Blood Red Kiss
Three Stories by Kresley Cole, Larissa Ione and Gena Showalter

These three authors are on my top five favorite author list.

The Warlord Wants Forever
By Larissa Ione

This story was steamy…as in dampen your panties and sit in a hot sauna surrounded by sexy men steamy.

Myst is a Valkyrie who meets Nikolai who is a Forbearer vampire while she is imprisoned in another vampire. When Nikolai and his army take over the castle, Myst tricks Nikolai into thinking she is his Bride. Forbearers get one chance at having a mate in life. Sometimes, they have to wait centuries to meet that Bride. Sometimes, they never meet her. When a Forbearer vampire is turned, he stops having any sexual desire and his heart does not beat. Once, they meet their Bride, their heart starts pumping and their desire comes back but they cannot ejaculate without their Bride being near. Myst purposely works Nikolai into a frenzy and escapes when her sisters come for her but before she leaves, she does one last cruel thing. She kisses him, purposely cutting her mouth on his fang to give him her memories to further torment him. You see, Forbearers are not allowed to take blood directly from the source because they fear going crazy and turning evil.

For five long years, Nikolai suffered with memories of Myst and with not being able to climax. Then one of Myst’s memories comes to him and reveals where she lives, New Orleans.
Myst and her family of Valkyries hate vampires. Fifty years ago, their queen went off to fight a vampire and was never seen again. Rumor has it that he chained her to the bottom of the ocean where she drowns over and over again due to her immortality. Most creatures of the Lore think of vampires as the lowest of forms so they shun all vampires. The Lore is what creatures such as vampires, Valkyries, Fae, demons etc., call themselves. They live right alongside humans yet humans have no clue they exist. The Lore views vampires as leeches so the shun them. Myst hates that she still has an attraction to Nikolai and even regrets leaving him to suffer when she should have killed him.

When Nikolai finds her again, she tries to run but he catches her around the chain that she has worn around her waist for over a thousand years. It breaks so she is able to get a head start running. Nikolai yells for her to stop and her feet just stop running. It takes him but a second to figure out that the chain controls her. He uses it to his advantage and kidnaps her. He takes her to his home in Estonia.

From this point on it gets a little stalkerish and raperish. Nikolai was not only out for revenge but also trying to get Myst to stay with him as his Bride but he orders her to do things that were a little over the top like pleasure herself in front of him. If she hadn’t decided that she liked it…and it wasn’t so steamy, I would have been out for Nikolai’s gonads. I was mad at Myst for the initial playing of Nikolai and making him suffer but I also understood that she isn’t human and plays by a different set of rules and that she wasn’t going to just accept that just because a male wants her for himself, doesn’t mean she is going to roll over and lose her freedom and life. Plus, her family and the rest of the Lore would make her into a pariah and put her at the bottom of the food chain if she ever got together with a vampire.

Despite their many faults or maybe because of them, I rooted for them. I wanted them to end up together even though it seemed impossible.

I actually read this story last even though it was the first one in the book because I have read it before. It is the first book of the Immortals After Dark Series and because I have been thinking about re-reading the entire series again and wanted this fresh in my mind.

Forsaken by Night
By Larissa Ione

This is the second story in Blood Red kiss and the thrid book in the MoonBound Clan Vampires series. I’ve been waiting for Lobo’s story and was not disappointed.

Lobo is a skinwalker vampire. He can shift into almost any living being including humans and vampires. Most vampire clans believe skinwalkers are evil and should be killed but some disagree. They do agree, however that shifting into the form of another vampire should be punished severely. Because of this, Lobo was banished from his clan decades ago and now lives a solitary existence in the vast forests in the Pacific Northwest.

In this world that Larissa Ione has created, vampires have been enslaved by humans and even though vampires are stronger and faster than humans and have certain powers, humans have figured out a way to control them. Humans experiment on them in labs and basically do anything they want to the vampires. But some vampires have managed to keep themselves hidden from humans with magic spells that hide their compounds and by other means.

