The Binding Read online

  The Binding

  ALSO BY VICTORIA CLAPTON

  The Dark Light Saga:

  Dark Light

  Luminous Shadows

  The Priestess and the Warrior Trilogy:

  Awaken

  Accept

  Avowal

  The Binding

  Victoria Clapton

  The Binding

  By Victoria Clapton

  Copyright © 2016 Victoria Clapton

  https://sites.google.com/site/claptonvictoria/

  All rights reserved: no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  For all the little girls who dreamed of being a vampire instead of a ballerina...

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Characters

  Vampire Vocabulary

  Credits

  A note from the author

  Prologue

  “Please don’t hurt us,” I heard a terrified voice plead from my shadowed balcony perch. “We’ll give you anything you want.”

  Halloween had come to the French Quarter, and while surely there could be no better place in the world to celebrate the thinning of the veil and the welcoming of spirits onto the earthly plane, the ensuing chaos could cause more harm than fun. New Orleans was peopled with those who embrace their dead and know how to make even death a party. The costumes were elaborate affairs, carefully planned out. The revelry was grand, and the people...they spilled out onto the streets, from every direction, in vagabond abandon in the pursuit of fright-filled fun.

  Concealed by darkness as part of the shadow, I observed my city from the gallery of my old apartment. With a view that followed down to Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral, combined with my supernatural hearing that spanned the entire Vieux Carré, my location served as the perfect spot for me to observe unnoticed, ready, at any given moment, to protect whomever I could from the various monsters that ravaged our city.

  On my command, my subjects were spread all throughout New Orleans in an effort to help our first responders make the streets a little bit safer. Often our unnatural presence caused more harm than good, but on this night of the year we were able to use our gifts to help others without scaring the wits out of them.

  Down below, I sensed a couple’s fear before the two had a chance to respond to their mugger, a young man in pursuit of money, and in hyper-sonic movement, I sprung from the balcony over the cast iron spikes down to the street in one fluid, silent motion.

  With one hand cupping the assailant’s outstretched, gun-pointing hand and my other hand resting not-so-casually on his shoulder; I focused on the frightened couple, willing them to be instantly calm.

  “It’s a lovely night for a stroll in the Quarter. You should stop by Gumbo Gris Gris for a meal. The head chef cooks up miracles in his gumbo pot,” I strongly suggested.

  Most humans were easily compelled. These two were no different.

  “Honey, I’m starving,” the woman dressed in a nurse outfit said to her doctor-adorned partner. To me she said, “Thank you for the suggestion.” Then the two headed into the restaurant without a backward glance towards the guy I still held onto.

  Taking great care to be gentle, a feat harder for me to accomplish than I ever could have believed before my transition, I turned the young man around to face me.

  He, too, smelled of fear but not the fear of being robbed, as the couple had carried. No, this young man reeked of the cautious scent that any true New Orleanian embodied when they crossed one such as me.

  “Queen Sybella Rose,” he stammered, frozen to the spot where he stood, smart enough to realize he could not run from me. As a predator, no one could.

  A young man, just barely legal, whom, as it was my business to know the people and problems of my city, I recognized on sight.

  I silenced him with a smile. Meant to be reassuring, my expression had the opposite effect. No matter how popular vampires were on TV and movies, the sight of a real pair of sharp fangs immediately sent people to shivering.

  “Trey, how is your brother faring?”

  He shivered once again as I called him by name but answered honestly. “The cancer is spreading. He’s up for chemo, but who knows.”

  I nodded, listening to the words he did not say and thinking of the action he had, moments before, reduced himself to and suggested, “Why don’t you go into the restaurant? Aloysius will fix you up straight. This is not the way to help your brother.”

  He nodded in acquiesce and literally sprinted into the restaurant, more thrilled that I had not killed him than he was to get the first good meal he’d probably had in days.

  At that same instant, the luring scent of bergamot assaulted my senses, temporarily blocking all else from my mind, the tell tale sign that my mate stood near enough to my position to hear my whispered request as I slipped into the shadow caused by the carriage gateway beside the restaurant.

  “Make sure that his brother is granted help through our medical assist program.” The family would be too proud to ask for help or to even accept help had I offered it to Trey, but they would gladly receive any sort of viable program that would assist in their medical bills. Poverty and potholes…the never-ending, unnecessary battles that this city faced.

  “I’ve already contacted our attorneys. It will be done, my Queen.” His phantom voice felt like a warm breeze over my skin as the sound of it slipped into the unique mix of jazz and happy laughter drifting out into the street from the lively restaurant.

  Leaning against the locked cast iron gate, I took in more of the costumes as they passed by in droves while I relied on my senses to alert me to any other danger. Underneath the bustle, past the locals and tourists, music and horse-drawn carriages, artists, humans and non-human alike throbbed the constant pulsing of the Mississippi River. Close enough for a person to walk to but too far for them to see from this street, I had the uncanny ability to feel the cadence of its ever-rolling waters, supporting and urging the vibrant life of this city.

