House Of Vampires 3 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HOUSE OF

  VAMPIRES III

  THE LORENA QUINN TRILOGY

  SAMANTHA SNOW

  Copyright ©2017 by Samantha Snow

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  The time for Lorena to decide who to choose was fast approaching.

  However, with one of the original candidates deceased, Vlad decided to take matters into his own hands.

  In more ways than one...

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sometimes being a hero sucked.

  Oh sure, in Hollywood they made it all explosive action sequences with dramatic music and steadily built anticipation, but that was a great big load of crap. Ninety-five percent of the time being a hero was that montage of training. It was all blood, sweat and tears drawn over a span of months. And there wasn't a whole lot of cheesy eighties music playing in the background while it happened. There was just a lot of failure, a lot of bruises, and magic blowing up in your face. Okay, that last one only happened if, like me, you were training to be a witch. That happened to me a lot, mostly because, so far as I could tell, I was the worst witch that there ever was.

  It wasn't the prophecy that swam through my veins, the one that said I would give birth to the child who would bring magic back into the world. It wasn't the fact that I was a necromancer, manipulator of all the undead, it wasn't even the fact that I hadn't started learning magic until I was nineteen, not even a year ago. Heck, not even three whole months ago. Nope, I was the crappiest witch to ever sling a spell because I got the man, or rather the vampire, that I loved, killed. All because I was an idiot.

  If I had known, half a year ago, that this is what would have happened when I traveled to the middle of Nowhere town in the middle of nowhere Virginia I would have just left well enough alone. I would have sucked it up and stayed at my crappy minimum wage job at the burger place with my aspirations of one day being a shift manager. It would have been much easier to ignore the stupid letter from a woman I didn't know. informing me that the grandmother I had never met, but always wondered about, was dead. Who cared if she had left me a little house and a very small fortune? Who cared if the very arrival of it marked a turning point in my life? And who really cared if it would eventually lead me to the most stoic, often grumpy, vampire and the confusing, often passionate love that would eventually blossom between us? Not me. No-siree-bob. I would have left well enough alone. I swear it.

  “Lorena?”

  That was my dad calling me. Ugh. My dad. The one who had carted me all over the United States, pretending that he had to take new positions inside some advertising agency so that we had never lived in a single place long enough to set down roots. To be honest, we'd never stayed anywhere long enough to set up potting soil. But oh no, that had been a great big fat lie. The truth? He'd been trying to keep me hidden from my super crazy mother. A cultist who pretty much didn't want me to fulfill my destiny as the progenitor of a new era of magic.

  Right now, I was pretty pissed off at both of them for trying to make my life decisions for me. I was pissed off at Marquessa for sending me the letter. I was pissed off at me for being a failure of epic proportions. I was pretty pissed off at the world too, but it hadn't really done anything but exist.

  “Lorena?” my dad called again. I continued to ignore him. I had no interest in starting up the conversation I knew he wanted to have. It was too hard to face. So was getting up, taking a shower, and other basic bodily functions. At the moment, breathing was about all I could manage, and if I was being honest I didn't even really want to do that.

  Wei was dead. He was gone. Nothing in my life had ever hurt more than this.

  Maahes, my tabby ghost cat, stared at me from the safe distance of a pillow. It watched me with that careful feline gaze, all bright eyes and stoic curiosity, as if it wondered what I was going to do. Him and everyone else. Everyone, for some reason, was looking to me to decide what was going to happen next. The problem? I couldn't bring myself to care enough to make a decision.

  “Lorena?” he called again.

  I continued to ignore him. What could he possibly want right now that was important enough to invade the nothingness that I was doing?

  Maahes stretched out on top of his pillow throne. The fabric didn't respond to the motion. Why would it? Maahes was dead. Not the way that Wei was dead, Maahes was ghost dead, shuffled off his mortal toil l but still there in spirit. Nothing responded to Maahes’ presence. Nothing but me. As a necromancer, I was the only thing that he could touch. His tiny paw reached out and settled on my nose. It was cold, and normally I would have moved away from it, but my body protested that.

  “Lorena?”

  “What!?” I finally jerked up. The motion caused the empty wrappers of what little food I'd managed to choke down these past few days to crinkle around me. I wanted to be left alone, didn't he understand that? Didn't anyone understand that? Maahes, in an act of feline dismissiveness, jumped off the pillow and hid in whatever astral realm ghosts went to when they didn't want to be seen. Then again, maybe he was just hiding under the bed. Maybe both. Probably both. Who knew what weirdness happened underneath a witch's bed? Certainly not me. I didn't know enough, not nearly enough. That was part of the problem. That thought had me flopping back down on the mattress, suddenly too exhausted to be angry.

