Siren's Song: The Gray Court, Book 5 (23 page)
About the Author
Dana Marie Bell wrote her first short story when she was thirteen years old. She’s now a
USA Today
bestselling author with Samhain Publishing and Carina Press. Dana has lived primarily in the Northeast with a brief stint on the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix. She lives with her soul mate and husband Dusty, their two maniacal children, two evil ice cream-stealing cats and a bull terrier that thinks it’s a Pekingese. She’s been heard to describe herself as “vertically challenged” and “a lapsed brunette.” Dana also suffers from ankylosing spondylitis (a progressive inflammatory arthritis that primarily affects the spine), and can be seen walking with a cane or tooling around in her mobility scooter. Her condition was the inspiration for Belle’s hip injury in
Steel Beauty
.
You can learn more about Dana at:
www.facebook.com/pages/Dana-Marie-Bells-Fan-Page/185916691436341
Twitter:
www.twitter.com/danamariebell
Look for these titles by Dana Marie Bell
Now Available:
Halle Pumas
The Wallflower
Sweet Dreams
Cat of a Different Color
Steel Beauty
Only In My Dreams
Halle Shifters
Bear Necessities
Cynful
Bear Naked
The Gray Court
Dare to Believe
Noble Blood
Artistic Vision
The Hob
Siren’s Song
Heart’s Desire
Shadow of the Wolf
Hecate’s Own
The Wizard King
Poconos Pack
Finding Forgiveness
Mr. Red Riding Hoode
True Destiny
Very Much Alive
Eye of the Beholder
Howl for Me
Morgan’s Fate
Coming Soon:
True Destiny
Not Broken
Halle Shifters
Figure of Speech
The Gray Court
Never More
The toughest battle he’s ever faced is convincing her she’s the queen of his soul.
The Wizard King
© 2014 Dana Marie Bell
Heart’s Desire, Book 3
Gareth Beckett takes the wizard throne in three days, and the woman who stole his heart is missing. Hoping with everything in him that it will call her back to his side, he casts the Beckett mate spell.
One minute, Genevieve Godwin is knocking on Gareth’s door to tell him she’s had a vision warning of a threat to his life. The next, she’s pinned to his sofa, trying to explain her recent absence to one very irate werewolf wizard.
Ever since Gen was forced to use her warlock powers to save him, he’s barely made eye contact. And now he wants her to be his queen? She’s a Hecate’s Own, not a princess. Her place is on the trail of evil—especially her own brothers—to bring them to justice, not sipping tea and making small talk.
Gareth is determined to keep her at his side, and not only to keep her safe. Between scheming courtiers, the threat of the Godwin brothers and Gen’s insistence that she be allowed to continue her work as one of Hecate’s Own, Gareth is about to lose his mind. It will take a powerful combination of witch, wizard and warlock to stop the magical
coup d’état
that could destroy them all.
Warning: This title contains explicit sex, graphic language, and a king who can’t live without his queen.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
The Wizard King:
“Oh, shit.”
Gareth grinned as his mate’s eyes went wide, her lips parting as she clutched the Beckett ring in her hand. He quickly covered her clenched hand with his own, completing the circuit.
He could feel the spell settle inside him as warmth flowed up his arm, twining around them both like a sleek silken rope, binding them together for all time. Heat raced through his system, filling him with the desire to take the next step, to take
her
and bind her physically to him.
The last step would place the shadow wolf on her shoulder, marking her as the chosen mate of a Beckett. If Gareth had his way, that mark would be there today. But unless she fully accepted the mating he could chant the last bit of the spell until the universe ended and her shoulder would remain distressingly blank.
So Gareth put aside casting the rest of the spell, knowing full well she was hesitating, intent on leaving him. His wolf howled in protest, demanding he claim her, keep her chained to his side.
Gareth would do what he could to accommodate its wishes. The thought of Gen running back out of his home to confront her brothers gave him hives.
“What have you done?”
Gareth growled out loud. Instead of horror, or sadness, or even confusion, Gen was…
Was leaning toward him, her pupils dilated, her lips wet and inviting.
She was aroused.
So instead of answering her question, Gareth did the only thing he could do, that wolf and man would allow. He accepted her unspoken invitation, kissing her with all the longing he’d felt since the moment she disappeared.
Whatever he’d done, however he’d driven her away, he’d regret for the rest of his life. Once he figured it out, he’d never do it again. She’d know she was wanted, was needed more than breath.
Whatever
it
turned out to be.
But that was a question for another time. Now the most important question he had was whether she was a screamer or a moaner.
He’d never understood how someone could say that another person tasted like sunshine, but that’s exactly what Gen tasted like: happiness and warmth and everything good. She tasted sweet, like she’d been sucking on a hard candy, and Gareth drank her sweetness down. He’d been starving for her, and now he was going to wolf her down.
