A Very Alpha Christmas Read online

  Dorian’s expression didn’t change. “I know, Cora.”

  The revelation was like a thunderclap, shaking my lungs in my chest. He knew…and yet he hadn’t come storming up to me with the fury that I knew he held harnessed within his darkness. Instead, he’d asked me to marry him when I had nearly betrayed him, however forced my initial connection to him was.

  “When?” I blurted. “When did you guess?”

  His words were soft, but his arms around me tightened fractionally. “I didn’t have to guess. I can feel echoes of what you feel. And that night, what I felt led me straight to your door.”

  My breath seemed to trip over itself. He had been on the other side of the door when I was on the sofa with Geoff, a moment from shattering the bond forever.

  “You didn’t come in,” I said. “You could have stopped me.” I was ashamed of how close to a plea those words were. Almost as ashamed as I was with how much I must have hurt him then. He was my captor and I his prisoner, but he had not been able to choose the bond any more than I had been able to deny it.

  His eyes glittered, cutting my heart with their sharpness. “I didn’t need to. I knew you would stop yourself. However close you came.”

  I shook my head. “You couldn’t know that. I didn’t know that.”

  He didn’t argue. Instead, he said, “If I had come in, would you have ever believed that you were truly mine?”

  That silenced me for a long moment as I worked through the twists and turns of that thought. If he’d come in then, it would have been for nothing more than another coercion—a reason for hate, not love, if I could manage anything like that with the bond that united us. If he hadn’t wiped my mind at that moment and turned me into a doll-woman, I would have always held a piece of myself back, knowing that what was between us had been forced upon me.

  “That’s why you proposed last night, then,” I said slowly. “You wanted me to choose, once and for all. And you thought I’d choose you. But I didn’t. Not until Geoff—” I shuddered at the memory.

  “You would have chosen me,” he said. “You might have fled at the moment, but you were running as much from yourself as from me. And that never works. Wherever you go, you will always be there. And so will your need for me, whatever name you choose to give it—lust or love—”

  “Or all that and so much more,” I finished for him. “I’m sorry, Dorian. For what I put you through.”

  His laugh was mirthless. “You were as right as I was in the beginning. You didn’t choose this. And I hid from you that there was still a choice for you. Without you….” He shook his head. “I’m old, Cora. Too old to do this again. I couldn’t risk you making the wrong decision.”

  “The wrong decision for you,” I said softly.

  “For both of us,” he corrected.

  It would have been for me. But not for everyone. I might have been one of the rare humans who was happier free of both the wonder and horror of the bond. He couldn’t know that. He could only believe it—as I could only believe it. There was no way to test it out that wasn’t irrevocable. And now….

  Now I’d rather die than give him up.

  I wondered when this change had come about, whether it had truly happened during the moment of the attack when the bond was about to be ripped from me forever or whether it had happened long before but I had been unable to accept it. It couldn’t have been the first time that he’d touched me or the first time we’d had sex. That was ludicrous. Perhaps it had been in the madness of the night after my introduction—or in the fragile vulnerability of the next morning.

  Or perhaps I’d been born for him, destined for this forever, but unaware until that crucial instant of crisis.

  Dorian continued, “I’m not without compassion, Cora. It doesn’t come easily to me, being what I am, but I like to believe that I’ve learned the ways of it.”

  Better than I have, I thought. I made a poor Beauty to his Beast, running after my old life, leaving him to his loneliness.

  But I’d come back. And I’d made my decision to stand with him, my beautiful vampire, who was and always would be the Beast and the prince in one, at the same time.

  “Thank you,” I said simply. “For everything. I’ll never leave you again, Dorian. Whatever happens. I promise you that.”

  His eyes sparked under the sweep of his black brows. “I know, Cora. Because I’ll never leave you. Not until the end of time.”

  Then he kissed me again, and those were the last words that were spoken for a very long time.

  The End

  About V. M. Black

  V. M. Black is the NY Times bestselling author of the Billionaire Vampire and Black Mesa Shifters series. Visit her website at aetherealbonds.com for more information. aetherealbonds.com

  When Darkness Falls by Terah Edun

  If New York City falls, the rest of the world will follow. Holidays be damned.

  As the junior demon hunter for the Southern region, Rhiannon Slator’s job involves a lot more low-ranking minion banishments than she’d like. In short, she protects the human regions of Hell while her friends go off and fight the mega-demons of Heaven. But when New York City is hit with the most deadly attack in its history, she’s upended not only from her low-level job in the boondocks but forced center-stage into a demonic battle for power…just in time for the holidays.

  1

  Stocks. They flashed by on the little ticker across the wide-screen TV almost as fast as her eyes had time to read them. It didn’t help that Rhiannon was studying them with a lazy eye while she really focused on the news reporter’s broad shoulders, pearly whites, and cheery morning smile.

  He of the wavy, blond hair and clean-cut gray suit was too happy for such an early start to the day. She tried to infuse herself with the sunny brightness wafting from the TV like a mega-watt bulb. But she couldn’t. It was too damned early in the day. The crack of dawn almost at seven a.m.

