Page 40 of Secret of the Vampire
It was Alex I ran to.
I hadn’t gone a block when I felt something sink its claws into my hips and shoulders and I was lifted off the ground and sucked back the way I had come. A scream rose in my throat as my fangs shot down and the vampire in me instinctively readied itself for a fight, my muscles tensing and my mind going over every possible outcome within the span of a second.
But it was all for naught as I slammed into the front of the djinn and his arms wrapped around me like steel bands. Hissing and growling, I struggled like a banshee in his grip, but he only chuckled, holding me to his chest with little effort.
“Sleep,” he whispered in my ear.
And then there was only blackness.
Chapter 15
Alex
“Where the fuck is she?”
It was Sunday, and Lizzy had closed the store and called an emergency meeting of the coven at her touristy voodoo shop—Ancient Magicks. We were all here: Judy, Alice, Talin, Angel, me, and Lizzy, of course.
It was also the middle of the day, so the last thing I’d expected was to have a pissed off vampire all up in my face. “Where is who?” I asked Jamal.
Lizzy put a hand on his arm. “Jamal,” she admonished.
But he shook her off. “He knows where she is. Hell, he’s probably the one who took her.”
My blood froze as the implications of what he was telling me started to penetrate my thick skull. “What the fuck are you talking about?” I growled at him.
I swear, I wasn’t a praying sort of guy. But at this moment, I would gladly fall to my knees and offer myself to any god who was listening just to have what I knew he was about to tell me not be true.
The conversation between me and Jamal had caught everyone’s attention. “Kenya is missing,” Lizzy told us. “I called this meeting to see if we could do some sort of a spell to find her. A tracking spell maybe?” She looked to Judy for confirmation.
The High Priestess was already hightailing it to the storage room, Talin and Alice on her heels. “How long has she been gone?” she called over her shoulder. “And does anyone have anything of Kenya’s?”
“Wait.” I held up my hands. “Her cell phone,” I said to Lizzy and Jamal. “Can you track it somehow?”
“I did that last night when she never came home,” Jamal told me. “I found it on the steps of the monument in Lee Circle.”
Lee Circle? Halfway between my house and hers. What the fuck was she doing there? I shook my head. “No. That can’t be right. She texted me and told me she was home.”
Jamal nodded his head slowly, his mouth pulled tight and his eyes knowing. “So youwerewith her last night.”
I found my phone and pulled up my text messages. “Look,” I told them, turning the screen around so they could see it. “Right here. See?”
“Looks like she was lying to you,” Jamal said with a smirk.
“How are you even fucking here?” I asked him, what little patience I had rapidly wearing thin. “Shouldn’t you be dead to the world in your coffin right now?”
He just bared his teeth at me in something that in no way resembled a smile.
Lizzy put her hand on his arm again, but her attention was on me. “When did you last see her?” she asked me. When I didn’t answer right away, she added in a quiet, “Jamal filled me in this morning.”
I ran my hands through my hair. “So Killian knows.” Weird that he would send Jamal instead of coming to kill me himself.
“No, he doesn’t know about your part in all of this,” she told me. “Jamal and I agreed that we should have the whole story before we told him anything.”
“So he knows he has good reason to kill me without feeling guilty about it?” I was only half kidding.
“No one is killing anyone,” Judy piped in from just behind the curtain. “We’re ready to do the spell. Do you have something of Kenya’s?” she asked Jamal.
“Yeah,” he told her and handed over a piece of jewelry he’d had in his jeans pocket. A necklace. “I wasn’t sure what to bring,” he said. “She doesn’t wear this all the time, but she wears it enough that I thought it would work.” His expression was tight with worry as he waited for Judy’s approval. “If not, Lizzy can maybe run back and grab a shirt out of her laundry or something.”