He almost laughed at that thought.
No pun intended.
She whimpered, collapsing against him, trusting her weight to him. Gareth wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight as he plundered her mouth. Her total surrender to him, the way she clung to him, soothed the snarling beast inside him. Alpha that Gareth was, he needed that, to know that as powerful as Gen was, she was willing to give in to him.
But Gareth should have known better. His Gen didn’t stay passive for long. Soon she was clawing at his shirt, tugging it up to caress bare skin, her nails leaving little trails of fire as she scored him, marked him in her own way. He hissed as she broke skin, drawing blood, the scent making his wolf wild.
Just a few steps, and he’d have her. A few steps, and they collapsed together onto his velvet sofa. Gareth thrust his hips against her, moaning as she trembled beneath him.
“Gareth?”
He had no idea what expression he had on his face, but Gen’s eyes went wide. She tilted her head, baring her neck to him, that long, slender line and smooth, creamy skin tempting him as nothing else in the world could. The need to bite down on the fleshy part of her shoulder, right where neck and shoulder met, was almost overwhelming.
Gareth growled, pleased at his mate’s show of submission. He longed to allow his fangs to descend, to take that tender flesh between his teeth and mark her forever as his. He shuddered with the need to chant the last bit of the spell that would bind them together for the rest of their lives, marking her forever his.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bite her yet, couldn’t chant the rest of the spell. She hadn’t fully accepted him. So Gareth, despite his aching gums, despite the whining of his wolf, pulled back from that tempting flesh and instead sat up. He ripped his shirt over his head, smiling when her breath caught.
He’d bite her when the time was right, take her blood into him, chant the last of the spell to mark her forever as his.
Only when it was time.
But for now, he’d do everything he could to chain her to him without it.
You can’t outrun love, especially when it runs on four legs.
Love’s a Witch
© 2014 Roxy Mews
Hart Clan Hybrids, Book 2
Since a very real set of vampire fangs sank into her arm, Mary Fields has accepted that she’s part of a magical world where all her dreams and visions finally make sense.
As she journeys to find a Wiccan mentor who’ll help her get a handle on her new powers, she clings to the one relic from her former life—a sketchpad. She also tries to ignore the red mating aura she’s beginning to see around her only companion on the trip—the hottie she used to read to at the library.
Mary’s readings were once a fun distraction from the cruel joke the supernatural world played on Craig Hart. He’s supposed to protect her from vampires out to make her their personal blood supply, yet he can’t bring himself to keep his paws off.
As Mary digs deep for the inner strength to protect herself, one stumble off her magical path sends her straight into Craig’s arms. Where love burns…but so does a truth that could turn that red mating aura into a river of blood.
Warning: This book contains outdoor sex without the benefit of bug spray, and erotic biting that could result in involuntary eruptions of fur.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
Love’s a Witch:
Great. Don’t leave me alone with a candle. Yet another thing I could consistently screw up. I was only doing twenty or so other things wrong on a daily basis. It’s a good thing we found something new to keep up the variety.
My best bud, Amber, let me keep my name, Mary Fields. At first I thought it was because she didn’t want me to lose my identity, but now, cleaning up the burnt remnants of the hotel curtains for the second time in as many days, I’m starting to wonder if she just didn’t want me to screw up my name too.
I’m not a pyromaniac, I swear. I was trying to trance. I was trying to use the magic I’m supposed to have as a witch. When I let go of my consciousness I must thrash around a lot more than I thought. Or maybe the drapes were doused in gasoline. Normal curtains don’t really burn that fast, do they?
I’ve had psychic dreams for, well, as long as I can remember dreaming. Swirly electric wisps, neon blue hazy clouds, and various other things pop up when I am sleeping that would make any normal person believe they got a bad batch of weed. Those are the dreams I need to pay attention to. Those are the ones that come true. Even with the freaky psychic stuff, though, I’d rather not clean up these curtains. How far up the wall did the smoke go? I put it out fast, but fire is pretty speedy.
Working with the local Wiccan coven in Chicago was supposed to help me train. It worked out okay for a while. They tried to teach me some basics, but a klutz isn’t welcomed into the circle during athame work.
I learned two things the night they let me hold the knife. First, making a high priestess bleed when she wasn’t expecting it…not cool. Second, when you live with vampires, coming home smelling like blood is a lot like walking into a Weight Watchers meeting with powdered sugar on your shirt.
Did I mention that? My best friend is a vampire now. A larger-than-life vampire/werewolf hybrid actually. Amber towers above me by at least half a foot and even though women that tall aren’t common, undead women who can shift into a giant dog are even rarer.