  Rhiannon glanced down at her watch and cursed, nearly choking on her coffee in the process. She had lost track of time. Again.

  My boss is going to kill me, she thought miserably as tried not to choke on her early-morning beverage of choice. Unfortunately that only made the situation worse and the coughing fit that erupted was enough for her to spill the delectable brown liquid all over her sheets with the shaking of her hand.

  Great, another thing to throw in the wash, she thought while her eye caught on the laundry basket half hidden by the open closet door. She despised doing the wash. Which is why the basket was full and the spilled coffee was just the frosting on a cake for a morning that was already going wrong.

  Setting the mug down on her night dresser, she wiped the back of her forearm against her mouth and tried not to curse up a further storm.

  Her morning had just officially been lost. Because it wasn’t seven a.m., not according to her watch. It was seven twenty-six. And she was late. Like most days in her life. But today was special. Today she wasn’t supposed to be lounging in bed with one eye half open and a remote in her hand. Today she wasn’t supposed to be lying back with her hair wild across the pillows. Today she was supposed to be dressed to impress because she had a date.

  A date with a sexy demon. At least…she hoped he was sexy. When she had picked him off that online site she had specified sexy. Sexy and armed to the teeth.

  They were going hunting in the Void, after all, and it wouldn’t due to be caught hunting without a permit, in this case a living permit in the form of her sexy demon. And his handsome smile would just have to be the bonus she needed to get her fat ass out of bed, downstairs into her car, and onto the turnpike before she lost her job.

  She was going to make it to work. That demon she had requested had better make it as well, for both their sakes.

  If she was going to get up at the crack of dawn, in this case anything before eight a.m. in Rhiannon’s mind, well then that demon had better deliver on the sex appeal. So help her god.

  Grumbling to herself, Rhiannon sai
d, “How did my life go wrong? How is a date with a devil’s minion the greatest part of my week? And why is the date at the freaking crack of dawn?”

  She snorted as she scrambled across the cotton bedsheets that her mother had airmailed to her from a stakeout in Borneo on the day her youngest daughter had moved into her new townhome. The sheets hadn’t come without their own restrictions, though. Rhiannon had had to listen to her mother’s admonishments from halfway around the world that she needed to wash them every week to keep a proper home, as if that was going to ever happen.

  There were two things that Rhiannon and her mother didn’t agree on. Rhiannon suspected there would have been a lot more contentious topics if she had actually grown up with her mother in her life instead of being raising by her twin aunt, who might as well have been the night to her mother’s day.

  But Rhiannon knew her mother had desires…more like demands…of her.

  The first was that Rhiannon needed to keep a clean house.

  The second? That Rhiannon needed to find a man.

  One was much harder than the former, depending on who was telling the tale. The man part they had agreed to disagree on after Rhiannon had turned her aunt’s last suitor from the local Baptist church into a creature he much more accurately personified—a sheep. The tongue-lashing she had gotten after that had had her ears ringing. But the satisfaction of seeing that mealy-mouthed man led out of her house—excuse me, her aunt and uncle’s house—with a rope around his neck and bahhing for all his worth had given Rhiannon Slater no little joy. She’d even gotten a bit of reputation among the gossip-mongers that were her non-magical aunt’s church crew. They had since stopped coming around with their sons, her mother had stopped sending non-casual letters about grandchildren, and Rhiannon had once more had peace in her life.

  So it had all worked out after a few contentious years and they continued to agree to disagree on the subject of the man, or lack thereof, in Rhiannon’s otherwise pretty average witchy life.

  But the housecleaning? Oh, that was all-out war then and still was now…even if Rhiannon did happen to live in her own home. If her aunt came over and saw one speck of dust, the tirade was never-ending, and Rhiannon knew she would spend the rest of the evening with an eye-twitch. They didn’t just argue of how often she needed to be cleaned, but what constituted clean, and how it should be done.

  Typical arguments between a teenage daughter and foster mother that hadn’t really died down regardless of the fact that Rhiannon was all grown up and twenty-four now. If you asked her aunt, she might as well as be twelve and was still in need her aunt’s firm hand. It always made Rhiannon wonder what it would have been like to be raised by the globe-trotting, famously successful Void-hunter of mother.

  But long ago, when she had spent more than seven days at once with her mother, she had decided she really didn’t want to know. That one week had been traumatic enough. For both of them.

  Now Rhiannon stayed on her own, having moved out of her aunt’s family home in the dead of night at twenty-three. Long story short, it had involved a shrieking banshee of an aunt and an annoying fire dragon that her mother kept as a pet that had forced her to make the choice, and now here she was, in her home…still sleeping on her mother’s sheets.

  “They’re mine, not hers,” Rhiannon said as she turned on the hot water in her master bathroom and hopped into the shower with a hope and a prayer. A prayer that the hot water heater was working this morning. Her shriek a second later probably woke the dead and definitely woke the neighbors.

  The water heater was definitely not working on this lovely southern Sunday morning.

  “Just what I needed,” she shouted as she scrambled out of the torture device. “A freezing shower on a cold fall morning. How is this my life?”

  She grabbed a towel as she finished the sentence and hurried to dry off.

