Bloody Mad: A Dark Urban Fantasy Story (The Legacy of a Vampire Witch Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Legacy Club Teaser

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Make a Difference

  Free Book

  The Legend of Nyx

  Copyright

  Also by Theophilus Monroe

  About the Author

  Theophilus Monroe’s Legacy Club members get

  free books, free behind the scenes

  photographs and unique items to accompany

  the books.

  Members are always the first to hear about

  Theo’s new books and publications.

  See the back of the book for details on how

  to sign up and get a FREE BOOK from Theophilus Monroe Today!

  Chapter One

  “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood… A beautiful day…” I skipped along the sidewalk through the French Quarter. It was a little game I’d played with Edwin to hopefully distract him from his barbaric obsessions. It was also a purely random way to identify my next victim.

  “Could you be mine… Would you be mine… Won’t you be my… meal!”

  Edwin cackled from within my skull. My target was a handsome boy, if you could see past the bloodshot eyes and beer breath. Judging by the two Greek letters on his sweatshirt, the drunken moron who was lucky enough to be ushered into Mercy Brown’s Neighborhood—aka my vampire stomach—was a college boy. He’d be fun to play with. Yes, I know you aren’t supposed to play with your food. But when it’s so damn cute, why the hell not?

  Rip him apart! Drink from his wounds right here in the street.

  I shook my head. Edwin always wanted me to go right for the kill, and usually in some kind of torturous way. The kid would have made a fine client for the folks who ran the murder motel in the Hostel movies. Edwin didn’t share my craving for blood, my craving for the taste of human souls. It was pure sadism, inflicting pain and suffering on others, that he desired, that he insisted upon… that I had to fulfill if I ever wanted him to shut the hell up.

  The soul of my little brother, Edwin, was warped and twisted on account of spending roughly the last hundred and thirty years in hell. Now that he was stuck in my head as a kind of familiar, I had to deal with him.

  Poke his eyes out! Bite off his fingers, one by one!

  “I’m not doing that, Edwin.”

  Do it, do it, do it.

  Fuck, that kid had been annoying when we were both human. He was nine. I was nineteen. He was hardly tolerable then. This was patently unbearable. He only really talked at all when I was on a hunt—something about the presence of humans, the proximity of potential victims, seemed to bring him out. Other than that, his interjections into my head were few and far between. I was thankful for that, at least.

  I might have found Edwin’s sadism mildly bearable if he were at all creative about it. I mean, if he told me to rip out his heart through his anus and wring out the blood into my mouth, I still wouldn’t have done it. But at least the entertainment value of his suggestions would be redeemable.

  Rip out his intestines and eat them in the street!

  I shook my head.

  Ramon—my vampire boyfriend—had a penchant for dismemberment. That was gruesome enough. But Edwin’s flavor of choice was disembowelment. Way worse… and not nearly as delicious. Who wants to eat bowels, anyway? Not much blood, a whole lot of shit and bile. But it wasn’t the taste, per se, that Edwin craved. It was the torture of it all, the pain, the anguish. It reminded him of hell, and in some kind of screwed-up way, he found it comforting.

  Giving him what he wanted would wouldn’t shut him up. It just gave him a taste for more. Accommodating Edwin’s craving for the gruesome was sort of like enabling an addict by helping him score his next fix. In the end, it would only make things worse.

  One thing Edwin didn’t understand is that vampires are not especially gruesome creatures. Even Ramon’s proclivities weren’t out of some innate craving for the macabre. It’s all about the unique and intoxicating flavor that accompanies the blood contained in a severed limb. It ages just enough that it’s comparable to a fine wine. An acquired taste, no doubt. I gave in to Ramon’s methods once before, and while thrilling, they brought on more headaches than they were worth. Most vampires, if given the choice, prefer to keep their meals clean. And that’s precisely how I intended to feast upon the frat boy I’d targeted. Pull him into a dark corner, bite him, and drain him just enough that it raised his blood-alcohol content while leaving him with enough to recover. He’d likely forget the whole thing on account of his intoxication. It was the method Nico, my now fully-deceased sire, had taught me. It was what I intended to stick to.

  I didn’t even need to bother trying to seduce the fraternity boy. He was already checking me out. I couldn’t blame him—I’m a vampire fucking princess. My short skirt, knee-high boots, and perpetually toned body were enough to drive most men mad with desire. Even ugly people, when they become vampires, somehow become attractive. It’s a part of what we are, one of our hunting mechanisms. Though some vampires are more alluring than others. As my late sire often observed, I had a particularly irresistible allure. Typically some humans could resist some vampires, some of the time. In all my years, however, I’d never met a single man—or woman, for that matter—who could turn me down. For my victims, I was a wet dream turned nightmare.

  But with Edwin in my head, my whole existence was a nightmare. He stayed silent most of the time. Didn’t say much at all until it came time to hunt. Then he was in my ear like a gnat on a hot summer day. While to Edwin’s chagrin I wasn’t going to engage in public disembowelment, I did still need a meal, and this boy was cute enough—and probably tasty enough—that he’d have to do.

