Bewitch (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series Book 5)

A vampire with a past stained with blood and a soul tainted with darkness, he is perfect in his self-control, never surrendering to his darkest desires. Now a beautiful witch in the shadowy fae underworld threatens to reawaken long denied hungers and tempts him with carnal pleasure.

Payne despises the incubus side of his mixed genes and refuses to give it free rein, but when the wickedly sexy Elissa offers him a possible way to help a friend, he finds it difficult to resist paying the price, even if it will be his undoing—one night of passion at her command.

Elissa is a witch down on her luck until Payne comes crashing into her life. The dangerously handsome male is the key to fulfilling a promise she made, but he is also forbidden, and surrendering to the wildfire passion he stirs within her means risking ruin and death.

When one incredible night of fulfilling their deepest fantasies leads to more than just a pathway to keeping a promise and saving a friend, will they be able to overcome the barriers that stand between them and forever?

T
his was the last place on earth that Payne wanted to be.

The heavy iron gate squeaked as it closed behind him. Slippery, damp stone steps led downwards into the gloom. Payne allowed his eyes to change to reveal his vampire nature, his irises burning red and his pupils turning elliptical, and the tunnel brightened enough for him to make out the arching roof cut into the rock. Noises came from ahead. He followed the steps in a sweeping curve, his footfalls echoing around him. His breaths formed as white fog in the moist air before dissipating. A golden glow crept into view further down the tunnel and a gust of drier air washed over him, carrying a myriad of scents. Herbs. Spices. Dead things. Blood. Other disgusting fetid smells joined them as he continued to descend and he wished that vampires didn’t feel the need to breathe.

The steps ended and he followed the uneven earth floor. The tunnel grew larger until it opened onto a high plateau at the start of a cavern. His eyes switched back to their normal grey and the world dulled to a more manageable level of brightness. Enormous rust-coloured stalactites hung from the ceiling arching above him, as though the cave had grown fangs, rows of them, all sharp and wicked in the golden glow rising up from below. Their menacing shadows stretched long across the roof, adding to the sense of danger that he liked. He could live in a place like this. A vampire liked mystery. It was perfect for his kind.

Or it would be if it weren’t for the thousands of fae that bustled in the small underground town spread out below him.

Stone buildings covered the huge base of the cavern, a hotchpotch collection of square flat-roofed structures of different heights. Some were two storeys but most of them were a single level, with large windows and tattered canopies reaching out from them into the narrow streets, each a different jewel-tone colour. Some of the ones directly below him bore crests or fae words he didn’t understand. Alleys wound between the stores and homes in stilted lines that reminded Payne of veins. His stomach growled a reminder that he hadn’t eaten in days, not since he had started out from Vampirerotique on this ridiculous mission.

Scents rose from copper stills, thatched baskets, vials and terracotta or stone jars that stood on display outside the stores on his left, and a wooden arch at the start of one of the streets declared it was the witches’ district. Fae and other creatures crammed the streets, passing from store to store. There had to be close to five thousand fae and other creatures in the area.

Payne studied them, an increasing sense of dread churning in his stomach.

Witches didn’t like vampires. His kind had almost driven them to extinction many centuries ago and they hadn’t forgiven them for it.

Still, he had to go down there. He had made a promise and he intended to keep it. He smiled to himself as he thought about the succubus who needed his help. She had chosen to call herself Chica. Andreu, her lover and one of the vampires who worked at the erotic London theatre with Payne, had explained that it was a pet name that he had called her a few times. Payne couldn’t blame her for keeping her real name secret. He knew firsthand the danger of giving your true name to someone.

Chica needed a way to break the spell that bound her to the theatre, Vampirerotique, stopping her from ever leaving its walls. They had tried everything over the past few weeks and none of it had worked. Antoine, the vampire in charge of the theatre, was at the end of his tether and the dark aristocrat didn’t need this extra burden on his shoulders. He had enough to deal with. Callum had brought a very heavily pregnant Kristina to the theatre, moving the werewolf into his apartment there, and then Snow had taken a turn for the worse three weeks ago, shortly after Javier and Lilah had married at Vampirerotique.

Payne smirked. It hadn’t quite been the wedding that Javier had envisioned for his lovely bride, but Lilah had wanted everyone there, including Snow and Antoine, and Andreu. Andreu, Javier’s younger brother, hadn’t wanted to leave Chica alone at the theatre with Snow and Antoine in order to travel to Spain, so Javier had brought his whole family to the theatre to wed his bride on the stage. It had been tasteful enough. They had since left to hold the traditional celebrations in northern Spain at the family’s mansion there.

Chica had been miserable then because Andreu had again refused to leave her and she felt it was her fault that he was missing his brother’s wedding celebrations. Andreu had done his best to reassure her and Payne had reiterated his promise to help her and free her of the binding spell. He’d had more luck in his latest search for a way of undoing it, managing to find three potential leads, all of them in the fae world.

One of those leads had landed him in trouble.

One had refused to speak to a half-breed. That had pissed Payne off no end. He had told the shapeshifter that he was a vampire but the male had focused on the incubus side of his genes. Payne had felt like killing him but had let it go. Dead or alive, the man wouldn’t have been any help.

The final lead had brought him here, to a whole fae town hidden beneath the grounds of an elegant palatial mansion in the English countryside. Fae lived in the mansion too, the elite of the light side of that world. Everyone down here were merchants, plying their wares to make ends meet, or workers and travellers. Payne had thought witches had higher standards but there were probably hundreds if not thousands of them here, trading with other creatures, selling spells, ointments and god only knew what else.

