Discovery of the Vampire (discreet paperback)

Her scent made my fangs ache. Her smile made me forget I'd been dead inside for half a century. And the moment I held her in my
arms as her eyes turned gold, I knew I was about to lose her, too.

Two hundred years ago, Dae-Jung buried the only girl who ever saw past his smile — and swore he'd never love anyone again. Then sweet, soft-spoken Alice Moss walked into his coven's territory in a rainbow dress, and now every rule he ever made for
survival is bleeding out at her feet.

Alice thinks she's free. The djinn who hunted her family is gone. Defeated. Done. She can finally breathe. Finally let herself fall for the vampire who's been watching her
across crowded rooms for years.

She's wrong.

Marcus isn't dead.
He's curled inside her, dormant and patient, weaving himself into the mate bond as it forms — strand by strand, kiss by kiss, every surrender feeding him. By the time Dae sees what he missed, Marcus will be sewn into them so deeply that breaking him will mean breaking themselves.

A hidden spell book is the only weapon Alice has left. A two-hundred-year-old secret is the only key Dae's ever held. And the cost of using either one might be everything
they've finally let themselves want.

Six books. Six couples. One last fight.

This time, either love wins — or Marcus does.

Vow of the Vampire is the explosive, angsty series finale of L.E. Wilson's Deathless
Night: Into the Dark paranormal romance series — twelve books in the making across two interconnected series, all converging on one vampire, one witch, and the djinn who's been waiting fifty years for both of them.

DAE

The low frequency of the bass thrummed against my ribs like a heartbeat.

I rolled my hips to the downbeat, letting the music move through me the way it had a thousand times before. A flash of bright white light sliced across the stage, catching the sheen of sweat on my bare abs as I lifted my shirt in a teasing gesture, and the two women directly in front of the stage screamed and waved handfuls of dollar bills in the air.

My body knew the choreography so well I could dance this entire set in my sleep. The drop, the roll, the slow drag of my hand down my stomach that always made someone in the audience grab her friend's arm. I hit every mark. Smiled on cue. And flashed my fangs when the lights dipped low enough that the humans would think they were part of the costume.

But my head was stuck somewhere else. Specifically, three nights ago in this same club, with an ethereal witch in my arms whose eyes had turned gold as I watched.

We've been waiting for you, Dae Jung.

I faltered. Just a half-beat — my shoulder dipping when it should've lifted — but I recovered fast enough that I seriously doubted anyone noticed. Actually, I could probably stop dancing completely and no one would notice. That was the problem. The crowd was thin tonight. Tuesday thin, except it was Saturday, and the women who were here had come for the cheap drinks, not the show.

Except maybe for the two ladies who were still in front of the stage, one of them wearing a tiara and a "Divorced AF" white sash draped over her too-tight red mini dress.

The song shifted into something slower, heavier, and I used the transition to slowly peel off my shirt. It was one of my basic moves, a reliable crowd-pleaser. A few bills hit the stage. One of them was a five.

We used to pull hundreds on a Saturday. Sometimes more.

"Come on, ladies," I said into the mic clipped to my jaw, and the grin I gave them was practiced enough to look real. "I know y'all can do better than that. I'm up here working hard for you."

Laughter. A few more bills as a small group of ladies wandered over to the stage from the bar to join the other two. A woman in a Saints jersey whistled and waved a twenty, and I dropped to my knees at the edge of the stage to let her tuck it into my waistband. Her fingers lingered on my hip, warm and human. But her aura was a muddy pink. Loneliness and two-for-one margaritas. And her touch did absolutely nothing to me — no spark, no heat, no pull. Just skin on skin. A transaction.

Three nights ago, Alice had touched my face and my entire body had lit up like a live wire.

I winked at her, but something sour twisted in my gut as I stood back up.

For fifty years, we've been waiting for you to find her.

A shiver ran through me at the memory of the voice that had crawled out of Alice's throat. The way her body had gone rigid in my arms, first convulsing, then going terrifyingly still. And for three seconds that lasted a fucking century, I thought she was dead. I thought I was holding a corpse, and the sound that ripped out of me wasn't human, wasn't vampire, but something else entirely. Something that couldn't express the grief rising inside me.

My fangs punched down hard.

I turned upstage, away from the audience, pressing my tongue against the sharp points until the sting grounded me. Breathe. Just breathe. She's fine. She woke up. Judy came and took her home, and Alice texted you the next morning to say she was okay, and you said good and get some rest, yeobo and she sent back a little sun emoji and that was three days ago and you haven't heard from her since.

