2 Witch and Famous
Read 2 Witch and Famous Online
Authors: Eve Paludan,Stuart Sharp
Presented by J.R. Rain
Witch and Famous
(The Witch Detectives #2)
by
Eve Paludan and Stuart Sharp
Witch and Famous
Published by J.R. Rain Press
Copyright © 2013 by J.R. Rain Press
All rights reserved.
Cover design: David H. Doucot
Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks go to J.R. Rain for your energetic inspiration, encouragement and enthusiasm.
Stuart Sharp, it is my honor and privilege to work with an author of your talent, caliber, credentials, and work ethic. — Eve Paludan
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Presented by J.R. Rain
“We all have our secrets.”
— Samantha Moon in
Vampire Dawn
I shouldn’t have eaten that eel pie and mash last night. The fallout of my midnight snack with Niall was that I dreamed I was a mermaid—and my silvery tail was tangled in a fishing net.
I screamed underwater, but Niall couldn’t hear me. My words soundlessly bubbled up to the bright surface, where I could see Niall sitting on the dock, dangling his legs over the water. Below me, the darkness of the deep held the secrets I needed to escape, but I was afraid to see exactly what they were.
As I struggled to free my tail from the net, something pulled me toward the bottom of a loch where Nessie lurked, waiting for me to come closer…
Just as I saw amber sea serpent eyes open, two things woke me up from that vivid nightmare. First, there was my phone, with a text from Siobhan telling me to meet her at the Fringe for new information. More than that though, there was the hunger that gnawed at me like fangs gnashing against my psyche. It was the hunger I’d learned to live with over the past few weeks, since I’d learned the truth about what I was.
The enchantress in me was clearly hungry.
I blinked against the sunlight that dappled Niall’s master bedroom and unwound my legs from his tempest-tossed linens. Those were wrapped, cocoon-like, around my bare legs. Presumably, it had been those dragging me down into the depths in my dream. I didn’t want to think about what else it might have been.
Being Niall’s lover was sublime. I sighed in contentment as the previous night came back to me in a rush. However, after a memorable night that ranged from tender emotional connection to sizzling passion that defied words and escaped only through cries, Niall seemed to have fled from his house before I woke. Again. All I could think of was that he must really dread those awkward morning-after moments—he always disappeared without waking me.
Always. He’d been gone when I awoke every morning since we started sleeping together. At first, I thought it was just the need to take things slowly, the restlessness of being in bed with someone new. Now, weeks into our relationship, I knew better. Niall and I slept together, but waking up together seemed to be a different question entirely.
Shaking off the nightmare, I dressed and headed downstairs. I checked in the living room, where there was still no sign of Niall, and checked my phone, in case this was the time that he had left me an explanation. Nothing. At least not from him. Instead, I found a text waiting for me from my goblin contact, Siobhan.
Meet me at the Fringe. Bring cash. I have information.
Siobhan was a goblin and a thief, but she was also one of my better sources of information on everything that went on in Edinburgh’s underworlds. Both the criminal one and the more literal one occupied by the goblins.
I headed out of the back of Niall’s town house through the open garage doors. I decided to take a shortcut to the festival to meet Siobhan and perhaps use the Fringe’s sea of emotions to put off the less physical hunger that I felt a little longer. I couldn’t feed from a crowd—emotions I tried to take snapped back to their owners without a break in the body’s defenses—but I could at least ride the highs and lows of the crowd’s feelings. I could always get some more human breakfast from the food stalls.
As I headed through the garage, David, Niall’s driver, was polishing the chrome trim on the sleek black Lexus that served as Niall’s car when showing up in the Aston Martin wasn’t quite right for the occasion. He looked up as I passed.
“Wait, Miss Chambers. Please? Mr. Sampson asked me to give you a ride this morning to wherever you wanted to go.”
“Hi, David. I don’t really need a ride, thanks.” I swallowed as I realized this was probably the best chance I was going to get all morning to feed. “But I do sort of need… sustenance.”
I sighed, embarrassed.
“I understand,” he said. “Luckily for both of us, I nicked myself shaving this morning. It should make things easier.” He bent down to my height, his skin just inches from my face.
I gulped. Since they were among the few humans who knew what we were, Niall’s staff were a lot more understanding about my feeding needs than anyone else would have been. I’d been feeding from them since Niall had showed me what I was. An enchantress. An emotional vampire, able to take feelings and manipulate them, the way I’d always been told I could, but also able to use them as fuel for magic. I needed them to survive, now that I had embraced my power.
That was the hard part.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and pressed my lips tightly against David’s clean-shaven neck at the site of a small nick in the skin—skin that smelled of fragrant vetiver aftershave. The placement of the cut was unfortunate. It reminded me too much of all the classic images of vampires, when a pinprick to the finger would have done the job just as well.
Or a kiss, but there was only one person I kissed, and that was Niall.
I fed—possibly a little too greedily. I sucked down emotion and energy through that tiny break in the skin. I could taste the blood there, but that had nothing to do with it. People always made too much of the blood. It was just a way in. If it were just about the blood, I could get some from a hospital or a slaughterhouse, rather than having to feed on living, breathing humans with real emotions.