Demetrius
Authors: Marie Johnston
Demetrius
New Vampire Disorder, Book One
By: Marie Johnston
Demetrius
Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Elijah
Editing by The Killion Group Inc.
Cover by P and N Graphics
The characters, places, and events in this story are fictional. Any similarities to real people, places, or events are coincidental and unintentional.
As if overthrowing the vampire government and helping implement a new council to make vampires, shifters, and hybrids play nice wasn’t enough, Demetrius Devereux finds a bigger problem to deal with in an innocent, stubborn, and privileged beauty.
Callista Augustus is the over-protected daughter of a once-powerful vampire leader. Discovering her desperate father has tapped into a well of pure evil, Calli swallows her sense of betrayal and turns him in. She almost regrets it when she meets the infamous and arrogant Demetrius. Forcing herself to work with the male who ruined her family, Calli’s only concern is saving her father.
When Demetrius gets past the infuriating personality of the righteous female, he realizes Calli’s the one in great danger. He gives her his help out of duty, until it becomes clear that if he loses her, he loses everything.
Contents
To all my lovely readers:
All of my family and friends who read my books because they’re just as excited about them as me. Those readers who stumbled upon the Sigma Menace series, with all their newbie mistakes, yet followed them all the way through. The readers who are discovering my work for the first time. I can’t thank you enough, for giving my book a chance, for giving an indie author a chance, and for giving me the chance to spin my tales for you.
Chapter One
Callista Augustus huddled in the corner of her dark room.
Why do Mother and Father always have to fight?
She flinched at the sound of her father’s voice booming louder than before.
“I can’t believe you did this Josephine! You’re despicable!”
Her mother’s rich voice rose to match her father’s. “I wouldn’t have had to if you were a worthy male!”
Hot tears seared Calli’s cheeks. She was only eight and didn’t understand what some of the words meant, but she knew they weren’t good.
“You had no right,
no right
, Josephine, to do that to her. She’s not a tool, she’s our
child
!”
Calli squeezed her eyes shut. Daddy had never been this mad before.
“Why would I put my body through that, through
you
, if I couldn’t get some use out of her? It didn’t take me long to figure out how worthless you were. I knew I needed some sort of insurance when I saw that our weak-willed council was floundering.”
“How could you, Josephine? I can’t believe a mother would do that to her child.”
Calli frowned.
Mother didn’t do anything to me.
Her father’s voice was so much quieter than before. It was like when he found her playing on the house’s upper levels
before the sun had set—for the fourth time. Father didn’t like to repeat himself, but he was always so patient with her.
“She should consider it a gift,” her mother hissed. “It’s done and going to the council won’t help because you know what they’d do to her.”
Her mother laughed, and it was…disturbing. Calli hated when her mother laughed like that. It usually meant one of the servants was getting punished.
The laughter died off. “Edgar, what are—”
Calli raised her head, waiting for more arguing. She couldn’t hear talking, nothing. Silence clogged the air.
Slowly, she uncurled her body and crawled to the heavy oak door of her room. Little light from the main area made it under her door, but it didn’t matter. Her eyesight was better than good.
Good bloodlines
, her father always said.
Prime bloodlines
, her mother always countered.
Calli didn’t know why it mattered how her blood lined up.
Finally, she heard movement, like scuffling and scraping.
Her parent’s quarters were on the other side of the mansion, but they’d been arguing in the room Calli called the fireplace room. It was closer than her parent’s room, so Calli was surprised they’d been arguing there in the first place. Usually she could hear her mother screaming from the master bedroom.
Once she’d snuck out to see what was going on.
Only once.
The memory of her mother’s terrifying expression prompted Calli to scurry back to her bed to avoid getting caught.
Climbing into her pink princess canopy bed, Calli burrowed under the covers. Recalling her mother’s blazing red eyes and bared fangs, she pulled the blankets over her head.
She strained to listen, trying to hear what her parents were doing. Warily, she pulled the covers back down so her ears were no longer covered. Soft thumps and doors shutting were all she heard. Calli hoped her parents weren’t going outside. The sun was already up and even though they were powerful vampires and their house was surrounded by trees, Calli worried. Her parents always lost their tempers when she meandered too close to the outer door during the day.
