Dante's Choice , livre ebook

Untreed Reads - Devon Marshall

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

131 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Dante Sonnier, Hollywood agent and friend to the vampire community, has been left reeling by revelations of her own supernatural ancestry. She also has a host of questions, but Dante knows that life with the vampires is rarely a one-problem-at-a-time deal, and answering these questions was never going to be simple.Any hopes Dante may have had of taking time to find answers to her questions is interrupted by first an unexpected proposal from vampire girlfriend Ellis, and then the intrusion into Dante's life by Jude, vampire leader Voshki Kevorkian's hybrid half-sister. Jude reveals some startling new information about Dante's history and leads Dante into some serious temptation.The Children of Judas also have not finished with Dante. Rebel leader Robin Shepherd is still determined to topple the existing vampire leadership and to force Dante to claim her "Right of Blood" to rule over all supernatural creatures. Robin has one more desperate plan to achieve this and she intends to execute it with extreme prejudice, no matter how shattering the consequences might be, and no matter whose life it may cost.

Informations

Publié par	Untreed Reads
Date de parution	03 décembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781611876444
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0224€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Table of Contents
Copyright
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
Dante’s Choice (Vampires of Hollywood, Book 2)
By Devon Marshall
Copyright 2013 by Devon Marshall
Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Also by Devon Marshall and Untreed Reads Publishing
Dante's Awakening (Vampires of Hollywood, Book 1)
http://www.untreedreads.com
CHAPTER 1
My name is Dante Sonnier and I’m a Hollywood agent. I’m also a friend to and often fixer for the vampire community. Being an agent is easy. Working with the vampires? Not so much. In fact, just being around the vampires can get downright life-threatening.
Three months had passed since Robin Shepherd-leader of the Children of Judas, the reviled vampire sect who had threatened my life as a means of ‘persuading’ me to take over leadership of the general vampire community-had made her dramatic declaration that she would bring down the Promise of Darkness upon the world. The Promise of Darkness was some ancient vampire curse which could bring about total war and devastation and such unpleasantness. Robin made this dramatic declaration whilst she broke my wrist on a sunny Beverly Hills street in the middle of the day. Which made her lunacy all the more frightening. You just don’t expect to be attacked by an insane vampire bent on world domination on a Beverly Hills street in the middle of a Wednesday.
So far there had been some scattered incidents of sabotage and, regrettably, some vampire and human deaths, but nothing that you could really call devastating or even war-like. I was inclined to believe-as were the vampires-that Robin had been a little overly ambitious in her plans. Still, the vampires were taking no chances; they had doubled my protection detail and made me travel everywhere in a limo armored out the wazoo with bullet-, bomb-, and fireproofing. For all I knew it could have been kryptonite-proof too. I do know that I felt conspicuous and silly being driven around in that big-ass boat of a vehicle by Ollie, my new driver. Ollie was a strange guy, kind of quiet and deep, but nice enough.
Nothing had been heard or seen of Robin in those three months. She had effectively vanished from the face of the planet, much to Voshki Kevorkian’s chagrin. Voshki wanted nothing more than to take the rebel vampire’s head off at the neck, and then burn her lifeless torso to ashes.
“Jesus, Vosh, do you also want to display her severed head on the gates of your estate?” I asked the vampire leader.
She gave me a coolly considering look. “Hmm, sometimes you do have good ideas, Dante.”
Never piss off a vampire. Especially a very ancient and powerful one like Voshki.
I was beginning to think that my life might get back to normal-or at least as close to normal as your life could get with vampires in it-when I met Jude Kevorkian, the other sister that I never knew Voshki had.
Have you ever experienced an instant, all-consuming desire for someone? You take one look at them and know you will just die if you do not fulfill this end-of-the-world need which they have ignited in you? It’s frightening and it’s exhilarating and it’s damned confusing all at once. Especially if you thought you were already in love with someone else and that even thinking about sex with anyone else could make an unbelievably large mess out of your life.
