“Guess we can rule out some snot-nosed kid breaking in at night based on a friend’s dare.”

  “Yeah,” I answered on a snicker.

  “But… that would also rule out a vampire—all those magical wards you have in place, I mean.”

  I let out a long-suffering sigh. “I know,” I finally admitted. “I guess I’ve known that for days—that the intruder couldn’t be a vampire.”

  “So, why did you think it was a vampire in the first place?”

  “I’m not sure,” I lied.

  Henner bent over the TV again and spoke over his shoulder. “Maybe you’ve got vampires on the brain... I mean, owing to everything that’s going on between Lorcan and you.”

  “Right.”

  I had vampires on the brain in more ways than one. After Rupert gave me his ultimatum, I’d loaded my store with more anti-vampire hexes than you could shake a stick (or stake) at. And I’d strengthened the wards—now no one with any inclination towards harming either me or my store would be able to enter. No one, that is, except for whoever was getting past them.

  Henner banged the side of his contraption three times with his palm, as if that was the final step. And for all I knew, maybe it was.

  “Whoever is pulling this crap can’t mean me any ill-will,” I went on, more to myself than to him. “And that’s the strangest part.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “The wards are protection wards—anyone who harbors any thoughts of harm towards me isn’t able to enter. Sometimes they’ve even worked on humans who weren’t in especially good moods—they’d try to enter the store and they’d bop right back out again, never even able to make it over the threshold.”

  “Hmm.”

  “If a vampire came calling, my hexes would blast them into a bloody smear on the wall.”

  Just then, the doorbell jangled, announcing I had a visitor. Henner and I turned to see Lorcan strolling through the front door, as if he owned the place. He looked every ounce the suave and self-impressed dandy he was. Upon seeing him, my heart did this weird flutter and I started feeling warm all over. It was a by-product, I believed, of the blood bond between us—recently I’d been feeling more… amorous than I usually did towards the infuriating man.

  Henner laughed again as he looked over at me. “What was that you were just saying about a vampire getting blasted into a bloody smear if he entered your store?”

  “Lorcan has an open invitation,” I explained, shaking my head. “The wards and hexes don’t apply to him.” And then something occurred to me as I narrowed my eyes at the vampire dentist.

  “My dear Ms. Witch and her groveling human, so nice to see you both,” Lorcan addressed us in his faint Irish accent. He appeared unusually tall today, dressed in his dark pants and his white dentist overcoat. His usually longish blond hair was pulled back at the nape of his neck and his emerald eyes glistened with boyish mischief. Lorcan was centuries-old but appeared to be in his early forties, owing to his vampiric inability to age. He had a handsome, chiseled face with high cheekbones and a strong, Roman nose—he sort of reminded me of Paul Newman, only far more irritating.

  “Hey, Lorcan,” Henner answered with a slight wave, not bothering to break protocol where the box was concerned.

  I glared at Lorcan. “If you’ve been taking advantage of your ability to enter this store by breaking in and leaving me bizarre messages etched into my floors, I’m going to stake you.”

  Lorcan looked at me and that smirk of his widened, until he resembled the Cheshire Cat come to life. “Alas, you have found me out.”

  “Lorcan?” I demanded, frowning, as I crossed my arms against my chest and glared at him. I wasn’t in the mood for his jokes—I had to get to the bottom of who was breaking in and why.

  Lorcan held up his hands in mock surrender, causing his scent to dance through the air and hit me full-force. It was a blend of spice, sandalwood, and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Very masculine and very… ahem, sexy. In fact, I had to dampen down my sudden yearning to throw my arms around his neck and taste his lips.

  Good Goddess, this blood bond is going to cause the death of me.

  Potentially, quite literally.

  “I must admit, my dear, I do have an escalating interest in your undergarments, but I’m afraid said interest is only reserved for those you, yourself, are currently wearing, as opposed to those you sell in your store.”

  “Gross,” Henner muttered.

