Chapter Two
TWO
Eleonore Bettencourt-Devereux was a rare creature in many ways.
The first: She had been born to an immortal vampire sire and a mortal succubus mother and was thus a hybrid with unique traits from both species.
The second: She’d seen many centuries pass, despite inheriting her mother’s mortality.
The third: She’d been chained to a crystal, magically compelled to obey a witch’s every command.
Those commands had largely involved murder.
Eleonore glared at the man who had ordered her out of the crystal. The binding spell allowed the crystal’s owner to turn her insubstantial and shove her into a rock whenever they pleased, so the fact he had been able to force her to manifest a physical form meant he had assumed control of the stone, and thus her.
Which meant the Witch in the Woods had set her free at last…only to present her to a new jailer.
On the one hand, that meant Eleonore could finally shred that evil witch into bloody spaghetti with her fangs, now that the binding spell had been transferred to someone else.
On the other, she now had a new villain to worry about and fantasize about killing, and who knew if he would be worse than the last? People always disappointed, and centuries of bitter experience had taught Eleonore there was no limit to how low humanity could stoop.
The man was gaping at her. Somewhat like a fish, or perhaps a Star Trek redshirt about to meet his demise. She took his measure, wondering what fresh misery he would deliver. He was tall—about half a foot in excess of her own height—with the broad shoulders, shaggy hair, and animalistic energy of a werewolf. He had a neatly trimmed beard and wore gold-rimmed spectacles, a stained T-shirt, and soft, plaid-patterned pants. Attire chosen to make a person underestimate him…if it weren’t for the silver weapons gleaming from the couch beside him. The spikes were long and sharp, and though they were currently tangled in thick, colorful thread, she had no doubt they would be effective when jabbed into an enemy’s neck.
Eleonore entertained a fantasy of shoving one into his jugular and watching the blood spurt before she lapped it up. Her fangs throbbed, and her stomach was so hollow it hurt. It had been a long time since she’d fed…in any way.
“I, uh…” the werewolf said, nudging his glasses up. “This…Huh.”
Eleonore bared her fangs and hissed at him again. “If you mistreat me, wolf, be assured that someday—be it today or tomorrow or fifty years hence—I will find a way to break this enchantment and torture you in a thousand horrible ways before cutting out your liver and eating it in front of you.”
“Oh,” he said, blinking rapidly. “Wow. That’s…descriptive.” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Sorry, who are you?”
She scoffed. “Don’t play the fool. I’m sure my prior mistress told you everything.” A former mistress whose name Eleonore didn’t even know, as the foul woman had never shared anything beyond the moniker “the Witch in the Woods.” Whenever Eleonore had been summoned, whether to murder an enemy or to acquire a human for the witch to drain of life, or sometimes just to read the newspaper out loud or watch Star Trek , her captor had worn a hooded cloak, so she didn’t know what the witch looked like either. The witch’s hands were pale, with a slashing scar across her right palm from the spell that had imprisoned Eleonore, and she’d glimpsed long black hair once, but that was hardly enough information to go on.
God’s bones, how was she going to find the witch in order to kill her?
The werewolf shifted from foot to foot. His eyes darted to her face, then away, as if her presence made him nervous. Ha! As if he couldn’t control her every action. He could tell her to slit her own throat and she’d grab one of those weapons on the couch without hesitating, mystically compelled to obey.
Rage burned in her breast. Hunger gnawed at her stomach and her mouth was dry with thirst. Her ravenous succubus need fixated on the bulge pressing against his soft pants.
Maybe she could intimidate him into masturbating, bite him, and then revisit how she would like to torture him.
“Are you…Eleonore?” the werewolf asked.
“Obviously,” she spat.
He blew out a shaky breath. “Wow. I thought the eBay listing was a joke.”
He sounded American, but she wasn’t attuned to his slang, since she hadn’t physically left the witch’s cabin or spoken to any other beings since her last official mission in 1969. She’d been summoned a few times since then for Star Trek marathons, of course—she’d seen all of The Original Series and most of The Next Generation , Voyager , and Deep Space Nine , since the witch grew bored without company—but she wasn’t sure when exactly those summonings had been. “Eeebay listing?” she asked, confusion joining her fury. “What is this eeebay you speak of?”
