The Last Vampire: Book One (EBOOK)
The Last Vampire: Book One (EBOOK)
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The LAST VAMPIRE: BOOK ONE—PART OF A COMPLETED PARANORMAL ROMANCE SERIES (EBOOK).
There’s a smokin’ hot dead guy locked in my garden shed.
That part’s bad enough. But now, he’s trying to get out.
Growing up, my father always told me that I’d come to a bad end, just like my mom did when I was a kid. Hearing that kind of stuff when you’re little eventually gets to a girl, but I can’t say I ever expected my ‘bad end’ to involve an angry vampire with a severe case of iron deficiency and a panty-melting English accent.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Ever since my mother was assassinated, I’ve felt like there was something vast and frightening hidden beneath the fabric of the world. Something none of us are supposed to know about.
So far, finding out I was right hasn’t been nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped. I guess the trick will be staying alive long enough to shout ‘I told you so’ from the rooftops.
But before I can do that, I really need to figure out if the vampire who just bit me is one of the good guys or not.
* * *
The Last Vampire is a steamy new urban fantasy romance series from USA Today Bestseller R. A. Steffan and Jaelynn Woolf, co-authors of the Circle of Blood saga.
Download Book One today, and enter a world shared by humans, fae, demons, and one very reluctant vampire. It’s a place where the supernatural threatens the mundane, nothing is as it seems, and love will either be the world’s downfall—or its salvation.
- Publication date: November 30, 2018
- Language: English
- Print length: 233 pages
- File size: 1933 KB
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ONE
I WAS SIX YEARS OLD when I learned that human beings weren’t supposed to have red, gaping holes through their chests. That’s not the sort of lesson that a person ever wants to repeat—and yet, here I was, staring down at the corpse stuffed into my garden shed like a discarded marionette.
I’d only wanted to mow my freaking lawn. It was supposed to rain later today, and the grass in the back yard already looked ragged and unkempt. So much of my life felt out of control—was it too much to ask for nicely manicured landscaping? Around the edges of my thoughts, I could feel panic swirling, threatening to drag me back to the long-ago autumn day when a little girl lost her innocence and her mother in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
My unease had begun to build the moment I noticed the broken padlock on the shed door. That sinking feeling in the stomach; the realization that someone has been poking around in your stuff and has probably stolen whatever looked most valuable. In this case, that meant my lawnmower. Aside from that and the weed whip, the shed mostly contained a collection of seldom-used gardening tools that had seen better days.
Bracing myself for the loss of a couple hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, I’d opened the door and peered inside. The good news was that the lawnmower was still there. So were the weed whip and the plastic gas can.
The bad news was that my access to them was blocked by the collapsed body of a man with a gaping gunshot wound through his chest. He looked to be in his early thirties, with tousled black hair a bit longer than was fashionable, and a face like something from the artwork of Raphael or Michelangelo. If one of the old masters had sculpted a dark angel, it would have looked like this man—tragic and beautiful and dangerous.
He was wearing black jeans, combat boots, a white tailored shirt with a couple of buttons undone at the neck, and a black leather vest, open at the front. The shirt was ripped and soaked with blood, the stain covering the entire chest area. And the flesh beneath—
I swallowed hard.
I’d like to be able to say that I immediately sprung into action, checking his vital signs and running back to the house to grab my phone and call the police. The truth was that I stood there for a really long time, frozen, my thoughts flying away to PTSD-land like frightened, fluttering sparrows.
There was no one else in sight. Every house in this neighborhood had a privacy fence around the back yard, the blank, six-foot wooden walls giving the illusion of isolation. I could see no sign of how he got here. The gate to the yard was closed and latched. No horrific stains or bloody handprints splattered the wood.
Paralysis finally broken, I crouched down on shaky, creaking knees. I reached a trembling hand out, feeling sick, and pressed it under the dark-stubbled planes of the man’s jaw like I’d seen people do on TV. His skin was cool in the balmy afternoon air. Far cooler than it should have been. I couldn’t detect the telltale throb of a beating pulse, though I made myself feel around the side of his neck thoroughly.