  Of course, I hadn’t really thought the intruder was Lorcan, but I figured it was good to still check. Concerning Lorcan, he was a constant surprise. And not necessarily in a good way.

  I strolled over to the counter to meet Lorcan and sighed as I looked up at him and he faced me expectantly. I’d asked him to come in but hadn’t told him why.

  “Dare I ask why you called me over? You said it was important.”

  “It is.” Then I turned around and led him over to the changing rooms. “Over here,” I started before he interrupted.

  “I must admit I have never given in to my carnal appetites in a fitting room, though such has always taken top priority on my list of proposed locations.” Then he looked over at Henner. “And with an audience, no less!”

  “Gross!” Henner muttered.

  “Will you stop it? You know that’s not what I…”

  Lorcan grinned like an undead fool. “Come now, Wandellmelia, no need to play coy with me.”

  I swatted his shoulder. “Cut it out. I asked you to come over because I need your help… not your constant attempts at humor… which really aren’t very funny.”

  “Oh, you cut me to the core, my dear.” Then he glanced down the line of my body and added in a lower voice… “And I should love to experience your core…”

  “I’m still here, people!” Henner shouted from the other side of the store.

  “Lorcan, I will hex you in your most favorite of places if you don’t quit it.”

  He looked down at his crotch and then back up at me with a sigh. “Very well. Consider it quitted.”

  I pointed to the floor. “Look.”

  Chapter Two

  Lorcan frowned as he looked down at the strange etchings that appeared in the dark wood floor, contrasted in white. But, I hadn’t and still couldn’t make any sense of them. They looked like pictograms of some sort.

  “Hmm, I do believe your dust bunnies are growing to the size of real bunnies,” Lorcan said as he looked up at me. “Do you think that’s by magic?”

  “No!” I boomed at him. “I’m not talking about the dust!”

  “Then what are you talking about, my dear?”

  “Look!” I yelled as I pointed at the markings which were literally right at his toes. “There are etchings in the wood and I can’t help but imagine they must mean something.”

  “Oh, those etchings,” Lorcan answered with a grin and I wanted to hit him. “Looks like you need to stop wearing those death heels of yours.”

  “Stilettos,” I corrected him, frowning. “And those marks weren’t made by my shoes.”

  He crept a few paces closer, bent over, and inspected the perturbing carvings. “Hmm, perhaps they were not made by your shoes, as you say.” Then he turned around to face me again, took me in from head to toe and revealed his growing fangs. “Perhaps we should experiment with leaving some marks of our own?”

  “Why do I even bother?” I grumbled, shaking my head.

  “Because you do so love it when I make suggestive innuendo…”

  “Gross,” Henner grumbled, looking up only momentarily before he returned his attention to the box that looked like Medusa’s head.

  I stalked to Lorcan’s side and reaching down, pointed at the designs. “What do you make of that?”

  He looked at me and beamed that smile that made him look like a little boy with a devilish secret. “I make nothing of it, my dear, as there is nothing to make of it. I believe the scratches are just that—scratches. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “The question is who made them?”

  He shrugged. “And on that subject, I’m afraid I can’t help you as you’re the one possessing magic. I’m simply a humble dentist.”

  I snorted out loud. “Humble and you should never exist in the same sentence.”

  He didn’t respond, other than to walk around the scratched mess in the floor. “I believe… this rather inelegant sequence could be… letters?”

  I looked down at it, but couldn’t make out any letters. The designs, if that’s what you wanted to call them, looked more like a pissed off chicken had gone to town on my 19th century floors. “Letters? You mean like Egyptian hieroglyphs because that doesn’t look like English to me.”

  Lorcan slipped his arm behind my back and started to pull me toward him and his eyes were suddenly heavy with need, thick with desire. He was experiencing one of his ‘moments’ as I’d termed them. Every now and then, the blood bond between us would get to be more than he could handle and his need for me would assert itself. This was just one of those moments.

