The Fallen King: The Bellum Sisters 4 (paranormal erotic romance) (4 page)

Her mother was a practicing grey
witch which meant she could dabble in magic that could heal or hurt. Abby had
the same power in her blood, but it seemed that each year that passed growing
up, each new birthday she had, each holiday that came and swept away without
knowledge of her father, she pushed her mother further and further away. Until
now, she only saw her mother on those holidays and birthdays, and only talked
to her on the phone a few days a week. Even the phone calls they shared didn’t
last long—Abby made sure of that. She just couldn’t stand to be around her.

And now she knew who her father
was. What she didn’t know was how to feel about it or how to feel towards her
mother. Her mother’s soft footsteps came out of the office and Abby closed her
eyes. Anger, she certainly felt some anger but that wasn’t the overriding
emotion surprisingly. No, she wasn’t
very
angry with her mother.

“Abby, is everything all right?”
her mother asked, her voice closer, wary.

Abby kept her eyes closed and
focused on just herself and the emotions scattering and darting around inside
her as if they too didn’t want to be figured out yet. As if something terrible
might happen if she did figure it out—something awful maybe. Abby felt as if
she was swimming through her own heavy emotions, searching to figure out which
one she was feeling. Her breath caught as she found it. It wasn’t anger,
surprise, or confusion she felt. It was pain. Pure and not very simple, pain.

The words came to the tip of her
tongue, laden with every ounce of emotion riding her. Abby spoke before she
lost them. “After all this time, I needed to know. I
had
to know and you
couldn’t tell me. Not once. Not after all the begging and the tears and the
pleading.” Her voice cracked, tears slipped out of her tightly squeezed eyes,
but still she went on. “And now that he’s found me and I’ve found him, he’s
dead. I know who he is and I can still never know him. And I can never talk to
him, never hug him, never
know
him.”

Abbigail wanted to drop to her
knees and curl up in her bed and let her numb body find itself again. She wouldn’t
do it, and her pride wouldn’t let her. She only let one sob escape before she
clamped her lips shut, slammed her eyes closed, and just rocked on her feet
with arms wrapped around her waist. He’d wanted her to know about him. He
hadn’t wanted her mother, which hurt on a level of its own.

“I wish he wouldn’t have even
sent the stupid letter,” Abby said, slowing her rocking. Her mother was oddly
quiet, all things considered. “You know, mom, it feels like there’s a knife in
my heart that hadn’t been there before. It’s like I’m being taunted. ‘Oh by the
way, I love you and would have loved to be in your life. Too bad I’m dead now.’
And the stuff he said about you. I don’t know if I hate him or…”

Finally her mother spoke. “Let me
see the letter, honey.”

Long engrained to answer her
mother’s commands, Abby pulled the letter out of her back pocket and handed it
over. She kept her eyes averted unable to meet her mother’s sad eyes.

A few minutes passed while
Abbigail listened to her mother’s breath catch and tears clog her throat as she
tried to control it.

“I’ll tell you everything,” her
mother said.

Anger started to poke its head
up.
Now you’ll tell me
, Abbigail’s inner conscious yelled.
Now, after
it’s too late to do anything about it! Isn’t that fucking convenient for you,
mother.
But she didn’t say any of those things that she was thinking.
Instead she got up, her back muscles feeling stiff like they hadn’t been used
in a while and went to her mother’s office to take a seat in front of the desk.
Her mother followed and sat behind her beat up wooden desk that was covered in
a disarray of pamphlets advertising the store, eschewed paperwork, pens without
the caps on, pencils with broken points, three cups of coffee that were
probably days old, and God knows what else.

“H-how do you want me to start?”

“Just...at the beginning, mom.”
Abby temples pounded against her skull. She pressed two fingers to the spot and
rubbed circles as her mother began to tell her the very thing she’d been
begging for her whole life. Funny, but she wasn’t relieved or excited to hear
it now. Not like she’d thought she’d be.

