t work like that. There would be consequences, mistakes, and people could end up seriously injured, or worse.
“Don’t take a step closer,” I warned again, even though the vamp had already guessed my method of defense. “My roommate is looking for me. She’ll call the police.”
The vampire gave a little smile, the corners of his mouth tugging up in a wry grin that twisted his face into something even more beautiful. He was beyond gorgeous with those dark eyes, thick, muscled arms, that curling black hair.
He wore suit pants and a white shirt that was unbuttoned one button lower than necessary, as if it’d been a long day at the office, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. One arm was marked with several tattoos. A girl could tell just from looking at this man that he knew what to do with those fingers that could make a girl blush. I glanced at his hands, suddenly distracted.
That’s when I figured out it was magic. The vampire was using his allure magic, a sort of innate magic that made vampires appealing to their prey just moments before they sucked them dry. He was distracting me with tempting thoughts. Typical vampire. It was stupid of him to think that garbage would work on me.
My hand clutched around the cabernet as the pull of magic grew stronger and stronger inside my belly. It swirled, sensing that I was in danger, the very strings of magic chomping at the bit to be unleashed in a way that could save my life. It was everything I could do to deny the natural pull of it. It took all my restraint to keep it from leaking out as a defense mechanism.
I was like a teapot ready to boil over at any second, but instead of a nice pot of chamomile, I was a dangerous elixir of angry and frightened, and I had a helluva lot of pent-up magic that could do a lot of damage.
The vampire stepped toward me. “You’re fighting it.”
“Fighting what?” I raised my wine bottle. “Don’t come closer, or I’ll—”
At that moment, the magic had coiled so tightly inside of me that there was no containing it. Even as I battled it down, there was a loud pop, and the cork shot out of my wine bottle with the force of a full-blown rifle. The knotted hunk of cork launched itself at the vampire, hurtled through the air with a velocity that could only be explained by magic.
In response, the vampire raised a hand, plucked the cork out of the air like he might a speeding bullet. It was alarming. He glanced at it, smiled in a way that showed pearly whites, those deadly teeth that could cut me to ribbons in mere seconds, and then he flicked the cork into the nearest trash can with alarming precision.
“Or you’ll what?” He gave a dark little chuckle. “Pop a cork at me?”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, exasperated. “Are you going to eat me, or can I get by you and go home to my apartment? I really did promise my roommate wine.” I took a swig of my cabernet for good measure, hoping he wouldn’t notice the shake in my hands despite my display of bravado.
At this the vampire threw his head back and gave a laugh that caused my belly to flip over. I’d never seen a vampire laugh before. Actually, I’d begun to wonder if it was even possible. Like, if that was just something their dark and brooding species had never evolved the capacity to do because it was something that resembled fun and sunshine and joy—the opposite of everything men like him stood for.
“So you do live here.” The vampire nodded at the door behind him. “You must be the witch on the seventh floor. I recognize your scent.”
“I’m one of them,” I said uncomfortably. Then it dawned on me. “You’re the vampire who owns this place. The one living in the penthouse.”
The man crooked his eyebrow, and I was loathe to admit he even had handsome eyebrows. For Pete’s sake, it wasn’t enough that vampires had fantastic senses of smell, super speed, and incredible strength? This one had gotten all of the good genes too? Even the scar that cut across his chin, just a faint outline of danger past, made him look a little bit more terrifying and a little bit more handsome.
I wondered who’d managed to scar a vampire. I bet they hadn’t lived to tell about it.
Unfortunately for him, my insides felt like they were tearing apart. It had taken every last fiber of my being to keep the magic from slipping out of every pore of my body. My stomach churned with the discomfort of abandoned magic circling through me with nowhere to go except to funnel itself into one measly little cork. I was anxious to get somewhere alone—and fast.