I had a dream the night before she turned vampy, with all the neon blue clouds and green and purple electric swirls. In the dream I walked into the parking lot in front of Amber’s building and saw her there, standing in front of her own tombstone. She laid a flower on the ground and crushed the stone with a bad ass stiletto boot and one swift kick. Then she turned to me and told me it was time to go. The clouds surrounded us and that was all I got.
When I woke up, I knew this wasn’t one of the dreams I could wait to play out. I knew this time I needed to suck it up and let my best friend know I was crazy. Turned out I wasn’t. Just uninformed. A phone call with Amber didn’t tell me much, but the next twenty-four hours gave me an education I never expected to get outside of a horror flick.
I can admit to being kind of freaked out. A lot of my dreams have heavy symbolism. The witches said it’s because I don’t know how to tap into my natural psychic ability, and it leaks out at night. Hence the trancing and the subsequent cleaning up of the curtains that obviously weren’t flame retardant.
The smoke was still heavy in the air when the door to my room burst open. The chain gave way with a loud clang and the knob was ripped from the hollow paneled door. Craig Hart stood there, sniffing the air, then let his hand fall to his side and his sleek golden eyes narrow.
“Do you want to go back to sharing space with two hybrids still in their honeymoon phase? If you keep burning down our hotel rooms we’re going to be forced to get menial jobs, or drastically cut expenses.” Craig was mad. He always seemed to be on edge around me. The way I kept setting things on fire I couldn’t blame him.
Craig was in charge of the Clan’s financial matters. Amber had decided a group of hybrids would be called a ‘Clan’. Not that I needed to know any of this since she wouldn’t let me play her reindeer games, but Amber was the first female leader of a group of hybrids who had broken away from both the vampire and werewolf traditions.
Even though both she and Jake lead the group together, she had the ultimate power. Normally this was a man’s world. Like everything else in her life now, Amber ignored any tradition she didn’t like. She was making up a whole new set of terms. Nobody was willing to call her a queen yet, but that didn’t stop her from trying.
Craig’s a werewolf. Amber and her mate had offered to turn him into a hybrid, but he said no. Since Amber had almost died when she turned, I can’t say I blame him.
“You got me, Craig. I meant to burn the place down. It’s all part of my master plan to send smoke signals to the vampires who are trying to kill my best friend. ’Cause I’m a heinous bitch like that.” Sarcasm is the one thing I do right. You could say I’m fluent. “And he who rips doors off the frame, shouldn’t throw stones.”
Craig held up the knob I don’t think he realized was still in his hand and cursed. “I’ll go pay for repairs. You might as well pack up. They usually kick us out when we cause this much damage.” He didn’t even look back at me as he let the door slam shut behind him.
Of course it bounced open again, due to the lack of a doorknob.
There was no denying it. There were a lot of hotels on our way west that had pictures of the four of us on their DO NOT RENT lists. Luckily, we had a pretty good nest egg which Amber’s dad had set aside for us when we made our speedy escape.
I really missed Amber’s dad. I used to go to their family dinners all the time. Now that I understand everyone in attendance had been a werewolf, the epic amounts of food made a lot more sense. Alpha Paulson, and his beta wolf, who we all called Doc, stayed behind when we ran.
Did you catch the part about vampires trying to kill us? That would be Amber’s mate’s father, Kevin Meyers. He is the Matheo, head vampire dude, to the Meyers Family vampires in Indianapolis. At least he was living there when we left. The Matheo was less than excited about his son, Jake, mating with a local werewolf.
It’s a long story.
Jake and Amber lead the Clan I’m traveling with. Amber is a force of nature. She’s loud, crude, and I am pretty sure she has no brain-to-mouth filter. Jake is her mate, and I have never seen a couple overcome so much to be together.
We all had to drop out of college to run from the vampire Family who wanted to carve Jake’s brain from his head to harvest his miasma. That is what the vampires called the photographic memory bonded to his grey matter. Amber stole Jake and his magical brain away, so she was on the chopping block. I just saw too much. Being that vampires enjoyed drinking from humans, and the werewolves wanted to avoid becoming a science project, it was better for me to disappear. Run or find out how they planned to deal with me. The choice wasn’t hard.
The whole fight began over fifty years ago when Amber’s dad found out the Matheo of the Meyers vampires was mated to the shewolf who attacked him and his family. Shit got real. A treaty was put in place. To ensure the safety of the children involved, there was to be no fraternizing between the hybrid baby, Jake, and kept-in-the-dark wolf, Amber.
I could have told these yahoos that whenever you vow to keep a girl and guy apart they are destined to fall in love. Read any epic romance novel. The people who shouldn’t be together always make for the sweetest happily ever afters when they finally make it to the end.
