TEASER TUESDAY ~ Incubus

I'm going with the theme this month: Supernaturals from my Sabrina Strong Series.

Today I wanted to introduce to you the incubus, Jacob, from Dark World. Sabrina doesn't know it at first, but Jacob likes to give pleasure to the ladies. He sort of latches on to her for a time. Let's go take a peek.

"Welcome. I am Jacob. You are a stranger here, yet I welcome you happily," he said in a mellow voice. "Your name is Sabrina?"

"Yes." I was also stunned he knew my name, but, I reminded myself, I was in another realm.

He made a sudden intake of air, his head tilted slightly, and he blinked those brilliant blue eyes. A look of surprised delight lit across his face. "You are the sibyl?"

"Oh, uh, yeah," I said, realizing this might be significant, but I was thinking of the demons who wanted to kill me earlier. I bit my lip watching what he would do, my hand on the laser's handle.

He made a low bow, his long, black hair falling into his face as he straightened and he had to shake it. "I welcome you, mistress. Please, understand that we only wish to give you a retreat, allow you to bathe and--forgive us if our ways are not your ways--but you must dress in something more... appropriate?" He was looking me over. I'd noticed that everyone here (except for Naamah, who was actually nude), was in either a dress or a robe.

"Oh, sure. No problem," I said, relief flooding me.

"This way," he said, hand outstretched toward the next curtained-off threshold.

I went ahead through the entry and found myself in a small, low-ceilinged room with a sunken bath that probably resembled the one Cleopatra herself plunged into. Decorative lanterns cast golden light all along the walls, and their gentle glow reflected in the water. I was happy to see this was a private bath.

"Disrobe, mistress, and bathe. I will return with your new attire."

I watched him duck out. I stood with indecision. This situation sent red flags up all over the place, but the water was scented, and I could tell it would feel soooooo good. Worried I'd be in the middle of pulling off my underwear when Jacob returned, I quickly stripped, letting everything lay wherever it fell. I located the steps that descended into the pool. Poking my toes in, I found that it was a perfect bath temperature. In a moment, I was neck-deep and swishing around in my own private hot tub. Eventually I found that there were a couple of little ledges to sit and settle back on. Luxuriating, I leaned back with my eyes closed. Nice. All I needed was a glass of Moscato, and a hunk of chocolate and I could forget where I was.

My eyes snapped open at the sound of water parting with someone entering the pool.  I saw Jacob, totally nude, striding into my personal hot tub.

"Oh, hey. What are you doing there, Jacob?" I asked nervously.

"I'm here to give you pleasure. We realized that you liked men. That is why I was sent for." And from what I saw, I gathered he was happy to oblige.

Tuesday Teaser ~ Jeanie Woodbine

This week's tribute to the women of my book is Jeanie Woodbine, Sabrina's best friend-turned vampire (in the first book). This is a selection from when they go shopping together.

We agreed to meet at Macy's, so as I walked into the store and surveyed the clothing areas, I hoped that Heath and Jeanie were already here. Within a few steps of the front door, I spied Heath right away checking out a mannequin dressed in a stunning, flamingo-pink halter-top and jeans. If he stood still he might be mistaken for a mannequin himself, dressed down in jeans and a black shirt that read, 'I love humans ... they're yummy!' in gold with a vampire happy-face with red fangs below it. A good thing he had a worn a brown corduroy jacket over it, someone might get the wrong idea. As I strode in, I watched as a woman pulled up a few feet from him and took secret glances at him. I hoped Jeanie hadn't seen it. She wasn't a jealous woman as a human, but I didn't know what she was like as a vampire.

I nearly chuckled with the knowledge that most humans couldn't resist a vampire, whether or not he was trying to enthrall them.

“How's this one?” Jeanie's voice brought my attention around to see the devastating blond in a beautiful red dress, displaying it for Heath to see. Against her paper-white skin, with her dark red lipstick, and the red, open-toed, hurt-me heels showing off her crimson-painted toenails - the contrast was startling. If I'd been a guy, I think I would have drooled.

“Nice.” Gaze flicking up at me he turned and thrust a hand toward me. “Here's the blushing bride now.”

Jeanie twirled to face me, that huge smile of hers more brilliant than ever. She padded toward me. “Look! I've found the perfect dress to wear at your wedding!” She twirled for me.

I was a little shocked with the words. Wedding. Bride. Panic. Now.

