Fangs and Fur- Beta Read Along
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2025 by LA Magill. All distribution rights reserved for the exclusive use of Wicked Women LLC.
Dili and Hadrian spilled out of the vortex with a rush of saltwater. Desperate, she gulped the fresh air. She was barely aware of her surroundings as momentum pushed her and Hadrian through even more water until they bumped up against something supportive if not solid. Her back squelched into thick mud, and Hadrian’s weight settled on top of her chest.
Water swirled around them, but she could breathe. They lay together, Dili beneath and Hadrian on top, front to back, panting and dead. She held his body possessively close even though that made it harder to catch her breath.
She glanced around. It wasn’t the same riverbank as her haven. The river stretched before them, brown and gold and eternal, its surface catching light like beaten copper. A musty smell permeated the nutrient-rich silt. The air hummed with heat. Abundant papyrus rustled louder than the water lapped at the muddy shore. Blue lotuses spread open to the summer sun, while others stayed closed, lurking until dusk. Unseen insects chirped and whined, and a crocodile bellowed far downstream.
There were no humans in sight. Nor any large animals, other paranormals, or divinities, as far as she could tell.
Grateful for the momentary peace, Dili allowed herself time to recover. Her muscles ached, her body groaned, and her mind wearied. Hunger rattled her empty stomach, too, as if she didn’t have enough to deal with. She squeezed Hadrian a little tighter as moody resignation threatened her relief, his sharp spine pressing into her.
The sensation snapped a memory from outside the pocket to the front of her mind. Dili held Hadrian just as he had ensnared her in his arms under the green canopy, caught in a rapturous moment she could not share. It had only been two days since.
Once again, the moment was one-sided. Hadrian didn’t breathe. His limp weight sagged onto her, far too light for a vampire of his size and strength. Her fingers felt bony protrusions and deep cavities where smooth flesh should have been. Even the locks of hair that stuck to her face, neck, and arms seemed duller.
Dili still hadn’t fully caught her breath as she pushed Hadrian off of her. She squirmed out from under him, her hands and feet sinking into the deep mud.
Starvation had whittled Hadrian’s powerful body down to sticks for bones and graying skin. Tattered underwear protected his decency, but the rest of his clothes had been lost to the sea. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His cheeks caved in. Pallid lips stretched tight over an open mouth. Physical death could not decay his vampiric cells, but seeing him so lifeless still disturbed her.
“Is he alive?” came a trembling voice from behind her.
Dili turned as quickly as she could to see Naddahdat, younger and brighter, emerging from the papyrus. She appeared just as Dili remembered her, with her painted skin and borrowed crown. Iridescent scales still shimmered on her arms and legs and trailed up her neck, a sign of her adolescence despite the blue aura of power encircling her, even at the tender age. That blue color was all her own, untouched by gold.
One look at the tears running down the half-siren’s guilty face reminded the witch exactly when and where they’d landed in her memories, but Hadrian’s body lay in place of the high priest whom she had once pulled from the Nile.
Sudden hope recharged Dili as she answered from memory, “No, but do not lose faith, my child.”
Naddahdat’s helpless voice trailed off into whimpers as Dili tilted Hadrian’s head back to check his airway. Vampires had no need for heartbeats, but she was counting on the course of the memory, and the creation magic of her left pocket, to adjust for the differences in his anatomy and magic.
Hadrian’s throat was clear, but his drowned lungs weren’t. She pressed her palms against his sternum and pumped hard. His body jerked with her efforts. When his head lolled to the side, dribbles of water spurted from his mouth with each compression. She kept pumping. One, two, three, four—she counted under her breath, centuries of experience helping her ignore how his body crumpled under the pressure.
Nothing. No spluttering cough. No panicked spasm. Not even the slightest change in his slack features.
She bent low, sealed her mouth over his, breathed. More compressions. More breaths. The sun beat down on her shoulders, and sweat gathered at her temples.
Still nothing. Dili sat back on her heels, concern beginning to claw at her composure. Maybe following the memory wasn’t enough. Or maybe just because Hadrian wasn’t human like the high priest had been…
She thrust her right hand into her right pocket and fumbled around for anything that could nourish Hadrian’s emaciated body. She had nothing except her emergency medical stores: several test tubes of blood samples containing ancient plagues and just enough type O blood to transfuse one average-sized human adult.
Dili carefully dripped a couple of drops of the very old blood—she recalled collecting it sometime in the 1800s—into the vampire’s gaping mouth. She’d hoped his blood magic would ignite at the hint of sustenance, but his body gave no reaction. The blood just pooled on either side of his rigid tongue.
The witch wouldn’t be deterred, even though she was growing discouraged. She stuffed the emergency blood store back into her right pocket and retrieved a tiny vial full of glittering gas. She sucked the breath of vitality into her mouth as soon as she popped the cork and breathed it back into Hadrian’s mouth. She covered his mouth and nose with her hands, but after a few seconds, the glittering remedy leaked out of his ears.
“No. No!” She tried a spell instead, pressing her golden glowing palms to his chest. Warmth poured out of her and into his frigid body. “Please. Please. Come back.”
Dili’s magic enveloped Hadrian, her power so forceful that his body levitated an inch out of the sucking mud, but her spell could not penetrate death’s permanence. Despair tried to worm its way into her mind as Hadrian’s body gently floated down, but a growing anger burned the insidious feeling away.
