Page 1 of Of Flame and Fate

Chapter One

I’m shoved into a cold room where a band of bloodsucking fiends tear off my clothes. Their long nails graze my skin as their master watches, his cold gray eyes glinting with malice.

“Son of a bitch,” I say, smacking Edith Anne’s hand away when she cops a feel. “The demon’s in my leg,notmy tit!”

There’s something you don’t say every day, but then that’s why humans are safe in the world and weird gals like me are stuck with demons burrowing under their skin.

“Just making sure,” Edith adds with a wink.

I’m ready to punch her in the face, except I’m too busy cringing at the thing crawling beneath the length of my shin, its spindly insectoid appendages stretching the skin as it curls up and over my knee cap.

“Get it out of me!” I screech, growing nauseous with each numbing tug it creates beneath the underlying tissue.

“We’re trying,” Agnes Concepcion snaps, like I’m somehow inconveniencing her by having an evil being claw its way through me.

Her tiny plaid skirt smacks against my hip as she shoves me into a massive glass and tile shower. Three other vamps, dressed like naughty Catholic schoolgirls (don’t get me started) follow us in, bottles of champagne tight in their grips.

“What the hell?” I ask, kicking as if I can somehow shake this thing loose, and certain the booze is to celebrate my grisly death.

Bottles of champagne open with a pop, the naughty Catholics pouring the bubbly over my breasts, back, and ass. This isn’t real. This is something out of a bad porno and somehow I’m the star.

But as the fluid reaches my thigh the lump with the creepy legs bounces, pulling at the muscle it’s crawling over, squirming to the left then right, trying find its way around the torrent of liquid they’re pelting me with.

“Don’t let it reach her heart,” Master Vampire Misha Aleksandr orders from the opposite side of the bathroom.

“What’s it going to do to my heart?” My head whips back and forth when none of the vamps answer. “It’s going eat my freaking heart isn’t it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Agnes mutters, adjusting her tiny librarian glasses as she angles the bottle she’s holding.

“Okay . . .” I begin.

“It needs your heart to nest and lay its eggs,” she explains.

“What?”

“But yeah, then the hatchlings will munch on your heart like raw steak,” Edith adds. She reels me around when additional vamps swoop in with cases of wine, drenching my chest with more alcohol.

She seems to be having fun. I’m mostly trying not to hurl and wondering how the hell this happens to me.

Agnes is more focused. She drips the wine just above the demon, forcing it back down my leg. “Quiesco,” she says, her tone as sharp and commanding. “Quiesco.”

My body shudders as the demon scurries downward. Its movement doesn’t hurt, surprising since I think it has pinchers, but the yanking motion is unnerving, like getting stitches while under anesthesia. My head flops forward and my vision starts to swim.

“I don’t feel good,” I mumble.

Agnes slaps me, the sting of the strike causing my eyes to whip open. “Don’t fall asleep.” She slaps me again when my eyelids flutter and close. “Taran, the poison the demon is spewing is numbing your skin and making you drowsy, if you succumb to it the alcohol won’t work and the demon will take you.”

Again, her palm whips across my face. “Stay awake so we can cut this thing out of you.”

I slap her back, knocking her glasses askew. “I’m awake, damn it.”

She smirks because she hits harder and maybe because she likes it, too. She returns to my leg when the vamp behind her hands her another bottle of champagne. “Quiesco,” she whispers against my leg, her breath hot against my cooling skin.

My head falls forward as I start to go under. This time, Edith smacks me.

“God damn it,” I hiss, my right arm quaking and threatening to release my flame.

“I was just taking my turn,” she replies defensively.

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