House Of Vampires (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy Book 1) 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

  THE LORENA QUINN TRILOGY

  SAMANTHA SNOW

  Copyright ©2017 by Samantha Snow

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  When her grandmother passed away, 19 year old Lorena Quinn was left a small fortune in her will.

  Along with a further surprise.

  Upon accepting the inheritance, Lorena learned that she was central to a prophecy. A prophecy that forecast the end of the world and Lorena was the only one who could save it.

  For this to happen, Lorena would have to have a child with one of the four sons of Vlad. Commonly known as vampires.

  Now she has to choose which of the four eligible vampire bachelors will be the father of her child.

  However, before she makes her choice, she must first live with them. All of them, at the same time...

  Welcome To The House Of Vampires!

  Things get very interesting in this vampire romance series aimed at adults. If you liked Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Twilight or anything that is sexy and paranormal then you will LOVE this!

  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

  For even the very wise cannot see all ends

  -Tolkien

  CHAPTER ONE

  I should have been able to recognize my grandmother's house, even though I had never been there. They were all supposed to look pretty much the same, right? A picket fence, happy little mailbox, and lacy handmade curtains that fluttered in the middle of the midsummer breeze. Maybe there would be a fat dog or a moody cat lounging on a porch cluttered with the shoes of her many visiting grandchildren. My grandmother's house had none of these things. At least, not as far as I could see.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered under my breath.

  I pulled my powder blue VW Bug into the tiny driveway, parked beneath the aluminum car port, and double checked the GPS on my phone to make sure that I hadn't taken a left turn for the Twilight Zone. 1730 Sparrow Field Lane, middle of nowhere Virginia. Yup. My phone, complete with Wonder Woman phone case, promised me that I was there. Okay, fine. Whatever. I turned off the navigation app and looked at the house, trying not to feel completely disappointed.

  I must have pictured my grandmother's place a thousand times. I mean, my dad never really talked about her or anything, but I had always wondered about her. Who wouldn't? Especially since I didn't have a whole lot of family to start with, it was just me and dad, and we were always moving around, so I didn't have many friends either. Sometimes, I wondered if she was ridiculously rich, like Bill Gates rich, and that she was living in some super fancy place where you had to wear some kind of futuristic implant on the wrist just to get past security.

  And sometimes I wondered if she was, like Dad said sometimes, crazy. That maybe her place was really the psych ward at a hospital. I have a really active imagination. Dad blames my choices in hobbies, but I blame my complete lack of friends.

  The house, being nothing like I had imagined, was old and shabby, and it looked like it was going to fall right off the side of the mountain that it clung to. Once upon a time, it might have been a cute little rustic cottage, but it was a few decades beyond that. It was built with dark tree logs, cabin style, with a little porch that was decorated with what looked like ten different wind chimes, all made of different materials. There was no cute animal lounging in the sun or pile of kids’ shoes. Just an old rocking chair with a single pillow so faded that I couldn't tell what the pattern had been.

  “Jeez,” I groaned as I opened up my car door, grabbed my lone box of possessions out of the passenger seat, and stepped out into the Appalachian sunshine. For October, it was pretty warm, still hovering in the mid-seventies with a heavy breeze; just cool enough for me to get away with wearing my jean jacket over a t-shirt, complete with screen-printed dragon, and jeans so worn they were almost white. I tugged the jacket closer and pulled a very crumpled envelope off the very top of the box.

  The box was what I called “my stuff.” '. My dad moved a lot for work. He's in district marketing. I didn’t t know what that means, exactly, but it usually winds up with us going from one place to the next just as I start to feel settled in.

  Since mom disappeared when I was little, I pretty much had to do whatever he said. My best friends when I was a kid were comics, books, and handheld video games. Don't judge; that stuff can keep you from getting lonely. My Stuff, capital letters please, was chock full of my favorite things: the things that I couldn't live without in case the moving van lost half of our worldly possessions...again.

  Inside the envelope were three things. The first was a letter. It must have been folded and unfolded thirty times. I knew, because it had been me that did the folding. The creases in the paper were starting to come apart.

  To Miss Lorena Meredith Quinn, the first line read. That was me, though I couldn't remember anyone ever calling me “Miss” unless they were really polite or really pissed. Sometimes both. I have that effect on people.