  “What’s your name?” I asked with a sly smirk, looking the boy up and down—not so much to check him out, but to give him the impression that I was.

  “Um,” the frat boy chuckled like a moron. “I’m Brian… yeah… just Brian.”

  “Well, Brian… how would you like to have some fun?”

  I swear, if they ever made a real-action film of the nineties MTV cartoon, the boy could have been cast as Butthead. He was cuter than I imagined Butthead would be, but he sounded just like him. And given he seemed so nervous talking to me, I expected he hadn’t had much luck with girls. Again, a lot like Butthead. The thing about boys: even if they’re cute, if they don’t have a lick of confidence about them their good looks are wasted on most ladies. Such fellows, though, tend to still have a bit of innocence about them. He was probably a virgin. That meant unless he’d done something incredibly heinous in his life, he’d be delectably sweet.

  “What do you say we find a dark corner somewhere?” I asked, batting my lashes.

  “Uhhhhh….”

  Dear Lord, this kid was helpless. Not that he had reason to be nerv
ous. For all he knew, I was just a good-looking girl looking for a cute boy and a good time in the French Quarter. Most girls aren’t monsters. Granted, I was an obvious exception to that. But Brian didn’t know that.

  Bite his nose off…

  “Shut up,” I snapped back at Edwin.

  Brian scrunched his brow, clearly confused.

  “Not you,” I said. “I was talking to the voice in my head.”

  “Um, you hear voices in your head?”

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t everybody? You know, let your conscience be your guide. Jiminy fucking Cricket.”

  Brian pressed his lips together. “But most people don’t talk back to their conscience.”

  “If only you knew what my conscience was saying.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “You definitely do not.”

  “Just so you know, I’m a psych major. You should probably talk to someone about that.”

  “A psych major, huh? What year?”

  “I’m a freshman at LSU.”

  I rolled my eyes. He probably hadn’t even taken more than one or two courses in his major. Hell, I’d lived through the history of psychoanalysis. Freud was alive when I was turned, and really came into his own during my first few decades as a vampire. I’ve even fed on a few shrinks in my time. It was a great way to snag a meal, frankly. Appointments were always in close quarters, in rooms no one could see into due to doctor-patient confidentiality. So long as I could get an appointment in the evenings, after dark, it was a simpler and less risky way to get a snack than pulling some schmuck off the street and luring him into an alley—like I was trying to do with Brian. “So you’re basically an expert, then,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that…”

  “Tell me, Brian. Ever been with a crazy chick before?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’ve dated a few, but…”

  “I’m not interested in dating you, Brian. Trust me, my interest in you is purely carnal.”

  Brian’s cheeks rouged. I could hear his heartbeat accelerating as he tried to picture, in his mind, what he thought being “carnal” together might entail. Whatever he had in mind, he was surely going to be disappointed. “But I don’t have any… you know… protection.”

  I smirked. Elevated myself on my tip-toes and whispered in his ear, “You won’t need any protection… not for what I have in mind…”

  He shivered as I tickled his earlobe with my tongue before taking his hand in mine. At this point I was certain he was mine.

  Rip off his face and wear it!

  Since Edwin was in hell when Silence of the Lambs came out, I was willing to give him at least one point for creativity. Still, I chose to ignore him. It would make him even more insufferable later, but I refused to give in.

  “How much have you had to drink tonight, Brian?”

  “Just a few shots. A couple beers.”

  He was surely underestimating his actual alcohol consumption. Still, it was more than enough. It also meant that with that much in his system, I could drain less of his blood and help him black out, to make sure he forgot. My bite would filter the alcohol out of his blood as I extracted it. I wouldn’t need to gorge myself and, truthfully, I only needed a little drink to take the edge off. Before Edwin was stuck in my head, I only really needed to feed every few weeks. Now, with him in my ear constantly, I fed more regularly. It helped keep me level-headed, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from going bloody mad.

  I pressed Brian against a brick building in a dark alley. His breaths quickened, his heart beating fast. He sighed in ecstasy as my fangs pierced his neck—they almost always do. I was right—he was sweet as honey. His body collapsed like a rag doll in my arms.

  I left him in the fetal position behind a dumpster. He’d blame himself for drinking too much in the morning, and if he remembered me at all, it would be a dream.

  So boring. You didn’t even break a bone or leave any marks…

  Edwin was right—the venom in my bite healed my victims in minutes after the bite. Just goes to show: vampires are designed to be discreet. It’s one of the many tools in our arsenal that makes us so dangerous. What Edwin wanted me to be—what he was himself—was a whole other kind of evil. And it repulsed even me.

  Chapter Two

  Edwin died following a ritual that my former guide in the Craft, Moll, had deceived my father into believing would cure him from the ailments that he supposed were caused by my bite. Yes, as a youngling I fed on my own brother. It’s appalling, I know. But unless someone has experienced the insatiable cravings of a newly turned vampire, they have no room to judge.