Lobo has lived in a small cabin in the woods with a unique wolf who he found wounded in the woods. Tehya the wolf has been his only companion for twelve years. Sometimes, she projects and image into Lobo’s mind of a beautiful woman, a beautiful naked woman and Lobo believes Tehya might be this female’s spirit animal. When Tehya gets shot by poachers and lies dying, Lobo makes a decision that could cost him his life. He shifts into the image of the nearby MoonBound Clan’s chief, Hunter, and runs with Tehya in his arms to MoonBound’s caves where he sets her on a table in the medical lab and lets the doctor and his assistant take over. He begs them to save the wolf and they get to work immediately. He leaves, wondering if he will ever see his wolf again and knowing that he may get the death penalty for shifting into a clan chief’s image.

Tehya wakes up as a vampire in the lab. A little over twelve years ago, she was a human but was bitten and turned into a vampire. She had only been a vampire for a month when she had been injured and shifted into a wolf but couldn’t shift back into a vampire. Lobo found her starved and dying. She had tried for a long time to shift but just couldn’t so over time, her wolf mind took over and she just became content living as she was as long as Lobo was taking care of her.

When she wakes in the clinic, she’s frightened and panics. She pushes a female in her hurry to escape and realizes she was pregnant too late but it seems the female is okay so she takes off out of the compound which is a complex cave system. She run through the woods naked to find Lobo. She tells him who she is and what happened. He’s surprised but not totally shocked. He and Tehya have an immediate sexual attraction to each other but now they will have to run and hide because Hunter and the MoonBound Clan will hunt them down and kill them.

One of those in the hunting party will be a woman who has tormented Lobo since he was a toddler when Hunter’s father was clan leader and she wants Lobo dead. Hunter’s father had raided Lobo’s clan and killed everyone except for him who he brought back to the caves and put on a chain. He had to eat scraps from the floor and was generally treated like crap but one vampire took it further. Su’Neena liked to kick him and torment him. She enjoyed his suffering but that is not why she wants Lobo dead. She wants him dead because he knows a secret about her that she does not want her clan to know. A secret that MoonBound would kill her for.

This was an entertaining story and I am glad I got to read Lobo’s story. I wonder who will be featured in the next MoonBound Clan Vampire book.

Dark Swan
By Gena Showalter

This was the final story in Blood Red Kiss.

Although I have read many of the talented Gena Showalter’s book series, I have not read any of the books in this Alien Huntress series yet…well, besides this one now. I’m not sure exactly how many books have been written in the series so far but when I went to Gena’s website, I counted eight so this one is probably the ninth in the series. I usually like to start from the beginning because I feel like I’m missing something when I start in the middle but Gena Showalter did a great job of making this a stand-alone book so I could follow along easily.

The prologue begins with three twelve-year-old sisters Trinity, Jade and Lilica. The sisters, who were created in a lab, were being threatened by one of the staff members, Dr. Walsh. He frequently uses the sisters against each other to control each of them. The youngest sister, Lilica, is the stubborn one and tries to take on any punishment for her sisters but this time it is her sisters who won’t budge when Dr. Walsh threatens her. When they refuse, he tells them their dinner is taken away and then when they still won’t budge, he threatens to take away their breakfast too. Lilica lost it when Dr. Walsh took out a syringe with which he intended to tranquilize her. She used one of her many powers or gifts on him, the ability to use her voice in a certain way which controls the subject. She ordered him to stop and then to the orderlies trying to open the door, she told them not to enter and it worked until new orderlies to whom she hadn’t issued the order to came through the door but not before she had ordered the doctor to try to kill himself and if that didn’t work to kill all the staff members. Yikes!

Many years later…

Alien Investigation and Removal agents aka AIR help keep Earth free of dangerous aliens. Dallas Gutierrez works for AIR and is after the Queen of the Schön, a beautiful alien who is infecting people with the Schön virus which rots them from the inside out unless they constantly prey on other humans or aliens and pass the virus on. She calls them her army. The Schön Queen ends up being Trinity, one of the three sisters. Dallas needs to stop her before she harms anyone else.
We, the reader, find out that Earth had had an alien war decades ago and it now has many different type of beings living here.