  The door to my bedroom, which had once been my grandmother's, swung open to reveal my dad. He didn't look like me, not at first. His hair was darker than my ash brown, with strands of silver sprinkled around the temples and along the top making him look artfully aged. His eyes were brown rather than my hazel. In one hand was a plate, in the other was my cell phone. I knew it was mine because of the Wonder Woman case. His brows, which I knew for a fact he brushed to make them lay flat, were drawn together with concern.

  I didn't care. He could be concerned, that was his problem. You wanna know what my problem was? Death. Here I was, supposedly this prophecy ridden necromancer, master o
f life and death, and my almost boyfriend was dead. I was pretty sure my problem was bigger.

  “You haven't eaten all day,” he said.

  I hadn't. I knew that. And if I was remembering right the only thing I'd managed to eat yesterday was a fruit roll-up, breakfast of champions. Eating sucked. I didn't want to do it. The idea of chewing on anything felt ridiculous and, to some extent, painful. I didn't want to eat. I wanted Wei back.

  I didn't respond.

  He took a few steps in. The edges of his jeans made a soft sound on the pale gray carpet. That drew my attention. My dad rarely ever wore jeans. For as long as I had known him it was all loafers and sweater vests and perfectly pressed khakis. Not like me. I loved jeans. Jeans and t-shirts and sturdy boots, that was the uniform of my life. But there my dad was, dressed more like me than himself.

  Now that he was closer I could see that the plate he was holding was stacked with a club sandwich. That wasn't playing fair. Sandwiches were my all-time favorite food, and as far as I was concerned the club was the tip of the top of that group. I could smell the bacon and my mouth watered in response. Rude mouth. Didn't it know that I didn't want to eat?

  “You need to eat,” my dad's voice was utterly gentle. That was weird too. My dad was the kind of person who didn't suggest things, he demanded them, told them. Maybe this wasn't my dad, maybe this was some weird magic clone that was going to nice me to death. Yeah, that was logical. What was logical anymore?

  “I'm not hungry.”

  On cue, my stomach gave a gurgle. My dad laughed. I didn't. I was thinking that my stomach was a traitor.

  “Come on, I made it with swiss. Cold Dr. Pepper too.”

  Dang. I knew my limitations. I was willing to waste a lot of things, but not my favorite drink. I certainly wasn't about to let that go to waste. With a sigh, I sat up and held out my hand.

  “Do you wanna come sit at the table?” he gave the bed a once over.

  I gave him a look. I knew the bed was a mess. Hell, I was a mess. I had spent days laying in it, probably growing mushrooms out of my backside. But I wasn't getting out of bed. As far as I was concerned I lived in this bed. If he couldn't take that, then he could leave and take the sandwich with him.

  After a series of meaningful looks he finally relented and handed over the plate and the tall glass filled with Dr. Pepper. I set the glass on the nightstand and the plate in my lap. For a moment, I just stared at it. It was almost like I had forgotten how to eat real food. I mean, I wasn't saying that a pack of Pringles wasn't real, but pressed and fried potato sludge didn't feel so much like food as it was a terribly wonderful snack.

  I found myself remembering all the other club sandwiches that I had eaten before, usually in cheap diners across the country while my dad was carting us from one state to the next. I picked up a piece of bacon that had fallen out of one side of the sandwich and tucked it between my lips. I couldn't really taste anything but I could almost feel my body breaking down the salt, protein, and fat. I guess I was hungry, even if I couldn't feel it.

  “I know it's a stupid question, but how are you feeling?”

  I settled back against my pillow and began the process of picking one quarter of my sandwich apart, bread, slathered with mayo to one side meats to the other, and finally swiss cheese. My dad was right, it was a stupid question, but I answered it anyway.

  “Tired,” I finally said. It was true. I was tired. But it was the kind of tired that sleep couldn't fix. It was the bone deep tired that came when the world had just given me too much to deal with. “Exhausted.”

  My dad took a seat on the foot of the bed, tucking one sock clad foot beneath him.

  “I remember when my dad died. I wasn't very old. Old enough, I guess, to understand that my dad was going to die, young enough to think that it shouldn't be happening to me. I hid in the closet for two days. I don't know why, it made perfect sense at the time.”