This memory had not ended in death then. She refused to let it win now.
Fury evaporated the haze of disappointment, frustration, and desperation, leaving only one clear path forward that led far back in time to another memory. She straightened her shoulders and turned toward Naddahdat, diverging from the original scene that had played out on the bank of the Nile.
“Come here, my child,” Dili commanded.
In the witch’s subconscious mind, where her ire could not unseat instinct, she worried that the half-siren would not respond, trapped by the confines of recall, as Gaia had been on the battlefield. To Dili’s grateful surprise, though, the half-siren reacted to the changed dialogue, her amber eyes darting toward the dead body before Dili’s knees.
“I-I did not intend to hurt him, my lady. I swear,” Naddahdat mumbled.
“Come!” the witch beckoned.
The half-siren walked cautiously forward and knelt at Dili’s side, uncaring of the muck. Fear oozed from her skin, an acrid stench compared to the stinky silt. Dili would reflect later whether it was her own need reshaping the memory or if it was the diluted creation magic within Naddahdat that allowed the hybrid to step beyond the remembered script.
“I have sinned.” Misery cracked through her voice.
Dili ignored the half-siren’s self-pity. “Give me your hand and lend me your magic.”
Naddahdat started and pulled back. She drew her hands close to her chest. “Why?”
“You dare question me?” Dili snapped.
Naddahdat flinched, then stretched a trembling hand forward. Dili grabbed her hand, the scaled skin slippery, and lay it against Hadrian’s chest. The half-siren shook all over as her fingers touched the vampire’s cold, clammy skin.
“I do not wish for a servant.” Even Naddahdat’s voice trembled.
The witch took gentle hold of the half-siren’s chin and forced eye contact. Slowly, Naddahdat stopped shaking, but the fear never left her wide-eyed gaze.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” the hybrid whispered.
In the memory, Dili had chastised the young woman, both for stealing her mother’s supplicant and for lying about it. Now, Dili ignored Naddahdat’s self-centered morals, instead reciting age-old instructions.
“Call this man back from death into sacred service,” she ordered.
Naddahdat blanched, her pretty face twisting with doubt. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Now!” Dili yelled.
The half-siren whimpered, but she drew a deep breath, and summoning magic imbued her next words with irresistible power. As she chanted, raw power encircled the three of them in an azure aura. Once again, Hadrian’s body began to lift off the ground, this time wrapped in an azure aura.
Dili pressed her hands together, channeling the natural forces of life and death through her palms. Then, she placed her hands on either side of Hadrian’s head, creating a liminal space between the beginning and the end where magic could guide the vampire’s mind back to his body.
Hadrian shook, too. Nerves fired, muscles spasmed, but it was only the body reacting to the overwhelming flood of magic, not the miracle of reanimation.
“Louder, Naddahdat!”
The power of the charm grew with her volume, so much that even Dili unconsciously leaned in toward the blue glow.
But it wasn’t enough. Hadrian’s body seized in Naddahdat’s magical grip, but summoning magic had never been the key to making vampires.
“Use your creation magic!” Dili ordered.
“But—I—”
“Do it!”
Dili’s wrath overrode Naddahdat’s resistance, because the air started to hum. Creation magic vibrated through every atom around them, building, building, building with unlimited potential and without an outlet. It didn’t matter, though, that Naddahdat didn’t know where to pour all that power as long as Dili did. It was her memory. Her pocket. And her vampire.
Creation magic, familiar and foreign at the same time, latched onto Dili’s direction and funneled between her hands. Hadrian’s body contorted as divine power filled every orifice, pore, and cell. The violence of his jerking nearly made Dili lose her grip on his temples. Naddahdat’s hand slipped from his chest, but the creation magic held, anchored by the witch’s touch.
Dili didn’t know how long it took for the divine power to remake what she could not fix. Finally, Hadrian snapped upward with a sound like tearing fabric. His eyes flew open, wild and unfocused and neon green. His back arched. His hands clawed at the mud. He started convulsing, then coughing forcefully. Water exploded from his mouth—water, bile, and a small streak of a noxious green. Its foul color and stench jumped out at Dili, but there was no time to examine the unknown substance.
Relief washed over her in a gentle wave as Naddahdat gasped and scrambled backward, hands flying to her chest. The half-siren’s eyes shone with tears, as they had in memory when the high priest had gulped his first revived breath, but fear constricted her pupils instead of gratitude.
“What have I done? What did I…” She pressed her hands over her mouth in a silent scream.
Dili again ignored the remembered half-siren’s woe. She did not know what consequences might come from using half-baked creation magic fueled by desperate hope to mimic the first turning. She doubted the real Naddahdat outside the pocket of reality would suffer any of them, though.
Hadrian made a gurgling noise between coughs. He tossed his bedraggled head and caught sight of Naddahdat. A shriveled, bony hand stretched out toward her, and the half-siren squeaked with fright.
“Please… help… me…”
Dili moved into the vampire’s line of sight. His glazed eyes rolled over her face, sparking a frantic glint. Talon-like fingers grasped at her dress, her arms, her shoulders, her face, anything he could reach.
“Help… me… help… me… help… me,” Hadrian begged.
The hopeless agony in his voice pierced Dili’s heart. Her conscious response had barely formed when the vortex opened around them both, and the Nile, the papyrus, the summer sun, and Naddahdat’s scared face dissolved into a blur.
Next chapter on Friday, December 20.