That’s how it was for me when I met Jude Kevorkian. But I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Around the time that Robin was threatening my life and trying to convince me that I would be better to side with her and the Children in the coming war (trying unsuccessfully, I might add-breaking my wrist has never done much to make me see another person’s point of view), I also discovered that at least one of my ancestors was a vampire and that through him I might be related to those psychotic, murderous, red-haired Children of Judas. I hadn’t shared this knowledge with anyone other than my best friend Lydia, and my vampire girlfriend Ellis. And I only told her because I was feeling lonely under the burden of the knowledge and I figured that a burden shared is your loneliness halved, and so, one night I spilled everything to her.
My sudden loquaciousness on a subject I’d vowed to keep from the vampires might have had something to do with the fact that Ellis had just asked me to marry her.
Right out of the blue, while we were watching some idiotic quiz show on television because Ellis loves quiz shows. I hate them. Hyperactive adults making loons out of themselves and simpering over some smarmy perma-tanned host who couldn’t get a real acting job. Anyway, in the middle of one of these dire shows, Ellis announced, “I need to ask you something, Dante…” and then she frowned, shook her head. “No, I mean, I want to ask you something.”
I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me to get her the autograph of a smarmy, perma-tanned quiz show host.
“There’s a ceremony that we have…vampires, I mean,” Ellis began. I had no idea what was coming next, which was why I didn’t make some excuse to run away whilst I still had the chance. “It’s not an official thing…well, it is, for us. It’s a ceremony of union. Oh fuck it!” Ellis scowled at the TV screen as though it had offended her somehow. I know it was offending me in a variety of ways. “This isn’t coming out the way I planned at all.”
“Things rarely do,” I sympathized.
She took a deep breath of air that vampires don’t actually need and started again. “I want you to marry me, Dante,” she stated.
I wished she had asked me to get her the autograph of a smarmy, perma-tanned quiz show host.
I stared at her. As marriage proposals went, I suspect this one had to rank right up there as one of the clumsiest and least romantic of all time. The kind of proposal which might become embarrassingly immortalized on You Tube-were vampires not fiercely publicity shy and would probably kill anyone who put them or their business on You Tube. My response wasn’t exactly girly hand-clapping and high-decibel squealing either.
“You, uh, want me to… what? Marry you? Uh, same-sex marriage isn’t legal, not in this state,” I stuttered. I felt my lips try to twist themselves into something resembling a smile, an effort which I got about halfway to completion and then gave up on when Ellis began to look concerned and asked if I were all right, or was I having a gas attack?
“No, I’m not having a gas attack,” I told her irritably. I sat up in bed and massaged my temples with my thumb and forefinger. “I just think it’s all a bit…soon.”
“Are you saying no?”
She sounded so dejected, and looked so hurt, her dark eyes turning all liquid and soulful, that I was immediately undone. Crying women and puppies, either one of those things will get me every time. “No, no, of course I’m not saying no,” I hastily assured her. What was I talking about? I was saying no. I was saying “Hell no!” I was just trying to say it nicely . “I mean, I’m not saying no, I will never marry you. It’s just…we’re not even living together yet, Ellis. And-and I barely know anything about you.”
She scowled. “What do you want to know?”
Vampires can be truly exasperating sometimes. Okay, they can be truly exasperating a good deal of the time. Which was another reason not to get married to one of them: I am frequently irritated out of my wits by Ellis. True, in the past few months of seeing each other I had begun to appreciate even her more irritating qualities, but the question remained, would I stop being so willing to put up with these irritations if I felt obligated to do so? After all, that’s really what marriage is-an obligation to put up with another person’s shit and nonsense. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that to marry is to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other. Of course, Schopenhauer was a notoriously curmudgeonly old dude who preferred the company of poodles to that of human beings…
As patiently and as simply as I could, I explained to Ellis that most people at least meet one another’s parents before they get married…hell, before they even get engaged or begin living together.
“My parents are long dead. I assumed you had figured that out…what with me being a three-hundred-year-old vampire and all, Dante,” Ellis stated.
“Yes, I did sort of figure that out. Very funny.” I took a deep breath. “I still don’t know anything about them. Dead or not. Nor do I know a great deal about you.”
“I see.” Ellis’s tone cooled several degrees. “So it’s fine to sleep with someone you don’t know much about, but making any kind of commitment to them is out, is that it?”
I shook my head. “You’re making this into some