Princess of Seduction (Dracula's Bloodline Book 6) Read online

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  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction,

  the work of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to real persons or events is

  coincidental.

  Copyright April 2019 – Ana Calin

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE END

  CHAPTER I

  Irina

  Lazarus and I sit at a pub, watching the brothel across the street. We know the place is bustling inside, but this is Berlin, Germany, which means that not even the slightest sound makes it out the heavy metal door under the Pleasure Haven sign. Prostitution is legal here, but turning up the volume could totally get the cops to your door.

  We’ve been focused on that door for an hour now, during which time Lazarus didn’t look at me even once. He keeps his eyebrows furrowed over his intelligent blue eyes, his long fingers tapping the stem of his wine glass as he waits for our target Herald Gruff to emerge. I imagine those fingers trickling down my body. It’s impossible not to think of Lazarus Raica that way.

  He’s a vampire with the air of a handsome young scholar. Those rich locks of dark hair and sinewy arms with tribal tattoos that emerge from under the rolled-up sleeves of his white shirt add to his special sexiness, and with the good looks specific to vampires you get a Molotov cocktail that can send female hormones into overdrive.

  Problem is, Lazarus hates me with all he’s got. To him, I’m the blonde vamp who can sexually enslave men through the power of her pheromones, and the one who turned him into a vampire decades ago. He despises everything I represent.

  “The easiest way to get to Herald Gruff would be infiltrating me in there,” I break the silence, nodding my head in the brothel’s direction.

  “Shouldn’t be hard,” he replies. “Someone like you would totally fit in.”

  “You mean someone with natural whore material.”

  “It’s not what I said.”

  “It’s what you meant.”

  “Listen, Irina.” He faces me in full for the first time in the twenty-four hours since we started on this mission. The table tilts to his side as he puts his weight on his elbows. “I can see that you’re trying to mend things between us, but that’s never going to work. I don’t like you, I never will, and I’m sorry if that offends you.”

  “It doesn’t offend me. It hurts me.”

  He puffs as if I just said the most preposterous thing. “Irina Motovilova, the great vampire seductress and Dracula’s best spy, emotionally vulnerable to me? I’m honored.”

  It’s what happens when you’re falling for a guy, is what I want to tell him, but I refrain. He’d glare at me full of hatred, recounting how I basically tore him apart and feasted on his blood two decades ago. There’s nothing I can do to change the past, nothing I can say to change his feelings about me, and it hurts more with every minute that I look at him, aching for his touch.

  “Listen, I don’t need you to like me,” I lie. “However, for this mission it’s important that you trust me.”

  “I do trust you. We’ve been on the same side, the side of Dracula, for years. But I still can’t look at you without my stomach turning.”

  I bite my lip to keep the tears back, but the heavy metal door to the brothel opens, and a big bouncer with a boxer’s nose lets out a completely drunk Herald Gruff. The muscles in my back tense as I focus my attention on him. This would be a great opportunity to move in, but two drunken girls emerge giggling after him, one with tousled hair and the other carrying her pumps in her hand. They’re both leaning on him, but he can barely keep himself on his feet.

  “Come on,” Lazarus says. “You can take’em.”

  His words hurt, but he’s right. I stand a good chance of getting Herald Gruff to pick me over them, if only because of my vampire attractiveness and the power of my pheromones, none of which I can take credit for. They are powers that came with the territory when I became a vampire, but I did earn my other skills, and I promise that I’ll prove them to Lazarus by the time this is over.

  “Still, we need a plan before we do anything,” I say, my eyes out the window at Herald Gruff’s greyed head disappearing with the girls on the back seat of a red Porsche that his driver then pulls away from the curb. “What we want is to use him and get to the person he’s working with, the one with whom the Old Priest shared the secret of human immortality.”

  “Would you sleep with him for the mission?” comes the abrupt question. My eyes fly to Lazarus, finding his on me, contempt behind his blue irises.

  “You’re just asking that to satisfy your own curiosity, not because of the mission,” I bite. I repent for what I put him through twenty years ago, but I let his boots walk all over me long enough.

  I stand and grab my purse. “Now pay and let’s see where he’s taking the girls.”

  Lazarus

  HERALD GRUFF TOOK THE hookers to an expensive hotel. More room for play, more people to serve him. Luckily there’s another hotel just across the street, where Irina and I checked in, and now I’m watching his window. My vampire senses allow me to see across the distance, peer through the darkness, and get a clear picture of what’s happening inside that hotel room, but it’s repulsive, and I’m not sure how useful it is for the mission. I turn around to find Irina rolling black pantyhose up to her mid-thighs.

  She’s striking with her silky tan skin and straight, shiny blonde hair. The fine small nose, plump lips and catlike eyes could make even a dead man’s cock stand to attention. Hell, even my shaft reacts, and I thought I despised her enough to remain immune to her charms.