“Me. Right?” Jeanie grasped the dress in her fingers and stuck one red-heel-clad foot out. “The shoes are on sale, and they match!”

“Nice,” I said, easing within a few feet of the both of them. If Jeanie were human, I would have hugged her. Her being a vampire meant the touchy-feely thing had to remain as part of our history.

And tomorrow I will be doing a dedication to Jonathan Frid, who died last week, on my shared blog with Carole Gill. I will throw the link up in here and share it all over for anyone who are Dark Shadow fans.

Teaser Tuesday ~ Ilona Tremayne

Once again, it's Teaser Tuesday. I'm bringing you the different women in Vampire's Trill. This is Ilona Tremayne. She was Erik Tremayne's wife, and she isn't the nicest person in the room. Take a long look because this character is Sabrina's nemisis, and she meets her for the very first time here.

There was a flurry of movement and voices from the entry. Two women and three men composed Mrs. Tremayne's entourage, and all but one was human. They stepped along smartly behind the woman at the center of the bustling group. The entourage stopped before they reached the main area as though not allowed past a certain point.

A tall, svelte, beautiful woman strode from the center of the little clique. Back straight as a board, shoulders pronounced with the exaggerated shoulder pads on her shell-pink jacket. Ilona Tremayne — the most powerful female vampire in America. Her blond hair was up in some sort of complicated twist, with black tendrils running through it. Striking, sapphire blue eyes fringed in black lashes that looked too long and lush to be real, swept the room, and then latched onto me. If they had been lasers, I'd have been a crispy critter. Her expression had gone from cagey to unadulterated, absolute hate as two lines burrowed folds between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, on a face that had never seen the age of forty. Her strong presence was like that of a well-known actress' on stage. Everyone's breath abated as she strode slowly forward, all of us awaiting her opening line — or, in my case, dreading it.

I clutched the gold chain of my crucifix expectantly. There was about to be a showdown, and I had a feeling I was going to be sideswiped.

Suddenly, almost as though she'd thrown a switch, her hateful expression smoothed out, her eyes fell off me and onto Nicolas — as though I was the unwanted child and he the favored one. Her hands went out toward Nicolas in a greeting, trilling in dulcet tones, “Nicolas, darling. Why didn't your secretary let me at once? You should reprimand her severely.”

“She is new, but I shall, of course, explain that she erred.” Nicolas' gaze darted away from her and briefly lit on to me and said, “At any rate, may I present Ms. Strong.”

I didn’t miss her look of surprise. It didn't take much on my part to realize that she had not expected me to be there. Not tonight, and not any other night.

As though her emotions were like the color phases of a chameleon, Ilona swooped toward me, her long neck seemed to arch somewhat like a heron's about to snag a fish in its beak. “Ms. Strong.” She stared down her nose at me. A meticulously plucked brow curved.

Gaining my feet, I made a polite bow while biting my tongue. This was what she expected from a groveling human such as me.

“Ms. Strong, Mrs. Tremayne,” Nicolas made the introductions.

“Pleased to meet you ma'am, and my condolences,” I tried to sound sincere while doing my best not to meet her eyes. I, of course, wouldn't shake her hand with gloves on, whether she was a vampire or human. She wanted me dead, after all, and looked decidedly disappointed that I wasn't.

“Of course, Bjorn's trollop,” she sneered, a tight smile curved her red lips.

Anger struck me no less than if she'd slapped me. My glare rose to engage her gaze.

Ilona's eyes locked on mine, and, at nearly the same time, Nicolas' thrall froze me. I couldn't move. Double-teamed by two extremely dangerous vampires, I felt a definite invasion in my head. Unlike most other vampiric invasions, this one had a feel, a texture, almost like a sharp stick tracing patterns in the sand, and my brain was the sand. Then it became more invasive. It was more like fingers plunging in and sifting through the sand, looking for some hidden treasure buried just beneath the surface.

Mentally, I pushed the invader out.

Teaser Tuesday from Vampire's Trill Chapter 8

Hi, everyone. Well, it's Teaser Tuesday. Today I'm taking this from Vampire's Trill from chapter 8

When it was over, as I lay there catching my breath and trying to focus my eyes, I heard a man's voice anxiously asking me if I was all right. He was hovering over me, and he sounded scared, half out of his mind.

“Should I call someone? Should I call the paramedics?” he was demanding with panic in his voice and a cell phone in his hand.