A group of three young females reached the top of the stone steps to his left and passed him, dressed in the traditional garb of witches, long black featureless dresses that swamped their bodies and concealed their curves. They tittered amongst themselves, their eyes on him, blushes heating their cheeks. His incubus side rose to the fore and he shot them a smile, earning giggles and a few sultry smiles in return. The incubus in him loved every second, lapping up their desire, draining it from the air around him.

Payne tamped it down and his vampire side took control again. The witches’ looks turned dark and he knew they had seen the red in his eyes. Strange how they would toy with an incubus, one who wanted them purely for sexual gratification, but they would scowl at a vampire. His incubus nature was more likely to kill them.

He took the steps on the left down to the cavern floor, his eyes on the town, studying it. There were larger buildings near the edges of the town. Banners hung on their walls. He recognised a few. Not just covens. There was a shapeshifter pride. A wolf pack. Ogres too. There was even a succubus clan. He didn’t need to recognise the banner on that particular building to know what type of creature lived within its dark red walls. There was a steady stream of men coming and going, and some succubi were hanging out of the open windows, calling to them and teasing them with flashes of flesh. The fae equivalent of a bordello.

He shook his head and focused back on the witches’ district. He was shit out of luck if the street signs were in fae. The fae language was extensive and his knowledge of it was limited. He knew the basics but names were often written in a special way. He had never learned those characters. He looked down at the line of markings that tracked up the underside of his forearms and disappeared beneath the charcoal grey rolled up sleeves of his shirt. The swirls, dashes and spikes shifted in hues of dark blue and burnished gold. Not a sign of his incubus side. His markings shone bright gold and cerulean when that was in control. No, this was apprehension.

Understandable considering he was about to enter a world that prided itself on bloodlines and purity.

An abomination like him was liable to end up deep in shit. He wasn’t sure which role to play. The vampire or the incubus? They were more likely to accept his demonic lineage and most of the creatures in the area he needed to head into were unlikely to be able to sense the vampire in him.

Incubus it was.

He hated that.

He reached the bottom of the stone steps and the crowd immediately swallowed him. Women dressed in very little tossed provocative looks his way and his incubus side purred from their attention. He wanted to tamp it down but his vampire side had a tendency to show when he forced it to the fore to obliterate his incubus hungers. He couldn’t risk them seeing he had a dual personality.

Payne preened his long fingers through the dirty blond spikes of his hair and the women hissed at him and disappeared in a flash, teleporting out of his presence. Fairly standard behaviour for a succubus when it saw an incubus. He grinned to himself, remembering how Chica had reacted to him in such a way when she had first come to the theatre. Succubi were weaker than incubi, and it had led to the incubi taking advantage of them more than once, and trying to kill them too. It seemed both sides of his genes had trampled on the feelings of other species without remorse.

He found his first street sign at a junction between four shops all selling herbs that stung his nose. Each plump female owner stood outside, trying to outshout the others. Payne covered his sensitive ears and glared at the wooden post in the middle of the busy crossroads and the boards pointing in different directions.

Just as he had expected. He was shit out of luck.

He didn’t recognise any of the symbols on the wooden boards. He jammed his hands in his jeans pockets and not just because he was frustrated. He had been bumped more than once and he was damned if he was going to have his wallet nicked. That would be the turd icing on a crap cake.

A woman with milk white skin and hair the colour of snow approached him, the crowd parting to allow her through. Her starlight coloured robes flowed ethereally around her, revealing more than they were concealing. She looked like a ghost. Payne stood his ground, his vampire senses sparking high alert, and steadied himself. Every instinct said to roar and scare her away.

Phantom.

He had never seen one before but he had heard that a phantom’s touch could make a man incorporeal. A phantom too. It was the only way for one such as her to mate. She needed to make her male as intangible as she was. When he had first heard that, it had sounded as though it might be fun. Then he had learned that once a phantom, always a phantom. The male never got his corporeal status back and was destined to roam the world as a hollow husk when the phantom cast him aside. No way was he signing up for that.

Her palest silver eyes slid to him and she held her hands out.

Payne reacted on instinct, his eyes darkening to crimson and his pupils turning elliptical. He bore his lengthening fangs at her and growled. She halted and even moved back, but she didn’t leave. She stared at him and her white lips moved. No sound left them but he heard her words in his head.

Unfortunately, he didn’t understand most of them. He caught fae words for ‘fated’, ‘bond’, ‘blood’ and ‘death’.

Before he could ask her in English what she had said to him and what it meant, she swirled into smoke and disappeared. He looked around at the people now staring at him, his skin crawling from their attention and the way they were looking at him as though the phantom had just announced his death sentence. He let his fangs recede and his eyes change back to dark grey, and then singled out one of the witches who had stopped to stare.

“What did she say?”

The woman frowned at him, turned her back and went about her business. Just great. It seemed their looks of horror were because he had flashed his vampire nature. No one else had heard what the phantom had told him and he was damned if he could remember what she had said to repeat it to them.

He didn’t need this shit on top of everything else.

Payne stared at the street sign and decided to go left. He was feeling in a sinister mood after all.

He reached another crossroads and was in the process of deciding which route to take next when a huge cloud of sparkling grey dust exploded into the air off to his right. People ran from that direction, pushing past him. He braced himself and frowned over their heads. There was a shape in the dust, small and curvy, and she wasn’t alone. Four larger shapes surrounded her.