Author's note: Hello and thanks for reading my werewolf romance. A new chapter will be released every Sunday night. BUT, you can read each chapter two days early by subscribing to my Ko-fi. For further updates on my writing, feel free to join my Discord. The next chapter will be released on November 10.
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[CW: This chapter contains derogatory language that may be painful to some transgender readers.]
I tried to sound brave when I called the Vampire Lorde a leech. The words didn’t feel brave. They felt like they dropped from my tongue as soon as I rattled them from between my teeth. Now, as this Vampire Lorde slunk through the darkness toward me, icy terror gripped me.
What little fire Mars lit in my belly went out like a candle on a cold windy night.
The man advancing on us was death walking on two legs. His eyes swallowed my gaze and left me trembling like a wounded gazelle before a lion.
My knees buckled, and it took everything I had not to sink to the porch and start whimpering. That was the aura of fear Beauregard exuded into the night. And he’d come here to kill me specifically.
I’ve never had someone try to kill me before. Sure, I’d been beaten up a few times in high school. It was the end result of being labeled the “campus tranny” in a rural high school. And there’s a certain level of fear that comes with walking down the hallway in a skirt, feeling alone and vulnerable like at any moment Lance Hulverick is going to pop out of a doorway and punch me square on the jaw.
But this. . . this was abject terror, staring down at the glistening fangs of a creature (because that’s what he was — a creature, not a man) who was drooling over the aspect of ripping open my neck and sucking down every last drop of blood I had.
For a shocking morbid second, I briefly wondered if a vampire drinking my blood would taste the estradiol and progesterone I took each day. I suppose that was my version of gallows humor — or gallows curiosity.
People think of strange things when they believe the end is moments away. And the way my heart hammered in my chest, the way my breath came in short ragged gasps, the way my vision blurred with tears driven by madness and fear, I was certain these were my final minutes.
Beauregard was a spongey bag of bones and dead organs held together by graveyard sorcery. Every step he took, the sickening smile on his pasty face grew larger. I was a thick-cut steak covered in butter and salt in his eyes, and the realization of being someone’s dinner pushed my mind into a whole new level of outright fear.
My throat wanted to close. I desired nothing more than to run away from this nightmare that I’d found myself in. Nothing made sense. Why was something as old and cold and dead as Beauregard here to kill me tonight? What horrible sin had I committed to deserve my life being snuffed out with such violence? And it would be violent. How else would one describe the piercing of living skin and the severing of nerves to drink a person’s blood while I hung limp in the Vampire Lorde’s jaws? That was violence incarnate.
Another whimper from my seizing throat, and I realized my hands were shaking, fingers trying to curl inward as though they might be able to hide from the horrifying creature before my quivering eyes. The night was closing in around me, and I suddenly felt like a sheet of paper being folded and placed into a tight envelope.
“Why?” I wept.
“Because Telsyn demanded it, darlin’,” Beauregard answered. “And what my Lady commands, I must do. I know it doesn’t help to hear this, but your death really ain’t personal to me. Before now, I’d never even set foot in Maine. Probably wouldn’t have ever crossed paths with you otherwise. But. . . orders are orders.”
When Beauregard was just five steps from the porch, my mate launched forward with bewildering speed and sank her canines into the Vampire Lorde’s knee. I heard the crunch of bone and cartilage as the undead creature hissed with furious pain. He drew back a claw of his own to strike, and just before he brought it down on Mars, she pulled her jaws up, and Beauregard slammed into the ground.
After that, Mars spun, and with as much force as she could muster, flung Beauregard back down the driveway and out of sight into the trees. I heard the snapping and crashing of limbs and timber from where I stood on the porch.
A second later, a nude Mars was standing before me, having left her wolf form behind. If my legs weren’t still jelly from watching the visage of death that was Beauregard strolling toward me, I might have been fascinated by how seamlessly my mate shifted skins.
My eyes traced the treeline of Mars’ driveway, knowing that at any moment, the Vampire Lorde would reappear and come for me again.
Mars grabbed my face with both hands and pulled my vision to her.
“Lilith, listen, we don’t have a lot of time. Go back inside. Lock yourself in the basement. I’ll buy you as much time as I can,” she said.
Her breathing was ragged. She’d already been fighting Beauregard before I woke up. Something dawned on me at that moment, driving my dread to obscene levels of horror.