  It is my duty, though not my pleasure, to inform you of the passing of Loretta Quinn, your grandmother, as of August 31st of this year. I am sorry for the late notice. We attempted to reach out to your father first, but received no response.

  I snorted. Yeah, like my dad was ever going to respond to the death of the woman he was really busy pretending didn't exist.

  Your grandmother has left all of her belongings to you: the house that she spent her life in and everything within it. Her savings, which totals to an amount of six hundred and eighty thousand dollars and thirty seven cents, is also to be passed on to you.

  Cha-ching, I thought to myself, and then felt immediately guilty about it. Yeah, it was cool to suddenly have money, but I kind of would have preferred to meet my grandma. Still, a couple hundred thousand dollars was going to go a long way to paying off the student loans for that two-thirds of a year of college I had flunked out of and the credit card that I had already maxed out.

  I'm not terrible with money, just throwing that
out there. I am, or was, a minimum wage employee without health benefits and a totally broken arm last year. While my dad's insurance paid for most of it, it hadn't covered the time I couldn't work and the bills that I'd had to pay while hauling around a cast that weighed half as much as me, which is no small amount, thank you very much.

  While no amount of money can replace the love that your grandmother had for you, it was stipulated in her will that in order for you to receive this inheritance, you must spend at least six months at her home in Colt Valley, Virginia. I hope to see you soon.

  Marquessa Green

  I folded up the letter and put it back in the envelope. The second item was a key, pretty much the same size and shape as a billion other house keys in America. The last was a picture, the kind from an old Polaroid camera. The glossy square showed a woman who couldn't have been more than fifty, holding a small child in her arms. Her ash-brown hair was coiled into a thick braid that trailed over one shoulder, and her nose was sharp and pointed. Basically, just like mine.

  In a thick sharpie marker, someone had written on the white rectangle at the bottom, “Loretta with Lorena, 3 mo old.”

  It was the first picture of my grandmother that I had ever seen. There was something about the way the woman in the picture looked at the baby that made my throat feel too tight. Like she was just so sure that the little girl was going to amount to something. I am sorry to say that my grandmother would have been really disappointed. Unless she thought that a fast food working college dropout was the absolute best thing a girl could be. Then we'd be just fine. I doubted it though.

  “Well,” I said as I plucked the key out of the envelope, “here goes nothing.”

  I paused halfway to the side door. I had heard something, I was almost sure of it. A whisper, I thought. A woman's voice. I thought it had said my name. Then again, maybe I had just been imagining things. I had been driving for sixteen hours and living off drive-thru food. It was enough to make anyone hear things. That stuff is bad for you. Trust me, I know.

  It took a little work, but I got the door open. Time or weather had made the fit imperfect. I had to use my hip, which was a little larger than I would have liked it to be, to bump open the door. It creaked ominously and swung away to give me my very first look at the woman that I had never known.

  Messy was the first word that came to mind, or at least unorganized. I found myself smiling. My dad had always hated that I wasn't as much of a neat freak as he was, and now I knew why. The cabin wasn't gross; there weren't piles of food or anything, just a lot of clutter. I could see the kitchen and the living room from the doorway, as well as a tiny little nook that I guess you could call a dining room. All of the space was taken up by...stuff.

  I stepped inside, not bothering to take my shoes off, and started to wander. Piles of magazines from twenty different years were tucked beneath a squat living room table with newspapers on top. I set my box of things next to the stacks and took a look around. There were three bookshelves in different heights cluttered with books, pictures, and what my dad would have called knickknacks. Mostly, they were bits of rock and crystal, but there were small piles of what looked like broken glass and metal, too. At first, I thought it was junk, but then I remembered all the wind chimes that were hanging outside. I scratched “junk” off of my mental list and wrote in “art supplies.” Grandma was artsy; we had that in common, too. Or at least, we did before she had died.

  I shook off the strange emotions that came with that thought and continued my exploration of the main room. The books were...weird. The ones that I could read had titles like “The Meaning of Dreams” and “Cleansing the Aura of Your House” and others that would have looked right at home in a new-age store. The rest were in languages that I didn't know, but I was guessing a couple were Latin. My grandmother was new-agey. Neat. We didn't have that in common. I wasn't religious or spiritual.