  With a baleful glare at the still-running shower, Rhiannon turned around and raced into her bedroom with a shout over her shoulder, “You’d better be hot by the time I get back or so help me, God...”

  She didn’t finish the angry prayer. She didn’t have to. The threat was enough.

  Going from her closet to her chest of drawers and back again, she threw out an outfit that would have had her college dean in apoplectic shock and her aunt’s mouth turned into a disapproving frown. It consisted of skin-tight leather pants, an over-sized large sweater, some hoop earrings, and some suede boots she’d been dying to wear since summer.

  Hey, she would going demon-hunting. No reason not to look cute while doing it. Although she suspected her aunt and her dean would have very different reasons for why the outfit was inappropriate. One doesn’t hunt beside the devil’s minions in heels was a favorite saying amongst her sisters in college. The women who braved the Void every dawn by her side to hunt those that tried to escape their grasp. They weren’t her sisters by blood. But she wouldn’t have anyone else by her side. They had all learned the saying from the head dean who trained them in combat.

  Peering into the closet, Rhiannon couldn’t find the last accessory to her outfit.

  Grimacing, she hiked up the slipping towel a little higher and quickly rolled the ends at the top so that it would stay secure. Letting go, she leaned over until her entire upper torso was in the closet and she pushed aside shoe boxes as she searched.

  Sending a pair of red stilettos sailing over her shoulders, Rhiannon chuckled and said, “Found you!”

  Standing up, she emerged from the closet triumphant. Or rather, she tried to. Instead her head got caught in some clothes and she yelped as she felt a hanger tugging on her curls.

  “Today is not the day,” she cried as she disentangled herself and pushed back out of the closet with so much force that she ended up on her bum in the middle of the room with shoes strewn all around her and the prize she’d been digging for in her lap.

  A dual-action crossbow equipped with enough firepower to take on Hell.

  2

  With a grimace, Rhiannon picked up the heavy wooden crossbow from where it sat astride her knees and looked down at her brown thighs. She couldn’t see a bruise, but she could already tell she would be aching in the afternoon.

  She stood up then, balancing one hand on the floor to compensate for the extra weight in her arms. She was facing the bedroom wall and the windows facing the pine-covered forest floor outside. She couldn’t see the trees, but she knew they were there. Just like she instinctively knew to raise the crossbow up a half an inch and a quarter-inch to the right.

  “Perfect shot,” she said with a smirk.

  Taking aim at a lone Christmas ornament she kept over her window for moments just like these, Rhiannon loaded a bolt and fired.

  The satisfying sound of the thin walls of the orb shattering as the bolt hit her target and ploughed about two inches deep into her wall was the most satisfying noise to her early morning ears. She’d mourn the dent in her wall later. Maybe even put a framed picture over it at some point.

  But for now she was armed, she was ready, and she needed to get going.

  Rolling her shoulders to get rid of the stiffness that even sleep and a soft bed couldn’t get rid of, Rhiannon tossed the crossbow onto her comforter as she tried to block out the incessant chirping of the birds outside. Their chirps were high-pitched and stringent, the sound of a nest of birds that were alarmed at that sound of her bolt hitting the wall next to their little heads.

  Well, they should be, she thought with no little satisfaction. She despised early risers. Birds included.

  Finally Rhiannon shook her head and decided to refocus on the blond newsman on her TV.

  He greeted her every morning with a cheery smile. It was always the same thing. A look at the stocks and how the U.S. was doing on the world stage. Maybe a video clip of the president visiting with another head of state or a look at a natural disaster in another part of the world. She expected no different today. Why would she, after all? Get up and hunt with demons. Watch the news.
Re-start the day. Her life never changed.

  She could even say…it was boring. After all, the South wasn’t well-known for its high-level Void activity. Quite the opposite. After the Civil War all the major nexus points of travel to and from the other realms were shut down in Rhiannon’s part of the country.

  Everything south of the Mason-Dixon line was nothing higher than a level-three Void crossing. With one being the lowest. Which is why a junior agent like herself could tackle the job with one measly demon by her side.

  But to Rhiannon’s practiced ear, something was different today. Her newsman didn’t sound the same today. He was still cheery but that cheeriness had taken on a hint of uncertainty.

  That’s not like him at all, she thought, still not too concerned. Maybe the stock market’s doing worse than I thought.

  If it was, that was no skin off her back. She’d survive just like she always did. Besides, he’d been watching the markets, but not too closely. She had a bit of cash in different stocks but not enough to force her to get up at the opening bell and trade like a madwoman. She was comfortable. She wasn’t rich. Her news guy, on the other hand, looked like just the type to have had his life savings tied up in “that mess of companies,” as her grandmother had called the market. With a haircut that cost two hundred dollars a clip and a smile that said he’d had veneers put on before he was twenty-five.

  If she had been a huge investor, she’d be a lot more stressed out about the market than she was now. She didn’t think turning as pale and shaky as a ghost would have been a good look on her in any case. She was glad to be young and relatively free of those encumbrances. In other words, she was too poor to know much about anything regarding stocks and trading beyond the bare limits.