  After my mate, New Orleans stood as my greatest love and my one true home. I loved its people; I loved its character and charm. I loved its shiny places and dark places. I loved the dead, the alive, the magickal, and the religious. And no other place, no other thing could ever replace its space in my un-beating heart.

  “Wow, lady, your costume is killer. Who is your character?”

  “Yeah. Those fangs look real, and your makeup is
like from a movie.”

  I smiled at the two highly intoxicated tourists while I took quick stock of my appearance. Clad in an elaborate Victorian gown of gray and black with black boots at my feet and my unruly curls in a toppling up do, I wore a silver and black fleur-de-lis about my neck. My skin, naturally pale and devoid of all color, looked more like the ivory of a doll than of human skin. My gray eyes were sharpened into fathomless all-seeing depths. My stance was still as death while my fangs offered the promise of it.

  With my predatory smile, I replied as I crouched ever so slightly to rise to the darkness of my gallery, “I am called Queen Sybella Rose, the Vampire Queen of New Orleans,” and vanished from their sight.

  Chapter One

  A greenish haze, too thin to be considered fog and too dense to be mist, settled on the carriageway and back courtyard that connected the Voodoo shoppe and restaurant beneath my new apartment, and its presence trickled out in indistinguishable wisps into the old street. The strong sweet scent of kerosene escaped from the gas lamps hanging beside the gallery porch of my apartment, and these vapors mingled with the sacred scent of incense and a spicy warm aroma of simmering filé gumbo. The restaurant kitchen’s gumbo pot, cooking slowly on low heat on the first floor below my feet, was producing the pungent scents of sautéed onions, peppers, and dried sassafras, which mixed with burning nag champa, and it was these that wafted in the breeze, combining as a single heavenly smell. The rich fragrance rose upward, past the ground-level black iron support poles that were embellished with the hauntingly protective “Romeo Spikes” that beautifully served to keep intruders from entering into the second floors of the Creole Townhouses found in the French Quarter, and the aroma meandered its way on up further, past these defenses, to the cast iron embellished gallery, where I now sat on a slightly-slanted porch, outside my apartment, watching tourists pass by in revelry.

  Just a small town girl, I was miserable in my day job and seriously in danger of becoming complacent in the belief that I would never find a life that felt like my own. So, on a whim and a dream, I loaded up myself and my snow white cat companion, Marie, into my environmentally-friendly electrical car and drove South as fast as my four-cylinder would carry me away from the horrid little place that I once called home, and I didn’t stop my runaway mission until I was safely over the Causeway and the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain and engulfed into the heart of the Crescent City, the French Quarter in New Orleans.

  “What do you think?” I asked an uncaring Marie, as she stared at me with her sharp green eyes. She watched me shuffle around my three duffle bags, two boxes of books, and finally her bag of cat supplies.

  Marie blinked at me in approval while she continued her vigil over my meager unpacking efforts. My new apartment, which I’d found online, was fully furnished, so I brought only clothes, books and a few electronics when I made my spur of the moment escape, and I currently felt no hurry to unpack as the city waited just outside my balcony.

  I was instantly attracted to this newly-renovated apartment I had previously viewed online, and immediately began a silent prayer that the listing was a true place and not a scam situation, as so often happens with online rentals. The building embodied an old, romantic yet slightly-ominous feel about it, common in many of the Creole Townhouses. With thick red brick walls to deter from damage should a fire occur (like the great fires of 1788 and 1794), asymmetrically-large arched windows which were faded from tropical breezes and dressed in time-worn green shutters, and topped with a steeply pitched side-gabled roof, I was drawn inescapably in before I knew what awaited me on the inside of this unique place. From pictures, I could tell that the one bedroom apartment contained all the essentials. Most of the walls were the same red brick that could be seen from the outside, except for the bathroom, which was painted a bright white, and all of the ceilings were alike and painted in what the advertisement called “Haint” blue. The floors were hardwood. The living room boasted of a fluffy brown suede couch and matching arm-chair, several dark wooden end tables and a coffee table, and a small, unusable, yet still charming, fireplace.

  True, it was darkly decorated; the color and pizzazz came not from the furnishings but the brightly colored paintings that had been placed all through the apartment, unique creations by local artists which certainly gave the rooms an authentic New Orleans vibe.

  Housed in this great corner building, the restaurant, Gumbo Gris Gris, occupied one side, and a Voodoo shoppe, JoJo’s MoJo, rested on the opposite side. My apartment was “L” shaped, with the entrance a curved iron staircase that lead from the courtyard up to the second story.

