The Soul Merchant

First Draft

~~~.~~~Chapter One~~~.~~~

“He wouldn’t get circumcised,” said the woman sitting next to me at the bar. “So I dumped his sorry ass.”

I was perched atop a stool at Fayed’s Rot Gut Tavern, a place I frequented, well, frequently, even though I’d recently discovered it was a bar for Kindred and not for humans.

That didn’t mean that humans didn’t come in; it just meant they might not get out again.

I was one of the few and fortunate exceptions, mostly because Fayed, a centuries’ old vampire, had taken a shine to me. I didn’t take that privilege lightly. I couldn’t afford to.

While I still wasn’t comfortable with the thought of vampires being a reality, let alone having their own bar, I was getting better at dealing with it all. I’d been thrust into the world whether I liked it or not. I had already managed to get into and out of more trouble than I cared to when it came to the supernatural, and that included the tavern.

Fayed had alternately tolerated me, welcomed me, barred me, and welcomed me again.

I might be safe here for now, but I didn’t take it for granted.

So I lifted my glass of Rot Gut, a drink named for the tavern, and I waggled the stem of the glass at my companion so the crystal of absinthe at the bottom sparked a brilliant green in the incandescent lights.

She wanted a response, I knew. Her tilted her gaze in my direction indicated exactly that. She even leaned back on her stool to snug in close to the backrest, confident I would have something to say to her confession.

Trouble was: I was still racking my brains trying to come up with an explanation for why she really should hightail it out of a bar altogether. The dangers of the Rot Gut might be easy enough to miss if you were human, but they were real, even if she was oblivious to them. And if she haunted the place for much longer this evening, she might end up haunting it for rest of her afterlife.

As a means to keep her engaged while I worked out what exactly, and if anything, I should say to get her ass off the stool and out into the dark alley where she’d be much safer, I tilted my glass toward her in a mock toast. Maybe I could use it as a segue into shuffling her out the door. Far be it for me to put another human in harm’s way when I knew better about the drinking establishment she’d decided to patronize.

I had reason to be in a vampire bar just a couple hours after the sun set, and I had a burly protector from all things fangish in the form of the vampire owner, Fayed.

The woman sitting next to me, on the other hand, was no doubt already living on borrowed time. She just didn’t know it.

She was nursing a martini of some sort, her fourth in the last hour, even if this one had sat in her grip so long it had to have grown warm by now. She hung over it like a sad vulture. A sad, gorgeous vulture.

She smelled of frankincense. Her long black hair was ombre-dyed on the ends to a light mauve that had been curled into perfect beach waves and she touched them every now and then with fingernails done in French tips. When she wasn’t adjusting her hair, she tapped the stem of the glass as though she hadn’t really made her mind up about the man in question no matter what she said.

I dumped the drink back in one unceremonious swallow, all the better to excuse myself from comment about her uncircumcised beau. I caught the absinthe between my teeth as I considered just telling her to get the hell out of Dodge without any sophisticated preamble.

She drummed her nails on the bar and watched me.

“You meeting someone?” she said.

“Yes.”

I thought about Maddox, who I was indeed, waiting for.

Maddox wasn’t a vampire, but he was Kindred. If I had to describe him to a casual human acquaintance, I’d call him my new boss and owner of an estate auction house. I wouldn’t say he owned a place called the Shadow Bazaar or that he was the owner of a even shadowier business he called Recollections. I would leave out the fact that he was the kind of male women would have fought to bear their children in the days of yore when he’d been a mere man instead of an immortal.

Hell no. I wouldn’t even admit that to myself. That way lay madness.

This woman had come in an hour earlier and took the stool next to me with a sort of possession that seemed natural and easy. We’d struck up a conversation. We ordered drinks. She didn’t truly warrant an answer, but there was that niggling sense that I might get her to move on if I was nice to her.

“My boss,” I said. “I’m waiting for my boss.”

I’d already been waiting for Maddox for an hour, and was wondering when he’d finally deign to show his sorry ass. I might be relatively safe in Fayed’s bar, but it was foolish to assume too much.

