Isabel and the Werewolf Beast (Vampire Tales #1)

7. Isabel

Chapter seven

Isabel

T his was another turn of advents I’d never have predicted. A werewolf asking a vampire to tell them about themselves. If my vampire friends in the ballroom saw me now, they’d shake their heads in bemusement the same as I was tempted to do, but then they’d kill the werewolf without answering his question, such was the long-standing feud between our species. The longer I spent with Dante, the less I was inclined to do so. He was… amusing… for want of a better word. When was the last time a person or vampire surprised me? I honestly couldn’t remember. Time stretched when you were an immortal. Past friends faded into the distance. I recalled the feelings of joy I’d experienced as a human with human friends, but it was so long ago it was more like a memory of a dream.

Shaking off my thoughts, I said, “Did you realize you have three forms?”

He set the book back on his lap, his large hands making the pages seem small, inconsequential. The tips of his claws hovered away from the delicate paper as though he was afraid to tear the precious work inside. His brown eyes lifted to my face, and the questions swirled in the depths of his desire to learn more about himself.

“Your human form, your werewolf form, and your wolf form.”

His eyebrows rose at each statement. “I can change into a wolf?”

“Yes. It’s what most shift into during a full moon. The half-shape you’re in now is unusual for werewolves to run around as the half-beast and half-man version of themselves. I suspect it’s because you haven’t truly accepted who you are now.”

Did anyone truly accept themselves for who they were? I’d struggled when I was a human woman. Weakness went hand in hand with being a woman a hundred years ago. I’d reveled at the strength a vampire possessed when Lucian turned me. No longer had I felt weak. Vulnerable. Not until Silas and this curse. Yet again, a mortal man had made a woman merciless to his power. History seemed doomed to repeat itself.

Dante dropped his intense gaze from my face to the book in his hands. His lips pursed as he stared at the glowing orb of the moon high in the inky sky through the window in the library. “Your words have merit. Ever since Asher changed me, I’ve fought the beast living inside me. The only time he comes out is during the full moon when I have no control over the outcome. I’ve even tried hiding from the moonlight, but it still happens.”

“You can’t hide who you are. Even if this isn’t who you started out to be, it is who you are now. Vampires are created too. I was once human.”

Once, so long ago.

His massive head lowered as his gaze once again sought mine trying to confirm that I too understood being one thing and then turning into another. And I did. I understood the change too well. His mouth opened, lips that for all their beastly appearance appeared soft, and he closed them again without a word coming out. I sensed he wanted to ask about my human life, but he realized I’d get annoyed with him asking more questions. Giving a werewolf knowledge of myself was wrong on so many levels. We were natural enemies. Created to kill each other.

“If I embrace this change, then I’ll be able to shift into a wolf?” he asked instead of the questions about me I saw hidden in the depths of his eyes.

I rolled my shoulders in a dainty shrug. “I’m not a werewolf and couldn’t tell you the way it works. Perhaps the book might give you the answers you seek.”

“Right.” He opened the book again but glanced at the library shelves, searching, seeking the knowledge he hungered to learn. “Are all the books in here like this one?”

I smirked. “No. There are fiction works too. My treasures. If you harm them, then I’ll kill you.”

“I’d never damage a book.” He hugged the book to his chest with his hairy, muscular arms.

“You’re a strange werewolf.”

“So you keep saying.” His lips lifted into a wry smile.

I cracked an answering smile. What was it about this strange werewolf who kept making me smile when I should have ripped his throat out and rejoiced at his death?

His attention dropped to the book in his lap. Eyes the color of molten chocolate scanned the pages. The pad of his finger carefully lifted the pages and flicked it over faster than I would have guessed he’d read. Werewolves were fast but not as fast as vampires. I was almost tempted to stand behind him and read the words too since I couldn’t open a book in my cursed state. I couldn’t do anything inside the castle except sit or lie on the furniture. Doors opened themselves for me whenever I wanted to go into a room, which was handy since I couldn’t open them myself. It was as though a part of me had become the castle.