  I found it hard to imagine my dad doing anything of the sort, but he didn't really have a reason to lie to me now. I popped a piece of turkey in my mouth and chewed thoughtfully. I tasted it more than I had the bacon, but only a little. “How did grandma take that?”

  “Pretty well, all things considering. I think I was mad at her. Here I was, feeling like my heart got ripped out, and she was still cooking, cleaning, eating, doing all those things that I just didn't want to do anymore. Then again, I never needed an excuse to be mad at my mom.”

  Yeah, I had picked up on that. Dad and Grandma were not what I would have called close. He seemed to dislike her for being a witch, and therefore himself, and that created a whole lot of weird feelings. I could empathize. I was nothing but one big ball of weird feelings.

  “Anyway,” my dad continued, watching as I finished off the turkey and moved on to the ham, “I pretty much assumed that she never loved my dad, that it was all some big joke, and she was happier without him.”

  I knew that wasn't true. I had Grandma's journals. So far as I could tell, she loved my grandfather a lot. I didn't say that right then, though, not only because my dad was clearly working himself up to passing along some life changing epiphany moment, but because interrupting him was just too much energy.

  “So it got to the point where she was telling me I needed to eat, or at least take a bath because I smelled exactly how an almost teenage boy who hadn't bothered to bathe would smell. And I just got mad, really mad, I was so angry that I burst out of the closet and accused her of all the terrible things that I had been thinking while sitting alone in the dark.” He shook his head, staring down at his lap, lost in his memory. “I was expecting her to yell right back at me. My mom was like that, she didn't take people snapping at her without giving them her own two cents, kind of like you. But she just stood there, she took it, and when I was so red in the face and dizzy with the anger that I couldn't go on any more she just asked if I was going to take a bath or if she ought to dunk me in the lake.”

  I couldn't help myself, I laughed. Maybe it was the soda getting to my malnourished cells but it struck me as hilarious.

  My dad grinned at me. “I know, I know. But her saying that made me realize how dumb I was being. When I just looked up at her, completely shocked, she told me that she had been doing all those things, eating, bathing, and such, because she had me. She couldn't fall apart because I was there, and I needed to be taken care of.”

  I frowned. I wasn't sure how this was supposed to help me. No one needed me. My dad had never needed me, neither had my mom. My one and only friend had recently started a relationship with a brand-new girlfriend, who was nearly my other friend. The vampires, so far as I could tell, were laying low since one of their own was dead and there was a good chance another one was involved. I didn't have anyone. Just little ol' me, and the ball of sadness that I was wrapped up in.

  “Okay,” I finally said.

  “The world needs you, Lorena.”

  I blinked, looking past my half-eaten sandwich to stare at my dad, sure that he was being ridiculous. Then I saw the look of absolutely sincerity and pushed my food aside.

  “You wanna run that one by me again?”

  “Even if you never decide to bring magic into the world the Order of the Loyal Hermit is certainly going to try to do something about this prophecy, and I knew them well enough to know that whatever they plan, it isn't going to be good.”

  I hadn't thought about that. That made the cold feeling that had grown in my belly turn into a pile of nauseating sludge. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Getting out of bed would be a good place to start,” my dad eyed the debris of my grief.

  “And then?”

  “A shower.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I get it, basic hygiene is needed, but what then?”

  My dad ran a hand through his silver streaked hair. “The way I see it, you've got a few options. You can go to the Vampire House and pick whatever b
lood sucker will have you and... well...” my dad trailed off.

  “Ew, dad, ew. Let's never discuss that again.”

  He held up his hands, palms outward. “I won’t argue with you on that. But it's an option.”

  I didn't like that option. It wasn't that the vampires that were left weren't great options for the father of the prophecy child. There was Alan, the hottest vampire to ever exist. And there was Dmitri, who had that brooding handsome artist thing going for him. The problem was that sometimes Dmitri's brooding turned into full-on Hulk moments and Alan was desperately in love with him, hulk or not.

  Neither made good candidates.

  “Okay, next option?”

  “You get yourself prepared for Marquessa to return with the army of witches.”

  That option was not without merit. Marquessa was Jenny's, my one and only friend, grandmother. She had been friends with my grandmother, and was currently wandering the world finding witches who were hopefully going to help us take down the Order of the Loyal Hermit. The Order was my mother's cult and they were the people who were so hard up against me fulfilling my prophecy that their leader, whom I had dealt a serious blow to, had used his magic to try to kill me in my dreams.