“I didn’t know ladies like us had bosses,” she said. “But there you go. Progress marches on.”

She lifted her martini glass high over her head, but I had the sense it was more of a sarcastic celebratory move than a real one. Booze sloshed out over the edge and onto the floor.

She snickered as though she thought my mention of boss was a euphemism. I ignored her deep-throated chortle. She could think what she wanted so long as she left whole and alive.

“It’s pretty dark out there,” I said, priming the pump. “I hope nothing happened to him. Bad neighborhood and all.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.” She waved her long fingers at me.

I placed the glass back onto the counter.

“He’s late.”

Fayed was busying himself adding a few droplets of blood to a glass of ale on the other side of the bar for a rotund, hairy looking man, who, if he was a vampire, lacked all the legendary charisma so enjoyed in fiction.

“Imagine,” she said. “Refusing to have it done when I was at his beck and call.”

So we were back to that, it seemed. She huffed as though it was truly the most incongruous and unimaginable thing she could think of.

Fayed must have heard her comment, because he glanced my way ever so subtly and his eyebrow lifted enough to indicate he was interested in my reply. A smirk rode his full lips, revealing the tip of one of his elongated canine teeth.

Fangs, I told myself. Vampires called them fangs.

I was still getting used to the idea that there were vampires and all sorts of other creatures big, small, good, and bad. Kindred, Maddox called them. Kindred was the word for humanoid that existed that were of this world and not human.

My twenty six years of humanity colored my view of things because most people, according to Maddox, had no idea there was a supernatural world seething beneath their feet. Nine worlds to be exact, and most days, I dearly wished I hadn’t either.

There was a certain bliss in ignorance. I wasn’t sure who had coined the phrase, but it fit perfectly.

I was unabashedly and painfully human, myself, despite some pretty awful events over the last couple of months. Even with my experiences, I had a long way to go before I could call myself comfortable with any of this Kindred stuff.

For instance, once upon a time, I’d thought the absinthe crystal in my drink was something they created by distilling the liquid until a hard chunk of chemical was left behind. Not so. I didn’t even know if that was a possibility, and hadn’t cared.

Now, I knew that the crystal was created from magic. I wasn’t sure what kind of magic and while I hoped it wasn’t fae magic, I didn’t want to know. Not really. When I’d drank the concoction in the past, I expected to hallucinate, but apparently, the servers only gave the human clientele–of which there were precious few–a placebo unless they were targets.

They saved the real thing for Kindred who knew how to deal with the magic.

The woman beside me downed her drink, a sanguine martini, I think she called it, and told me she’d had a hundred lovers in her lifetime and not one of them refused to be circumcised.

“I’m celibate,” I blurted out. “So it’s not an issue for me.”

I didn’t confess to my current state of celibacy was involuntary or that it was also attached to the fact that I’d murdered my ex-fiance, Scottie, who had brutalized me in ways few women ever managed to escape from with her psyche intact. Made me sort of gun-shy to jump on that pony again.

And yeah. Not even for the gorgeous Maddox.

Didn’t matter that I’d had to do it. Didn’t matter that my ex-fiance was going to kill me or worse. I’d taken Scottie out, and Maddox had cleaned up the mess after me. Wherever he put Scottie’s body, whatever he’d done with it, I didn’t want to know.

It was enough that I didn’t have to worry about him ever again. Maddox, however, was an entirely different issue. He’d tried to give me a Christmas gift that could lift me from the funk of knowing I was a murderer. Not just a thief and a runaway.

A killer. That’s what I was. That kind of truth does things to your psyche.

His gift had backfired in all sorts of ways. Not the least of which was his blatant declaration that he wanted me.

And he, the man who wasn’t a man, who had lived hundreds of years, had taken vows of celibacy.

Such is my life.

So, I was broke, working for a man who wouldn’t give me a job or a roll in the hay, and confused the hell out of me about how I felt about it all.

And he was late.

The woman beside me waved Fayed over, and I pushed thoughts of Maddox aside for the time being.