“I met him twenty-six years ago.
He was so handsome and charming. There was something old world about him, you
know, as if he came from a different time. I felt something special about him
and when he pursued me, I agreed. I realized he was an incubus then. I fell in
love with him fast. So fast...”

Abbigail’s chest felt like it was
going to explode. That meant she was part succubus?
Oh my God
.

 “Mom,” she cut in, “can you skip
to only the most needed details please?” She couldn’t handle hearing the
falling-in-love story of her mother and father. Not right now anyway when
everything felt so raw, and especially after hearing how her mother had just
been second best.

“Oh, okay, anything you want
honey.”

The knife in Abbigail’s heart
twisted even deeper at her mother’s favorite endearment for her. It had to be
unfair that she felt angry with her mother, right? Except for the fact that
she’d asked for more than twenty years to know who he was and she never received
an answer. She had to find out from a letter from a dead man.

“Well, um, I got pregnant. Pretty
quickly actually, and, well, I know you know about it from the letter, but it’s
still hard to say. He had three daughters already. They were all so precious to
him. I mean he worshipped them. Their mother was his Protector. You know how
they are, they get that one person who is sort of like a mate to them and they
stay together forever. He loved her. They don’t have to love their Protector
but he did—so much.”

Abbigail turned her head to stare
at a green metal shelf that held cardboard boxes, stacks of printer paper, more
paperwork, and a bunch of her mother’s witchcraft knickknacks. She tried to
focus on the paper she saw and to read the words there, but it didn’t distract
her enough. She couldn’t remove herself from this situation because she needed to
hear this. She just didn’t want to, not really.

“I was afraid. I
knew
that
I could never compete with that. He never actually said it but we spent many years
together, and he never asked for us to move in. He never asked to see you. He
never wanted to marry me. After his wife went missing, he never stopped looking
for her. I’m sorry Abby, but we were always the outsiders.”

Abbigail finally turned to look
at her mother. She had her head buried in two hands and her shoulders were sagging
forward. She looked much older at that moment. Her mother looked at her with
wet, sad eyes, and a frown.

“I was always second. I had no
choice but to be that. I didn’t...I couldn’t...” she scrubbed her hands over
her face and shook her head as if to get rid of a bad thought. “I’m sure I was
wrong, but it’s like...he was holding back something from me so I...so I...”

Oh my god. So that was it, Abby
thought. “He held back part of himself from you, so you kept me from him. Talk
about petty, mom.”

Anger sliced in her mother’s
eyes. “It wasn’t quite like that. He never pushed to see you at all. I’m not
the only one who’s petty, or who’s made mistakes. At least I sent him pictures.”

Her mother’s words hit home just as
she wanted to. She’d never become a practicing witch like her mother wanted her
to. She’d never carry on her mother’s legacy, and yes she actually had a bit of
one. And yes she did it just to spite her mother.

“Yeah, I guess we’re both petty,
mom.”

Abby stood up, but couldn’t meet
her mother’s eyes. Her mother started to say something, but the phone in Abby’s
pocked buzzed.

She took it out and answered it.

“Yeah?” she said. “Got it.” She
closed the phone and pocketed it. “I gotta go. A case.”

She left her mother in silence
and rushed out to her car. That was good. For the best. She loved her mom no
matter what and all of this would have been different if only her mom had told
her who her father was. She didn’t deserve to find out in a fancy letter
written by a dead man.

Warm air had gathered in the car,
and it suffocated her in its heat. She started the engine then rolled down the
windows to let in some cooler air. The breeze made her sigh as the tight
muscles in her back relax. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep
from crying.

Chapter
Four

Night set by the time Abby got
home from the lab. The dead shapeshifter case was going to be a hard one for
detectives since they had no witnesses. Either that or anyone who witnessed the
crime wasn’t coming forward. Some people get scared in situations like this and
don’t want to come forward. It could be to their benefit or demise in cases
where they recognized the killer. The knife used to commit the murder still
hadn’t been found and until all the blood and evidence was processed, nothing
could be done. It was a waiting game until they got another hit.