Yeah. What happens to me when I go into a full trance is genuinely scary. I didn't blame him for that look on his face.

I shook the cobwebs out of my head — at least partially. “What? No. No, don't call anyone. They don't know how to treat my form of affliction.”

“Jesus,” he said. I was glad to see, however, that he had pulled on some jeans while I had been out of it. Tattooed heavily on the upper body and both arms, I saw some wild-looking scenes on his chest that I didn't want to linger on.

“Are you—”

“I'm alright. I... My face was wet. I wiped it, wondering what it was. I gaped at my hand. Spit? Realizing my hands were uncovered—and at the same time I was still naked—I said, “Where are my clothes?”

“Babe, you came that way,” he said. “Don't you remember? You went into your creature. You came to me. We were together the whole night.”

“What?” I was trying to make sense of it all. Here I was, naked as the day I was born, in a strange man's house with him telling me that we'd spent the night together. Then it came to me: he had been a wolf, and I was — whatever I became. “Oh. Shit.” I'd forgotten because of what had just happened to me. I had been totally out.

We stared at one another for a few heartbeats.

“Do you usually babble like that?” he asked, pointing at me with the cell phone.

“Babble?” I asked.

“Yeah. It was really freaky,” he said. “It was like you had a seizure or something. I didn't know what to do, but I knew that I didn't want you to bump into anything while you were under that spell, whatever you call it.”

“I'm a clairvoyant. Sometimes I black out, sometimes I talk about what I see, and sometimes I speak in tongues.” I knew that when I did that, no one could understand me, except, apparently, vampires. Who knew?

“The blacking out part I can handle, but whatever else you just did was scary.”

“You mean going into a trance and babbling?” I pulled the blanket up as I gathered my legs underneath me and sat up.

“I guess. It was all nonsense,” he said. “I couldn't make heads or tails of it.”

“I really, really need to go home, if that's okay with you,” I said soberly, changing the subject. (I didn't want to be here, and I didn't want to spend one more minute with Hobart than I had to, but I needed clothes.) "Do you have something I can wear?"

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, sure, sure.” He seemed distracted.

I twisted my mouth with his lack of moving. “Is there something wrong?”

He looked up at me then. “No. Just... memories.” I felt his sadness. He seemed so despondent I had to ask.

“What's wrong? What happened?”

Gazing at me, he took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh, his shoulders going limp. “Frank was really bummed by his old lady being killed and all. I thought that he might go off the deep end, but... ”

“Okay, old lady meaning his girlfriend or wife?”

“Yeah, his woman. She was run over by a semi.”

“Run over!” I was shocked.

“She was a wolf at the time. Semi got her, just missed him. He was really depressed afterward. Blamed himself for it. So, him biting you, well, that might be something that maybe Frank did to try and find himself someone else. He marked you for himself. Tonight, if he'd been out there, he would have called to you. And you would have come to him just like you did to me.”

“Okay, I'm sick of you people biting and marking me for future lays or whatever you have in mind.” Holding the blanket around myself, I leapt to my feet, and he jumped up too.

“What are you talking about? I didn't bite you.”

I strode off, but it was hard to storm out of the room naked with only a ratty blanket around myself. I had nowhere to go, so I stood with my back to him, arms crossed around the blanket. “I was bitten when I was ten by a rogue master vampire.”

TEASER TUESDAY ~ Mrs. Bench, the witch

Hey, and hi to all my fans out there! Since I've been bringing you sections of my books, I realzied I've been posting the men in the books. I think it's time to give equal time to the female characters of the books. Today I'm giving you a short segment involving Mrs. Bench, Sabrina's neighbor who happens to be a witch and damned good medium.

Enjoy!

Bill led me into the same cozy room where Dante and I had gathered that first night. The power or magic I had been feeling intensified here dramatically. It was like a thin wall, but a wall nonetheless. My skin crawled, the hairs on my arms rose. Objects in the room were actually floating and slowly swirling around the room, not furnishings, or anything heavy, but pictures, magazines, glass or porcelain pieces, small things like that. It was as though I'd stepped into a place where gravity, as I knew it, was struggling to maintain its hold.

Over at the couch, Mrs. Bench, who was dressed in powder blue sweats, was floating too. She was in a seated position, hovering maybe six inches off the couch. Her snowy white hair was moving around as if someone had both a fan and a vacuum trained on her head — her hair went out at all angles, all floaty. She had her eyes closed and her hands outstretched over her crystal ball – it too was floating about a foot off the table. Other than all this hocus-pocus, she looked fine.