I steepled my hands and placed my chin in them. His fur was soft-looking, and I wondered what it would feel like under my fingers. I’d killed a few werewolves before, but I’d never taken the time to register how their fur felt or anything about them. I had the time now to study this werewolf. He was appealing annoyingly. I wanted to hate him, but so far there had been nothing about him to hate.

They taught vampires to kill a werewolf on sight. I tilted my head. Why were they our enemies? I couldn’t recall the reason. Had I even been told? Or was it a fact drilled into us from the time we changed with no explanation? I guess in a way I’d been lucky when Lucian changed me all those years ago. His sire and my grandsire helped run the Nightshade Academy for new vampires, perhaps still did to this day, but I wouldn’t know since I was stuck here. At least at the academy, we’d learned who and what we were and, most importantly how to control our blood lust.

Dante had none of that. Werewolves usually ran in packs and passed down the knowledge that way, but since it was just him and his brother, then he’d missed important learning in his growth as an immortal.

“Werewolves live in packs,” he said, as if reading my mind, but it was the book’s information he was parroting.

“Yes.”

It was why we usually picked off a lone werewolf whenever we found one. Easier to kill a single werewolf than a pack.

“Why didn’t my brother and me join a pack?”

“You’d have to ask whoever bit your brother.”

“All I know is that it was a woman. One he didn’t have sex with.”

“The clarification was necessary?” I cocked an eyebrow.

He chuckled. “Probably not, but it shocked me they didn’t have sex.”

“Changing someone and having sex with them are two different things.”

He glanced up from the pages. Our eyes met and held for a moment before he dropped his gaze back to the book.

“Did a vampire kill her?” he asked.

“How would I know?”

“Right. Sorry. Thinking out loud. I’m going to assume something happened to her, and that’s why she didn’t take us into her pack.”

“Either that or she was a rogue.”

“Rogue?” He glanced up again. Every time his gaze hit me a spark of need lit inside me. His focus was so intense. So focused on me I longed to have more of his attention. To see me when others hadn’t while Silas had cursed me here.

“An individual who thinks themselves above the laws of their species and whose thirst for blood overwhelms them so much that they are a liability to others. We have laws to uphold as immortals. They sometimes kick werewolves out of packs for breaking laws.”

I’d killed a few of those too. I assumed that was the pack’s way of getting rid of their liability because they appreciated a lone wolf would be picked off easily by a vampire.

“Laws? I need to read those.”

“The volume on laws is on the top shelf on the right.”

He stood, thick, muscular legs straining against the pants he wore, and strode to the ladder. Clasping the ladder in his huge hands, he climbed to the top of the ladder and then shoved it to the right, the wheels whirred across the floor and stopped at the correct place. A moment later he found the book on laws, extracted it from the shelf, and jumped from the top of the ladder in a graceful display of his werewolf form. Clouds of dust puffed from his enormous feet and swirled around him. He coughed at the particles circling his head, his nose wrinkled as he waved the dust away from his face with the book.

Dante strode back to the chair. To me. Every step he made was full of confidence. How hadn’t he accepted who he was? Why couldn’t he sense the power in him now? The werewolves were strong. Stronger than most. They were formidable opponents to vampires.

He flicked open the law book.

The teachers at the Nightshade Academy had pounded the laws into my head. I didn’t need to sit here and watch him read that book too. I could though. He intrigued me more than he should have.

“I’ll leave you to read that.”

He glanced up, brown eyes studying me with his intense focus. “Where are you going?”

“Obviously not far.”

He laughed, a deep, husky sound that tickled my cheeks into wanting to laugh with him. I didn’t though, for what would becoming his friend get me? Nothing good would come of this. We were natural enemies, yet…

“You’re a werewolf. If you want to find me, you can,” I said. “But whatever you do, if you track me to the ballroom, never go inside.”