  In truth, it wasn’t my bites that made him sick. He just had consumption—what we now call tuberculosis—and was going to die anyway. But when my father—who, unbeknown to me, was the leader of the Order of the Morning Dawn, an organization dedicated to the eradication of all witches and vampires—discovered I’d risen as a vampire and had fed on Edwin, he had me staked. And in an act of desperation, he’d believed Moll’s lie that if he fed the ashes of my heart to my brother, he’d recover.

  In truth, binding my heart to my brother’s soul made me nearly invulnerable. While a lot of vampires are heartless, in my case it’s a literal fact. Our lives were bound, tied together, and so long as he resided in hell, I was fine. But in an effort to prevent him from moving on, I had no choice but to go to hell and bind him. I’d intended to bind him to a fetish, a Voodoo totem, but Alice—a member of the Order whom I’d inadvertently turned into a vampire more than a century ago—intervened using a strange kind of magic, something she called “celestial magic,” to prevent the binding.

  The Voodoo that was supposed to bind him to the fetish was rather simple. Souls crave embodiment. The first part of the spell is to imbue the fetish with the essence of a soul’s former body. But there’s a reason why souls leave dead bodies. They become uninhabitable. They lose their spirit, their life force, if you will. The fetish must, therefore, also be blessed by a Ghede Loa. Theoretically, such a soul would see the fetish as if it were its own body, an inhabitable body, and naturally be drawn to inhabit it.

  Herein lies the complication. As his sister, we shared an essence, a similar DNA. Not to mention, since he’d consumed the ashes of my heart, a part of my essence was already in him. It made sense that he would be drawn to my body. Furthermore, as a vampire I was a creature created by Baron Samedi, the highest of the Ghede Loa.

  So, once Alice interfered and took the fetish out of the equation, I became the fetish, the totem, an ideal place for Edwin’s soul to migrate.

  As a result, for the last six months I’ve been dealing with the ravings of a hell-warped, nine-year-old lunatic. I’d always imagined myself a ruthless vampire, a heartless bitch, but compared to the sort of person Edwin wanted me to become, I was a regular Mary Poppins. At least as vampers we have a sophistication to our villainy. Edwin was just plain demented.

  “How’d the feed go last night?” Ramon asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Your brother spoiled it again?”

  I sighed. “I used to enjoy the thrill of the hunt. Not just the bite—the whole process of seducing them, luring them in… I get off on that shit.”

  Ramon nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “But now with that asshat in my head, it’s all I can do to just get through it without ripping someone’s head off. Not because he wants me to. I don’t have to do shit that he says to do. But because he enrages me so much that I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “Well, ma chérie,” Ramon said, using his favorite French pet name for me, “Annabelle Mulledy still owes you a favor.”

  Over the last six months a lot had happened in the Voodoo world. Annabelle Mulledy was a girl I knew, one who could actually open portals to hell courtesy of a soul-bound familiar—one much less sadistic than the one locked inside my cranium. Unfortunately, Ed
win’s possession of me did not come with such perks. And over the last six months, a nasty Loa—one might as well consider him a demon—went on a tear throughout their community. A lot of people died—a majority of New Orleans’ Voodoo community when he flooded Vilokan, the Voodoo underworld. Annabelle Mulledy—once just a novice in Voodoo—was left with little choice but to recruit me to aid in stopping the demon, Kalfu, and his otherworldly army of nasties. In exchange for my help? She promised she’d help me get back into hell, so I could (so she thought) help my poor brother who’d been damned there for my sake could move on to heaven. Of course, that’s not at all what I wanted to do. Sending him to heaven would kill me—but she didn’t know that. If I told her I’d been possessed by him the first time she helped me go there, that it was a misguided attempt to imprison him in a fetish so he couldn’t move on, I doubted she’d ever help me a second time. After all, like many vodouisants, Annabelle Mulledy was a Catholic, in spite of the fact that she’d recently been appointed the new Voodoo Queen of the decimated—though recovering—Voodoo world.

  Still, in the process of vanquishing Kalfu, Annabelle’s own father—who’d become a vampire himself—devised an ability that separated entangled souls. It worked for Annabelle; she was no longer possessed by the girl who once inhabited her body. But it didn’t work for me. Since Edwin’s soul had already been consumed by the essence of my heart, I assumed the power that bound us was too strong. Bottom line: I was pretty much stuck with Edwin.

  Annabelle Mulledy could still get me to hell—she still had connections with the spirit who could help her open a gate there—but I wasn’t even sure why I’d go back. Was Alice still there? The vampire hell, the place where I’d been, is partially inhabited by vampires who are staked. That’s where they go until their stakes are removed. Some are there for just a season, others for centuries. I imagine there are old vampires lost, perhaps at the bottom of the ocean or buried under rubble, who will probably be stuck there forever. The other half of the vampires are those whose hearts were burned, or their bodies decimated. They exist there as wraiths—confused, wandering spirits who are not altogether pleasant for those who still have bodies, like myself, to encounter.