House Of Vampires 2 (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 II

  THE LORENA QUINN TRILOGY

  SAMANTHA SNOW

  Copyright ©2017 by Samantha Snow

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  When Lorena Quinn went to live in the house of vampires she really did not know what to expect. With 4 vampires fighting for her love she knew that it was not always going to be easy.

  And things took an interesting twist when Wei made a move on Lorena which caused Dmitri to fly into a jealous rage.

  A rage so intense that it left Lorena wondering if she really had to fulfill the prophecy in this way, or perhaps there was another way out....

  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

  What really sucked was that I knew it was a dream, but I still couldn't wake up. Most dreams were a foggy haze where things didn't fit together, like puzzle pieces from different boxes. This dream was real, too real, a half-remembered memory just distorted enough to know that I wasn't actually awake. It was full surround sound with the volume turned up and high definition television. It was full on 3D interactive with those fancy glasses and bright colors, a video game that I wanted to get lost in or maybe couldn't escape from.

  In my too-real dream, I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an SUV. It, the car, not the seat, was too long to be realistic. There were an extra two bench seats so that it looked more like one of those weird stretch limos rather than the car that I remembered. The seats were filled with four vampire brothers, also known in the secret world of the paranormal as the Sons of Vlad. Yeah, that Vlad. Vlad the third, the second son of Vlad Dracula, more commonly known as The Impaler, and the very first vampire to ever walk the earth. There were three witches: one who I could only call organic, the other was very...mathematical, and then there was me, who was lucky enough to call myself a witch, if only just barely.

  In the very back seat was Alan, who was quite possibly the most beautiful man who had ever been born. His angelic face was fixed into a charming and polite smile. His long golden hair floated around his angular face like a summer cloud. He wore dark leather pants on long slender legs and a sapphire blue French Renaissance jacket left unlaced to show off a bare chest. There were other men, bigger men, who were chiseled with washboard abs and other features. Not Alan. He was all slender lines and elegant beauty. His lips were parted just enough that I could see a glitter of fang.

  “You'll have to choose, you know.” He spoke French, but I knew what he said. I had never taken French. My years had been spent sitting in Mr. Bergen's German classes instead. Woe is me.

  “Choose,” he repeated.

  Choosing. That's what this was all about. The reason why I was living in a great big mansion in the mountains of rural Virginia. The reason why I was learning about my history and the magic that lived inside of me. It was me deciding on one of three, or was that four now, who would become my beau and, ultimately, the father of a child of prophecy.

  “I know,” I said. My voice echoed strangely in my ears, like I was talking down a wind tunnel.

  “How beautiful.”

  I was about to ask him what was beautiful when I realized his attention wasn't on me anymore; it was on the guy a few seats up.

  The car rocked, shivering beneath me. I felt a trill of fear as we took a sharp turn around the mountain. I was pretty sure one of the wheels left the road, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Just me.

  Dmitri, in his full Romani glory, was looking at me, completely unaware of Alan's provocative attention. He was dressed in black, but the outfit was out of date: loose billowing slacks trimmed with dark fur and a long vest so dark in hue that it got lost against the romantic profusion of curls. Beneath the vest, he wore a laced-up tunic left open just enough to catch a hint of the impressive musculature beneath. But I couldn't enjoy the view because of the look he was giving me. It wasn't a deep look, like you might give someone who was interesting to you, or even the soft look that happened when that special someone stepped into your view. It wasn't as if he cared that I was there, but that anyone was there, someone to give his intense attentions to.

  “Pay attention to me,” he said.

  “I do,” I promised.

  The car shivered again, as if it knew something I didn't.

  Then there was Zane, little more than a shadow, and not just because of the rich deep brown of his skin. His features were less perfect, less visceral from everyone else's. Perhaps because I didn't know him, perhaps because I knew he had been drained nearly to the point of death. I didn't know.

  “You saved me.” His voice made goosebumps appear on my unconscious flesh. It was deep and rich and precise, as if he thought about each and every word before it left his lips. “I will save you before the end.”

  The end of what? I wanted to ask him. The end of this prophecy? The end of this weird road trip? My whole life was a series of endings and beginnings. I needed him to be a little more precise.

  The sky turned dark, and storm clouds in shades of purple, black, and green filled the horizon. It looked like rain but not the kind I'd wanna go out in.

