Page 5 of The Midnight Order (The Thorngray Vampires Duet #1)

Jasper

She’s inside when I rush up onto the porch, my speed and power making me soundless as I bend and sniff her dinner that’s getting cold.

Human, then.

When Corvin told me someone was living in the Dormund place, I thought he was lying. No one’s dwelt here since Soliel died.

I thought no one would occupy the dwelling again, but I was wrong.

I learned from the townsfolk that her name is Silver, which is hilarious because my fellow coven mates and I are allergic to it.

She’s a walking nightmare with a warning sign attached—one that says, ‘Stay away.’

But there is a process to these things, and we can’t deviate from the ritual, or the lower born will riot, especially after all this time.

We’ve put so much effort into finding the key that if we let one outsider slip through the cracks, we’ll have a war on our hands.

They want to be free just as much as we do, so we must test her.

After a century, I’m certain she’s not it, and she’ll be yet another we send on their way, memory-less.

Moving stealthily back into the trees, I make my way back to where Lowell is waiting.

“Well?” he asks, his deep voice carrying.

I nod, motioning with my hand for him to calm down. “She has to be tested.”

We both turn as she steps outside and snatches her food quickly, slamming the door again when she’s retrieved it.

Lowell smirks. “This one might be fun. She’s got spunk.”

“I don’t know why you must toy with them. There’ll be plenty of fear in their blood when they bring them to us.” I shake my head.

He shrugs. “It’s my thing.”

His thing. We all have one.

Each of us has some ritualistic thing we do when it comes to testing the outsiders, and I think it’s the only thing keeping us sane.

Lowell taunts and stalks them in the lead-up to the test.

Corvin loves to analyze their blood first, to delve into their lineage and what it reveals to him.

Asher will toy with them sexually and try to assess how their aura suits his needs, while I’ll talk to them and try to discern what brought them through Blackmoore in the first place.

Because if the curse doesn’t see potential in them, they’ll pass right through like we don’t exist.

Sure, the humans who need to know that we exist do. The rest of the world, however, is oblivious.

For the first two days after she arrived, I wondered if she was an exception to the rule. Her aunt lived and died here, the only human we ever allowed to do so, for a good reason, so I thought the blood connection allowed her to wander in unexpectedly.

Usually, we have a warning. The ley lines and wards surrounding and running through the town experience disruptions and outages right before outsiders enter our world from beyond.

“Are you done teasing her for the night? Corvin will want to have a sit-down before the retrieval happens tomorrow evening.”

He rolls his eyes, looking longingly back toward the woman’s house. “Just another hour.”

I know better than to impede his stalking, so I stuff my hands in my slacks and head off for home.

“Tell Corvin not to drag this one out, will you? I’m sick of taking so much time only to toss them back.”

I could tell him he’s doing the same thing, but I don’t.

“I will, but I think it’s Asher we should tell with this one,” I muse, thinking of the beautiful woman hiding from us beyond the trees.

Cops pull up, and lights paint the night sky.

“She is pretty, isn’t she?” he asks, turning to look at me.

“That she is.”

“Be home in an hour,” he tells me, his voice sounding slightly deranged, more so than usual.

“See you then.”

The walk back to Thorngray takes moments, even while I try to go slow. Its sprawling lawns and overly manicured foliage tell of our wealth, but really, it’s all we have to do anymore: maintain the estate.

The four of us are the last remaining in the Midnight Order, and if we weren’t cursed, I don’t know that we’d still be here.

Actually, I know we wouldn’t be here. We’d choose to go elsewhere.

Anywhere else.

The wind blows me through the door, and I slam it behind me as Milly passes with her skirts swooshing, a broom in one hand and a bucket of cleaning supplies in the other.

She never stops; I swear it.

“Milly, I don’t see the point in—” She keeps walking, ignoring me entirely as Corvin comes down the stairs to my right.

“Oh, give up. You know she doesn’t listen to you, anyhow. Listen, I was thinking maybe we add this extra blood test this time to?—”

“About that, Lowell’s asking that you don’t drag your portion of this out, and I have to agree. He seems a bit off-kilter, and we should grant him this one thing. Just this once,” I repeat to drill my point home.

Corvin slams the book in his hands shut, his face growing stoic. “Fine. Just this once. The next one, however, I want to test for any relation to past vampiric lines.”

He turns on his heel and walks toward the kitchen.

“Stop!” I shout, and he halts, turning back with a grin on his face.

“Why would you need to know that?” I pinch the bridge of my nose.

He steps closer, his eyes lighting up as they do when he’s found something to dig his hooks into.

“Well, I have a running theory that the curse lets some through because it senses a kindred spirit. Like a long-lost relative with the vampiric strain,” he adds, staring at me as my brain tries to work his theory over.

“Will the key be of vampiric lineage?” I ask him.

He thinks about it, and his face falls. “I don’t know, but it’s letting them in, so, logically, it senses something we don’t.”

Hence, why we allow him to run the gamut of tests on the subjects that the curse feeds us.

“Fine, add the test. For the love of everything, don’t tell Lowell,” I plead.