He reached toward the couch, and Eleonore tensed as his hand passed the silver spikes before retrieving a small rectangular object. “I’m Ben. Ben Rosewood,” he said, holding the object up. “Please don’t eat my liver. I just want to show you something.”
Saying please moved a command into the category of a request, but this “Ben” had no need to order her not to harm him. The binding spell ensured she would never be able to hurt him.
She eyed his large, capable-looking hands, then the object. It didn’t look deadly, but neither did a lot of terrible things, Eleonore herself included. Ben tapped the black rectangle, and a screen flared to life like the television in the witch’s forest home, emitting an unnatural light.
Ah. Eleonore’s shoulders relaxed infinitesimally. She’d seen this on Star Trek . It was a Personal Access Display Device, like the one Captain Picard used to seek information, although this was a compact version, easy to hold in one hand. The witch had told her Star Trek was fiction, not a documentary, but apparently there were commonalities with today’s world.
Had humanity conquered the stars yet? The last time Eleonore had left the cabin to acquire a human for the witch, the American government had been about to send a man to the moon. An unimaginable feat…especially to a woman who had spent her youth wrapped in furs and leather, sharpening her sword with a whetstone while gazing up at the cosmos and wondering if the stars were the silver thrones of the gods.
Now she knew there were no gods. Or if there were, none deserving of worship.
The werewolf stepped toward her gingerly. “Don’t hurt me,” he said, holding out the PADD.
Eleonore bared her teeth. His second order after demanding she show herself. What would the third be? “I wish I could,” she replied bitterly.
Ben’s eyes darted again. He was approaching her at a sideways angle, as a swordsman might to limit the size of the target for his opponent, and her eyes were drawn to his pectorals. “eBay is an online retailer,” he said. “You can buy things from other people around the world. Your, uh, rock was listed. I thought it was a joke.”
Eleonore snatched the PADD from him, peering at the glowing screen. During her last summoning for an evening of watching Star Trek reruns, the witch had told her of the so-called “internet,” a place where people could communicate, shop, and learn anything they wished by visiting “web pages.” Eleonore had had difficulty envisioning it, but she’d assumed it was a plane tangential to the physical one, perhaps inhabited by scholarly spider creatures with access to the multiverse, and that Picard’s PADD could access this realm through witchcraft.
Her first look at the internet was underwhelming. Black writing filled a white page, and there was a picture of a tacky blue crystal, nothing like the quartz she’d first inhabited or the polished malachite the witch had forced her into after the quartz had been damaged in the 1700s. The last time Eleonore had been embodied, the witch had said she’d found a more modern and durable vessel, but Eleonore hadn’t seen what her new prison looked like before being banished inside it.
Dark Arts Sexy Succbus She-Vampire TALISMAN PARANORMAL POSSESSED BLUE CRYSTAL DARK ARTS SEXY CONJURE ROCK, said the PADD.
Eleonore’s brow furrowed. “This is a nonsensical string of words.”
“Right?” Ben ran a hand through his thick brown hair, which would be just long enough for Eleonore to sink her fingers into and grip in preparation for beheading him. The movement sent a waft of his natural scent her way, and her lower belly clenched at the sweet yet masculine aroma. Just her luck that her new jailer should smell good. “And it was only ninety-nine cents and plastic, so I assumed it wouldn’t actually be possessed.”
Eleonore’s head snapped up, and the werewolf flinched. “Did you say plastic ?” She’d learned of said unnatural substance during her 1969 mission.
He grabbed something from the couch and held it out. Sure enough, the blue jewel in his fingers looked as cheap in person as it did in the picture.
The indignity! Eleonore bared her fangs at the plastic stone. She couldn’t touch it herself—some stipulation of the spell—but she would love to smash the thing to pieces with a mace. Alas, even if she had a mace, that wouldn’t free her from the curse—the witch had informed her she would inhabit some nearby object instead.
Wait a moment. “Did you say ninety-nine cents ?” Eleonore asked. As she recalled from 1969, a dollar could buy a gallon of milk, three gallons of gas, or a six-pack. “My service costs the same as six beers?”
“Ah.” Ben shifted again, looking embarrassed. “Less than that these days, I’m afraid.”
