A Dash of Vampire (Cocktails in Hell Book 4), page 1
a dash of vampire
S.E. Babin
contents
Foreword
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
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Also by S.E. Babin
About the Author
foreword
Thanks so much for loving Violet as much as I do!
If you spot any typos, please do me a solid and send me an email at authorsebabin@sebabin.com. We’re only human around here (unfortunately) and make mistakes. I’d like to know so I can correct them asap.
Feel free to drop me a line there too, any time. I don’t have a PA, so I personally respond.
Happy reading!
chapter one
Tied up men might by my new, all-time favorite thing.
Lachlan lay on his side, trussed up like a farm animal, a dark glare looming on his handsome face as he watched me craft potions.
I rarely let anyone in the back with me, but Lucifer insisted because, “he’s a downer, Violet. We come here to let loose, not be judged by an ancient blowhard.”
He could have forced him to stop, but Lucifer was being very careful right now not to violate any agreements he had with the fae.
I only had one agreement with their bitch queen, and it didn’t involve this freaking guy.
I’d silenced Lachlan two hours ago because he wouldn’t shut up about the “hell he would rain down upon us all” if we didn’t let him go.
Apparently, he didn’t realize that Hell was actually pretty fun without anyone raining on us, and if he did get to that point, these psychos would treat it like an elementary school field day.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
So now, he was tied up and silent.
Pretty to look at.
Blissfully quiet.
Why couldn’t we do this to all our men?
If only human women embraced their ferocious side a little more, all the men might fall in line.
I blamed estrogen.
As I worked, I chatted in a nonstop stream of verbal diarrhea. Enough words to make a saint weep.
Lachlan’s eyes begged someone to put him out of his misery.
But alas, it was only me, my mouth, and the verbatim recitation of an eighteenth-century compendium of ancient medical treatments Az had made me memorize ages ago.
Good times.
“And so you see,” I blathered on, “the paste of lead and mercury recipe healed skin lesions. One could only think they spoke of cysts or boils, potentially even skin cancer, but what they didn’t realize was they traded one issue off for another. Sure, it might heal the epidermis, but it also might give them brain cancer down the road. No MRIs mean it must be the witches, amiright?” I chuckled like a lunatic and waved a sparkling spoon covered in angel skin at him.
Lachlan didn’t seem impressed by me, so he must not have a schoolteacher fetish. What a shame. I had the perfect outfit in my closet if he did.
My eyes narrowed as I stared down at him. Or maybe I could dress up in it anyway just to annoy him even more.
Annoying the Unseelie King was fast becoming my favorite thing to do.
Not because I was a terrible person or anything, but because he kinda tried to screw me when I was stuck in the fae realm, and not in a fun way.
And that’s super uncool.
Even for a fae.
I clicked my tongue. “Old remedies don’t do it for you? How about the current hierarchy of Hell?” Tapping my chin, I looked up, pretending to be deep in thought. “You like fables? I know gobs. Grimm’s fairy tales?” I frowned. “No. That’s way too fun,” I muttered.
A soft groan came from behind his lips.
I swallowed down the snicker threatening to break free. “Or,” I mused. “You and I could come to an agreement. That’s what fae do, right? You bargain?”
His eyes narrowed, but I didn’t miss the gleam of interest sparking in them.
I’d just waved the fae equivalent of kryptonite under his nose. Few could resist the allure of a bargain. They always thought they’d win.
Maybe they did more often than not, but I was no amateur when it came to this world. I was way too paranoid to be.
A muffled sound came from behind his lips. “If you promise to stop threatening all of us with imminent death, I’ll release the charm. Deal?”
He was thinking about it. Rolling my eyes, I went back to crushing up the angel skin.
Lachlan whimpered this time. When I looked back up, he nodded his head vigorously.
“Good.” I eyed him before dropping the charm. “One wrong word and I won’t offer a next time, got it?”
Anger flashed over his face, but he nodded again.
I dropped the charm and turned back to my potion mix waiting to see what he might say first. This was a new potion to me. I had a lot of making up to do for everything Kendrick, the Dragon King, had done to me. Some might have retaliated right away, but I was more of a revenge is a dish best served ice cold kind of girl. I needed time to think and plan how best to royally fuck up his world, but I also had to be careful because he was still, in the most technical of terms, an ally to us. I had to do just enough to get my point across that I was not a good person to fuck with and inform him screwing with me in the future would come at his detriment.
“Can you untie me?” Lachlan’s voice was harsh and raspy with disuse.
“That doesn’t seem wise.” With steady hands, I tipped the angel skin into the tiny jar and labeled it appropriately. Several other ingredients lay in tidy piles, all waiting to be jarred and labeled. To my immediate right, I had other ingredients out, those I planned on using for Kendrick.
He huffed a sigh like he had any right to be offended. “And if I swear not to harm you or yours?”
I slid a glance at him. “Not good enough.”
