Vampire Most Wanted by Lynsay Sands Page A

blinked her eyes open with surprise when a cold cloth was laid across her forehead. She found herself peering up into her son’s thin face. It was half obscured by strands of his long hair, making his expression inscrutable.
    “You’re awake. How do you feel?” Damian asked, sitting on the edge of the mattress she lay on.
    Divine stared at him blankly, confusion rife in her thoughts. “Damian? What are you doing here?”
    “You don’t remember?”
    Divine glanced past her son at that question, her eyes settling with dislike on the dark-haired man who had spoken. She couldn’t prevent the scowl that claimed her lips. “Abaddon.”
    “Basha,” he greeted with a condescending smile, and anger whipped up through her like a snake.
    “I don’t answer to that name, Abaddon, and well you know it. My name is Divine and has been for a good century. You should be used to it by now.”
    “You can call yourself what you like, but in your heart you will always be Basha,” Abaddon said with a shrug.
    That just made her furious, perhaps because in her heart she knew it was true. She could give herself any name she wished, but would always be Basha, daughter of Felix and Tisiphone, granddaughter of Alexandria and Ramses, and niece of the great and powerful Lucian Argeneau, a man she used to adore but had learned to fear. In her heart, she was still Basha, but she was trying hard not to be, and loathed that the young woman she’d been so long ago still clung to the woman she’d become.
    Knowing he could and probably was reading her thoughts, Divine shifted her attention to the room she was in to clear her thoughts. She noted the torn, old-fashioned wallpaper and scarred hardwood floors. There were holes in the walls and a large one in the floor as well, telling her where she was—the derelict building on the edge of town that her son had settled in for his brief stay in California.
    “I don’t know why you choose to live in such horrible places, Damian,” she said unhappily.
    “Where should he live?” Abaddon asked dryly. “Should he run away? Join the carnival like you?”
    “I didn’t run away,” she snapped.
    “Basha, my sweet, you’ve been running from yourself since—”
    “Get out of here, Abby,” Damian interrupted. “You’re just upsetting her.”
    Abaddon hesitated, but then nodded obsequiously. “As you wish.”
    “I don’t know why you allow him in your life,” Divine growled as she watched the man leave.
    “He has his uses,” Damian said mildly.
    “He’s an animal like his master was before him,” Divine snapped, and then turned to her son and said with frustration, “It took me ten years to get us away from that man and remove his influence from your life, and then when you turned eighteen and set out on your own, you just welcomed him back in like a long-lost uncle.”
    “Do you really want to argue about this again? Now?” Damian asked.
    Sighing, Divine shook her head and closed her eyes briefly. She’d given up arguing about Abaddon two and a half millennia ago . . . after more than two hundred years of useless attempts to get Damian away from the man, she’d acknowledged that it was his life, he could do what he wanted with it, and have who he wanted in it. That was also when she’d started spending less time around her son, leading her own life and leaving him to lead his.
    “I don’t want to argue, Damian,” she said finally, “But he—”
    “Saved your life,” he interrupted, and then added chidingly, “Again. Surely you can cut him some slack?”
    “He saved my life?” Divine asked with a frown, now trying to sort through her memories to find how she’d got here. She remembered coming back from town, dropping off Marco by the bunkhouses, returning to her RV intending to put the motorcycle away and . . . she’d heard a noise from inside the RV, Divine recalled. She’d gone in to investigate and— She raised a hand to feel her head as she recalled the pain