Vampaholic
Kat Crosse is falling for the sexiest man around…the only problem is he may have to kill her!According to legend, the Crosse triplets are doomed. One of them is the new vampire slayer. One can heal vampires. And one will turn into a blood-sucker forever. Sexy vampire-hunter Jack believes cocktail-loving Kat is the vamp-to-be. Yet she needs his help to find ancient vampire Cyrus Kane.With Kane dead, permanently, Kat might be able to stop the prophecy. But Kat hadn’t counted on her growing feelings for Jack. The fearless hunter is all man, yet the clock is ticking and passion is a distraction Kat can ill afford…
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All of a sudden I was grateful to Jack Rawls.
Heâd saved Megan from having to stake me, I thought as I felt more sunlight pour over me. Heâd saved me from having to die by my own sisterâs hand. I looked down at my arms, sure they were starting to burn now, and for a moment I couldnât 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 Iâd imagined everything Iâd seen.
Jack pulled me closer and put his mouth to my hair. âI donât kill humans, and the only reason I can think of for you not burning is that youâve still got some human in you. But you and I both know youâre turning, and when you do I intend to finish what I started tonight. Thatâs a promise, vamp.â
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.
Vampaholic
BY
Table of Contents
Prologue
I canât let anyone know how afraid I am.
It has to stay my secret, one that Iâll die before I reveal. I probably will die, of course. Or maybe I wonât, and that terrifies me more. What it really comes down to is that right now I could use a little comfortingâ¦but when a girlâs 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 sistersâtriplets, actuallyâwho lived in a charming, upstate-New York town called Maplesburg with their grandparents on their fatherâs side, Grammie and Popsie Crosse.
Although their parents died when they were babies, Megan and Katherine and Tashya werenât 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 couldnât 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 isnât?
Anyway, except for the squabbling, the Crosse sistersâ 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. Meganâs Dean was a stuffy investment banker, Katâs Lance was a lawyer who would sell his own mother to get ahead, and Tashâs Todd was a philandering plastic surgeon, but princesses these days donât marry for loveâthey marry for money and security, no? So the night before Meganâs wedding, the three princesses were looking forward to becoming brides and living happily ever after.
The end.
Iâm going to try to sleep now. Iâm 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 canât, 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 hadnât 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 sheâd saved her babies, at least. Again, everything comes down to needing comfort, doesnât it?
Even if comfort takes the form of a lie.
Because Angelica didnât save her daughters. As Anton, our Grandfather Darkheart, told us when he reappeared in our lives, one of Angelicaâs babies received the kiss of the vampire queen. That baby wasnât Megan. Grandfather Darkheart instructed us all in the ways of fighting the undead, but in the final battle between the queen vampireâs army and the Crosse triplets, only Megan proved more than a match for the Mistress of Evil.