He nods. “I’ll sneak a sample with my others and be quick. It won’t take the results any longer to run, anyhow.”

I pin him with a stern glare. “Be sure that it doesn’t.”

He backs away, crossing his heart as if it still beats regularly, and the promise means something.

“Hey, where’s Asher?” I ask him.

“Dungeon, per usual.” Something flashes through his eyes that I can’t read before he pushes into the kitchen.

I sigh as I head for the dungeons.

One never knows what they’ll find Asher doing down there, so when I get to the door separating me from whatever hellish thing he’s up to, I take a steadying breath.

Entering inside, the steady beat of techno music wraps around me as neon lights flash overhead.

Asher is in shorts and no shirt, jumping rope in the middle of the room.

To the left of us is a full gym we all use religiously. To the right is a sex dungeon Asher uses to torture not only Corvin but also outsiders during their testing.

“Hey,” he says, wiping his face with a towel as he turns the music down with a remote. “What’s up?”

“I, Uhh… I need you to keep yourself together tomorrow during testing.”

He knits his brows, taking long swigs from his water bottle. “Why wouldn’t I? You’ve never warned me like this before. Why now?”

Goddamn him, there’s hope blooming in his eyes, and I hadn’t meant to put it there.

“I just… She’s pretty, and there’s an aura about her. I don’t want another situation like…”

“Like the one that got us all cursed? Yeah, I think I understand that much.” His tone is dry as he shakes his head.

“I’ll be fine. If that’s all…” He turns the music back up, now louder than it was before.

I grit my teeth as I close the soundproof door and lean against it.

I did what I could.

I relayed my worries and Lowell’s, and now I just need tomorrow to go off without a hitch so we can send her back into the real world and move on with our lives.

Of course, it would be nice to share in Asher’s hope that she’s the key, but I gave up on that dream years ago. Fifty, to be exact.

Once I’m back in my office, I shut and lock the door, rounding my desk and plopping into my chair.

From the mini-fridge beneath my desk, I grab a bottle of O negative Cuisara and take a swig, forgoing heating it to ninety-eight degrees and blanching when the temperate liquid hits my stomach.

I’ll regret it later, but it takes the edge off for now.

Corvin synthesized blood early in our takeover of Blackmoore in the early 1800s. Then, our kind was common knowledge and hunted to near extinction. Cuisara is now the blood that sustains us and the entire town.

The blood and the warding were necessary to carry on life like average citizens—ones who didn’t die, but that’s beside the point.

Now, a company in town manufactures and distributes blood to our town and many like ours beyond the ley lines.

Chugging the bottle with my nose pinched, I toss the empty in the recycling bin and sit back in my chair. It creaks at the speed with which I moved, and I close my eyes as I cross an arm over them.

She dances through my brain like a beautiful nightmare. The way her dark hair blew in the wind. Her scent that carried down to my awaiting nose—her captivating blue eyes.

The more I’ve wound myself up since seeing her, the more I worry about Asher.

He’s the darker of us in the order, and because of that, I try to keep him on a tight leash. He’s why most of the town were turned in the first twenty years we were here.

He’s also the reason we’re cursed.

I sigh, tossing my anger back as it tries to rear its ugly head.

I remind myself that there’s no time to dwell on what we can’t change, standing just as Corvin walks through my door.

“That was locked for a reason,” I sneer.

“I don’t know why you bother. It was nothing to unlock it with my power.”

He drops onto a leather couch before my empty fireplace as I pour us two glasses of bourbon.

Handing one over, I eye him.

He lifts his and we clink them together before each of us takes a long sip.

“So, how was he?” Corvin asks, worry painting his eyes.

“Seemed fine, although I think I accidentally made him hope she’s the one by asking him to rein it in.”

“Fuck.”

“Why are you asking me how he is? Don’t you guys talk about this shit? Pillow talk and all that.” I wave my hand animatedly as I jazz him.

“Getting him to talk to me anymore is like pulling teeth. He’s getting worse.”

“I know,” I say, looking down at my glass as I swirl brown liquid inside it.

“I don’t know how long we can carry on this way.” He knocks on his mask.

I nod, completely agreeing with his words. Not about Asher.

About myself.

“I don’t think we have a choice in the matter.”

“Unfortunately not,” he agrees.

“You’ll be careful with this one, too, right?”

I look up at him, peering deep into his red eyes as if they’ll give away more than usual.

They don’t.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He laughs. “I know you’ve told yourself you’ve given up, J. But I know you better. I watch you go through the trials just like everyone else, each time someone wanders into town. I watch you mourn when they’re gone, too. You can lie to yourself, but can’t lie to me.”

I swallow, unable to acknowledge that his words have a ring of truth. “I’ll be careful.”

“Well, then. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Corvin.”

I stand and walk to my window, looking out and seeing Lowell as he speeds through the yard and up to the porch. Looking beyond, to the woods that hide her from me, I wonder if she knows we’re coming.

“Just one more sleep, and this will be behind us,” I tell myself, lifting my glass in cheers to the starry sky before swallowing its contents.

Just one more sleep.