Read Online Wicked Desires by Jezebel Jorge - Free Book Online Page B

was no costume. She dressed like this every
day of the year.
    Maybe taking the St.
Charles streetcar in the midst of the evening commute hadn’t been
such a good idea. Except that she enjoyed the stares of both the
men and women that perused her body with heat in their eyes. She
almost felt sorry for these nine-to-five commoners making their
daily trudge home from work.
    It wasn’t as if being William
Fletcher’s wife wasn’t a job. That house had been in a horrible
state of disarray when she had first taken over the place. His
money might have paid for the prime First Street property, but it
was her inheritance that turned that old house back into a mansion
worthy of being occupied by a DeFliehr witch.
    The evening had begun its descent from
dusk to darkness when Dinera got off the streetcar at the last stop
in the French Quarter. Despite the rapidly fading light, she bought
a bouquet of roses from a street vendor and fearlessly entered the
St. Louis Cemetery.
    Little things like muggers and street
thugs meant nothing to a witch of her power. She strolled through
the cemetery until she reached the ornately decorated Fletcher
family crypt. Dinera placed the roses in a silver vase attached on
outside wall.
    She lit a white candle pulled for the
folds of her cape and unlocked the door with a key dangling from a
silver chain with another one of her pentacle amulets.
    The heavy door creaked open
and she stepped inside, scattering the wilted roses from her
previous visit. Placing the candle on the floor, she knelt beside
it to thank William’s parents, grandparents and great-grandparents
for her New Orleans home. Although she had never personally met a
single Fletcher enshrined in this crypt, she considered this people
to be her only family on this side of the Atlantic
Ocean.
    As much as she loved her
adopted home in New Orleans, on nights like this she ached to be
back in her native Romania or her father’s French homeland. She
knew her mother would be in Transylvania tonight sitting beside the
grave of her father. DeFliehr witches were always cremated so there
would be no ancestral graves of the omen kinfolk.
    After paying her proper respects,
Dinera left the candle to burn itself out in the crypt and
carefully locked the door behind her. She looked up at the angel
atop the crypt and wondered what William might be doing at that
very moment with his beloved Odessa.
    A good little witch would have packed
up her bags and headed back to Europe. Dinera might be little in
stature standing just above five feet tall. However, she was about
as far from good as a witch could get. If this Odessa wanted
William as badly as he claimed, then she was going to have one hell
of a time pulling Dinera’s claws out of his back.
    It wasn’t about love. It hadn’t been
about love since the birth of that useless boy child. This was a
magickal power struggle. No one took what rightfully belonged to
her and in Dinera’s eyes William was her property, much like her
First Street home.
    On her way to the cemetery
entrance Dinera encountered a group of teenage thugs. The night’s
waning moon provided just enough light to illuminate the face of
her own son. Fueled with anger she marched right up to him, yanking
a can of beer from his hand and pouring it on the
ground.
    Her high heel boots gave her just
enough height to smack his face. The blow wasn’t hard enough to
hurt, just enough to make him blush with embarrassment. He’d
inherited her pale complexion and red haired temperament, but he
knew better than to talk back to her.
    “ How dare you disrespect
your ancestry on the most sacred night of the year?” For further
emphasis she smacked his other cheek. “If you are not home in your
room in fifteen minutes you will not be leaving that room until
Winter Solstice.”
    “ But Mom, it’s Halloween
and we're just having fun.”
    “ It’s Samhain. The night
the veil drops and we are closest to those who have passed over to
the other side.”