Beloved Vampire by Joey W. Hill Read Free Book Online

truth.
    “You don’t belong here,” she said, her voice rough and strange to her own ears. “You can’t touch these things. These are his gifts to her. That he’s still bringing her.” How could they not see it? The fresh flower petals, the orchid, three hundred years of offerings?
    Or was she dreaming again, meshing the reality of their presence with the illusion of what she wanted this chamber to look like? No, she’d imagined dried bones, had even been comforted by that idea. Everything here was real, particularly their threat.

    “Miss Anna,” Harry said quietly, “none of us will keep you from staying here. Mel doesn’t want anything to do with that woman.
    But you have no use for these treasures. What does it matter if we take a few?”
    “Because they’re hers . Because something has to matter enough that we don’t take from it.” From their startled looks, she suspected they could see that fire welling in her eyes, hear the raw, despairing fury in her hoarse voice. She was getting dizzy, a gray haze at the edges of her vision, but she defied it, brandishing the knife. “ Something has to be sacred.”
    “Well, you go on and worship all you like, you crazy old witch,” Mel growled. “I’m plundering to my heart’s content.”
    “No, you are not.” She swung the knife as he moved forward. Surprised, Mel leaped back as the tip snagged and ripped his sleeve. “You will not touch anything here as long as I have breath to fight you.”
    “Fair enough,” he retorted, and drew a knife of his own, the blade catching the torchlight.
    “Mel,” Harry snapped. “No call for that, now. We’ll just knock her out. She couldn’t fight off a baby.”
    “Why can’t you leave her be? Why can’t any of you . . .” As she choked on the pain of it, her head swam, the floor tilting. She wished Lord Mason had thought to bespell this chamber like they did in the movies, so that in the presence of grave robbers, cracks would run across the ceiling and the walls would crumble in, burying them all, preserving it forever. But then the chamber would disappear, as if it had never been, a figment of her imagination. No, it was here. She could see it, could see all of it. “You won’t take from her, damn it.”
    “Jesus, Harry. She’ll die here anyway. Might as well hasten the old bat along.”
    “I’m not old,” she snarled. “I am twenty-nine years old.”
    That caught the men off guard, bought her a minute. Why not? She was tired of having it all bottled up inside of her. She’d endured months, years even, of trusting no one, talking little, even to Raithe, because most times speaking wasn’t the primary use he had for her mouth. Even knowing they would think her crazy, she would confess it here and now, because it was all right. She could tell Farida, so she would hear it, before they killed her at the foot of her sarcophagus.
    “I am Jessica Tyson, not Anna Wyatt. I was the servant of a vampire for five years. A vampire who killed my fiancé. That vampire did this to me”—she gestured at the wasted flesh of her face—“but I survived. To do this. To come to this woman’s grave, to someone who understood . . . that life is the most horrible thing in the world, and the most marvelous.”
    Tears were running freely down her face now, though Jess was surprised her dried-up heart, pounding so erratically, had any left to give. “I beg you, if you have any scrap of decency, do not defile this place.”
    But she knew when it came to these men and decency, threats worked better. “If you refuse and kill me”—she pinned them both under her gaze—“I swear, no matter what deal I must make from the grave, I’ll curse you for the rest of your days. You will know Hell on Earth, until you bang on the devil’s door and beg him to let you in. She was Farida, daughter of Sheikh Asim, the lion, and wife and beloved of Lord Mason, the desert tiger. She chose to abandon everything for his love, and she