CHAPTER ONE
Connor held a spotting scope pressed to his eye. His adrenaline flowed as he levitated high in the air. He was forty feet above the witch, his heart pounding in his chest. He’d tried about a dozen times to leave, but couldn’t since his craving for the Tribunal Public Safety officer had finally tipped the needle into the red zone. He wanted her bad.
As a Border Patrol officer for Crescent Territory, he often spent time surveilling suspects. The problem was Iris Meldeere hadn’t broken the law. She wasn’t part of a Five Bridges drug cartel, she didn’t traffic innocent humans into their sick world, and she definitely kept her hands off the lucrative business of running flame drugs.
For a witch, she was a model citizen.
It was after midnight, but he was still in the middle of his shift. And he had no damn reason to be at Iris’s house, except he couldn’t help himself. Not that he had plans for the future since he could never actually be with the woman. As a witch, and a powerful one at that, she had the power to kill him with a touch of her fingers.
She moved around her overgrown garden, her voice reaching his ears almost incessantly. At first, he thought she was talking to someone on her Bluetooth because both hands were constantly busy, pruning, digging, cutting, planting. He’d rolled his eyes when he realized she was communicating with her plants. Very witch or very Iris, maybe both.
Apart from his bizarre need to spy on the woman, he hated witches with a passion.
A witch had started this whole shitfest with a brew pot. Result? Seventy thousand humans, in Phoenix alone, lived in a pit of hell, having gone through the alter and become something not human anymore. At least the original witch had changed as well. Witches were now one of the five alter species living in Five Bridges. Being an alter witch or a vampire wasn’t a choice; it was a genetic mutation.
His own story wasn’t unusual. Devastated by his wife’s death, he’d stupidly tried to numb-out with a hit of blood flame. But it had been laced with the alter serum that created a set of fangs and an annoying craving for blood. The flame drugs by themselves weren’t the culprit, only when enhanced with an alter serum.
He’d gained physical strength and long-life. Beyond that, he was living a nightmare, one that had started thirty years ago, not long after the flame drug craze had hit the human population.
Now he was here, watching a witch who had gotten hit with an alter serum herself ten years ago. Only her flame drug had carried the witch serum. He knew this because he’d Googled her. A lot.
She wore a purple smock over her jeans and a pair of flats that looked like ballet shoes, typical brew-faring clothes for one of her kind.
And he liked her in jeans. She wore them snug and that was part of the problem. He’d seen her dozens of times at the Tribunal building in her casual investigative uniform of short-sleeved t-shirt, also worn tight, along with the form-fitting jeans. He’d mentally stripped her clothes off about a thousand times. He swore he knew what she looked like naked.
Yeah. Obsessed.
And guilty as hell. His kind didn’t go with her kind.
His kind killed witches, wizards and anything else that dared to smash up herbs and throw them in a cauldron, or cast spells, or worse, kill with the tips of their fingers. Witches, like Iris, were a danger to vampires and shifters. She should be offed, like all her murdering, enthralling kind.
Yet, here he was, floating above her garden, so quiet he’d never be heard not even by another vampire. He’d gotten good at stalking the woman.
Iris had that feeling again across the top of her shoulders that a vampire was watching her. She had excellent instincts, but every time she either hunted through her garden or checked the night sky, nothing.
She also had an instinct about who the vampire was. James Connor, also known as Officer Connor, of the Crescent Territory Border Patrol.
Yep, Connor was here again, which caused her heart to beat hard in her chest. Vampires killed witches as often as they could, but in this case an attack wasn’t what she feared.
No, the dull thuds of her pulse meant something far worse. Against all reason, small tendrils of pure desire moved over her breasts, down the insides of her thighs and curled around her sex.
A year ago, she’d seen Connor at a crime scene, one that involved a couple of human children. Until that moment, she would never have believed a vampire capable of any kind of compassion. She honestly thought that the alter had removed all tender emotions from those humans who had become vampire.
That night, she’d been called to the same scene to make a full report on behalf of the Five Bridges Tribunal, the central governing organization for which she worked. She served as a Tribunal Public Safety officer and as such could move freely among all five territo
ries without too much fear of getting assassinated in the process. Murder among the five alter species was rampant.
