Cora's Secret: A Vampire Ménage Urban Fantasy Romance by Tracy Cooper-Posey Read Free Book Online Page B

Irish clans had ever had contact with elves. So the word actually meant… “Pixie,” Lindal interpreted. “The vampeen hunt them? What for? They aren’t even a bite’s worth.”
    The pixie gave a soft shriek and disappeared and the dryad took a step back, her arm lowering.
    “What did I say?” Lindal asked. He studied the dryad. “What do they do to the pixies?”
    The dryad’s eyes filled with tears. “Play,” she whispered.
    Sport , Lindal interpreted. The vampeen hunted them for sport.
    The dryad turned on her toes and for the first time he noticed that she wore no shoes. She pointed to her back. Then she turned to look at him and held up a hand, one long finger pointing up into the sky. With her other hand, she made a plucking motion toward her upheld finger.
    Linda’s heart gave another sickening shift. The vampeen caught the pixies in some way that defeated their ability to teleport, which is what he guessed the dryad’s friend had done a moment ago. Then they plucked their wings off.
    “Tell her to come back. I’ll take her with me. I’ll protect her.” He had no idea how he could do that when he lived in New York. He couldn’t walk down Fifth Avenue with a real pixie in his hand. But he would worry about it later.
    The dryad looked up at the sky. Lindal looked, too.
    The pixie appeared in the air just above him, her wings beating fast as she hovered. She looked at the dryad, who made some more of the odd sounds she had used to call her in the first place. Then the pixie turned in mid-air to study Lindal.
    Curiosity touch him. Pleasure that he was friend to Clídna and wanted to help. But Ferr was sad because she had to leave her friends behind…
    Lindal gasped. You are telepathic? He made the words form in his mind.
    Happy excitement reached him. The pixie, Ferr, dropped down so that she was at eye level. Her head tilted as she looked at him with her big eyes. I like talking.
    To Ferr, who didn’t speak any other way than mentally, this would be talking.
    With the same breath-robbing abruptness as before, Ferr gave a soft cry and disappeared. Clídna, the dryad, took off with the suddenness of a startled deer, racing across the open ground with vision-blurring speed to disappear between the trees.
    Then Lindal heard the sound that had alarmed them. It was a vehicle engine, working hard, in low gear. It revved and died off, the sound muffled by the trees, but clear enough for him to guess it was a heavy engine with six or eight cylinders. Something powerful.
    There was a break in the trees almost directly opposite the bald patch in the growth around the tower. That would be what was left of the road.
    Lindal considered disappearing himself. But he didn’t know if Ferr would be able to find him again if he moved. Unlike Dryads, pixies were as much a myth to elves as to humans. He didn’t know anything about them. But their fate at the hands of the vampeen infuriated him.
    Even as he was deciding, the car appeared between the trees, a plume of dust rising behind it. It was the Sheriff’s cruiser, the gold in the badge on the side of the car flashing in the morning sunlight.
    That decided the matter. Lindal stayed where he was and watched the car slide and swerve as it made fresh tracks in the knee-high grasses, bumping over hidden holes and mounds in the rocky dirt. He couldn’t see through the windshield clearly because the sun was bouncing off it, but he thought there might be two people in the car.
    Sheriff Wisherd had pricked his curiosity, last night. He had asked questions that made Lindal wonder if he had been able to hear his thoughts. Law enforcement types were generally not sensitive. They couldn’t afford to be. Blake, the trinities’ solitary NYPD representative, seemed to be a rare exception although he couldn’t read thoughts—not directly. He could read his trinity’s emotions through their shared bond, but not actual thoughts.
    So Wisherd was a mental question mark and now