  The balconies were my favorite feature of the apartment. I had two galleries. One overlooked the busy street filled with tourists, eagerly soaking in the atmosphere that only the Quarter can provide, while the other gallery was part of the secluded courtyard I shared with both shops as part of my rental agreement. The courtyard was magical unto itself, a tropical paradise featuring two large palm trees and some other small tropical plants, a bright pink bougainvillea growing up one of the walls, and little ferns tucked in here and there on the shady side of the brick. Red cannas grew near the staircase that led up to my apartment, while purple, white and pink begonias decorated both the entrances for the two shops.

  There was a bubbling water fountain and its musicality lulled who ever enjoyed its sound into a peaceful state. And though the courtyard was connected to the entrance way, the hidden area in the back of the building that actually led to the doors of my apartment, the restaurant, and the shoppe, it was so perfectly secluded that it felt like a gateway to another world. So far, I had spent most of my “settling in” sitting on one of these two balconies absorbing the allure of the oncoming night, which was simply too enticing to ignore.

  My pull to this city, and now this apartment, remained an unsolved mystery. In fact, I’d been adamantly warned to stay away from this place because of its corruption. My father was a judgmental, grouch of a man who had successfully raised six sons into perfectly acceptable citizens of the world, (each one possessing a meaningful career, including two doctors, two lawyers, one marketing genius and one more who became a news anchor). It goes without saying that he was completely disappointed that his only daughter, born a melancholy child, had grown into a semi-Goth teenager, and chose to double-major in Music Theory and Philosophy, even though I could not play a note of music. I worked menial jobs, on purpose, so that I could volunteer all my spare time at the local animal shelter, and since I had no interest whatsoever in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, my father and I were forever destined to be at odds with one another.

  I was unwanted. It had always been so. As a small child, I romanticized that my father’s hatred of me stemmed from the hereditary fact that I so similarly resembled my dead mother. She died giving birth to me, her seventh child. But, as I grew older, it became painfully obvious that my father was not tragically heartbroken over the loss of his beloved wife. I was simply unloved. And worst of all, in his opinion, I was an awkward embarrassment, dressed in black, with no life ambition, who responded unnaturally to all normal situations.

  And this is how and why it was so easy for me to throw caution to the wind and move to New Orleans. In my mind, though my dream had always been shot down by criticisms from my dad, my final destination was always to be the great city of New Orleans. After stumbling upon a popular vampire novel in my local library as a small child, I became obsessed with someday moving to the city I imagined alluring, dark and vibrant. Back then, the librarian, an aged woman with a beehive hairdo and a snub nose, insisted that I was much too young to read such debauched books, and suggested that I should choose my reading selections from the children’s room. To her, I had not even graduated to the young adult books that I then thought of as “big kids” reading.

  But for me…well, I craved lush imagery and rich characters. Adult fiction may have driven me constantly to a dictionary, but the evocative stories kept my imagination activ
e, especially if the tales happened to involve the supernatural and took place in New Orleans. And so began my plan to abandon the drudgery of my early life, misery I did not choose and I certainly didn’t want. Working first as a bank teller in my home town, I saved all that I could so that I would be able to afford several months’ rent in the Quarter once I arrived there. I didn’t know what I would do next. But I knew that surely the new location, my beloved New Orleans, would help my life unfold in a better way.

  That’s right. Upon arrival to my new abode, I reached the end of my semi- thought out plan, and after I unpacked and got my sweet Marie settled, I, Sybella Rose Felde, the once at odds child who grew up to be an even more eccentric woman, had no idea what I would do next. I was simply hoping for something more.

  My true knowledge of New Orleans came from the countless fiction books I had memorized with reading and re-reading in my first twenty-five years and from my carefully selected collection of movies that I had watched over and over as I fantasized about a place where my dreams, though unknown, might come true, a place where I might be accepted for who I was, a place where I might be wanted. I was old enough to realize that I probably should have done a little more investigative research before I uprooted my entire existence, but I was young enough yet to be excited by the chance of an unknown adventure.

  With a meow and a strong leap, Marie turned two circles in my lap before she settled to watch the passing tourists as she kneaded my legs and purred. Though we were in new surroundings, Marie had already paced the perimeter of the apartment three times and had finally deemed our environment safe enough to have a relaxing sit on my lap. We’d been together ten years, my cat and I, after she found me during one of my many unsuccessful teenage runaway attempts, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. She didn’t mind that I had wild curly hair, the color of pomegranates, or that my eyes were a pale gray. Marie did not go around saying judgmental things about how I was unsuitably tall for my age, 5’8, of average build and my eyes were shaped like almonds, but their color, along with the unsightly shade of my hair, were ghastly. Marie did not think that the small scars on my wrists, (which I obtained from some of the wilder animals at the animal shelter where I previously volunteered), were cause for alarm. She did not even mind that sometimes strange things happened around me like all of the lights exploding out when I was angry. No, Marie liked me just the way I was. We suited each other fine. And living in the Quarter would be just a continuation of the only solid relationship either of us had ever had.