For good measure, I held my hand a hairsbreadth above his nose and mouth for long seconds, checking his breathing. Nothing. The dark angel in my tool shed was long gone, his body cooling to the marble chill of the statue I’d mentally compared him to.
I felt faint. Frightened. Useless. It occurred to me all at once that I might be in danger. Had the killer brought him here to hide the body? Was a madman with a gun even now sneaking around my property, ready to silence any potential witnesses?
My heart, which had been tripping away in a shocked, thready beat, pounded into triple time. I staggered upright, backing away from the shed door, suddenly certain that a murderer was lurking on the far side of the ramshackle structure, just out of my line of sight. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the headache that had been plaguing me all day throbbing in time with my thundering pulse.
I needed to get my shit together. I was losing it, and I had to stop. Whoever had done this was probably long gone. This wasn’t rocket science. When someone dumped a dead guy on your property, you secured the scene as best you could and called the cops. I could do those things. They weren’t difficult.
So… secure the scene.
I closed the door on the grisly tableau inside. The little hinged latch was undamaged. The padlock that was supposed to secure it was broken, but when I threaded the shackle through the latch and twisted it closed, it wasn’t very obvious that it hadn’t locked properly.
I gave a final nervous look around the yard—still empty and quiet. Exercising the better part of valor, I didn’t look behind the shed to see if a murderer was crouched there. Instead, I retreated to the sliding glass patio door and yanked it open, slipping inside before closing and locking it. Why the hell had I never listened to Dad when he’d told me to buy a length of board to jam in the door’s track as an added security measure?
Dragging in deep, steadying breaths, I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the counter. Twenty-six years old, and this was the first time I’d ever dialed emergency services, I realized.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” The voice on the other end of the phone call answered promptly. She sounded bored.
“Hello. There’s… uh… there’s a dead body in my back yard shed. I was going to mow the lawn and—”
“Your name, please?”
“Zorah Bright.” I spelled it out, forestalling the inevitable question about the ‘h.’
The woman rattled off my cell phone number from the caller ID and asked me to confirm that it was correct.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Address?” she asked, still sounding like she wished her shift would hurry up and finish.
“Three-eighteen Evian Street, St. Louis, six-three-one-one-eight.”
“Thank you. Do you need an ambulance?”
I blinked. “Not… really. The guy’s dead.”
“Did you check his vital signs?”
“Yes,” I said. “His skin’s cold. No pulse. No breathing. Big hole through his chest.”
My nausea rose, and grayness threatened the edges of my vision again.
“Police and ambulance services are on their way to your location.”
Still with the ambulance. I wondered if they got a lot of people calling in dead bodies that turned out not to be dead.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
I felt shaky, but wired. If I tried to sit down, I knew I’d be crawling out of my skin in five minutes flat, so I paced instead. I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait. The idea was that they were supposed to get to you in only a few minutes, but I’d caught an exposé piece on the local news not too long ago about how slow police response in the city could be. Sometimes it took them half an hour or more. The talking heads on television had argued back and forth about how much of the problem was down to poor management, and how much was due to insufficient budgetary allocations.
No matter the cause of the problem, the practical upshot was that it might be a while.
Maybe the wait would give any murderers hiding in my back yard enough time to sneak away, so the ultimate police confrontation could take place somewhere besides my house. Preferably, someplace far, far away from here.
I checked the time on my phone obsessively, still pacing despite my throbbing head and aching body. The seven-minute mark had just passed when I heard pounding noises.
I froze, my feet abruptly glued to the worn hardwood floor. It wasn’t the pounding of police officers at my front door. There’d been no sound of sirens, and the sound was coming from the back of the house, not the front.
Heart in throat, I crept toward the sliding patio door. This hadn’t been the noise of a fist against glass. More like noise from a neighbor working on some kind of construction project. But… it had sounded closer than that. I sidled up to the wall next to the glass door, feeling vaguely ridiculous as I darted a peek into the yard.
Nothing.
The pounding came again, and I chanced a longer look, not so concerned now about trying to stay hidden.