Mars didn’t say she’d come back for me. The werewolf didn’t even tell me to try and run away. My mate knew she couldn’t beat Beauregard. She was just trying to coax me into a shelter that might hold up for a few minutes after he put her down.
And what would I do with those few extra minutes? Take my own life in a more peaceful manner of my choosing? Was that the only option left to me at this point? Should I be grateful for this last bit of mercy she could deliver me in the face of such overwhelming power of the night?
“Mars,” I whispered, unsure of what to say.
“If he was a normal vampire, I’d have slaughtered him before you even woke up. But that beast putting himself back together as we speak is a Vampire Lorde. He’s 200 years of graveyard magic condensed into a single set of thirsty fangs. I can’t beat him on my own.”
I shook my head, more tears drifting down my cheeks.
“Where’s Buckie?” I asked.
Mars shook her head.
“I heard his truck leave an hour ago. He doesn’t sleep much. Sometimes Buckie likes to go for a long evening drive if he gets restless. Beauregard must have been watching and decided to attack after he left.”
When I struggled to get out any more words, Mars pleaded with me again.
“Go inside, Lilith. I love you.”
But for reasons that are not all that clear to me, I took her hands in my own and pulled them down.
“I know how to use magic now. I have spells. . . ready and waiting,” I whispered.
It almost felt like the magic inside of me was moving my body at that moment. But the words I spoke next were my own.
Mars raised an eyebrow.
“What are you proposing?” she asked.
“That we live to see dawn. That you will take me in your arms again and again as I pledge my adoration for you anew. . . as friends. . . as lovers. . . as mates.”
The werewolf’s eyes widened as she considered this, and Beauregard’s voice rang out from the woods.
“Okay, now, Mars. That was awfully rude! I was quite set on letting your mate die quickly and painlessly to show this wasn’t personal. But your actions and wolf-like stubbornness are encouraging me to reconsider that decision.”
I closed my jaw so fast that I bit my tongue. His voice was a hand squeezing the very life and faith from my heart.
But Mars placed her forehead against mine.
“You are asking to step into a maelstrom of pain and derangement, of fang and claw. And I cannot promise you that we’ll survive,” Mars said.
“The only promise I want from you is that you’ll never stop loving me. If I know that I have your love with me until I die, be it now or in several decades, then maybe I can find the courage to fight at your side against someone so fearsome as Beau.”
My mate ran her thumb over my knuckles as the Vampire Lorde unleashed another string of superlative sentences from the forest. We both heard the snapping of bushes and limbs.
“Then listen carefully, Lilith Chambers, my Little Cottontail and the fated mate born to run beside me.”
Power spun from her words as we kept our foreheads pressed together, and I felt my heart bolstering as Mars spoke.
“You are my pack. I am your alpha. Your magic is mine. My claws are yours. Your loyalty is mine. My courage is yours. Hear now the alpha’s command,” she growled, pulling tighter against me.
Her power flowed through my body, raw strength of nature and wilderness shoving away the terror, the cold, and the hopelessness that had so vexed me since I locked eyes with Beauregard. Gooseflesh claimed my arms, and I gasped as Mars ran her hand down my chest.
All through my body, her courage built castles and walls. They constructed a magnificent fortress of bravery.
In response, my magic flowed through me to her, ready to be called at Mars’ command. For in that moment, she was my alpha. I followed her every whim, no matter what she asked of me. Not just because I knew she loved me, but because I Understood that by her command we would live or die tonight to the best of our abilities.
Her eyes held my gaze even as Beauregard stepped back onto the property in full view.
“You are a wolf. You show no fear. You hunt the undead that trespasses in our territory. You run him down and answer every growl of his with a snarl of your own. Kill the vampire. Protect the pack. That is your oath. Swear it.”
And with all of Mars’ determination and firmness running through me, I put aside my prior apprehension.
“I swear it, my alpha.”
Mars turned to face Beauregard with renewed drive in her eyes. And I believed at that moment, as she’d bolstered my courage, I’d given her the strength and resolve to duel this walking sack of death once more.
It’s one thing to fight and defend the woman you love. There’s power in that. But it’s a hell of a thing to fight ALONGSIDE the woman you love. That brought even greater power.
Standing beside Mars as she again shifted into her full wolf form, I said, “I have five spells. And I can cast three with each sunset.”