She was fine.

Probably.

The song was only halfway through, but I caught Tyler's eye in the wings. He was one of the new human dancers. Twenty-three, good body, decent moves, absolutely zero supernatural magnetism. He blinked at me, confused, and I jerked my head toward the stage.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, cranking the charm up to eleven because that's what I do, "let's give it up for Tyler, coming in hot to close out the night."

Tyler scrambled on stage with a slightly panicked look, and I grabbed my shirt from where I'd thrown it and ducked behind the curtain before anyone could ask questions.

The corridor backstage smelled like cheap cologne and energy drinks. Tyler's stuff, and Marcus's—the other Marcus, the human one, which was a coincidence that made my skin crawl every time I thought about it. We had five human dancers now, rotating shifts to cover what used to be wall-to-wall vampire. They were fine. Competent, even. Brogan had helped train them before he'd stepped back entirely, his green eyes going dark any time Esme came up in conversation, like even the suggestion that he might still be taking his clothes off for other women was an insult to the mate bond.

I couldn't relate to that. Not the mate part, because I didn't have one. And not the stepping-back part, because stepping back meant stepping into nothing. The stage was the only place my mask still fit.

Or it used to be.

I shrugged my shirt back on without buttoning it and pushed through the door into the main part of the club.

The Purple Fang looked tired. That was the only word for it. Same obsidian bar, same black tables, same low lighting designed to make everyone look a little more beautiful and a lot less sober. But the energy was wrong without my vampire brothers here. Flat. Like someone had pulled the plug on whatever current used to run through this place and left only the furniture behind.

Elias still stood behind the bar, polishing a glass that was already clean. His dark beard was neatly trimmed, his bottles perfectly aligned, and the compulsive precision of his movements should've been comforting in its familiarity. But there was a mug of coffee next to his elbow. Coffee. I could smell it from twenty feet away. Bitter and dark and aggressively human. And underneath it, the scent of his blood, which had been doing strange things to my self-control ever since his little transformation.

"You stopped early," he said without looking up.

"Tyler needs the stage time." I dropped onto a bar stool and ran both hands through my oiled hair. Ginseng oil. It kept everything nourished and shiny. "When he tries to do a body roll, it looks like he's having a seizure. And practice makes perfect."

Elias set the glass down and looked at me. Actually looked, not the glancing assessment he usually gave. His eyes were the same dark brown they'd always been, but there was something behind them that hadn't been there before. Warmth, maybe. Mortality. And every once in a while, the faintly bewildered expression of a man who'd woken up to find his entire existence rearranged overnight.

"You haven't been sleeping," he said.

"I'm a vampire. We don't sleep, we die for the day. Totally different vibe."

"Dae."

"I'm fine, Elias."

He gave me a look that said he didn't believe me, which was fair, because I was lying. But Elias had never been the type to push. He expressed concern, you deflected, and he went back to polishing his already spotless bar. It was one of the best things about him.

"Coffee?" he offered.

"Hard pass. Give me a bourbon."

He poured without comment, and I drank without tasting it.

From the back office, I could hear Kenya's voice, low and clipped, running numbers on the phone. Probably talking to the liquor distributor, or the DJ service, or one of the other vendors she dealt with on a nightly basis. Kenya handled the books because she was brilliant and precise and kept this place from going under even when we had no customers.

She also hadn't left the office in three days, and I was pretty sure she was sleeping back there on the loveseat Killian kept for "meetings." Not because she didn't have a place to go — Alex was home now, recovering in their room at Killian's — but because Kenya processed stress by working, the same way Elias processed it by cleaning and I processed it by pretending everything was a joke.

Surely, all that couldn't be healthy. But a head doctor wouldn't be any help in this situation. We were all too stuck in our ways to change now.

"Where's Killian?" I asked.

"In the office with Kenya. He wanted to go over the quarterly numbers." Elias paused. "Again."

"That bad?"

"The human dancers bring in about a third of what we used to pull." Elias said it the way he said everything. Carefully, precisely, each word measured and placed. "But I don't know that that's a bad thing. The only one we need to worry about feeding now is you. Brogan isn't working. Jamal isn't working. I'm—" He stopped. Looked at his coffee mug like it had personally offended him. "I don't need to feed anymore."

"Yeah." I took another drink. "I noticed."