“How much do six beers cost now?” The gall of that witch! And while Eleonore was asking questions…“When is now, anyway?”
Ben had the PADD. Was it possible she’d reached Captain Picard’s twenty-fourth century? It seemed impossible, but perhaps her recent summonings to watch TV with the bored, foul, utterly disembowelable, soon-to-be-spaghetti witch had taken place over a longer timeline than she’d imagined.
“When is now?” Ben’s eyes widened. “Wait, are you immortal?”
Eleonore gave a short, dismissive hiss, baring only her right fang. “No, but time doesn’t pass for me when I’m trapped in the crystal.” No aging or eating or drinking, just an eternal, hazy, hungry despair—half blurry dreams and memories, half darkness.
“How long have you been trapped?” Ben asked.
Dull, regrettably attractive man. “I can’t tell you unless you let me know what year it is.”
Ben winced. “Right.”
When he told her a date in the twenty-first century, Eleonore’s eyes widened. She looked around, assessing his house in detail for the first time. The walls of this room were forest green, the couch was brown, and the only art in sight were photographs of smiling people propped on various surfaces. Hard to find details that might anchor her in this new reality.
What was the nature of this time? Ben had the PADD, and who knew how else technology had accelerated while Eleonore had been dreaming cold, empty dreams? It wasn’t the twenty-fourth century, but it was alarmingly close.
“I have been bound by that curse for almost six centuries,” Eleonore said, the weight of it heavy on her tongue.
Ben inhaled sharply, then started coughing. “Breathed in my spit,” he wheezed as he hammered his chest with a massive fist.
Eleonore eyed him. Perhaps she wouldn’t need to break the spell to kill him. He might manage to do it himself.
Ben finally stopped coughing. “Sorry. I’m just— six centuries ?”
“Yes, six centuries,” Eleonore said, a scorpion’s sting in her voice. If Ben had a shred of empathy—unlikely, based on past experience—maybe he would reconsider treating her the same way the witch had.
That witch had brought Eleonore out with varying frequency over the centuries, and it had rarely been enjoyable. Sometimes once a year, sometimes once every twenty—it depended on what was needed. Humans had to be sourced every fifty years so the witch could drain their energy to extend her own life span, but assassinations or spy missions could be ordered at any time.
“A six-pack costs more like ten dollars today,” Ben said. At Eleonore’s outraged exclamation, he cringed. “That’s why I thought the post was fake. I had no idea you were actually, uh, in there.”
Eleonore stared at him, trying to determine his level of truthfulness. He looked nervous. Although he was massive, he was hunching his shoulders as if trying to make himself smaller. His eyes—a warm brown a few shades lighter than his hair—met hers and danced away, and he rubbed the back of his neck while shifting from foot to foot.
The liars Eleonore had known were far more confident in their deceptions. And was the werewolf…bashful?
The curse meant Eleonore could easily become this man’s prey, but now she considered him with the eye of a predator.
Bashful was good. Bashful had few defenses against her succubus half. Maybe she could entice this werewolf, then manipulate him into, first, not ordering her about and, second, helping her find a way to break the binding spell. And then perhaps she could feed from him, sinking her fangs into his neck and absorbing both his blood and the inevitable erotic response that accompanied it.
She licked one throbbing fang.
Perhaps it had been hasty to threaten his liver. It was her vampire father’s legacy—during times of stress, it was fangs first, critical thinking later.
Eleonore tried to remember the rules of being enticing. She’d been very much formed from her father’s mold, and though she’d loved her mother dearly, she’d never been…talented…at channeling the skills of that succubus half. No matter how often her mother had tried to train her in sensual walking and fluttering lashes and the language of coy glances, Eleonore had preferred being blunt about her appetites and opinions. A negotiation was just a sword fight that hadn’t started yet.
Still, even Eleonore recognized when a change in strategy was required. She shifted tactics, popping out a hip, then dipping her chin to look up at him from beneath her lashes.
Ben gulped. She sensed a spike of carnal interest, lush and rich.
A promising start. Eleonore fluttered her lashes, feeling absurd even as she soaked in his fear-laced arousal. “So,” she said, lowering her voice to a purr despite the anger still roiling in her chest, “if you didn’t know I was in the crystal, why did you buy it? And…” She licked her lips. “What do you plan to do with me?”