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The last words Mars spoke before losing her human vocal cords to the throat of a howling, shaggy beast, were, “I hold him. You hit him.”
We stepped off the porch and into a — actually, her description was perfect. The violence and chaos as Mars met Beauregard really was a maelstrom of pain and derangement.
But this time, I had courage and resolve. And Mars had me.
Beauregard drew first blood this round, cutting open my mate down the side. I almost flinched, but Mars’ courage continued to fuel me. I hung back at a distance while the werewolf recovered and sank into a frenzy with Beauregard.
Their dance of fang and claw destroyed the farm around them. He’d grab her by a leg and drive a powerful fist into her chest. Mars would roll under Beauregard and then tear into his back.
As I watched the two struggle, instinct ran through my mind like a live wire.
“You are a wolf,” Mars had said.
And I circled the two, waiting for an opening. I watched with the eyes of a huntress as Mars and Beauregard tore each other apart. I dodged, ducked, and repositioned myself again and again while they snarled.
That’s when I saw what Mars was doing. She wasn’t just trying to inflict damage on Beauregard’s body. She was driving him away from the farm and back toward the woods.
She was used to fighting in the forest, whipping between trees, and running through bushes. Mars was a wolf. And tonight, so was I.
So when she body slammed the vampire backward with enough force that a tree branch pierced through Beauregard’s chest, I ran forward while my mate dove for cover.
Surrendering to the instinct of my spellcraft, I felt static electricity building in each palm. The flesh covering my hands glowed blue, and I surged magic into each finger. This was my raw power, spellcraft bringing the storm to a trapped Vampire Lorde.
He let out a mad hiss as I slammed my palms together in Beauregard’s face. The magic I’d built in each finger exploded outward with a shockwave of lightning, followed by the deafening boom of thunder.
I blew half the skin off Beauregard’s face and even an ear as the branch that pinned him snapped, and the Vampire Lorde flew off to my left, crashing into a tree trunk before sinking to the ground with a moan of pain.
This is pack strategy, I thought. The teamwork of wolves, of hunters driving their prey to exhaustion before killing it.
Mars’ instinct had put a point on our scoreboard for the first time tonight.
But as the Vampire Lorde rose, I knew it’d take more than what we’d just hit him with to walk away with our lives.
So, we endeavored to hit him with more.
The next round was not so different than the last with thrashing in the woods, exchanges of blood via claws and fangs. Superficial wounds that would neither immobilize nor kill a Vampire Lorde or an alpha werewolf.
Beauregard caught my mate by the throat and slammed her into a boulder. The rock shook violently under the pressure he applied, and I heard Mars whimper as her bones began to bend and groan.
“What’s changed, Mars? Having your mate at your side juice you up? You still lack the power to kill me, and you still ain’t strong enough to save her. An alpha derives her strength from the pack. And your pack was eradicated years ago by my Lady. All that’s left for you to do now is suffer, as the newborn sorceress will when I open her from belly to chin.”
Seething with rage at the sight of my alpha pinned by this trespasser, I summoned all the cold in the air around me, drawing it in with a vacuum of heat. Frost spread across the leaves and twigs on the ground under my feet.
My eyes drilled into Beauregard’s wrist, the one just below his hand pinning Mars. And with the razor focus of a huntress, I willed every bit of cold I’d gathered to the joints and ligaments just beneath his hand.
Ice and chill claimed the Vampire Lord’s flesh and spread across his wrist, drawing his attention and furious stare.
Cracking and splintering skin earned me a grimace of pain from Beauregard. Mars took advantage of the weakness and distraction, surging forward and sinking her fangs deep into the Vampire Lorde’s wrist.
He roared in pain as the werewolf pulled with all her might and severed the very hand that held her against solid rock. Beauregard’s roar of pain grew twice as loud as he held the frostbitten stump of a wrist.
While he agonized, my mate zoomed out of range, and I hit Beauregard with my final spell, another clap of deafening thunder splitting his arm to his elbow and sending him rocketing facedown across the forest floor into the side of a hollow log.
The wood of that log shattered, and Beauregard didn’t move an inch.
For a split second, I dared to hope that we’d finished him. That hope built like a dim light bulb in my chest.
With the adrenaline starting to fade, my knees buckled. My vision swam as I held a hand to my head. The vitality I’d spent to cast those three spells in quick succession took its toll on me. Weakness spread through my core, like numbing waves.