Teaser Tuesday Vampire's Trill

TRILL TEASER

Here is a little shopping experience for Sabrina. She gets more than the frozen pizza and ice cream she craves to get over her heartache. Is the tall, handsome Bill Gannon stalking her?

I returned to my shopping and angled straight for the frozen section. I mulled over the choices in the ice cream shelves. There were so many to choose from. Why does a person need so many kinds of ice cream, really? All we want is the sugar factor, the melt-in-your-mouth-I-need-to-get-over-him thing. I found mint chocolate chip—my personal favorite. But a Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey was calling my name. I grabbed that, plus a plastic spoon from the deli so I could plow into that as soon as I got out to my car. My mouth was already starting to water thinking about it.

My hand was freezing as I carried the ice cream to the pizza aisle. Again, a huge selection. I went with barbecue chicken, and grabbed a second one that had spinach and portabella mushrooms and five cheeses. Healthy. Right?

I balanced the pizzas on top of the large container of ice cream, sat the smaller pint on top of that and did a balancing act toward the milk section. Grabbing a half gallon carton using my pinky, I now had my hands full. The one carrying the ice cream was frozen by the time I went down the cereal aisle—I was sick of eggs and bacon, or eggs and ham for breakfast. I was gaining some weight and knew if I didn't quit eating like a sumo wrestler I would gain five pounds of winter fat before winter started.

Scanning the shelves filled with—again—a million choices of cereals, trying to find one that wouldn't give me gas, yet sounded like something I'd actually enjoy with cold milk in the morning. I opted for flakes, instead of granola. I was down to a blueberry crunch thing that boasted it could make me lose five pounds in two weeks—yeah, if that's all I ate—when I decided to switch hands because the one holding the ice cream was numb—even though I had my gloves on, the cold seeped through and began to numb my fingers. Wish I could numb my emotions like my hand.

I set the milk down on the floor, and had to shift everything frozen into my left hand. Spying the box of cereal I wanted on the very top shelf (naturally, the one I wanted would be out of reach), I went up on tip-toes and stretched my right hand. Fingertips touching the box, I tried to knock it over, to bring it within my grasp.

That's when another hand snagged it easily.

Startled, I gasped as I turned to the owner of the large, male hand. I stared into cool green eyes. As recognition hit me, I found myself unable to utter anything intelligent for a full twenty seconds while he brought the box down, placed it into his cart, and then took the frozen things out of my hand and put these things, plus the milk in a corner of his cart as well, while I was still trying to form monosyllables, like “hi”.

“You do know that this store offers carts and baskets for the shopper's use for free, don't you?”

“B-Bill?” I said, my mouth trying to work. It was as though I'd been holding the ice cream and pizza in my mouth instead. It took me a second or two to get his joke, and I found myself smiling. “Yeah, I-I, um, I didn't think about getting one.” Lame, Sabrina. Lame.

He stood there staring back at me. “By the way, you're welcome.”

“Oh,” I looked down and saw all my things were in the cart with his stuff. He had a rotisserie chicken, some frozen vegetables, a container of salt—kosher, I noticed—bag of sugar and flour and some chocolate chip morsels. I was still suffering from a brain-to-mouth malfunction. “Uh, thanks.”

“Are you alright?”

“Sure. I'm fine.” Will be after I snarf down the Chunky Monkey.

“You sure?”

“Yes.” Didn't I seem sure? Maybe it was my hair, and unflattering jeans. Oh, and the damned sunglasses.

I caught him gleaming, unblinking at me. He had the nerve to stand there and steal my breath away. The nerve. Plus, he was the antitheses to me; hair laying perfectly back from that highbrow; god-like, close-shaven face; pants pressed to a razor's edge, and his sweater was brown, fading to ecru at the bottom. I thought I picked up that Mrs. Bench had knitted it for him.

“Are you ready to check out?” he asked. My feet seemed stuck in cement as I watched him push his cart around me and avoided a head-on with a lady on her cell phone.

“Uh, yeah.” I dodged the woman on her cell phone talking to her husband—he wanted some cereal, but he couldn't remember what kind—God, get a life!

“Banana Nut Oats,” I said to her. She glared at me. I smiled sinisterly as I heard the man's voice over her phone say exactly that.