  “I don't know you,” I whispered. I wasn't sure if I was talking to Zane or the impending storm. Maybe it was both.

  What I did know was that the girl sitting next to him was the closest thing I had to a friend. Jenny sat with one of her long, athletic legs tucked up beneath the perfect point of her chin. Her skin, a deep burnished brown, shimmered with the bronze blush she liked to wear. She was reaching a hand cluttered with rings out to me, offering something that I couldn't actually see.

  “Are you okay?” Jenny asked, her voice echoing similarly to my own.

  Was I? Maybe. I didn't know that either. The dream was beginning to stretch, like too little fabric across too much skin. I didn't answer her, not because I didn't want to, but because my lips wouldn't move. I wanted to wake up, but the dream held me down.

  “Are you okay?” she asked again.

  When I cou
ld focus on her, the beautiful skin that she took such care of was cracking. A soft glow was spilling through the lines in her flesh.

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “I... don’t know.”

  Count on Jenny to be the only one to answer me, even in a dream.

  On the other side of her was another woman whose face was vivid, but the rest of her wasn't. She was hidden in a robe in shades of smoke. The center of her forehead held a diamond, like a bindi charm, which suited her, considering it was Reika. The apples of her cheeks were decorated with mathematics symbols. Not plus signs or anything like that, but strangely perfect interconnecting lines that formed pictures.

  “Do you have to follow the prophecy?” she asked, her eyes flashing with a power I didn't really understand. “Do you have to end the world?”

  Rain hit the windshield, green and acidic. Thunder, like the howling of wolves, rolled down the mountains. Everything started to shake. Fear turned inside of my belly. I didn't want to end the world.

  “Ya gotta choose.”

  This voice, rich with the drawl of Appalachia, drew me to a woman I was sure hadn't been in the car before. Marquessa sat in the very back, next to Alan, and smiled an enigmatic smile that turned the deep mahogany of her cheeks into apples.

  “No, she doesn't.” a woman answered. I couldn't see her, but I knew my mother's voice now. “She can just walk away.”

  They started to bicker, but not with words. I knew they were arguing in the way that you simply know things in a dream, with unconscious certainty.

  A hand reached out and touched my face. It was strong and sure. My fear dwindled inside of my belly, and I looked into eyes of flecked obsidian. Wei was beautiful in the way a sword was beautiful, honed to perfection. His long dark hair was coiled into a topknot, held in place by a bright band. A changsun top in shades of green brought out the natural gold in his skin. But he, more than anyone I had ever known, was more than a collection of colors and shapes. He was lethal and glorious and proud, and every emotion was held behind a perfect veneer, invisible unless you knew how to look. I knew, or I liked to think I did. He loved me; I could see it in those eyes.

  “Watch me,” he said, even as the SUV plummeted over the side of the mountain. I felt my stomach jump into my throat as we fell, and a dozen hands reached out to grab me as the rest of us fell. “Just watch.”

  I jerked awake with a suddenness that left me breathless. Rain pounded down against the window of my bedroom, turning the rose-stained glass into a pattern of colors through water. Lightening flickered in the distance, illuminating the shape of a man who stood in my bedroom doorway. I knew the shape instantly.

  “Wei?” I asked, just in case I was still dreaming. A flash of lightning illuminated my otherwise dark bedroom. The usually warm wood of my furniture looked cold in the hard temporary brilliance.

  “You cried out.”

  He was careful to keep his voice empty, but I knew better. I could feel him. I was...aware of him. To be fair, I was aware of the undead in general. I was a necromancer, or at least, that was what everyone was telling me; it gave me an edge when dealing with the undead. What all those edges were, I wasn't sure.

  “Sorry,” I said. I meant it. He looked tired. It was little more than a tightness around his eyes, but it was there. Everyone was tired. Not two days ago, we had escaped a compound of creepy cultists who thought that I shouldn't fulfill a prophecy. For some of us, the escape had been a near thing. A prophecy, by the way, that I had mixed feelings about all around.

  He hovered there, standing with the light of the hallway behind him so that all I could see was the sleek line of his shoulders. He wore a robe, Chinese in origin, like the rest of him, a bo staff in one hand. I'd bet my substantial comic book collection that he'd been practicing some kind of martial art. He wasn't sweating. Vampires, so far as I could tell, didn't sweat, but his hair was tucked up in some fancy braid to keep it out of his face.