Oh, I thought. This is why spell components are so important.
As I stood freshly drained by the arcane rituals I’d performed, I took shallow breaths, trying to focus on Beauregard.
But everything was so damn blurry and dark.
“Shit,” I hissed.
I felt like my blood was low on iron, sugar, protein, and every single thing that would make a girl dizzy with a poor enough diet.
Mars was covered in matted fur, sticky with drying blood and open wounds still oozing out more of her life liquids. I was surprised to learn a werewolf’s blood is just as red as mine.
But before I could say anything, a chunk of log the size of a car door flew past me. It moved like a baseball unleashed on home plate from the MLB’s greatest pitcher. I felt the wind as it missed me by inches and slammed hard into Mars with the full force of a bus on the interstate.
She yelped and vanished from my sight, crashing into another tree behind me.
My eyes tore back to where Beauregard used to be, but the one-handed vamp was suddenly standing before me, full height and menace unleashed.
“Well now, I do believe it’s time to tenderize the meat before I tear you open, girl,” he said, grabbing my throat.
I choked and sputtered as he slammed my head back into a tree trunk. A bolt of pain rocked my skull, and my eyes fluttered. The worst migraine imaginable flared from the back of my head.
Then, as easily as a human might toss a soda can into the recycling bin, Beauregard whipped me to the left, letting me fly forward into a thorn bush and get cut to hell. I screamed as a hundred points of pain opened up from my cheeks to my shoulders and upper back. Ragged thorns tore into my flesh as though it were a flakey biscuit pulled fresh from the oven.
And before I could even think about crawling backward, Beauregard picked me up with his good hand again and held me upside down.
“What do you think, Lilith? You tender enough yet?” he asked. “Maybe I could break a few bones first.”
The vampire dropped me face-first to the dirt, and I cried out as my neck crimped to the side, my full body’s weight thrown upon it without warning. And before my entire self was upon the ground again, Beauregard drew back his leg and kicked me across the woods. I bounced and scraped over dirt with every blow bringing forth an ocean of concussions and battering pain.
The boulder where he’d pinned Mars ended up being my final resting spot, the momentum carrying me and slamming my back into the side of the rock.
I coughed up a spattering of blood, eyes wide open as pain rocked my body. I felt like a puppet thrown into a spin cycle at full speed. Everything hurt, and I just wanted to close my eyes forever.
Beauregard stood beside me and called down to my crumbled form.
“Are you still with me, sorceress? I can hear that heart of yours a pumpin’ blood, but you’re leaking like the fuckin’ Titanic.”
Nothing moved. And I couldn’t think for more than a second at a time about which limb I wanted to budge.
I was pretty sure by the severity of pain in my left shoulder that Beau had dislocated the fucking thing.
The Vampire Lorde sat me up against the boulder and crouched.
My face was starting to swell, and I could barely open one eye.
“You see, sorceress? All that fight and pain for nothin’. Less than nothin’. I’ll drain you, reattach my hand, and be well on my way out of Maine towards my next meal by the time Mars wakes up and realizes what I took from her. It wasn’t personal, darlin’, but then you went and made it personal. Look what you forced me to do. You sorceresses get a tiny taste of power, and suddenly, you think yourselves goddesses. Then a big old monster like me has to pull you back down to Earth and remind you of just how powerless y’all really are.”
A rush from the trees revealed Mars pouncing on Beauregard. But he drew back his fist and smashed it into one of her lungs with far more force than he’d shown me. The Vampire Lorde clearly had a good measure of restraint for his power.
I heard bones break inside of my mate, and it tore my heart right down the middle to hear her yelp again. Apparently, my tear ducts were still intact because my vision went blurry with tears again.
Mars yelped as she started to fly backward from the momentum of Beauregard’s hit. But he grabbed one of her hind legs and slammed her into the boulder again. She hissed in pain and coughed up a whole cup of blood that landed on me.
And Bouregard continued to wail on her, driving my mate deeper into the boulder, cracks in the rock crying out under the pressure of his monstrous force.
My brain sank into fear once more as I realized the difference in power between us and a Vampire Lorde. It was truly terrifying that with half a face, one hand, and one ear, the undead creature was still 10 times stronger than Mars and I put together. Every strike of his fist into her body displayed that with force. Mars wasn’t whimpering now. I didn’t even know if her eyes were open.