She heard the same sounds again, like someone was coming back down to the underground level they lived in.
Footsteps approached her door and Calli huddled further into her blankets.
When the door opened, she sensed her father approaching the bed. The scent of her mother was so strong, Calli was surprised she wasn’t with him.
“Callista?”
Of course he knew she wasn’t asleep. She could never fool him.
“Father?”
“You heard the fight.”
He wasn’t asking, but she nodded.
Father looked…haggard. “I’m sorry you had to hear that. Listen, your mother is…gone.”
Calli waited for him to continue, she didn’t understand.
“She was unhappy and she left.”
Calli sat up, shoving her long blonde hair out of her face. “When’s she coming back?”
He hesitated, his face paler than she’d ever seen it. “I don’t know that she will.”
For the second time that night, tears welled, only this time they spilled. Her father sat on the bed and gathered her up into his arms.
She wept until she fell asleep.
Chapter Two
Seventeen years later…
Calli pulled into the circular drive and angled her car toward the row of garages. She hit the button on her dash and one of the large doors moved up, opening a yawning black hole of nothingness.
Well, almost nothing. Calli pulled in next to the Rolls Royce her father refused to sell. They’d gotten rid of so much stuff since the Vampire Council dissolved. Not that they’d had much, but enough to put on a good show pretending they weren’t nearly destitute. Jewelry, fancy cars, anything that could sell went. Thank you eBay. They could hardly afford to keep the mansion heated.
It’d been less than a year since life as she knew it had changed.
And what a relief. Faced with desolation, her father finally let her—gasp—get a job.
“Twenty-four damn years old,” she muttered, killing the engine.
I must insist on a stipulation Callista,
her father had said almost a year ago
. Please work with the very young or very old. I cannot have you exposed to the hazards of youth.
And that means what, father?
Sex. She knew her father meant sex. To say he was extremely protective would be like saying the Facebook guy was sort of rich and famous. But he hadn’t been the same since the night her mother had left them. So yeah, she could take pity on the old guy and keep her panties on.
Everything else was up for grabs. She’d been sneaking out for years. To avoid her own kind and the tales that would work their way back to her father, she stuck to places prime families didn’t often frequent, like human clubs, and even the library.
She climbed out of the used car she’d gotten an excellent deal on and slammed the door. Thank whatever being out there who’s watching over vampires for technology. The internet made her teenage years bearable and helped her attain something akin to autonomy as a cloistered adult. After her mother had taken off with all their money, they only kept one butler around. The rest of the upkeep around the home fell to her. Callie relied on YouTube while her father could barely power on a computer. He preferred the old tomes that cluttered their library.
She hit the button to lower the door. It made a loud noise and the annoying light on the roof flashed.
Of course. Why wouldn’t that be broken, too?
A year without money, and even more without the butler, and the place looked like it’d been abandoned for decades. The wet winter had encouraged lush growth, and now that they were headed into fall, the greenery lost its luster. Brown, withered foliage covered the mansion from vines left untrimmed. Bushes looked like a haircut gone awry and the grass was brittle with little green left in the blades.
Again, what a relief. No more lawn mowing at five a.m. trying to get it done before sunrise. It had often taken more than one early evening to cover the acreage their mansion sat on. She missed having the butler’s extra help, and his mechanical knowledge. The lawn mower clogged up so badly that she couldn’t get it running again. Or that’s what she’d thought at first. Turned out the black stuff leaking out of the loose cap had been really important to the engine, and the machine wasn’t supposed to have white smoke billowing out from it. According to YouTube, she’d trashed the engine.
Jumping up, she unlatched the lever to make the garage door manual. Pulling the door down, she flipped the latch back hoping it’d work the next day.
Dusting her hands off on her bright pink scrubs, she wrinkled her nose remembering why the scrubs needed to go right into the wash.
The scent of aged urine clung to her. Calli loved her job, but it had a downside and that was body fluids. Tonight, she hadn’t gotten any on her, but as a certified nursing assistant for a local nursing home, she often spent enough time in a patient’s room to absorb the smells permeating the air. And little old Thelma liked to take her adult diaper off at night before she went to sleep.