Kindred Souls: Entire Series Books 1 - 5 Read online

  © Copyright 2017 by Bree Branigan- All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Kindred Souls

  MF, FF, Paranormal

  Suspense Romance

  By Bree Branigan

  It was difficult to argue with him and, again, Nora didn’t want to. She moved into his arms, melted into his embrace and got lost in that sweet measured kiss that made her feel an age she couldn’t even remember at this point.

  She didn’t need an elder to tell her that this boy, whatever he was, would only bring trouble into her life. She could see it herself, right there, in the way his hands held onto her hips as he kissed her with a soft determination that made her immortal knees weak.

  Table of Contents:

  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

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Kindred Souls

  Chapter 1

  “So he remembers you?” Elise gripped Nora’s arm tightly, making no attempt to hide the alarm in her eyes.

  “How could he?” Nora growled, yanking her arm out of Elise’s grip and moving to the opposite side of the large library where they spoke in useless hushed tones.

  Elise followed her, unable to drop the subject. “This is pretty serious, Eleonora. I think you should talk to Marcel about it.”

  “No,” she glowered at the blonde woman. “Elise, not a word about this to Marcel, or anyone else.”

  “You need to tell me right now if you think this human remembers you, Nora. If he remembers what you are...” Elise stood with her arms crossed, tapping one foot on the carpet.

  “That would mean he’s immune,” Nora snapped, swallowing hard. She felt her stomach tighten. “Have you ever found anyone who was immune? Ever met someone who looked you right in the eye even after the wound healed? He woke up in my arms, Elise. I ran.”

  Elise stood there quietly for a moment before shaking her head. The truth was, she had never heard of a human regaining consciousness so fast after being bitten. Granted, she was far from the oldest in the clan, but surely she’d have heard about it if it had happened in the past.

  It was a matter of nature. Some plants had thorns. Some animals had claws. And some predators, their kind specifically, had a poisonous bite that could make a person forget. Too much of it could stop a person’s heart or drive them mad as easily as it claimed their short-term memory. That wasn’t their style, though. For years, their clan had made an effort to remain kind, unnoticed; to feed without ever killing.

  They only spoke about who they were to prospects; potential new vampires. Those prospects, with very few exceptions, were chosen by the elders every ten years. Elders turned and trained them. Only the elders were allowed to bring new blood into their midst.

  They were pacifist vampires looking for their place in a new world. Their rules were simple, and breaking them resulted in banishment or death. It had always been that way, and it gave all of them an appreciation for the freedoms and serenity of life as part of the Aóratos clan. Invisible as their name suggested.

  “I don’t…” Elise finally spoke, glancing up at Nora with worry in her eyes. Her brow wrinkled. “I haven’t found anyone immune, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. And if it does, Marcel is going to be pissed you didn’t tell him.” Her voice quavered. “Especially if it reaches Lena before it gets to him. And he is going to be pissed at me for keeping it secret.”

  “It won’t get to Lena,” Nora said dismissively. She stared at the wall, away from Elise.

  “How do you know?” Elise snapped back, fueled by the fear in Nora’s eyes. “You don’t even know if he saw you, do you? You think that you were imagining things but what if you weren’t, Nora? What happens if he remembers you? What you did to him? What happens if he tells someone?”

  “I’ll take care of it, okay?” Nora gritted her teeth, visibly working hard to maintain an even tone.

  “Tell Marcel.” Elise spoke with finality.

  “Elise,” Nora looked at her pleadingly, her eyes feverish, “please just give me a couple of nights to figure this out, okay?”

  “Fine,” Elise said, pushing herself out of the chair. “But if this goes south don’t say I didn’t warn you. It could get us all into a shitload of trouble.”

  Elise stormed out of the room, her heels raining on the carpeted floors, occasionally hitting hardwood letting Nora know she was headed to her room on the other side of the manor. Finally, her foot-steps were nothing but an echo in the distance and then nothing at all.

  Nora stood in the middle of the library, feeling small in the midst of all those books. Most of them weren’t as old as she and yet she couldn’t help feeling tiny. Irrelevant. Guilty, too. She really wasn’t sure of what had happened earlier at the bar, and the idea that something as simple as hunting for dinner could go wrong made her feel like a fool. This is what she did, who she was. How the hell could it go wrong?