Thump.
My eyes were drawn to the shed.
Thump, thump.
The shed door rattled against its hinges ominously.
Crash!
The latch and one of the hinges tore loose, the door half-falling open.
My jaw went slack. I stared like an idiot at the damaged shed, watching open-mouthed as a figure stepped past the twisted remains of the door. Red stained the front of his torn white shirt, drying to a darker shade of rust around the edges. He staggered a bit, catching himself on the doorframe with one hand as he looked around, clearly disoriented.
Unerringly… inevitably… his gaze settled on the glass door, peering directly at me through a too-long fringe of black hair. Even from this distance, I could see that his eyes were the same color as the ice in the center of a glacier—a blue so cold and brilliant that they seemed to be glowing from within.
I stood unmoving as he approached, those eyes pinning me like a cobra mesmerizing prey.
He’d been dead. I was sure of it. He had a freaking hole in his freaking chest, for Christ’s sake. And why wouldn’t my feet move? He stopped on the other side of the door, and we regarded each other through the flimsy barrier of glass. His eyes still glowed with that unnatural blue light.
“Open the door.”
His voice was muffled, but not so much that I couldn’t make out a panty-melting British accent. My hand crept toward the little lever that controlled the lock without conscious thought. I gasped and yanked it back just in time, appalled at myself. I would have staggered backward a step, but my feet were still rooted beneath me.
His brow furrowed as if I’d surprised him, two tiny lines marring the perfect planes of his face. “Right, then,” he muttered, and lifted a hand to the door handle. A single, sharp jerk and the inadequate lock popped open, the sliding door jumping a bit on its track in the wake of the force he’d applied.
He stepped over the threshold, frowning down at me. His skin looked like alabaster, it was so pale.
Run, I thought furiously. Why are you standing here, you idiot? Run!
“Apologies for this, pet.” His voice was low—maybe even a bit distracted. His hand, when it curled around my nape, was gentle. His skin still held that unnatural coolness. “I don’t normally eat and run.”
Share
- 5 stars: 12 (55%)
- 4 stars: 8 (36%)
- 3 stars: 2 (9%)
- 2 stars: 0 (0%)
- 1 star: 0 (0%)
I enjoyed this romance story enough to buy all three books.
It was interesting. Unusual setting.
I truly enjoyed this book and look forward to reading the rest of the series
This was a good and interesting book. Keeps you guessing as to what will happen next. Can't wait to continue onto book 2
I definitely enjoyed this read since it had a whole new twist to the supernatural bent. Here we have Rans, the last vampire due to a war, and Zorah, a woman who has no idea of any of what is happening to her or why. Then we have the Unseelie Fae who seem to be in control of everything. Action from start to finish with a cliff hanger to have you wanting more. Kudos to authors as my first read and on to the second book.
I liked how this book was different from the other vampire stories out there. The main character is demonkin, which is in itself unusual, but the vampire aspect is unusual too. Yes, he has physical perfection, but he also has mental weaknesses. I didn’t like how the book had a main character who was obsessed with ****, but it fits for the type of creature she is.
I liked the fast paced nature of the book. The.world building is slow. I would have rated this a four, but the heroine Zorah is TSTL in most of the book. I like Rans, The vampire and most of hos friends. I don't want to say to much about Z, as it'd be a spoiler. Hoping she gets better. The story stayed interesting. Told from her POV.
The book was too short. Like the main characters. The escape scenes were entertaining and believable. Would liked to have been warned that there were **** scenes. The main character is part succubi and the fae are at war with them. The vampire uses all his connections and skills to save her.
I thought I was over vampire books, and am so pleased to say how much I enjoyed loved this introduction to a new series with a vamp H, and an interesting h. She has all sorts of issues, health, family, financial and has to go on the run with the H, who is somewhat bemused by her. Their attraction is hesitant for lots of reasons, but great steamy scenes all the same. There is so much story to come, yet I wasn't left feeling as if this was incomplete either. Great writing, great story and I am ready for the next book. I want more about this world, please!