“Oh, you stubborn wolf. I am tempted to just snuff out your existence here and now. It would almost be worth it to face the wrath of my Lady if that meant I got to pay you back for how much you’ve irritated me tonight.”
Drawing back his fist again, Beauregard spit on my mate and sighed.
Suddenly, my fear sank into the oath I’d given Mars. A fuse lit somewhere within me, and I reached for magic, a spell, anything I could use to hurt this fucker.
My mind swam back to the memory of that Bouquet that Phenna passed on to me. And I realized when I grasped for those last two unknown spells that I’d been wrong in my Understanding.
Those final two flowers I ate didn’t represent basic spells like the others I’d been gifted. They were two halves of a much more powerful spell, entirely separate from the arcane rituals I’d named.
When I reached for that spell inside me, only darkness answered. Hunger. The urge to devour. A gnashing of teeth, magically speaking.
I shuddered and pulled back. This didn’t feel like the other spells I’d cast tonight. I couldn’t comprehend what was stirring inside me, writhing like worms in my intestines. But two things happened that pushed me straight into the black of that unknown spell.
Beauregard struck Mars across the jaw, and I heard The Maiden whisper in my ear, “Ravage him.”
The fuse inside me met a powder keg, and I gave myself over to The Maiden’s gift. Darkness swam across my vision, and I saw the massive ball of graveyard magic that was Beauregard’s power, his core. Where everything else around me was dimmed, that tightly wound ball of gray light at this core that gave him his strength, his endurance, and his ability to whip an alpha werewolf like a ragdoll was the most delicious-looking morsel I’d ever laid eyes on.
I was alarmingly aware of the lack of magic within me, having spent my three spells for the night. But what I was about to do to Beauregard required no magic on my part. This spellcraft was vicious and took everything it needed from whatever I attached it to. The ultimate magical siphon.
Beauregard was a shiny car, and I was about to take all the gas out of his tank. Obsidian veins of hunger crawled down my right arm and turned the flesh on my hand solid black. My open palm became a magical black hole, eager to tear into a magical source and bleed it dry.
The ground under me cracked open, and nearby trees and bushes cried out, life attempting to flee the ravenous open wound I’d become.
Magic shredded the sleeve over my right arm, and I spotted the spider tattoo The Maiden left me. It had moved to the top of my right shoulder.
“Ravage him!” she hissed in my ear once more.
I rose just as he slunk over Mars’ body, fangs fully extended and ready to drink of my mate. Dead leaves and dry twigs flew into a cyclone around us as I snarled, and thrust my blackened hand toward his throat.
His eyes widened as I grabbed the Vampire Lorde and pulled him away from Mars with surprising strength and an unspeakable need for his magic. With a mad cackle, I drew his energy into my body.
I tasted death and the graveyard magic that’d created him two centuries ago. It took everything I had not to gag on the taste of sludge and tainted soil. Beauregard hissed and snarled as I drained him. He tried to tear free of my grip, but his power fled, and the Vampire Lorde knew it.
The air around me grew acrid, and trees and bushes withered to dust the more magic I siphoned from Beauregard.
Power like I’d never felt before bolstered my previously empty reserves. But I quickly realized that I could not entirely contain such a vast amount of magic. My body as a vessel was too young and new.
But at the same time, I didn’t know how to stop the siphoning spell. Nausea roiled my stomach, and fever took me as I cried out. The chilled pain brought about by swallowing so much graveyard magic raced to the core of each bone in my body, and I laughed all the louder driven by the madness of so much energy swirling in and around me.
Inky tears raced down my face, but the spell’s hunger did not cease.
“Please,” I whispered to The Maiden, but if she heard me, the spider did not respond.
Fear filled Beauregard’s now-milky eyes as his skin pulled back, and he started to desiccate. He opened his mouth to. . . what? Plead for mercy? Give me his final words? I never found out because after an agonizing few minutes of siphoning, his magic was finally gone, corpse of a body devoid of energy, core dimmed after exactly 207 years of “life.”
With nothing left to eat, the spell ceased, and I could do nothing but fall back as the chill of death finished spreading through every inch of my body. I was never meant to use that spell. And if I was ever stupid enough to cast it, I wasn’t meant to survive.
“Mars. . .,” I whimpered before my head slumped left, and I went limp, buried by the very death that gave Beauregard so much strength.