“Why? What’s inside?”

“Your death.”

His face flashed with fear so quickly, I thought I almost imagined it. He should be afraid. If he walked into a ballroom full of vampires they’d kill him on the spot. I almost experienced a pang of pity for his death. I’d warned him. It was the most I could do. If he ventured inside the ballroom after my warning, then his death was on him, and I wouldn’t feel guilty. Would I?

I walked from the library, gliding in my ghostly state and never leaving a footprint in the dust growing inside the castle. My dress swirled around my legs as I glided back down the stairs to the ballroom. I needed to sink my fangs into a human and feed. Remind myself I was a vampire, and the werewolf was my enemy. At the door to the ballroom, I paused and glanced over my shoulder making sure Dante hadn’t followed me. If he saw all the people inside, then he’d have even more questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.

The door opened for me as though welcoming me back to this cursed party. Where masks and ballgowns adorned the room. Where vampires partied over and over with no knowledge of anything wrong with their existence. To where I once again became corporeal inside the castle.

Skirting the outside of the dance floor, I found my friend Renee, delicate lace mask in place across her face highlighting the ecstasy of her fangs buried in a woman’s neck whose equally ecstatic face gazed unseeing to the ceiling. Renee lifted her head and licked her lips, not spilling a drop of the crimson liquid down the smooth column of the woman’s neck. Even though I didn’t suffer hunger, a thirst for blood welled inside me. The need for blood was a deeply rooted vampire characteristic.

“Care for a taste?” Renee asked, flashing her blood-covered fangs in a delighted grin.

This was what I’d come in here for. Being around the werewolf had made me hungry. Needy.

“Yes.”

I picked up the woman’s hand since her head had lulled backward, resting on the wall behind her with the blissful release of our bite in her system. Our fangs released a chemical that produced a euphoric state in humans. Some people chased the high of our bite until they died from either blood loss or too much of our chemical. This woman looked close to the latter, but my fangs poked my bottom lip desperate for a drop of blood to quench this need building higher and higher inside me. I lifted her wrist to my mouth, listening to the steady pound of her heartbeat. At least her body was strong. She hadn’t suffered too much blood loss being stuck in this curse. Another bite wouldn’t kill her tonight. My fangs slid into her soft skin with a pop and her blood seeped into my mouth one tasty pound of her heart at a time. I let her body do the work instead of sucking down her blood like an animal until the vampiric urge for blood waned, eased, then passed. Releasing my fangs from her skin, more blood entered my mouth before I swiped my tongue over the puncture wounds and sealed them with the healing properties in my saliva. The woman let out a contented sigh as though my bite had been the one thing she desired in her entire life. I lowered her to a chair to rest and recover, to let her ride out her wave of euphoric bliss with our bites. The long skirts of her gown fluffed around the chair making it seem like she was floating in the air .

Renee gathered my hand into hers, a familiar hold from our long years as friends, and led me onto the dance floor. I welcomed this distraction from the werewolf, but my mind kept going back to him. Was he still reading? Had he left the library?

As we danced to the music, I leaned closer and asked, “Renee, do you remember why we hate werewolves so much?”

Her top lip curled in distaste. “Werewolves! Why ever would you bring them up at this delightful party?”

Was that a spike of fear skittering in my veins? Or was it the warmth of the woman’s blood?

“No reason.”

None except for the fact one was in the library. In this castle. Stuck in the curse with us. A curse she knew nothing about.

“Stinky creatures.” She wrinkled her dainty nose.

Except Dante didn’t stink. He smelled of the fresh woods. We twirled a circuit of the dance floor, then I excused myself. Dancing with Renee didn’t appeal to me right now. I’d come in here to feed. To remind myself I was a vampire, and he was the enemy, but it hadn’t worked. All my thoughts kept wandering back to Dante. Was the werewolf looking for me?