  “You just gonna stand there, or are you going to come in?” I didn't mean for it to sound sultry, but my still tired voice made it sound that way. “You just standing there makes me feel anxious.”

  He hesitated and then crossed the threshold into my room. He moved so nicely, like he was made of muscle and silk. He stepped a full foot into the room and then stopped.

  “I had a nightmare,” I said, realizing he was looking around the room for some kind of threat. “Just a nightmare.”

  His eyes flicked to me. “You are...unwell.” For the first time, I heard a little lilt in his tone. In another person, it would have been a rush of concern.

  I scoffed. “Gee, I can't imagine why that would be. Maybe because everyone has this grand opinion on what I need to be doing and whom I need to be doing it with. Maybe because, in the past three months, my entire life has changed. Maybe because I am struggling to figure out a plan for my own damn life. Should I just suck it up and have some prophecy baby? Damn my feelings. What does any of that matter? Should I just leave this town and never come back? I mean, I was doing fine with french fries and all that.”

  I hadn't expected all of that to spill, and from the look he was giving me, Wei hadn't expected it either. I couldn't figure out if we were close or not. We had lived together for three months (he, I, and his two vampiric brothers), but our closest moments had been while he was teaching me to fight.

  “What do you need?”

  I curled my knees up to my chin. My print pajama pants with vintage Wonder Woman pictures all over them bunched with the movement. What did I need? It was the most loaded question. This wasn't some fast food shift where I just needed to get into the groove of things. I needed...well, I needed a plan.

  “We could practice.”

  He wasn't talking about magic. That, I practiced with Jenny and Marquessa. Reikah, a girl from the same cult that my mother and half-sister were a part of, had said, before I’d passed out, that she wished to help me learn magic as well. I didn't know how I felt about that, but I figure that all knowledge, no matter how different, is a good thing to learn.

  Wei was talking about martial arts. Forms of Kung Fu, if we were going to get specific about it. I wasn't half bad. I wasn't all that great either, but I was learning. Even so, I was too worn-out for magic. Everything in me still hurt, and that weird dream had not left me feeling at all rested.

  “Will you talk with me?”

  He blinked. “Talk?”

  I gave him a little smirk. “I know you can talk. I just...I need to figure out my plan, and I do better when I can talk it out.”

  “Alright.”

  Now that I had someone to talk to, my mind went a little blank. “Will you tell me how you became a vampire?”

  He went very, very still. Most people's eyes went wide when they were surprised by something, or their eyebrows might go up their forehead. Wei went as still as a statue. He didn't even breathe. Vampires, after all, didn't have to breathe or eat, though most of them did the second one anyway.

  “Why?”

  I looked up at him. “Because you know an awful lot about me, and I know relatively little about you. Where were you born? When? Why did Vlad choose to make you one of his?”

  He stayed so still for so long after that that I had to wonder if he was still alive, or as alive as an undead vampire can be.

  “I was born in Yunnan Province, China, in your year of 1673.”

  I had to blow out a long breath. That made him just shy of three hundred and fifty years old. Impressive to say the least.

  “Do you speak Chinese?”

  “I do, but it is not my first language.”

  Now I was interested. Languages were cool. “What was?”

  “Why?”

  Well, that was a harder question to answer. I wanted to know because Wei was a bit of an enigma for me. I knew Alan well because the flamboyant vampire wore himself out for everyone to see. And I knew Dmitri because we both spoke the language of books and creativity; we had that in common. I didn't know Za
ne, the eldest of the vampire brothers, because I had been passed out for a good amount of the time that he had been back at the mansion since I had helped rescue him.

  But mostly, I wanted to know Wei because I knew that he was in love with me.

  Maybe that was weird, maybe a little childish, but there was a part of me that really liked the fact that he was interested in me. Then again, I remember hearing once that another person's interest was the greatest aphrodisiac.

  “Didn't we just cover this?” I asked. “You know plenty about me. You know my name is Lorena Quinn, most recent legacy of the Quinn witches. You know that my mom is nuts and my dad was stupidly over protective. You know that my half-sister, Connie, pretended to be my friend so that she could help my mom kidnap me. You know that there is a prophecy about me and that I am obsessed with books and comics and video games.”