At the crime scene, with so many vampires present, she’d remained in the shadows, content to merely observe and gather data.
Because of the bloodsuckers, her own killing instinct had risen to the surface, vibrating like a motorcycle engine on overdrive. Her fingers had ached to touch some pressure-points that night and rid her world of a few sets of fangs.
She hated this aspect of being a witch, the driving need to strike another species down. But every one of her kind, once having gone through the alter, felt an intense pressure to self-protect. She’d come to accept that what she experienced was a basic survival mechanism. Vampires and shifters killed witches, her kind returned the favor, though for her she’d only done so when attacked. However, that didn’t change how much she detested her new nature.
The crime scene that night had torn her own heart into a thousand pieces. Two children were found at the Phoenix entrance to Sentinel Bridge, a boy and a girl, about nine or ten. They’d accidentally gotten hold of one of the flame drugs that carried the alter serum, and had begun the process of change. But children couldn’t handle the sudden physical trauma involved. Death always followed.
They’d held hands as they’d died, facing each other. It had broken Iris’s heart, seeing their twisted bodies, fingers entwined. She’d wept quietly, and that’s when Connor had arrived.
She’d seen him many times at various crime scenes, but never like this. He’d taken one look at the pair then dropped to his knees, covered his chest with both arms and rocked. She’d had no idea what had gone through his head at that moment, but she’d felt his compassion in waves hitting her over and over, wrecking her heart and somehow causing her to become fixated on a damn vampire.
As much as she’d come to loathe his kind, she’d ended up craving him with a terrible need.
She was tired of thinking about him almost constantly, though. More often than not, her thoughts turned into elaborate fantasies that usually involved his fangs buried in her neck and his cock plunging in and out of her sex. Sick as hell.
Tonight, she was determined to change all that.
With a fresh lime in her hands, she moved into her workroom between the house and her garden. She set about creating a spell that she should have used about eleven months and four weeks ago. She had no doubt, once completed, the formula would end her obsession.
She fired up her cast iron pot-belly stove, using elder wood. Once blazing, she placed the blade portion of her hatchet on top. She needed the metal hot enough to slice instantly through a thick wax candle.
On her worktable, she cut the lime in half, then squeezed the juice onto a purified elder wood tray. She rolled a thick black candle in the juice and invoked Connor’s name several times until she felt the spell move into place. At the same time, she made use of one of her most powerful incantations. She then picked up the heated hatchet and held it aloft ready to slam the blade through the thick wax and break Connor’s hold on her.
She felt her witch power racing through her veins, giving her a heady buzz. The swirl of electrified energy let her know how potent the spell was. She had no doubt it would work.
With her arm poised and ready to strike, a soft longing ran through her of things hidden behind the veil of death. Her sister came to mind and she felt, as she often did, a trail of loving fingers down both cheeks.
She closed her eyes, her throat tight. “Violet. Are you here?”
A wind from the garden whipped through the room, smelling of thyme, the herb of love she always associated with her sister. Tears tracked down her cheeks.
Violet was long dead, killed in a vampire massacre nine years ago. Yet, in this moment her sister’s spirit was here, in Iris’s workroom.
“Violet,” she whispered again.
Once more, the wind blew in a strong gust and the scent of thyme thickened in the air. “Don’t you want me to end this obsession?”
This time, the fingers once more touched her cheeks while the wind blew. No-o-o-o, came softly into her mind.
Iris talked with Violet a lot, but her sister had never communicated with words before, not once in all these years. Yet, she had now.
“Violet?” She looked around, wondering if the ghost would show herself.
But nothing happened, no fingers on her face, no words in her mind, nothing.
She lowered the hatchet and returned it to a slab of cast iron on the long butcher block counter near the sink. It would need time and a safe place to cool.
She felt frightened suddenly. Something was coming and Violet was part of it, as was Connor. She walked back out to her garden to try to calm down, but again she sensed Connor was near, watching her.
But why? She knew the reasons she’d fallen into an obsession with him, but why did he so often hover above her house?