Page 20 of Bewitched By a Vampire

He hadn’t been going for her throat like a vampire would, thirsting for her blood. No. He thirsted for her kiss. He wanted to know the feel of her lips just as she wanted to know the feel of his, and both of them were wise enough to recognise how dangerous this attraction between them was.

It hadn’t been hunger for her kiss that had transformed him before her eyes though. It had to be bloodlust. The look he had turned on her had gone way beyond hunger, becoming something darker. Craving perhaps?

Starvation?

That was it.

He had looked like a man starved, one wild with hunger. Ravenous.

Dangerous.

And it had shocked her.

She had seen vampires in their true guise before, but this was different. The black that had marred his irises, corrupting them, reeked of bloodlust. It was another thing she wanted to ask Gillian and her coven about, because nothing in what she had read about Bastian or Night had mentioned bloodlust. Their brother, Grave, suffered it. Suffered was probably the wrong word.

The King of Death had harnessed it and moulded it into a terrifying weapon.

Lilian’s gaze dropped to the floor. Had Night harnessed his bloodlust in the same way? Had Bastian? Maybe bloodlust was the reason he had massacred the witches of her coven in Germany. She had heard rumours that it could change a vampire into a monster, a beast who no longer thought like a man, acting on pure instinct instead to satisfy a craving for violence. If those rumours were true, then it might be the reason she didn’t feel as if Bastian was capable of the crime he had been accused of committing.

She had only seen the man, not the monster.

She went to her bed, slumped onto the end of it, and stared at her hands. Night wasn’t the only one with a wilder side. She had come dangerously close to losing control tonight. Hopefully the vampire she had accidentally hit with a blast of electricity wouldn’t tell Night about it. Not that it mattered. Her power was running low. If she didn’t escape soon, or complete her mission, then she would no longer be able to conceal that she was a witch. The spell she was using to mask her true nature was taxing, a drain on her magic as she fought to keep it in place every minute of every day.

She was growing weaker and Night had taken away the only way for her to get a boost.

If she had been able to reach Gillian, her friend would have been able to give her a potion to increase her strength. Together with the fact she would have been able to lift the spell for a few hours while away from the mansion, she would have had enough power to keep going for a few more weeks.

Lilian huffed and sank forwards to rest her right elbow on her knee. She propped her chin on her upturned palm and glared at the door.

She would curse Night for being so stubborn and loyal to his brother, and determined to carry out his duty, but being a witch with her particular talents meant that curse would be the real thing, not just a swear word or two designed to make her feel better. She needed to vent though. She needed to feel better.

So she chose one that wouldn’t do him much harm. It would only irritate him a little.

“I hope you can’t sleep after what you did, you bastard,” she muttered.

There.

She waited, expecting to feel some sense of relief or at least less angry.

She didn’t feel any better at all.

Sleeplessness was a basic spell, one she had mastered with ease as a toddler because it required little more than a thought and the power to make it happen. Human parents thought they had it bad, but their pain was nothing compared to what witch parents suffered if their babe had been born with Lilian’s talent. If the crying didn’t keep them awake at night, the natural magic of their offspring would. All the child had to do was think about being unable to sleep and the entire house suffered the same fate.

Lilian had mastered her powers though, which meant she could direct the accidental spell that was the result of her cursing aloud at one person.

Correction. Vampire.

If he hadn’t shown up at Bastian’s door that night, she would have been free.

Now, she was stuck in his house, awaiting her sentence, and her jailer was too damned handsome for his own good.

Heat flashed through her, a rush of warmth that had her biting her lip as she tried her hardest not to conjure up an image of him in her mind.

She failed.

He shimmered into being in the crimson drawing room, the candles casting a warm glow over him as he lounged in a sexy way on one of the antique gilt-framed scarlet couches that formed a horseshoe around the black marble fireplace. His piercing blue eyes held her immobile as he swirled the goblet of blood he held in one hand and stroked a line over his collarbone between the open V of his black shirt with the fingers of the other.

Lilian kicked him out of her head on a frustrated growl and focused on figuring out what to do. Escaping during the daylight hours made the most sense, but she had tossed another spanner in the works by cursing her guard to spend the next forty-eight hours without sleep, which was as long as it would take for her spell to wear off naturally. Not only that, but she suspected he was going to tell the staff to stop her if they saw her outside the room.

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