“I’ve a fair hand with potions,” he said quietly. “I can’t tell what you’re doing, but I’d like to assist.”
My hands stilled. “Why would you want to do that?”
He looked away, jaw tightening.
I didn’t force a response. Instead, I slid my notepad closer and jotted a few more things down. Over the weeks, I’d come up with a few things I could do, but all of them seemed either too far or not far enough. There had to be a happy medium.
I decided to throw Lachlan a bone. It wasn’t his fault he was an asshole. Not entirely. Ariel made a lot of fae that way. “I’m trying to figure out how to rock someone’s world.”
His brow furrowed. “In a…love way?”
A snort escaped me. “Hardly. He tried to kill me more than once and didn’t live up to his end of the deal. The guy is kind of a dick, and I can’t let it slide. It would look bad on me if I did.”
“Ah. You are answering with vengeance.”
“Sort of. But mostly harmless vengeance.” If there was such a thing.
“You don’t want to kill him? A lock of shaggy dark hair had fallen over one strange eye, giving him a sort of rakish half-starved prisoner vibe.
I laughed. “Oh, I definitely want to kill him, but I don’t want to piss Lucifer off. He’s on our side. For the most part,” I muttered.
Lachlan edged into a seated position, wincing as the bindings tweaked his shoulders. “Allies don’t try to kill each other,” he said, giving me a strange look.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” I muttered. “Look, if you swear to not leave, not destroy anything, and not to harm anyone in this bar, including your own people, I’ll remove the bindings.”
Lachlan gave me a long look before nodding. “I swear it.”
Muttering a word, I released his bindings. A soft sigh came from him as he got to his knees, then his feet, stretching his arms and legs out. A twinge of guilt hit me for keeping him in the same position for so long hit me, but again, he’d tried to kidnap me and take me back to Ariel, so the feeling only lasted a few seconds.
“May I approach?”
He was treating me like a wild animal, wary and watchful. Probably a wise approach. I was nothing if not unpredictable. “You may.”
Lachlan came up to the other side of the spelling table, his eyes quickly cataloging what I had. His eyebrows rose at some of the rarer materials.
One thing most people didn’t realize about me was I was a dirty, dirty scavenger. I collected everything. Skin, hair, nails, fluids. Gross? To most, yes. But this practice had kept me alive for millennia. I had a sample from every creature in the world and some outside of it. If I’d seen it, I had a piece of them. The bar was the perfect place to get it from.
Everyone loses their inhibitions after a few drinks, and my bar was one of the very few places with drinks potent enough to get even the most powerful inebriated. I had angel skin and hair galore, and now I was chalk full of demon pieces as well. Lucifer noticed but had said nothing so far.
He probably assumed I wouldn’
He’d be wrong.
One thing I always had was a backup plan for my backup plan. I didn’t bring Lucifer’s stuff out of the spelling cabinet. It was locked behind so many spells it’d take even the most powerful a week to get through it all. If he suspected, he couldn’t know for sure. Even I couldn’t sense what was behind those spells and I was the one who created them.
“You have many spell ingredients,” Lachlan mused.
I shrugged a shoulder. He hadn’t seen anything yet. Not that he would. I didn’t open my cabinet for anyone.
The fae was taller than me, a finely built male specimen. This, of course, was no surprise. Paranorms, no matter what species, were almost always pretty. Someone had given him an old t-shirt recently. It pulled against his powerful muscles and strangely didn’t detract from his raw appeal, even though it said, “Ask me about my balls.”
Lachlan’s expression cleared. “You are a Brewer,” he said with awe.
My gaze snapped up to him. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
Lachlan’s eyes burned. “Do you ever take the time to think about what you’ll say before you say it?”
I offered a tight smile. “Where’s the fun in that?”
He wore the same breeches we’d captured him in, tan and tight. The view was nice, but it wasn’t the first time I wondered why he didn’t smell. A fae thing, probably.
“I’ve never been to Earth,” he said begrudgingly.
My fingers stilled. “Never?”
“This is my first time.” He shrugged. “So far, I find it odd.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “This isn’t exactly Earth. We’re straddling the two planes. Hell and Earth. I’m a Guardian as well as a Brewer.”
His expression cleared. “Ah. That is the reason for all the…” He wiggled his fingers around. “Horns.”
A snort escaped me. “Yes. This bar is neutral territory. Any paranorm can come inside and take a load off. No conflicts can happen inside. If they do, I have the leeway to stop them.”
Lachlan gave me an appraising glance. “You are not afraid?”
“I tackled you through a portal and have kept you hostage for weeks now. Do you think I’m afraid of a little demon brawl?” I scribbled dystopian wasteland from my list. Seemed too extreme.
“You caught me off balance,” Lachlan grumped.
“Sure did,” I said brightly. “Doesn’t mean I lost.”
He crossed his arms and glared at me. “Explain what you’re doing.”
