Min's Vampire Read Online Free

front door closed and threw the latch, the dead bolt, and the
chain. But it would take more than just that to keep a persistent
vampire at bay. Sure, if you didn’t invite them into your home they
couldn’t just come in. But they could throw things through
windows—burning, smoking, poisonous, exploding things. And then
your house would be on fire, and when you ran out to escape the
flames, voila! They got you.
    So she had to think up some protective
spells, and quick. Maybe conjure up something big and mean and
wolfy to play watchdog. Could she create a bulletproof, twenty-foot
high wall around the house on the fly?
    Maybe I should
move?
    But then she took a deep
breath and sighed. She’d never leave this house. And no blasted
vampire was going to drive her out of it either. After all , a twinge of
excitement ignited in her heart, making the back of her neck
itch, he’d look so good naked, up in my
room, on my bed. Damn good.
    You’re really going to do
this—this astonishingly stupid thing—aren’t you?
    Min stopped and looked about her, at
the house she’d grown up in, the house she now lived in all
alone…practically.
    Yep, she was going to do it.
    Min walked back to the kitchen and into
the pantry. There, behind the Oreos and the belladonna, she found
the family “Recipe Book,” otherwise known as the grimoire.
Grandmother had called it her Cicatrix. But her mother had thought
calling it a scar was nasty, so she renamed it the “Recipe
Book.”
    Min thought of it as her best friend,
something that never let her down, that had taught her so much more
than even her grandmother and mother, and that had saved her life
on twenty-six separate occasions.
    As she rubbed her neck and found a thin
line of her own blood on her fingers, she was praying to the
pestilent gods that tonight it would be twenty seven.
     
    ~*~
     
    Luca doubled back to Vine Street, and
then started off in the direction the witch had been headed before
her glamour had led him astray. And at first he did smell the
witch’s scent, her hot blood. But not even a block later he lost
it, the trail going cold as his mind raced for an
explanation.
    Maybe she had magicks that could cloak
her scent?
    No. She would have used it all along,
or might have doused her glamour with her scent to keep him running
after her.
    What she had done, Luca figured out
just before he lost his mind, was double back herself. She’d led
him in the wrong direction, and then she cast her charm, making him
go the wrong way.
    That would give her enough
time to get home. Clever witch.
    Once in her own home she would be safe.
He could not enter unless she lost her mind and invited him in. But
there were ways of getting around that. Luca smiled as he
remembered throwing a bag full of live snakes in through the window
of one hapless girl. How he’d caught one delectable widow’s son
just before he made it to his mother’s door. He’d used the yowling
child as bait, and the widow had run out heedlessly to save the
boy.
    Luca had eaten them both.
    So, clever or not, Luca was sure that
once he tracked this witch down, getting her back into the clear
night air would be easy.
    What was hard was going back to the
cold trail to try and follow it again. No sooner had he caught a
strong, fresh whiff of her, than the trail evaporated, and he was
left brooding again.
    He turned back around and slowly paced
up the street until it came again. There was fear in that scent.
And something else; pure, unadulterated lust. Luca licked his lips
and inhaled deeply. He would have her, and tonight!
    As if the scent of her blood was
pulling him along by his nose, he slipped in through a side yard,
over a gate, down a short, dark alley, and out onto a neighboring
street. The scent became stronger, richer, and his strides came
longer and faster. He was close. The scent saturated the very air
and enfolded him in luscious torment.
     
    ~*~
     
    The witch’s house sat on the corner of
Temperance and