“What a day,” Abby said as she
unlocked her front door and stepped into her house. It wasn’t really her house;
just a rental but she loved it all the same. It had three bedrooms, two baths,
and a single-car garage to boot. Going from college dorms to the small apartment
she shared with her friend Jenna after college to this was like hitting the
lottery.

Her stomach growled. She hadn’t
eaten since breakfast that morning but her body was so tired she just wanted to
pass out and not wake up for a week. She couldn’t do that though, nope. She had
to face her problems. She needed to contact her step-sisters.

She wondered: what would they
think of her? Would they like her, accept her? She doubted it. She couldn’t say
she’d be so agreeable to accept a step-sibling that she didn’t know about until
now. Still, she had to try. As soon as she got some sleep she’d do some research
and find some addresses. A spark of hope filled her that maybe, just maybe,
they’d be wonderful. She’d only ever had her mom and no one else. She’d had
friends but that wasn’t the same as family. Jenna was always there if she
needed her, but they weren’t as close as they’d been while in college.

Abby set her lab bag on the
kitchen table, snagged a yogurt out of the fridge and spoon from the kitchen
drawer, and then headed to the bedroom. She needed to get a pet, a cat or maybe
a dog. Something so the house wouldn’t feel so empty every time she got home.

She scrubbed her face and changed
into her pajamas as she finished her yogurt and tossed it into the trash bin.
She’d just pulled down the comforter, ready to let her exhausted bones rest,
when a bang came at a door.

Not a knock, a bang.

She jumped, her heart starting a
fierce pounding beat in her chest. Her hand went to her chest, and her eyes
flew wide open. She checked the clock: ten o’clock. Who the hell would be
banging on her door like that? That sounded like the knocking SWAT officers
used before breaking down the door when they had a search warrant.

Getting control of herself, Abby
opened her nightstand drawer and pulled out her gun. She had a permit for it
and she knew how to shoot. The banging persisted.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
It
never relented, never paused.

Abby crept down the hall on the
balls of her feet as her heart thundered in time to the knocking. She kept her
thumb over the safety on her gun, ready at a moment’s notice to flick it off
and use it.

Just as she reached the door, the
banging stopped. She froze, straining to hear something. No whisper of breath,
no sound of movement; she only heard the cacophonous thud of her own heartbeat.
She breathed as quietly as she could as she tried to slow her racing heart. She
was glad the lights were off in the house. Maybe whoever was there would assume
she wasn’t home and leave.

Then the banging came again, this
time even harder. She flinched, her hand tightening around her gun warming the
cool metal as the door shook in its sturdy frame. God, whoever it was must be
strong. She wished like hell she had a peephole or even a window at the door
but she had neither. The nearest front window only showed as much as the
driveway. The front of the house blocked the doorway from view.

Only a door stood between her and
the person knocking.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Finally finding her voice, she
called out in a hard voice, “Who’s there?” Well, she’d tried for a stern voice
but it still came out sounding scared, alert.

The knocking stopped as if it
never happened. Only a resounding echo and her racing heart showed she wasn’t
crazy.

She heard a muffled voice, deep, unintelligible.

“What?” she said, yelling louder
through the door. She wasn’t stupid enough to open it. Hell no. Her thumb
traced over the small safety lever on the gun, itching to release it.

“Abbigail Krenshaw,” the deep
voice said.

Her stomach fell to her knees.
Fuck, what did she do now? Somehow this man, it was definitely a masculine
voice, knew her name and that scared the shit out of her. She looked around,
feeling as if dozens of eyes were watching her but she didn’t find any. Only
her empty dark house stared back at her. The green clock from the kitchen stove
still lit the kitchen up in a dim glow and nightlights in the hallway and
living room were dim but showed enough light to see that no one waited to jump
her.