  I clench my teeth as I imagine fucking her from behind, my fist in her hair, driving my cock into her. Making her clutch the sheets and scream. I’d make hate to her. I’d treat her like a whore, subjecting her to my darkest pleasures, punishing her for what she did to me. She’s a beautiful monster that deserves to be used—Fuck, this isn’t me, thinking these things, growing horny as I think them. Wait a minute, is she using her pheromones on me, is that what’s turning me into a beast?

  “What the hell are you doing?” I say through my teeth, grabbing my cock to make it back down.

  “Relax,” she says, her hair tumbling down her back after she takes off her shirt. The fine muscles in her back stretch beautifully as she bends forward to grab a bra, and my cock strains. “This isn’t for you. I’ll never try to seduce you, so you might as well stop worrying about it. I’m going to the brothel, try to work my way in. You keep an eye on Gruff, and make sure he goes back to the brothel tomorrow night.”

  I swallow the dryness in my throat. She’s not manipulating my senses. Her presence arouses the monster in me, a version of me that wants to fuck her senseless, but it’s not her fault. I’m the owner of these filthy desires, and I can’t blame them on anyone but myself.

  I take a step back just as Irina turns around, now dressed in a very short red dress, the black lace upper part of her pantyhose visible on her toned thighs. She drops on the bed, reaching dow
n to slip her stilettos on her feet.

  “I know you don’t enjoy watching what’s going down in that room.” She creases her nose. “But we can’t afford to miss anything. We need to know him intimately, what he likes, what he hates.” She pulls a pair of tiny earbuds from her purse and holds them up for me to see. “I’ll be wearing these tomorrow night. I’m leaving a pair for you here on the bed. You wear them tomorrow, and we’ll be able to communicate. Watch him tonight, learn what he likes, so you can tell me what to do.”

  “What are you going to do during the day? Isn’t it best for you to return here, away from daylight, and we can talk things through?”

  “You mean like you and me, a whole day in the same room? You’re sure that’s a good idea?”

  She stares at me out of those catlike blue eyes. I say nothing, but she understands all too well.

  “I didn’t think so,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’ll find a place to hide. Maybe a tomb, like in the movies.”

  She picks up her purse, hangs a thin leather jacket on her forearm, and gives me a wink over her shoulder before she leaves. The door closes behind her, and I return my attention to Herald Gruff in the hotel room across the road.

  One girl is riding his hips while the other rides his face. I plop on the armchair by the window with a glass of whiskey, hoping it’ll help me digest the show better. I can see everything clearer than I like with my superior vampire eyes, hell, I can even hear the women moan if I flex my senses a bit more.

  It’s not a nice experience, watching this bastard have his way with wasted women. The fucking continues, now he’s got both his hands in their pussies while one of them sucks his cock, the other licking his balls. Fuck it, I don’t need to see this. I open the laptop lid and start scrolling through his file, do something actually worthwhile with my time.

  I know the first half of his story by heart. I met Herald Gruff in person when Juliet and I came back to Berlin and took the Hound from him, the e-zine that he used to run. He spent many years after that trying to get something on Juliet and her exact relationship to the Prince of Midnight, the man who’d practically gifted her the Hound before they got officially married many years later.

  Radek, the Prince of Midnight, had me monitor Gruff and lead him down all kinds of wrong paths that only led further and further away from the truth, but after we were forced to leave Berlin there was no one left to keep Gruff in the dark. We disappeared, but he was still thirsty for answers. He dug deeper and deeper, until he found a solid lead, or better yet, the solid lead found him—the Old Priest, alias The Wicked.

  Before he died, The Wicked gave us a riddle related to the secret to human immortality. I’m a scholar with experience, which is why Dracula asked me to decipher it and get to the bottom of the Old Priest’s plan.

  What exists in the sea that is neither animal nor plant, and yet lives as both.

  The Old Priest gave Lady Ruxandra this riddle to save his life. He hoped that, to make sense of it, Dracula’s half-demoness wife would spare him, and he’d have a chance to come up with a plan for escape. But the Old Priest had been given chances before, and every new plan of his to take down Dracula and his family proved more dangerous, the last one almost turning an entire European capital into a city of the dead. Which is why Ruxandra decided to feed her inner demon with the priest’s life on the spot, and leave the riddle to her husband to deal with.

  I may actually have an idea where the riddle is going, but that won’t be enough without knowing exactly who the Old Priest shared it with besides Ruxandra, and how exactly the person uses it, or plans to use it.

  Here’s where Irina comes into play, because she already has a theory about that. She thinks Herald Gruff acted as the middleman between the Old Priest and the Serpent Lord. Her argument is that the Serpent Lord is a man of science, who has been working for decades on combining the genetics of man and beast in a way that would help humans regenerate indefinitely and never age, or even reverse the aging process.

  The Serpent Lord would probably start where I did—from the widest spread misconception in the world, namely that every living creature must die. But there are organisms in nature that do not die, and that is one of the most overlooked secrets of biology. Another detail worth looking at in the very beginning of our investigation was the direction that Herald Gruff’s life had taken during the past few months. He basks in luxury, which clearly means he’s playing top boy for someone of the crème de la crème in Europe. Considering all the connections mentioned, it can only be the Serpent Lord, or someone close to him.