In this end, Amber was turned into a hybrid. She ended up with some extra strength and became the first female to lead a supernatural sect. Sure, all of that came with a death sentence from her father-in-law, but seeing the beautiful mating aura that surrounded those two… I was honored to run for my life with them. Although I’m still not sure why, Craig came with us too. He was the only other member of Amber and Jake’s Clan. I am the fourth wheel. The one that spun out of control on occasion and set things on fire.
If I could join the Clan I would in a heartbeat. Humans, even with witchy powers, don’t have the ability to join a supernatural faction. I asked if there was a secret handshake or pledge. Amber said there was something that physically tied them, something they couldn’t make happen for me. I even tried speaking some of the ceremonial words the werewolves and vampires used to connect to their Packs and Families. Nada.
I’m pretty sure Craig hated that I was coming along. He never really came near me unless I was in danger of fatally injuring myself, or burning something. Such a shame. Craig had a body that would have been right at home on the cover of one of my erotic romance novels. Heck, he wouldn’t even need the artist to add the fangs for the paranormal pictures. He had his own. He was a giant wall of muscly man. He took his shirt off a lot. I enjoyed it a lot more than I should have, but unlike my best friend, I’m very much alive.
Craig towered over my 5’4” frame. I had brown ordinary wavy hair, and blue eyes. I liked my eyes and used to think they were something that made me stand out. Then Amber turned hybrid and got these amazing eyes that looked like a starburst. They even glowed on occasion. My only distinguishing feature was outdone again.
All I had that was different now were my dreams, and those just made me strange. Among a Clan of vampire and werewolf hybrids, that was a feat. It wasn’t anything new though. I grew up in a foster home and the one time I told my foster parents about the dreams they threatened to send me away. I knew there were some skeevy people out there, so I just kept my mouth shut, and got out the day I turned eighteen.
I tried so hard to blend in when I got to college. Then I met Amber. She was tall and strong, and so confident. Something drew me to her, and I loved how she could just be herself. She ate like a horse, wore whatever she wanted, and had the best dad ever. She had the most beautiful colors too. She radiated a purple with green lightning strikes. The witches told me I was seeing her aura. Craig had said something similar in passing. Whatever.
I don’t always see the colors around people. It’s usually when they are going through a strong emotion. Black with anger or extreme pain, blue with sadness, yellow with happiness and red with passion. I had never seen purple before I met Amber.
And because I met Amber, I was now stuck in this hotel room cleaning up burnt fabric. I pulled a bedspread off the queen-sized mattress, and hung it over the large window that led out to the walkway. No need for anyone to watch me do this. Especially no need to remind Craig. He was already pissed off.
The first time I met Craig he was working his library assistant job on campus. He held full-time hours there, so once I noticed him, it was easy to run into him whenever I wanted. He had the same purple glow Amber did. No offense to Amber, but I liked looking at Craig a lot more.
He wore glasses when he worked at the library to read the print. He would always take them off to look at me when I talked to him. I could see his honey colored irises flex when he looked at me. I would get lost in them.
I’m not even sure why he kept talking to me when I followed behind his restock cart. I was a dim bulb next to his strikingly bright aura, but we both loved talking about history. I read a lot of historical romance novels, and he had to tell me how historically inaccurate a lot of them were. I loved it when I found some that had it right. He would return the smiles I gave him at the library. Now I saw more of his tense back than his smiling face.
I used to read books to him while he returned the dropoffs or did cataloging. He would listen, and call out any incorrect facts or mannerisms that just wouldn’t exist in that time period. Then I tried some edgier books, reading some of those scenes out loud to him. Wow. Let’s just say if the man didn’t get a little aroused from my words, he carried one hell of a tool in his pocket.
That time together among the stacks of books was sexy, it was fun, and now…now we were busy trying to get me to understand my powers, and it didn’t happen anymore. I suggested it once. Craig shot me down. He said there were more important things to do.
The only other hobby I had was my art. I did keep a few sketch pads with me when we took off, but I could only draw for so long. It was a bit bittersweet every time I picked up my colored pencils. Memories of the mural I had been doing at the children’s hospital snuck into my thoughts. Now I had filled up cheap notebooks with the way Craig looks staring out the window of the car, or the way he stands outside our hotels to sniff the air and make sure we are safe.
I begged Amber to let me watch them change into wolves once for a little more inspirational material. She told me they got naked first. I told her I really didn’t mind, but it was a definite Do-Not-Pass-Go. She said I was her best friend and she wasn’t going to risk losing me. I think that was a bunch of bull. I’m human, sure. But I hung out with a lot of supernatural beings before. Only difference now was that I knew what they were.