“Another,” she said perfunctorily when Fayed laid his palms on the bar counter. She then shifted her attention to me.

“Celibacy is for monks and nuns,” she said in response to my comment as she inclined her gaze back in my direction. “No self-respecting woman: vampire or otherwise, would rob herself of an orgasm or two each night.”

Each night? I might have asked how many lovers she had, but found I was too insulted by her insinuation that I wasn’t a self-respecting woman.

“I didn’t say I was sexless,” I said, shifting on my barstool awkwardly. A spring on the outer edge bit into my thigh.

“My small friend, if you have to do it on your own,” she said. “You aren’t owning your sexuality. You need to own who you are. Every woman does. It’s time we realized our own value comes from within, not from some man.”

She pulled at the stem of the fresh martini glass as Fayed laid it down just within reach. “One for the China doll, too,” she said. I could almost hear the smirk in her voice.

Fayed avoided my eye altogether as he reached to clear her glass and replace it with another. “Isabella prefers absinthe to blood in her drinks.” His smokey voice was full of innuendo.

The woman reeled back on her stool and looked me full in the face.

That’s when it hit me like a cool breeze.

She was a vampire.

And she thought I was too.

“She’s human,” Fayed said, almost unnecessarily, judging by the flash of narrowed gaze and involuntary widening of the woman’s nostrils as she studied me afresh. “I thought you understood that.”

“Human,” she murmured with astonishment as she looked me over. I wasn’t sure if the color I saw in her face was from embarrassment or the blood in her drink but when it rose to her cheeks, I could really make out how pallid her complexion was.

I don’t know how I’d missed it before.

I tried to work out how such a thing as circumcision would work for a vampire now that I knew I wasn’t talking to a lovelorn, but callous human. And it overrode my concern for her safety.

“I thought vampires had some sort of magic that kept them the way they were when turned,” I said, trying to figure out how it would actually work.

“Circumcision for a vampire,” Fayed explained as he drummed his fingers on the bar counter. “Involves the teeth.”

He coughed into his hand.

I stared at him, astounded.

“Are you embarrassed?” I said, not sure what it could possibly involve that made him blush too, but I found the idea delightfully funny.

The woman reached across the bar to grip his wrist.

“Oh, Fayed,” she said with such a pitying tone that I couldn’t help chuckling out loud into my glass. “Don’t tell me you’re not circumcised. Your poor lover.”

Fayed rocked back on his heels and pulled his wrist from his grip. “My lovers don’t complain, unlike you, Cleo.”

She spun to face me on the stool and for a moment, I thought she might explain the concept, but then I caught something different in her expression. Something that hadn’t been there before but that I’d seen plenty in Scottie’s face when he was feeling especially amorous.

“So,” she said with a predatory note in her voice that wasn’t there before. “You’re human.”

The tiniest tip of her tongue darted out the corner of her mouth. Like she was mulling something over. Something she found incredibly exciting but taboo.

Then the pity and sympathy she’d shown for my state of celibacy all but dissolved from her expression.

In its place was something more feral.

~~~…~~~

Did you enjoy the sneak peek? I promise you will love the rest of it. Isabella really gets herself into it this time. But don’t take my word for it. Preorder it now so it delivers automatically to your ereader.

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Soul Merchant

When the supernatural steals your soul, you have to buy yourself time the only way you can.

Isabella is finally out from beneath Scottie’s thumb, but she still has one terrible thing hanging over her head. She is bound to the angel of hell and a dark shapeshifting sorcerer who wants the magic rooted in her soul.

The seedy underbelly of the otherworld still comes with strings attached even though she is working for Maddox. She’s doing the same thing she always did: using her skills to procure relics of great value. Except now those relics she’s meant to steal all have a supernatural origin, and some of them are flat out frightening.

When she discovers Maddox is after a long-lost relic crafted by an alchemist of great repute, she sees an opportunity to prove her worth and earn a tidy bonus at the same time.

But there are dreadful consequences to dealing and stealing ancient supernatural artifacts…