  Yet it was hard to deny what she had seen: that recognition in the boy’s eyes. He had looked right at her knowingly, and beyond the look of fear in his features, she saw curiosity. That curiosity was what Nora was having the most trouble getting over as she went through the evening’s events. It stood out because she had never found it in a person before.

  She was a good hunter. Good at spotting her targets in crowded bars, concert venues, and fraternity parties on campus; good at seducing them and being just one more girl in a sea of girls looking for someone to rub up against in a dark corner. It was harmless. By the time morning came, she was gone and the guy had no recollection of the girl that everybody saw him making out with. She was just one more story, a face blurred by alcohol. Even if anyone recognized her, the part where she fed on a person was forever gone. It was what the poison was for.

  Unless it hadn’t worked.

  But was that even possible? Nora wondered if there was a way to ask one of the elders without making them suspicious. If it was unprecedented there would be nothing to fear. But something told her that if she was right, if the human had recognized her, it was not the first time it had happened.

  She could have asked Marcel, but she knew that he would see right through her and guess her reason for asking. He was her maker, after all. They were forever connected, and there was no way she’d be able to hide all this doubt from him. All this fear of somehow having screwed up and jeo
pardized the safety of the entire clan after years of peacefully coexisting with the humans in town. It had been decades since their kind was persecuted, thanks to that tricky little balance achieved by never killing. They left their prey where they found them, or where they could easily get home.

  There was no permanent damage either. Victims were just left feeling a little woozy as the venom wiped the memory of the bite clean in a matter of minutes. Like a virus acting rapidly on a computer hard-drive until there was nothing but a previous setting to go back to. By the time they regained consciousness, all memory of being attacked was gone, and the blood loss? Well, it was nothing that a good night of sleep couldn’t take care of.

  Usually.

  That wasn’t how it had gone, though, was it? Improbable as it was, Nora had heard the guy calling after her. Not just in her thoughts, but his voice calling out to her. A, “Hey!” that reverberated through her brain in a loop, leaving her too distracted to attempt interaction with Marcel, or anyone else for that matter.

  Nora carefully pushed her chair under the table and went to her room. There were only a couple of hours left before sunrise, and it had been a long night. A night followed by dreams of his skin, his taste, and the way he had looked at her. A look that was uniquely peculiar and extraordinary because that sort of thing just didn’t happen. Humans didn’t remember being bitten, and that was the way it was supposed to be. The way it had always been. The reason all those fictional affairs in vampire novels were as popular among their kind as they were amongst humans. Vampires wanted to know what it was like as much as humans did.

  Chapter 2

  Fletcher had decided that being attacked by a she-demon was a good enough reason to give himself a sick day. It didn’t matter to him that the general assumption would be that he was so painfully hung-over he hadn’t been able to get out of bed. He knew it would be fine among his professors, but not with his Coach. There would be hell to pay and he knew it. It may have been okay if he had just told the coach he was feeling ill, but instead he had to go and tell him that he was attacked by some sort of vampire. That someone had tried to make a meal out of him between tequila shooters, jager bombs, and stale cups of beer.

  “You just stay where you are and rest, boy.” The coach’s voice was cold; sarcastic-sounding. “You will need it for next practice.”

  When he’d told his friends about what had happened no one believed him. They chalked his claims up to a long night out drinking with the team. Half the team had left tequila chunks of vomit all over the field. So whatever Fletcher said, Coach was likely to assume he had the same excuse as every other member of the team who’d been out the previous night.

  It made him doubt himself, too. Had he been that drunk? Jason kept telling him that the hot girl he’d been making out with probably slipped him something to steal his wallet and whatever was in it. These things happened in college towns, he said. Fletcher couldn’t remember taking any drinks from her, though. Not that his memory was the most reliable thing at the moment. He didn’t remember much at all, and the things he did with absolute clarity hadn’t been real. At least that’s what his team mates told him when he called on them to recount what had happened during the evening.

  No one seemed to think it was possible in the least. No one ever asked any questions, really. They had laughed and exchanged looks but didn’t seem to be worried that a woman had attacked and fed from him. Granted, Fletcher couldn’t imagine himself believing such a story. But surely his imagination and some drinks hadn’t rendered him completely crazy.

  He was a little alarmed at how easy it was for his friends to just ignore something as serious as someone trying to eat him. At the same time, he realized how far-fetched it seemed. Maybe there really was something in his drink. Maybe he had been stressing too much about the game next Friday and on keeping his grades up so that he could stay on the team -- be the star for a while longer before it was time to meet a different set of expectations through grad school. Those expectations were asphyxiating. His responsibilities on the field and off of it were a big deal to the school and a big deal to his family, even if they were all beginning to lose their importance to him. Maybe it was all getting in his head and this is what he got for it.