Meet Zorah and Ran. Zorah has health issues but they are really an indication of another problem. Now Ran is a vampire who Zorah finds in her shed aaa she tries to cut the grass. Ran has a couple of holes in his chest and Zorah being the good person calls 911. As this occurs the fun begins. Zorah and Ran met at where Zorah works but things from that time on develop into many problems. Zorah calls her father and from there things go downhill really fast. You will meet lost of different types of characters some which are good and some not so nice. The story is well written but the ending will leave many questions unanswered.It is an interesting book which I did enjoy. Read and enjoy the book.
Wow This was a fluke that I bought this series. It adventurous , mysterious and intriguing. It's a different twist to a vampire paranormal book
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will be buying the sequels. But darn it, I would buy the sequels anyway, even if we weren't dealing with the Scheherazade School of Storytelling and Marketing. I really dislike when I buy a book only to find out that it's just the first half (third?) and I've got to wait until I get my hands on the next one. Most books like that, I don't bother. This one, as I said, I will.
Could NOT put this down…… I purchased the audio book on Leonidas’s story & Fae….. looked up the author & noted it wasnt the first in the series…. Well my OCD self went back & started the first book. (Cause i CANT very well start a series in the middle!!) BUT to those who aren’t just saying you can read them as standalone. It gives you little bits and pieces of the past but not enough where you absolutely HAVE to go back to the beginning. HUGHLY RECOMMENDED!! Happy 😃 Reading!!
OMG! The Last Vampire, Ransley, is my new favorite vampire, well, along with Xander and Snag. Rans is delectable. It was love at first sight, er read, for me. He’s a reluctant warrior in an ongoing secret supernatural battle. Zorah is everything you want in a heroine-resourceful, able to think on her feet, brave, and of course, an emerging snarky badass. She has been alone most of her life, an outsider unable to find where she fits. Although Rans has many friends, he is also an outsider, the inexplicable last of his kind. They compliment each other perfectly. I am really looking forward to the next book. With The Last Vampire and Circle of Blood I’m back into vamps in a big way.
Rans and Zorah's story is intriguing! I love this point of view.... last vampire n a young girl who has no idea what she is or that she's even different! At first ya feel sorry for her being left behind by her dad but towards the end of the story you get more on dear ol' dad n want to throttle him for preparing her better but hoping book 2 gives more insight into that! This is the first book by RA Steffan I've read and i really like his writing style! Looking forwarding to digging deeper into Rans and Zorah's story! Also learning more about Albigard, Guthrie and Nigellus and the world of Fae according to Mr. Steffan.
"The Last Vampire" takes you on a ride. And wow -- what a ride! The first book in a series (and really, what book isn't part of a series nowadays?), it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's not too annoying. It naturally leads into the next book. It's told in the first person, and the main character **** narrator is hilarious. There are plenty of laugh out loud moments. There are also a lot of big reveals that kept me tearing through the book. Warning: this book contains graphic **** and a lot of f-bombs. If that offends you, then this book isn't for you. ****, violence, and adult language don't bother me, and it was all quite well done. Looking for a new paranormal romance? Check this one out. I was pleasantly surprised.
I loved the story. I got all wrapped up in it and hung on every word.Imagine my surprise when I learned it ends on a cliffhanger! I'm not happy about that, as there was no forewarning. I tend to stay far away from series' that do that. So that cost you a star.I may read a few more in the series, but I can almost guarantee that I won't last for 17 books.
I’ve read lots of vampire series, but I loved that this book was something new and fresh that I hadn’t read a hundred times before. I like the world the author created and the characters. I devoured this book in a night because I just couldn’t stop reading it. It does end with a cliffhanger, but I immediately purchased book 2 and can’t want to get back in it. My only complaint is, it could’ve been a bit longer, but the price makes them affordable to purchase the next book, so really no problem there. Rans is becoming my favorite vamp and I like the fact that Zorah isn’t a weak leading lady. Interesting story and I can’t wait to see how it ends.