  “Have dinner with me tonight. I’ve been pining for your delightful company.”

  I pretended to pull away, pretended that I didn’t need him as much as he needed me. “We already have plans tonight.”

  “We do?” he asked, and appeared to be perplexed. Yes, the fact that his vampire ‘Kiss’ hadn’t been returned to him through our blood bond was definitely taking its toll. I noticed he was having memory issues recently. And he wasn’t the only person on which the bond was taking its toll—I’d never felt desire for any man like I had for Lorcan lately. There were nights when I would wake up, covered in sweat and my body yearning for his. But, I also knew he and I couldn’t go there—Lorcan was already dangerously close to the precipice—just one more step and he’d go toppling over into the territory of uncontrollable, a territory where I’d either wind up a vampire or dead.

  “Yes, we were supposed to get together to test out that new version of Betanya’s spell, remember?”

  At that moment, Henner interrupted from the counter. “All done, Wanda! You’re ready to rock and roll and hopefully I can get out of here before you both continue to gross me out with another macabre mating ritual.”

  “There are no mating rituals between us,” I insisted, glaring at them both and inwardly glaring at myself. “Macabre or otherwise.”

  Lorcan took a deep breath, then gave me a peck on the cheek before stepping aside. “Must dash, my dear. See you tonight. I can’t wait!” As he walked past Henner who was now leaning over the machine again, Lorcan patted him on the head like a trusted dog. “Be a good fellow, Henner,” he said.

  “Oh, I will, Lorcan,” Henner answered absentmindedly, his attention still riveted on his machine.

  The vampire slithered out of the store and I returned to my front worktable, just as Henner lifted the thing back onto it. The sea monster’s wires and tentacles sprawled across most of the top of the desk. For a second, I had another hallucination of the thing standing up and scuttling around on its own.

  Considering this highly experimental device was an amalgam of Henner’s technomancy powers and mine together, it might do just that. Henner was what we supernaturals termed a ‘mundane’, but he was still a distant cousin of mine. And that meant he did have some abilities, so technically, he really wasn’t a mundane. He might not be on the level of a full-blown witch, but he could still do his own brand of magic and his magic was in the realm of technology—computers, machines, and every technological mechanism in between.

  This thing was definitely something in between. I’d never seen anything like it before and hoped I never would again. The TV screen stared out at the world—and me—like a giant eye.

  “Henner…” I began, shaking my head as I looked at it. “Are you sure this thing will actually work?”

  “Of course it will work!” Henner answered, waving away my concern. With that, he switched on the TV. A daytime soap opera popped up on screen in black and white. A woman and a man discussed the fate of their family fortune now that Matilda had married that charlatan, Richard.

  I blinked at it. “That’s it? Some crappy old movie?” I looked over at him and felt my irritation beginning to get the best of me. “You spent four hours of my morning on this?”

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said and I felt like zapping him. “This is just a smokescreen, Wands. See?” ‘Wands’ was his new nickname for me and I couldn’t say whether I liked it or not… regardless, I was letting him continue using it, for the time being, anyway. He flipped the dial on the front of the TV. That’s how old this dinosaur was. It didn’t even have a remote.

  The screen switched to a video feed of the alley behind the store. The next channel revealed a camera feed from the front door while the third gave me a clear view of the interior of my side of the duplex. Hmm, slightly impressive.

  Henner flipped the channels one after another. The system revealed a perfect surveillance feed of all sides of my home, the store and its entrance, exit, and walls, and lastly, a bunch of views of Lorcan’s dentistry office just down the street.

  “Lorcan’s office?”

  Henner shrugged. “I mean… I had the stations so I figured I might as well use them.”

  “Well, I guess instead of Dr. Pimple Popper, I’ll now get addicted to Dr. Cavity Filler.”

  Henner laughed. “That was a pretty good one, Wands.”

  “Thanks,” I managed. I did feel a little ray of pride swell through me, if I did say so, myself.