  He wasn’t so sure, though, and he was curious.

  The rest of the day was spent with his laptop close by, making a search that didn’t really take him anywhere. He found vampires who claimed to be real and drank blood in hopes a retrovirus would slowly but surely transform them into superior beings. He found groups calling themselves “real” vampires in places like Buffalo and New Orleans, and vampire clans that required an online subscription and a credit card to read the complete manifesto and possibly join. None of it seemed like anything more than a bunch of goths playing dress up.

  After a few hours, Fletcher was not so sure that the people accusing him of being too tired to tell the difference between reality and fantasy were wrong. The idea that vampires could not only be real, but had somehow found themselves in that particular town feeding on students – well, even he had to admit that it seemed a little crazy. It made far more sense to accept that something had been slipped into his drink.

  He closed his laptop with a head full of information that had only confused him more. None of it was helpful. It made him think that maybe researching vampirism online was about as smart as self-diagnosing a mysterious mass growth using nothing but “Ask Jeeves”. The whole thing made him feel stupid, so instead of worrying he decided to go for a run, take a long shower, and then catch up on reading to keep his mind focused on other stuff. All he needed was to stay busy. If he just did that surely he could get her out of his mind.

  Except he didn’t really want her out, did he? He just wanted more of her voice, and her hands, and her lips pressed down on the pulsation of his jugular. It soon became obvious to him that the reason he wanted more, the reason he couldn’t get her out of his mind, was that he wanted to learn more about her, whether that meant discovering an underworld of dark blood-suckers or just a woman who had tried to rob him blind. He wanted to see if there was some sort of online community, clan or site where he could find her, maybe track her down and get a few answers.

  After all, if it really was all in his mind, what better person to tell him he was insane than the person he was going crazy over?

  He kept getting these vivid flashes of what it was like to have her body pressed up against his, backing him into the wall to the rhythm of the music. Her voice, deep and sultry, like it was being pulled straight from the back of her throat, soothing as she whispered for him to relax. To breathe. He could feel his heartbeat speeding up and her lips against his throat. He could feel her lower lip dragging along the vein and then the rush brought on by her teeth as they sunk into his flesh and pierced it, leaving him with the greatest high he had ever felt.

  Maybe her teeth had never pierced his flesh and it wasn’t blood-loss that left him lightheaded, but that didn’t change the images that were now burned into Fletcher’s brain, replaying over and over again so vividly. He had to wonder where they were coming from and why he couldn’t get rid of them. Why he felt so damn inexplicably strongly about them. Why his physical reaction to them was unlike any reaction he’d had to any fantasy before, ever – assorted teenage fantasies and first wet dreams included. The memories of her burned through him like a wild-fire, raging to his very core and leaving him flustered and rock hard.

  “How are you feeling, Fletch?”

  He almost leapt out of his skin, reaching out to snag a pillow and throw it onto his lap as he turned to look at Jason, standing large and threatening in a doorframe that almost wasn’t big enough to fit him.

  “Huh? What?” he asked, shifting for comfort as he tried to fill his head with anything other than the flicker of her tongue before it had sucked on his neck. He cleared his throat. “What?”

  “Just checking up on you. You looked really freaked out when we left this morning.”

&n
bsp; Jason would have been too if the roles were reversed. Fletch was tired of having this conversation, though. Jason didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t touch with his monstrously large hands. To him, this was all a clear indication of one thing, and only one thing: Fletcher needed to get laid.

  “I’m fine,” Fletcher mumbled, adjusting his jeans at the crotch as he stood up, glad to know that Jason’s sole presence was a proficient boner killer.

  “Still think you were attacked by a succubus?”

  “Vampire.”

  “Same fucking difference, Fletch.”

  For a moment, he considered explaining how wrong he was but he knew Jason meant they were the same thing in that both were fantasy, both made up. In that, he had Fletch beat. There was nothing that proved he could be right. His arguments were no stronger tonight than they had been earlier that morning. He was obviously wrong.

  “No,” Fletch smiled. “No, of course not. Vampires. How dumb is that?”

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t that he’d been in the mood to party.

  He wasn’t going to confess to his teammates that the only reason he was going back to that bar with them was that he hoped he’d see the woman again.