The Purple Fang had always served two purposes: the public one, where beautiful men took their clothes off for money, and the real one, where vampires fed from willing humans who'd leave with a hazy memory of a very good night and a hickey they couldn't quite explain. The business funded the feeding. The feeding sustained the coven.

But Killian only fed from Lizzy now. Jamal from Angel. Alex sustained Kenya. Brogan had Esme. Even Elias — whatever Elias was these days — didn't need blood anymore.

I was the only one left who still needed to hunt. The last vampire at the party, and someone had already turned the lights on and was shooing everyone out.

"He's thinking about closing it," Elias said quietly.

My hand tightened around the glass. "The club?"

"He hasn't said it outright. But the numbers don't work without the vampire draw, and he can't justify—"

"It works fine."

"Dae—"

"I said it works fine." The edge in my voice surprised us both. I set the glass down and stared at the amber liquid like I could will it to make me feel something other than the slow, creeping dread that had been building in my chest for weeks. Months.

Hell, years, if I was being honest.

But I wasn't going to go there, because that way lay a darkness I'd been outrunning since before New Orleans existed as a city.

The office door opened and Killian walked out and came to join us at the bar. His sandy brown hair was pushed back from his face like he'd been running his fingers through it, and his black eyes swept the nearly empty club with a carefully controlled expression I recognized.

"Dae." He pulled up a stool next to me. "Ye're done early."

"Tyler needed—"

"Stage time, aye, ye said that about Derek last night." He signaled to Elias, who set a whiskey in front of him with mechanical efficiency. "But yer right. The crowd is shite tonight."

"It's February. The tourists are between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest."

"It was shite last Saturday too. And the one before that." Killian took a drink, his jaw working. "I've been going over the numbers with Kenya."

I nodded. "Elias told me."

"We're bleeding money these days. The humans are fine for the stage, but they can't — they don't have what—" He stopped himself, glancing at Elias, then back at me. "The business model doesn't work anymore. Not the way it's set up."

"So we adapt. We've been adapting our feeding habits for two hundred years."

"Aye, but we adapted together. All of us were invested. Now it's—" He gestured at the empty room. "It's you. On yer own. Elias is over there drinking coffee, for fuck's sake."

Elias made a small, tight sound that might have been offense or might have been agreement.

"I can carry it," I said.

Killian looked at me. Not with pity, Killian didn't do pity, but with something worse. Understanding. "Aye. But for how long?"

I didn't answer.

The silence stretched out between us. On stage, Tyler was attempting the body-roll move and it looked exactly like I'd described — a full-body spasm set to a Weeknd track. Two women at a front table were trying very hard to be supportive.

Bless their hearts.

"I'm not closing it tomorrow," Killian said, more gently than I expected. "But we all need to talk about what this place is now. What it can be."

"It's home," I said, and the word came out rougher than I wanted.

Killian's dark eyes softened. He didn't say anything. Just finished his whiskey and stood, squeezing my shoulder once before heading back toward the office.

Elias and I sat silently after he left. The music thumped from the stage, tinny and distant, the pulses of the women watching Tyler slowed to a normal rhythm with his less than sexy dance moves, and somewhere on Bourbon Street a woman laughed too loud and too long.

"You should go see her," Elias said suddenly.

I stiffened. "See who?"

The look he gave me was unimpressed at my attempt to be coy. "I've polished this bar through four of my brothers falling for their mates. And I recently just fell for my own. I know what it fucking looks like."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Leaning his elbows on the bar, he stared at me hard. "You've checked your phone eleven times in the last twenty minutes."

Had I? I glanced down at the device on the bar. The screen was dark. No messages. No little sun emoji.

"She's recovering," I said, which was true, and also an excuse, and Elias knew the difference because Elias always knew the difference. He just usually had the decency not to mention it.

"She came to you, Dae. Not Judy, not the coven. Not even her brother." He pointed at me. "You."

I went still.

He was right. She'd locked the door and pulled that torn page from her sleeve to show me.

ME.

Right before that thing had taken her from me and said my name through her pretty lips like it had known me for centuries.

We've been waiting for you.

"I need another drink," I said.

Elias poured.

I stared at my phone.

It'd been three days since Judy had arrived and peeled Alice out of my arms with a look that said this is witch business, vampire, and I'd let her go because what else was I going to do? Storm the Garden District? I didn't even know how the hell Judy knew to come help her, but I assumed it was some bond they all had. Just like we did. Alice belonged with her family.

But, dammit, I could still feel the phantom weight of her body against mine. Small and warm. Her heart hammering like it was trying to break free of her chest. The jolt of electricity when she'd touched my face.

