A Glimpse of the Dark Side: Adult Paranormal Erotic Romance Collection (11 page)

Yes, I will need to tread very carefully with
this one,
Secret thought.

"What can I do for you today, Mrs. Bennington?"
Secret asked her.

"You mean you can't tell that already?" the
woman barked at her. "I would think that as a psychic you would
already know things of that nature."

Oh wonderful! A rude one,
Secret thought
with dismay.
Well, that's why I work alone. I can always send
someone away when they're rude.

"I ask the question as a courtesy," Secret
replied. "There are many gifts that I possess as well as various
services that I offer. I simply ask because I'm not clear as to
which ones you're here to experience."

Mrs. Bennington sat up straighter in her chair
and sniffed disdainfully.

"Just tell me what you see," she said
sharply.

I could scare the hell out of her,
thought Secret,
and just start talking. Or I could make a show
of using the Tarot cards to tell her. Either way, it's going to be
the same.

Making a decision, she picked up her deck of
Tarot cards. Shuffling them well, she cut the deck, and started to
lay them out. Normally, she would have the client cut them and
choose cards from the deck, but she didn't want this horrible
woman's energy to infiltrate her cards.

"The High Priestess card," Secret said, as she
turned it over. "This card shows that you have secrets, Mrs.
Bennington. Some very deep secrets that are soon to be
revealed."

"What exactly does that mean?" the woman
huffed.

"Just what I said," Secret replied. "There's a
secret that you're holding very tightly to you, and you'll do
almost anything to keep it from coming to light."

Glancing up at her, Secret was somewhat
gratified to see that Mrs. Bennington had turned a bit pale.

Turning over the next card, she saw that it was
The Tower.

"This is The Tower," she said. "It shows that
things are going to start crumbling around you sometime very soon.
There will be changes in your life that must happen, but they may
not happen the way that you had hoped or anticipated. You may even
need help in dealing with these changes."

"I don't know why I'm even here! I've never
heard such garbage!"

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Bennington.
Shall we continue with your reading or shall I simply refund your
money?"

That seemed to stop her in her tracks. It was
clear that this was a woman who was used to getting her way all the
time. The fact that someone as inferior as Secret Lavalle had the
nerve to speak to her in that way infuriated her. On the other
hand, she was starting to become nervous about what Secret was
actually picking up around her.

"No, no go on."

"Very well. Your next card, as you can see, is
the Ten of Swords. This shows that there's been some violence
around you recently, and that you probably feel you have been
betrayed in some way. The next one is the Death card, which shows
that you're going to have a new start but, in this case, it may not
be the one that you had hoped it would be."

"Well, none of that makes any sense," Mrs.
Bennington cried. "You're a charlatan, just like the rest of your
kind that crowd the streets of New Orleans!"

"A charlatan? Is that what you called me?"
Secret barely managed to whisper the words.

"Yes! It's clear that you have absolutely no
idea what you're talking about!"

Secret swept up the cards with one hand and put
them to the side.

"I'll show you what a charlatan I am, Mrs.
Bennington," Secret said, as she leaned toward the woman's face
with a dangerous look. "I was trying to be kind and considerate,
but I can see that you're beyond understanding something so basic.
So here it is."

Mrs. Bennington had gone from being livid to
somewhat nervous.

"Your husband has recently died, Mrs.
Bennington, and you've been left a rather large amount of money.
However, you won't get to enjoy any of that money. You see, your
huge secret that I was able to pick up within minutes of your
darkening my door is that you killed your husband. Granted, he
wasn't a very nice man. He was the typical rich man who couldn't
keep his pants zipped up, and was constantly dipping into the
recesses of every gold digger that came along. You got tired of it,
but you just couldn't give up all that money. So you started to
slowly poison him with something that will never turn up in an
autopsy. A Wiccan High Priestess mixed it up for you and told you
how to use it, and it worked like a charm. The problem is that you
didn't hide the leftovers very well and the police are now
searching that big, old house of yours for evidence. They're
minutes away from finding the little bottle of poison, and your
fingerprints are all over it. The medical examiner is going to look
more closely at your husband's body and this time, he'll find what
the police need to put you under the prison!"

Secret finally stopped talking long enough to
take a breath.

"Now, tell me again what a charlatan I am."

Mrs. Bennington had now turned a dangerous,
pasty white, eyes wide and jaw hanging open.

"How... how could you possibly know any of
that?" she whispered in shock.

"Because I read it in you as soon as you sat
down."

"Are the police really at my home?" Mrs.
Bennington shuddered.

"Yes, I'm afraid they are. You need to go home
and face what you've done."

Secret stood up and looked at her client
meaningfully.

At first, it didn't seem as if the woman was
going to move, but she finally braced herself by placing her hands
on the table and stood up.

"Don't even try to run, Mrs. Bennington," Secret
warned her. "This isn't something that you're meant to avoid. You
chose a path and now you must follow it to the end."

Mrs. Bennington did her best to regain her regal
composure, but it wasn't working so well for her.

"You need to go now, Mrs. Bennington," Secret
said in more compassionate tone. "They're waiting for you, and it
will go easier on you if you just confess to it all."

"I can't go to prison," she said, as her face
started to crumple.

"You're stronger than you think, Mrs.
Bennington."

Actually, Secret could see that this woman
wasn't going to do well in prison at all, but she couldn't see that
telling her so would be helpful at all. In fact, Secret almost felt
sorry for her now. Her husband really had been a dick in the worst
way, but she had made the wrong decision in getting even with him.
Sadly, Mr. Bennington would be having the last laugh.

Escorting a very shaky Harriett Bennington to
her front door, Secret was relieved to see that there was a driver
waiting with the car in her driveway. She had been a little worried
about the woman driving herself home.

At the door, Mrs. Bennington stopped and turned
to face Secret.