Dallas keeps hallucinating which he learns are visions of the future. In one vision, he sees Trinity crawling towards him asking for help but the Schön disease had taken over her brain and she was just trying to trick him into coming near so she could infect him so he shot her. In another, he sees a beautiful naked woman sitting in his chair at home. These images are disturbing to him but when he meets the subject on his last vision, he is even more disturbed.

Devyn, his alien friend, has had her in a cage for three weeks torturing and interrogating her. Dallas recognizes her as the naked woman in his visions and, for some odd reason, feels protective over her and doesn’t want Devyn to torture her anymore. He volunteers to take over her interrogation by taking her away from Devyn’s.

He finds out that she is Trinity’s sister and she thinks she can save Trinity from the Schön virus but nobody has found a cure for it yet so Dallas insists on killing Trinity because she is much too dangerous and he thinks she has turned totally evil.

Meanwhile, one of Devyn’s associates named John has captured Lilica’s other sister Jade. John seems to have become fond and protective of Jade. Do I sense a future romance?

Lilica accidently or accidently on purpose bonds with Dallas because her dominant alien gene (she was created with a mixture of 23 different alien races plus human) is the Falle race which bonds with the person they choose as their husband or wife. When this happens, the urge to consummate their union is so strong that if they resist, the couple starts to get animalistic in nature as the urge takes over. They could even harm anyone who gets in the way of clinching the deal. Because of the bond, neither can hurt the other physically without feeling it too and they can read each other’s minds to an extent so their race against each other to find Trinity first will be difficult.

As his feeling for Lilica grow, he starts to worry that he will lose her if he kills Trinity but he must put the safety of others above all. How can a relationship where he kills her sister ever work out?
This book had a lot of sexual tension and erotic scenes but not so much that it took away from the story.

I will put this series on my to read list.

www.paranormalromanceslut.com ( )

Blood Red Kiss

The Warlord Wants Forever - Immortals After Dark, Book 1 - Kresley Cole - 4 Stars - Nikolai Wroth, Myst the Coveted - I read this book previously as a part of Playing Easy to Get.

Forsaken by Night - MoonBound Clan Vampires, Book 2.5 - Larissa Ione- Stars - CHARACTER NAMES - I will come back to this when I read this series

Dark Swan - Otherworld Assassin, Book 2.5 - Gena Showalter - 2 Stars - Lilica Swan, Dallas Guiterrez - I’m torn on this one. I enjoyed the story overall but man it took forever for me to read it. Lilica was all things strong and loyal. Dallas is very gruff on the outside but a bit of a marshmallow on the inside. I adored his friendship with Devyn. Despite great characters I tended to fall asleep every time I picked up this book. So while I appreciate the world, the story and the delicious sexual tension between Dallas and Lilica I have to give this story a 2. ( )

Vampire stories: "The warlord wants forever" / Kresley Cole (pp. 1-157) -- "Forsaken by night" / Larissa Ione (pp. 189-318) -- "Dark swan" / Gena Showalter (pp. 319-532).

The Warlord Wants Forever by Kresley Cole
I first read this short story back in 2006 when it was released in an anthology called Playing Easy to Get. Next to A Hunger Like No Other, The Warlord Wants Forever is one of my favorite stories in the Immortals After Dark series. This version has been revised, but it's still an awesome read and Myst and Nikolai are hot as ever.

Forsaken by Night by Larissa Ione
I really enjoyed Tehya & Lobo's story. For a wolf/vampire story I thought it was pretty unique. Love the MoonBound Clan series, so I was excited to read this one. I'm hoping there will be more stories in this series.

Dark Swan by Gena Showalter
This story is part of the Otherworld Assassins series, which is one I haven't gotten to yet. Another good read. My favorite part of this story was Dallas Guierrez who is from the Alien Huntress series, which I loved.

All in all Blood Red Kiss is a Paranormal Romance fan's dream. Three great authors and three fast paced, sexy reads. ( )