That had been real. That had been Alice. Not whatever crawled into her afterward. That small touch had gone straight through me like a live wire, shooting heat down my spine and pooling low in my stomach in a way that had nothing to do with hunger. Well. Not that kind of hunger. And for exactly one second I'd known with absolute certainty what this was, what she was, and what we could be.

My gums throbbed, and I pressed my tongue against the inside of my teeth, willing my fangs to stay put. This was getting out of hand. The aching, the obsessing, the way I couldn't close my eyes without seeing her face…

I frowned, remembering. Her aura had changed after the djinn had spoken through her. It was always a white-silver shimmer, clean and pure as starlight. But after, there'd been something else. A thread of gold woven through it, so faint I almost missed it. At the time, I'd thought it was beautiful. I'd thought maybe it was her djinn blood finally surfacing, stirred up by everything that had happened with Alex and Marcus.

Now I wasn't sure what I'd seen.

"Elias." I turned the glass in my hands. "You said you grabbed Marcus's binding thread. That you felt him. What did—" I stopped. This wasn't fair. Elias had nearly died unmaking himself to pull that thread. He'd burned through a century and a half of immortality in a single act of desperate courage to save Talin and Alex, and I didn't have the right to drag him back into it. "Never mind."

"It felt…like a god," he said quietly.

I looked up.

His hands had gone still on the glass he was holding, and his dark eyes were somewhere else entirely. "Every year, every decade, every century, peeled back like layers of skin. Everything I was as a vampire, everything Killian's blood made me, burned away. And underneath—" He set the glass down with exaggerated care. "Underneath was just a man. Standing in a field, listening to mortar fire, wondering if the next shell had his name on it."

My chest ached. Not for me. For him.

"Marcus didn't feel like a person," Elias continued, his voice dropping. "He felt like a black hole. Like a void shaped like a man, trying to fill itself with anything it could reach. Power, control, people—" He shook his head. "It didn't matter what. He just wanted to have things. Hold them. Keep them."

We've been waiting.

We.

Who the hell was we? "But it was just—"

My phone buzzed against the bar and I grabbed it so fast I nearly knocked over my glass. My dead heart did something embarrassing in my chest before I registered the name on the screen.

Not Alice.

It was Alex. Her twin brother. The text was short and direct.

She won't talk to me about what happened at the club. She says she's fine. She's not fine. Can you go see her? I think she'll talk to you.

I read it twice. Three times. My thumb hovered over the screen.

I typed back: What time?

The response came immediately: Now. Obviously.

Something cracked the careful nothing I'd been holding in my chest for three days and let something dangerous leak through.

Hope, maybe.

Or dread.

The two felt exactly the same these days.

I pocketed the phone and drained my bourbon. On stage, Tyler was taking his final bow to scattered applause, and two of the women from the front table were already putting on their jackets.

A few months ago, I'd have to kick the women out at closing time. But now the Purple Fang was emptying before Bourbon Street even filled up. And as I listened to the stage lights humming above the place where I'd been performing for decades, for the first time since we found the place, I didn't want to be standing under them. I didn't want the attention.

I wanted to be standing at a ward line in the Garden District, waiting for a witch in a rainbow dress to step through.

"Lock up for me?" I asked Elias.

He nodded once. "Go," he said. "I got this."

I went.

The February air hit me as I stepped onto Bourbon Street. After a brief warm snap, it seemed the city had decided to give winter one last chance, which only made me feel slightly better about our lack of customers.

The usual human chaos swirled around me: drunk tourists stumbling between bars, a jazz trio playing for tips on the corner, the smell of vomit and beignet grease and the lingering notes of a strong floral perfume that was probably way overpriced. Normally I'd walk through it all like a shark through warm water, reading auras, feeding on the ambient energy of a city that never stopped feeling.

Tonight, though, I barely noticed anyone else was even on the street.

I didn't know what I'd find when I saw her. Would she be my Alice? Or the thing that invaded her body? Would she tell me what happened? Did she know?

Would she look at me the way she had before?

I kept walking.

The Purple Fang's neon sign buzzed behind me, casting my shadow long and violet across the wet sidewalk. Ahead, the Garden District waited — warded, silent, full of witches and secrets and one woman who'd locked a door and trusted me with her fear.

I wasn't fine.

I hadn't been fine for a lot of years.

But for the first time in all of them, I was walking toward something instead of away from it. And that scared me more than any djinn ever could.