  “See this switch over here?” Henner pointed to a toggle on the back of the TV housing. “If you flip this, you can go through all the channels again and get different feeds.” He clicked through a dozen more images from all over town, most of them centered around my store.

  I looked up at him in surprise. “You really outdid yourself this time.”

  “I told you not to doubt me.” He flipped the toggle. The screen switched back to the reception area in Lorcan’s office.

  Lorcan rested his elbow on the counter while he talked to a mother holding her small son by the hand. How handsome Lorcan looked in his scrubs and white coat. A squirm of warmth went through me and I felt his firm arm behind my back from earlier as if he were standing right next to me.

  Ugh, I have to find a way to get rid of these constant sexual feelings for him! I said to myself, even as I dampened down the sex stallion within me that was threatening to go feral.

  Things had changed between us and it seemed that change had happened right after a demon had nearly killed us both most recently. Now, I couldn’t deny the fact that I had feelings for Lorcan—strong feelings. That was a subject that wasn’t easy for me to face. In fact, I pretty much hated the whole subject because I wasn’t used to having needy feelings like this for anyone, let alone a silly man. As a witch, I was meant to dislike all vampires. That’s just how things were between the magical races. But, owing to what Lorcan had done to me—turning me into a Blood Witch (no matter the hows or whys), I was meant to hate him. I should have hated him! And, for a while, I was doing a good job of exactly that. Yet, recently, that hatred had dimmed into a strong dislike which had then dimmed into a mild irritation and that mild irritation had been sprinkled with a healthy dose of sexual need.

  So now I wanted to have sex with Lorcan, almost as much as I wanted to wring his neck. Regardless, I found it impossible to put the vampire back in the coffin, so to speak.

  Shaking my desirous thoughts out of my head no longer worked, much as I tried multiple times per day. Things were significantly easier in the days when I’d fooled myself into thinking he was a heartless monster. Now, it seemed every second of every day I was imagining him naked, imagining him inside me and imagining everything in between. My dreams were the same—full of smoldering, naked bodies in the midst of one sexual dance or another. It was like the goddess of Hedonism had suddenly taken up residence in my brain.

  As my deadline of ten days loomed ever nearer, I became obsessed with solving the puzzle and breaking the bond between us. But, that wasn’t easy because every attempt at breaking said bond meant Lorcan and me… nearly naked… at my house… with no one to stop us from doing… anything.

  I was worried one of these days, we’d end up going too far. We might wind up actually having sex and that was the kicker. What would happen if we did finally know each other carnally? I was afraid to find out. It seemed the blood lust within Lorcan grew to uncontrollable levels whenever we were… close. I was fairly sure sex would cause him to lose complete control of himself and that could be very bad.

  More than once I’d wondered if I should just stop avoiding what was most probably my fate anyway—becoming fangy. Furthermore, I found myself constantly wondering what life would be like as a vampire? I had to admit—riding off into the sunset with Lorcan was looking less hellish by the day, but I still held back. If I was going that far, I had to do it on my own terms. And I still wasn’t ready to admit defeat. I liked being a witch, I liked being the woman I was and I didn’t want to change unless I had no other choice, even as it looked like having no other choice was the road on which I was traveling.

  Besides, there were other questions that had come up for me most recently. Most notably: what if this desire Lorcan had for me was fully owing to the blood bond between us? What if, once he turned me into a vampire, he lost interest in me? What if whatever this was between us actually wasn’t anything at all?

  I couldn’t say why, but that thought bothered me… a lot.

  Because you’re falling for him, I answered myself. Much as I wanted to argue the logic, I couldn’t because it was true. I was absolutely developing heavy feelings for Lorcan and had been. And in the process, I couldn’t help but feel like I was driving down a windy road in the dark, with no headlights.

  “Is it working?” Henner snapped me back to reality.

  “Oh.” I shot out my hand and gripping the knob, switched back to one of the feeds of the duplex. “It’s working perfectly.”