"I do apologize, my dear, for my horrible
manners and rudeness," she said in a trembling voice. "You're not a
charlatan. In fact, you're very accurate. Everything you said is
the truth. Everything."

"Mrs. Bennington, I'm very sorry that this has
turned out like this for you, but you cannot get away with this
type of vengeance." As Secret spoke, she motioned surreptitiously
to the driver to come and collect his employer.

"Thomas, please take me home," she quavered.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, as he offered her his
arm for support on the way back to the car.

Secret watched them as Thomas settled his
employer in the back seat of the large, shiny black car.

She felt a heavy sadness descend upon her heart.
Yes, the woman had been rude to her, but in the end, that was such
a small thing. Harriett Bennington was about to have everything
torn away from her, and she didn't know the half of what she was
about to face.

She was relieved that she had an hour to gather
her thoughts and center herself before her next client arrived.

KANE AWOKE AND sat up.

He wasn't quite sure what caused him to wake
because the sun had not totally set. Something stirred his rest,
though. Of that, he was positive.

Listening carefully, he trained all of his
senses in the direction of where the disturbance seemed to have
emanated.

There it was!

A scream and then silence. Blackness.

He had, of course, been keeping up with the
current murders that were happening in and around the New Orleans
area. So far, he hadn't focused on who was doing it. Other things
were consuming his attention.

That dreadful name the newspapers were calling
the killer simply grated on him. The Blood Drinker. Seriously? He
assumed they didn't fully believe that the murderer was actually
drinking the blood of the victims, but it seemed that humans always
had to sensationalize these things.

He would have to see who was encroaching on his
territory and calling attention to them all. This had to stop. That
meant, even though his current project was quite important, it
would have to be shelved for the moment so he could sort out this
murder situation.

Well,
he thought.
There's no time like
the present.

Since he had already heard the scream, he knew
what direction to take. It was, of course, too late to save the
woman, but he could still catch the culprit and dispatch him in
whatever way seemed appropriate.

Moving with his supernatural speed, he was at
the murder site in seconds. As he had known, the victim was long
past any help humans or his kind could offer to her. Sniffing the
air, he caught the scent he needed and followed.

In no time, he spotted his prey. He stared at
him in amazement.

No wonder he continues to collect victims so
easily,
Kane thought.
He looks as though he's no older than
fifteen or sixteen years old, and has the face of an angel.
Before the boy could move in on his next target, Kane swooped down
on him and flushed him into a deserted alleyway. . Pushed up
against the brick wall, the boy showed no fear until he got a good
look at Kane's face. Recognition, as well as terror, sank in rather
quickly then. Even he knew who Kane was.

Leaning right into the young vampire's face,
Kane hissed "So you're trying to call attention to all of us
because you're stupid?"

"I... I'm hungry and I can't seem to stop
myself."

"Oh, you can stop yourself. You just choose not
to do so. What is your name?"

"My name is Bonn," he trembled. "You're not
going to kill me, are you?"

"I haven't decided yet. Who is your maker?"

"She said her name was Lisette."

"Dammit!" Kane spat out as he shoved Bonn away
from him. "Where did she find you?"

"She's here in New Orleans. I was out with some
friends and we got separated. Suddenly, she was right there in
front of me."

Lisette was a very dangerous vampire because she
possessed a lethal combination of both beauty and evilness.
Outwardly, she had beauty that defied description. It was that
appearance which fooled so many humans over the years; even those
who knew of and believed in vampires.

Her hair wasn't dark like a good many vampires'.
Rather, it was the lightest shade of blonde. The only time her eyes
took on a red tint was when she was getting ready to feed or when
she was compelling someone. The rest of the time, they were a shade
of blue that the sky would envy. She was tall and slender.

The look of innocence that she wore drew more
people to her than if she had used her powers to compel them to
come closer. Everyone who saw her wanted to be near her.

For her to have snatched this boy from the
street, meant that her hunger had overtaken her. This fact made
Kane very curious. Lisette had been around long enough to control
her surroundings and sort them in a way suitable to her. What could
have happened that would have caused her to take someone just
because he was handy? Even more puzzling, why had he not been able
to sense her? Usually, Kane knew whenever Lisette was close.

"Did she speak to you?" Kane demanded to
know.

"Not really," Bonn said. "She did her thing and
threw me to the ground. But first, before she started feeding, she
told me that her name was Lisette and that she was going to give me
the gift of immortality."

"Let me guess. She bit your neck and the next
thing you knew, you woke up with a burning hunger, the likes of
which you had never felt in your life. You might have even tried to
eat food, but it only made you ill. Am I close?" Kane asked.

"That's exactly what happened!" Bonn cried.

"How do you know who I am? I can see that you
recognize me."

"All vampires know who you are, and most of them
are afraid of you."

"And you're not?" Kane asked.

"Of course I am, but if you're gonna kill me
there's not a lot I can do to stop you."

"That's very true," Kane said softly. "But this
is your lucky day. I've decided not to kill you. However, I do have
some conditions attached to that decision. You're going to stop
killing outright. Obviously, Lisette left you on your own with no
training. I'll show you how to feed without killing, and without
leaving the memory of your presence behind. Am I understood?"

Bonn looked at Kane as if he didn't quite
believe his good fortune.

"You know, I don't really like to kill," he
murmured. "I just get so hungry."

"How old are you?" Kane asked him.

"I was nineteen when I was turned."

"And how long ago were you turned?"

"Six months ago. I remember, because we were out
celebrating my friend's twenty-first birthday. We stumbled out of
the bar and into this crowd of people. My friends went one way and
I kind of fell in another direction. Then this woman comes out of
nowhere. Man, she was so hot! She's standing there smiling at me
like she wants to eat me up, which is kind of what ended up
happening."