  What surprised me most were the pictures. Most of them were of my dad. They started when he was very young, barely more than a baby, but I recognized the dark hair and big green eyes, though I was used to them looking more disappointed. He was on a big red tricycle in one of them, bare feet, bare-chested and muddy. It was a shock. My dad didn't get muddy. He liked to wear nice suits and loafers. This kid in the pictures? He seemed to live in the mud and the outdoors. I hadn't really understood the meaning of flabbergasted until right then.

  My grandmother, I decided, looked a lot like me; or, rather, I looked a lot like her. We both had hazel eyes and a tawny pink complexion, but the same could be said of half of the people who claimed their roots in the Appalachia. We had the same ash brown hair, though I kept mine deliberately short. Sure, all the magazines said that most guys liked long hair. That was fine since I wasn't interested in most guys. I wanted a special guy, a particular one; the others could like what they wanted. Besides, when you worked over five fryers, all of them over three hundred degrees, short hair pretty much rocked.

  We weren't twins, my grandmother and me. I was shorter than she was, and rounder too, but it was close enough that looking at the pictures gave me the jeebies. It was hard to look at a woman I hadn't known, who looked like me, living a life I had never been a part of. It pretty much sucked.

  I left the bookshelves alone and moved on. The kitchen was small, barely more than a single massive sink, a fridge, and a couple of counters. Most of the space was taken up with jars of dried herbs with handwritten labels scrawled over the front. I thought back to the new-age books and decided that my grandma had gone all out with her craft. Good for her. I might not be spiritual, but I was pretty much supportive of people practicing what they liked so long as they didn't force it on me.

  The only thing in the fridge and the cupboards was a box of baking soda and a bunch of mismatched dishes.

  It wasn't much, I had to admit, but it was more than I had a few weeks ago. It was mine. Or at least it would be after six months here. I wondered why my grandmother had left this all to me. Why not Dad? What had happened between the two of them that was so bad that they couldn't even set it aside when she passed away? These thoughts carried me past the tiny bathroom and to the one and only bedroom.

  The bed was a full size, with a massive handmade quilt tossed over the top. There were more shelves here, with even more books and crystals and pieces of materials that I assumed she used for her wind chimes or her craft. In the very center of the bed was a large leather bound book.

  Not like the kind that you might get at a kitchy thrift store (I love thrift stores) or anything but the kind that you'd have to order from some fancy company in Italy or something. There was a five-pointed star on the surface, with triangles at each point. The triangles faced different directions, and some of them had lines through the center. I had to admit it was kind of pretty.

  I stepped out of my shoes and climbed up on the bed. The mattress was old enough that it sagged comfortably beneath my weight. I tugged the book closer and, out of curiosity, flipped open to the first page. “Liber Magika, a Book of Shadows” was scrawled in fancy writing. I flipped to the next page and read:

  “A witch, at all times, is neither good nor evil. The magic she wields simply exists. It is the intention behind her words that matters most.”

  I frowned at that. I didn't know a whole lot about the New Age movement, but I was pretty sure that there were rules about white and black magic and things like that. Then again, what did I really know? I flipped casually through the first few pages, which I quickly determined was a list of definitions and a picture to go with them. The five-pointed star on the front of the book was a pentacle. Once I read the word, I remembered it. There were a bunch of other terms I didn't really know: athame, which turned out to be some kind of dagger, an esbat, which was sort of like a holy day, and a few others.

  “Is this why dad hated you?” I asked to no one in particular. I knew that people who called themselves witches got a lot of hate. Tabitha, a girl I had known very briefly in one of the schools I had
gone to, got picked on a lot because she had been Wiccan. I never really understood hating people for what they believed. The world took a lot out of you, why hurt people for what they used to get through it all?

  I closed the book and tried not to yawn. I'd been driving all day and all I really wanted was a meal that hadn't been frozen and a good night’s sleep. It was already ten o'clock...jeez, how long had I been looking around at things...and the bed was comfortable.

  I tugged the heavy quilt around myself and stretched out on one of the five pillows. My eyelids grew instantly heavy. I was in the middle of nodding off when I saw a shape across the street. I was pretty sure it was a guy, but then sleep worked its magic and I didn't think about it anymore.

  The sound of my phone going off pulled me out of a dream about a crying woman and floating crystals. I reached blindly for my phone and realized that it was still in my back pocket. I whispered a word of thanks to the gods of technology that I hadn't broken it in my sleep and answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Lorena Meredith Quinn, where are you?”