Harper Allen - Vampaholic

He’d saved Megan from having to stake me, I thought as I felt more sunlight pour over me. He’d saved me from having to die by my own sister’s hand. I looked down at my arms, sure they were starting to burn now, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

A final wisp of smoke drifted and died in the air. The heat bubbles on my skin collapsed without bursting. Even as I watched, my skin became smooth, as if I’d imagined everything I’d seen.

Jack pulled me closer and put his mouth to my hair. “I don’t kill humans, and the only reason I can think of for you not burning is that you’ve still got some human in you. But you and I both know you’re turning, and when you do I intend to finish what I started tonight. That’s a promise, vamp.”

Harper Allen,her husband and their menagerie of cats and dogs divide their time between a home in the country and a house in town. She grew up reading Stephen King, John D MacDonald and John Steinbeck, among others, and has them to blame for her lifelong passion for reading and writing.

BY

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Cover Page

Excerpt All of a sudden I was grateful to Jack Rawls. He’d saved Megan from having to stake me, I thought as I felt more sunlight pour over me. He’d saved me from having to die by my own sister’s hand. I looked down at my arms, sure they were starting to burn now, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. A final wisp of smoke drifted and died in the air. The heat bubbles on my skin collapsed without bursting. Even as I watched, my skin became smooth, as if I’d imagined everything I’d seen. Jack pulled me closer and put his mouth to my hair. “I don’t kill humans, and the only reason I can think of for you not burning is that you’ve still got some human in you. But you and I both know you’re turning, and when you do I intend to finish what I started tonight. That’s a promise, vamp.”

About the Author Harper Allen, her husband and their menagerie of cats and dogs divide their time between a home in the country and a house in town. She grew up reading Stephen King, John D MacDonald and John Steinbeck, among others, and has them to blame for her lifelong passion for reading and writing.

Title Page Vampaholic BY

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Preview

Copyright

I can’t let anyone know how afraid I am.

It has to stay my secret, one that I’ll die before I reveal. I probably will die, of course. Or maybe I won’t, and that terrifies me more. What it really comes down to is that right now I could use a little comforting…but when a girl’s let herself run out of vodka for the evening and, worse, let herself run out of men for the evening, too, she has to look for comfort where she can get it. Which sometimes means telling herself fairy stories to try to make sense of all the terrible things that have happened.

So: once upon a time there were three beautiful shop-till-they-dropped princesses named Megan, Katherine and Natashya. They were sisters—triplets, actually—who lived in a charming, upstate-New York town called Maplesburg with their grandparents on their father’s side, Grammie and Popsie Crosse.

Although their parents died when they were babies, Megan and Katherine and Tashya weren’t like orphans in other stories. Grammie and Popsie spoiled them rotten and Popsie only occasionally complained about the outrageous credit card charges the girls ran up. Oh, the sisters squabbled among themselves a bit when Megan, who was the eldest by a few minutes, got a tad bossy, or when Tashya, who was the youngest by half an hour, pouted because she couldn’t get her way. The middle sister, Kat, had her adorable foibles, too, if you want to get picky about it. Besides being partial to shoes, she was also partial to cocktails and men, but what girl isn’t?

Anyway, except for the squabbling, the Crosse sisters’ lives were perfect right up until their twenty-first year. The three most eligible bachelors in Maplesburg asked for their hands in marriage, the girls accepted, and three weddings were planned to take place that summer. Megan’s Dean was a stuffy investment banker, Kat’s Lance was a lawyer who would sell his own mother to get ahead, and Tash’s Todd was a philandering plastic surgeon, but princesses these days don’t marry for love—they marry for money and security, no? So the night before Megan’s wedding, the three princesses were looking forward to becoming brides and living happily ever after.

The end.

I’m going to try to sleep now. I’m going to try not to get a splinter in my hand from the wooden stake lying beside me, to ignore the smell of the garlic hanging by the windows and doors, to convince myself that the fairy-tale version is how it really happened. Because if I can’t, I have to accept that this nightmare is the reality.

In the nightmare, Lance and Todd and Dean turned into vampires and tried to kill Megan, Tashya and me. In the nightmare, we learned that our mom, Angelica, had been a vampire killer, but her skills hadn’t saved our father from being slaughtered by a queen vampire, or herself from being infected by the queen. At her own request, Angelica had died at the hands of her father, Anton Dzarchertzyn, who staked her before she lost her immortal soul forever.

She left this life comforted by the belief that she’d saved her babies, at least. Again, everything comes down to needing comfort, doesn’t it?

Even if comfort takes the form of a lie.

Because Angelica didn’t save her daughters. As Anton, our Grandfather Darkheart, told us when he reappeared in our lives, one of Angelica’s babies received the kiss of the vampire queen. That baby wasn’t Megan. Grandfather Darkheart instructed us all in the ways of fighting the undead, but in the final battle between the queen vampire’s army and the Crosse triplets, only Megan proved more than a match for the Mistress of Evil.

Tashya did her best, but she was out of her league. I’ve tried to tell myself that I was, too, but that’s just another comforting lie. I killed three vamps that night…and every time I drove the stake in, I felt as if I were piercing my own heart. Although I lie here in the dark with a stake beside me, I know I’ll never be able to use one again.

That’s why I’m so terrified. That’s why I can’t share this fear—not with my sisters, not with Grandfather Darkheart. The only reason I can think of for my revulsion at killing vampires is that I’m the Crosse triplet who received the kiss of the vampire queen so long ago.