My eyebrows rose. Lachlan huffed. “Please. I’m curious why you’ve chosen these ingredients to work with.” I had a good nose for dishonesty, and Lachlan looked genuinely curious. Of course, since he was a fae linked to Ariel, this also made me suspicious.
“Why are you so familiar with potions?” I wasn’t telling him anything until he told me a few things.
He scratched his jaw. “I was an herbalist. Long ago.” The tightness in his tone alluded to a story he wasn’t comfortable telling. “Before I became what I am.”
“The Beast in the Woods,” I said quietly.
Lachlan’s attention jerked to me. “You know.” It wasn’t a question.
“A little fairy told me. But I don’t understand the significance.” There wasn’t much time for spare reading in between preparing for Michael to come at us again and my training. The way the tiny fairy had warned me sent shivers down my spine, but there hadn’t been time to question her due to the whole running for my life thing.
When I came back and debriefed everyone, Lucifer spent weeks in a tizzy over his brother stealing Max right out from under his nose. Keelie barely spoke these days. She gave Lachlan a wide berth and me wide eyes every time she saw me.
Who could blame her? It was very possible I’d leaked her identity during my time in the fairylands. The one thing she asked me not to do. I’d done it by accident, but it wouldn’t help her if Ariel came after her.
Keelie was high on my priority list, but I still had some time before Ariel came after me. Fae are immortal and they think view time as irrelevant. They played the long game, and usually so did I. Kendrick had to come first since we had unfinished business with him, and I couldn’t work with him unless I’d paid him back for almost killing me.
It was the principle of the matter. If Ariel or someone loyal to her found Keelie’s dust and escalated, then I’d pivot. For now, the beef between me and the Dragon King was on like Donkey Kong.
Thus, the random and odd mixture of ingredients all over the spelling table.
Lachlan reached over to touch a pile of dragon scales. I sucked in a breath and reached out for his hand.
“No touching.” His hand was warm and calloused, rough against my softer fingers. I used lotion like no one’s business thanks to my constant exposure to alcohol and other things of dubious nature.
I dropped it once I realized I was holding onto it for an awkward amount of time. “Sorry,” I muttered, rubbing my fingers on my pants.
His eyes flicked to mine. “You have dragon scales?”
“I do. Just one kind.” For now…I had big plans for the next time I entered the dragon compound. The first go round I was doing my best not to die. They were expecting me, so it made everything twice as difficult. This time they wouldn’t see me coming and I could scavenge to my heart’s content.
Lachlan bent over the table and peered down at the pile. “Powerful,” he murmured. “How did you come across them?”
That was a story for another day, and one I wasn’t sure I’d be sharing with him. “I collect things here and there,” I said lamely.
One of his dark eyebrows went up, but he didn’t push. “What is the purpose of the alchemy you’re performing?”
I chuckled. “I need to give someone a hard kick in the ass.”
Lachlan scratched his chin. “You seek revenge.” A frown furrowed his brow. “Why don’t you just kill this person?”
A laugh escaped me. Fae logic. “Oh how I wish I could.”
He nodded then. “Ah. Politics. I understand.” Lachlan snagged a chair and pulled it over. “Tell me how far you can go and maybe I can help.”
I blinked at him. “Why would you do that?”
He lifted a powerful shoulder in a shrug. “I am imprisoned here. The magic prevents me from returning. Herbalism is something I…enjoy. It will help pass the time until you decide my fate.” His words sounded so fatalistic. Sadness plucked my heartstrings.
“To be fair, you did try to drag me back to your bitch queen,” I muttered.
Lachlan’s surprised belly laugh made my lips drag up into a reluctant smile. “You hate Ariel?”
I nodded. “I thought it was kind of obvious when I tackled you through the portal.”
“Not so clear. Humans don’t stay in our lands for long. I thought you’d gone astray and were being chased by something.”
I stared at him incredulously. “Uh. Yeah. You.”
His eyes glittered. “Besides me.”
“Well. Yes. You have a point,” I muttered. “Ariel has beef with me.”
“Beef?” he questioned. “You want to break bread with my queen even though you hate her?”
“No,” I said with a laugh. “Having beef with someone means you have a problem with them. She doesn’t like me. For many reasons.”
“I assume it has something to do with those two grumpy fairies who keep staring at me?”
“To be fair, one of them likes me. The other is plotting how to best kill me and get away with it.”
He grunted. “Yes. She’s flown down and tried to negotiate your death a few times.”
The spoon I held fell from my hands. “Sonofabitch,” I muttered. “Seriously?” Freaking Olive. I should have smacked her back to her lands as soon as I could with a memory spell. I straightened. Hmm. Maybe I still could. I always had a kill switch in every contract I entered into. If I could wipe her memories of all the craziness going on, it might be worth getting rid of her for good. Once I finished here, I’d talk to Keelie to see what she thought.
