The Mark (Interracial Paranormal Romance) (Toil and Trouble) Read Free

new day. And the sex was, well…earth shattering.
     
    Then I realized that he always left before dawn. When I joked that my morning breath wasn’t that bad, he shut down completely. In spite of myself, I concocted all these theories. The most fantastical was that Jack was a super spy, and broke all the rules by even being with me. The lamest was that Jack wasn’t a morning person and was worried his bad moods would turn me off.
     
    The truth was a little more alarming.
     
    When I kept suggesting meeting up for lunch and doing other day-time activities and he always got sick at the last minute or pumped out some other sorry excuse, I showed up at his apartment for lunch. Jack had already eaten…a preppy co-ed lying on his living room floor, drained of all her blood.
     
    Usually having a boyfriend that wanted to suck your blood would act as a kind of repellant or red flag of some sort, but one of the perks of being a necromancer is that my blood is poison to vampires.
     
    There’s a long drawn out prophecy that kind of explains it, but mostly it’s because I communicate with the dead, or more specifically our consumption of the blood of the dead. During our first summoning, a necromancer has to ingest a large quantity of dead man’s blood. It acts a bridge connecting us with the All, or the underworld where spirits go when they kick the bucket.
     
    Unfortunately, my blood doesn’t guard me against werewolves, shifters, or a whole host of other supernatural creatures, but I try to appreciate the small things.
     
    At the moment, it was hard to appreciate much of anything. I was a couple of hundred dollars richer, yes; but I felt a chill remembering the ghost’s power rippling through the room. Sherry Jackson’s ghost threw a glass across the room--the one I summoned an hour ago almost shook the very foundation of the building.
     
    I let out a sigh, staring at the embers that burned from the tip of my cigarette. My hands still shook a bit. The ghost had really done a number on me. I finally answered Jack’s request. “I’m not really that sleepy. Sorry.”
     
    “You wanna talk about it?” Jack asked, his strong fingers tousling my hair. He knew I hated it, especially when it was freshly twisted, but it gave him thrills to wind me up. And okay, maybe I liked to have my buttons pushed. Sometimes.
     
    “You think it would make it easier to talk about it?”
     
    “Not really.”
     
    “You’ll feel better,” he probed.
     
    “Not likely,” I said truthfully. “Unless you know a guy that could have a sit down with a ghost.”
     
    “Perhaps,” Jack said slyly. “Right now I’m more concerned about you, though.”
     
    “Are you, Dr. Badeau?” I said with a smirk. Back when he was a human, Jack was Jacques Xavier Badeau III. He studied medical arts in Montpellier, even working under Jean-Baptiste Denys for a time before forsaking an opportunity to work as the personal physician to the crown after Denys stepped down due to accusations of malpractice. Before he met his maker, a few days before his 25th birthday, he’d opted for a simple life in the Americas. Still, every now and then, I’d catch his head in some medical journal, his eyes full of life and excitement.
     
    “Truth be told, as your personal physician, I require you to make love to me several times more before the sun rises,” he said with a grin.
     
    I turned to him then, batting my dark lashes at him flirtatiously. “Why, doctor! Are you sure such a vigorous regimen is warranted?”
     
    “Only one way to find out.” He tickled me then, his touch soft and hard on all the places he knew intimately. He stopped when he saw that my mind was elsewhere. “You’ve gotta talk to me, babe.”
     
    I’d been necromancing with NACA for almost a year now. At first, I’d thought it was glamorous. I was paid in cash, with very little effort on my part. I burned the oils, I walked in a circle, I said a few words in Latin, I got