  The stakes have never been higher. The secret to human immortality in the hands of the Serpent Lord means that he can engineer humans into soldiers that he would have at his disposal. He could overrun the Hidden World using those soldiers, destroying the balance between worlds, and the only way Dracula could fight him would be to create an army of his own, an army of vampires.

  But that would throw the world into chaos. The Serpent Lord misusing the human race for his own purposes while Dracula would be destroying it to counteract the Serpent. I shudder when I realize that the world hangs on Irina and my shoulders.

  A hard slap like leather over bare skin breaks through my thoughts. My eyesight sharpens, directing to Herald Gruff’s room. One of the girls is on all fours, holding tightly to the headboard while the old fucker hits her over the naked backside with a leather belt. The red streaks along her butt cheeks would make the skin crawl on my arms if I were still human.

  My eyes dart to the other girl, who’s watching with a glass of champagne from a corner chair, fondling herself. My senses are on high alert—should I intervene? The abused girl turns her head, her ass all red, but when she gets up and faces in my direction I see the satisfaction in her eyes. It’s her turn. She’s going to beat Herald now, and she’s looking forward to it. Apparently, so is he. He lets her strap him to the headboard with the look of an eager dog, and pity rises in my stomach along with contempt.

  This goes on for a while, the three of them changing roles, then all coiling together like in an orgy until alcohol and exhaustion get the better of them, and Herald Gruff falls asleep with his head in a girl’s lap, and his legs tangled with the other’s.

  I start to type a report about the progress Irina and I have made so far, all the while trying to suppress the worry that builds up inside. She’s now where these girls came from. I slap the laptop lid shut, and lean my head back against the chair.

  Come on, Lazarus, Irina Motovilova has been at this game far longer than you have, she’s an old vampire. One with outstanding self-defense skills. Nothing can happen to her in a Berlin brothel.

  But then images of that girl strapped to the bed come back to me, and an image of Irina going through the same thing infiltrates my mind. Irina, the short red dress hugging her tight body riding up her perfectly round butt, some guy spanking her with a leather belt, the tip of it reaching the black lace at the top of her pantyhose across her mid-thighs.

  I push myself up from the armchair, my fist balling until the knuckles show white. Why do I care what happens to that monster of a woman? What do I care if she gets that kind of treatment from a man that isn’t me?

  A cell phone rings somewhere in the distance. It’s Herald Gruff’s. I can hear it because my senses are still focused on him and the sounds that come from that hotel room. I hurry to the window, peering over. He sits up with difficulty on the bed, and I tune my hearing to listen in closely.

  I hiss in frustration because I can’t get a lot from the voice calling him except that it’s a man’s voice, and it’s saying something about a woman. Gruff scrubs his tired face with his hand, the back of it wrinkled and blotched. I will never know what old age feels like because of Irina. I’m immortal and eternally young because of her.

  Fuck, I won’t be feeling thankful now, will I. It’s not like she intended all that when she threw herself at me, and sank her teeth into my carotid while I don’t know how many others bit me
everywhere else, almost tearing me apart. It was a bloodbath, and she left me there, almost drained, convinced I would die. She wouldn’t have cared if I died, it wasn’t her intention to make me into what I am today. I’ll be damned if I’ll let anything sway me from my hatred of her.

  Herald walks to the window, staring out into the night as he talks. He’s focused on the conversation, and now he’s close enough for me to hear what the other voice is saying in its nasal tone.

  “She looks exactly like Prince Radek’s ex. You know, the one he stepped into the limelight with when he bought that Nazi orphanage fifteen years ago?”

  “That’s impossible. There’s no way she’d end up in a brothel.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s her.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there soon.”

  “No, don’t come, the Goons are keeping her. But she’ll start tomorrow night.”

  Gruff looks up at the sunrise reddening the sky like a kiss of blood, and says, “All right, make sure you have a booth for me then. I want privacy with her.”

  “You got it.”

  Herald kills the call, and things start connecting in my head. The way he looked at the sunrise when he heard that Irina had left the establishment, and the fact that neither he nor the guy mentioned her age—anyone would have wondered why she hasn’t aged a day in two decades. Irina should be over forty now, hardly a good fit for a five-star brothel tailored for the fine taste of ridiculously rich men.

  Things become as clear as daylight. I pull the curtains to shield my skin from it and grab my phone. I have to warn her that she might have walked into a trap.

  Lazarus

  I’M PACING AROUND LIKE a lion in a cage. She isn’t answering her phone. Scenarios rise and fall in my head like tsunamis. If the goons at the establishment are keeping her hostage, can they hurt her? Or have they already taken her to the Serpent Lord?

  Only one thing makes this panic bearable—the certainty that they couldn’t have killed her. Herald Gruff is supposed to go there tonight and talk to her. I stomp to the window again, parting the curtains just a little to look, but he still doesn’t seem prepared to leave the place.