This is the first in a serialized Urban Fantasy series... meaning that it has a cliffhanger ending and the next book picks up right off from this one!Zorah has no idea what she is in for, when an apparently dead man shows up in her garden shed. It turns out, he isn’t dead, but undead. And he is only the first of a series of odd things to happen to Zorah. Ultimately, he is also the one person who can help her!A fascinating start to a series, with a glimpse of fae that are not at all nice the last in a long line of vampires, and demons who straddle the good/bad divide.Fans of authors like Patricia Briggs might enjoy this series.
These authors somehow crawled into my brain, read my thoughts, then produced this HIT of a series. It has all the tropes I adore about Urban Fantasy/Romance, and none of the ones I hate. In the past ten years or so, the Urban Fantasy market has exploded, making it harder and harder to find a GOOD series to sink my teeth into. (vampire joke, try to keep up)The main character, Zorah, is incredibly relateable, without being a Mary Sue. She has opinions, shes confident, and she can be tough as ****. At the same time, she's insecure, physically weak, and tries desperately to keep up with her new life.In a world of Fae, Vampires, and Demons, the story is still so incredibly, refreshingly, human.I think my only complaint would be the lack of closure at the end of each book. There is no definite ending to be found.I kind of equate it to being like a TV show, rather than a movie. If that makes sense. Every book starts right at the heels of the last one, with barely a pause in between.Fortunately, I have Kindle Unlimited, and could download all the books at once. I finished all of them in two days. Yep. So, not a huge complaint, but I felt it was important to point out.At the end of the day, I would advise you, Reader, to at least try the first book. You may get hooked like I did! And if not, It's literally a dollar. What do you have to lose?
This book built a fantastic universe to be continued in the following books in this series. I loved the number of different creatures that were included or alluded to in this book that could possibly make an appearance in future books.With all that being said Zorah was such a clueless main character that it ended up dragging the story down for me. She also has very special and, for what she is, impossible/never-before-seen magical powers that didn't add much to the story unless it was to put her on the pedestal she apparently deserves as an extra special half human half paranormal creature thing. She was also rather whiny and repetitive with her inner monologue which only got worse with time.Rans was an interesting character that I wanted to know more about. To be honest there were quite a few moments where I would have preferred to be in his head rather than Zorah's and that's coming from someone who doesn't really enjoy/go-after male pov novels. His secretive nature was what held me on until the end.I don't know how to feel about this book. The world the authors built is fantastic but the characters don't do it justice. I may or may not pick up the next book eventually in the future.The Audio Book:The narrator's voice for Zorah was on the shrill side and ended up grating in the long run. There were quite a few moments where Ran's British accent simply disappeared. This audio book would have been better had they had at least two narrators at the same time reading their lines (I think it's called dual narration or something of that like). It would have done more to pull me into the story.
Well, another book by Steffan but with her co-author which I have never read. I am a huge fan of R.A. but I am not such a great fan of vamps, therefore, I have not read the Circle of Blood series, consequently never read her co-author. That being said, I am in somewhat of a quandary as to how to review this new one. First, it is a very different take on vamps along with all of the other demonkin & fae persons involved. I very much liked the concept of the storyline of having an underworld simmering below the surface, very clever and explained well. Well, almost, therein being the thrust of the story. I like the grab there and it does hold your interest and of course I have already ordered the 2nd book. What I find missing is Steffan's signature wit and snarky banter that I love to death, scuse the pun. It is there somewhat but not like she usually has in her own novels. I am missing that very much. I will await the 2nd book to give a full review but will give a 3.5 stars for the time being. I await the next one and BTW if this one grabs me as I think it will, I will get the Circle of Blood series as well.
I am kind of tired of vampire books, but I really liked this one. The storyline is entertaining, grabbing and holding my attention through to the end. I found it hard to put this one down! The characters (and the primaries' relationship) develop through the story, without the author just telling you what they are and why they are. Yes, it is a cliffhanger, and it is hard not to buy the next book in the series, but it is so well written and edited ( I never noticed any spelling/grammar or other errors), that I didn't hesitate to buy the next one. I recommend this one!