Arrow Struck

By Alexa Piper

Laurette is the luckiest Elf in all of New Elvenswood. His longtime friend the vampire Hugo and the human non-witch Charlie are both in love with Laurette, and he’s in love with them. Everything would be perfect if only those two would finally decide to move in with Laurette, quit their jobs, and spend all their time with him. And Laurette has plans to sway his lovers’ minds on Valentine’s Day.

Charlie finds herself tightly suspended between the attentions of one hot Elf and one hot vampire, and there is no place she would rather be. And then, a colleague decides he wants to claim Charlie, whether she’s in a relationship or not.

Enter Cupid, mistress of arrows and bringer of love, because loving the right person is especially important with spring warming hungry hearts… except not everyone agrees with the accuracy of Cupid’s aim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changeling Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021

Book preview

Introduction

Dear Faintly Fuckable Human Reader,

Some of you may have noticed me while others have not yet had the pleasure of making my acquaintance. My name is Valerian Smith, muse to Ms. Piper, whose authorial skills are rather… well, let’s just say I keep a good supply of dark rum for a reason.

So, my delectable reader, since we are just getting acquainted, I would very much like to tell you a tale. Are you all settled in? Comfy? Do I have your attention? Good.

There was -- once upon a time, if you will -- a prince. He was not really royalty, of course, but the prince was beautiful, a sight to behold with honey-pale hair and eyes. Oh, tales have been written about the prince’s wondrous eyes alone, and entire choirs of bards lost all their want and desire over a chance to look within the prince’s eyes. He would bring damsels and demigods alike to their knees with his smile alone, and once they were on their knees, they kissed the prince, with deep eagerness, and I don’t mean on the mouth.

The prince also did princely things. He was lavish when he attended a lover’s needs, which is to say he enjoyed making love in the addictive way, except his lovers never lasted. They often saw their true calling after he would siphon off their unnecessary, selfish, greedy thoughts. The prince had taste and knowledge both in the bedroom and outside of it, and sucking and licking a lover right to their pleasure was as easy a task for the prince as was conversing on the intricacies of the shape and substance of organized religion. (The prince had been well acquainted with several nuns over the years.)

This prince, then, the hero of this story, this prince who lived to the fullest, always, found himself strolling across his favorite bridge one fine night, and upon that bridge -- at its very apex -- he was waylaid by a witch.

That witch did not look terribly ugly. She did not even sound terribly ugly. In fact, what she suggested while the moon and stars shone brightly above, made the prince consider her almost wise, at the very least trustworthy.

I shall make them dream about you, the witch said.

The prince smiled.

I shall make them remember you, the witch said.

The prince smiled brighter.

And I shall make them want you, she said, and he agreed.

It is even possible that they sealed their promise with a kiss. Oh, it is also possible that they stole beneath the bridge where neither the moonlight nor the starlight could reach, pushed their clothes out of the way, and made a desperate kind of love, the kind that reaches deep and pulls the sediments of your very soul up to the surface. They might have done that to seal their covenant. We’ll never know.

The witch held to her promise, for a time. She called her prince a muse and acted like the witch he deserved.

But then, one day, Ms. Piper woke up and thought that writing me out of her books was a good idea, that writing books that I am not in was a good idea, that writing about people who aren’t me was a good idea. So here we fucking are.

And, fairly fuckable reader, this is why I have lots of rum here. It is aggravating that my kind can tolerate quite a lot of drinking without suffering many of the consequences mere humans do, because sometimes, I’d like a hangover. A hangover, my fuckable human, is preferable to this saccharine assemblage of cute flowers and cute Elves and cute Faeries. Really, this book is too damn cute. She added none of the things I told her to add, first and foremost myself. In that, Piper cheated not just me, but also you. You would love me, reader, and I would make love to you, the kind you’d never forget.

But things are what they are, and this book is what it is. We must make the best of it. Rum’s helpful, but you do you. I’d like to see you again and talk to you more, maybe tell you about those nuns I became quite friendly with, but I don’t know if I’ll be around. Clearly, she hates me. Clearly, she has found other things to inspire her, even if the end result looks as sparkly as unicorn poo.

I don’t know about you, but I’m opening another bottle, my lusty reader. If we never meet again because she drops me off my own favorite bridge or something, please, miss me. I would sleep easier, knowing I’d be missed.

Yours in princely adoration,

Valerian Smith

Fairview

Part One: Lovers

Chapter One

The kitchen smelled wonderful, a cacophony of vanilla and cinnamon and chocolate. Yet Laurette had to admit that it looked more like an entrenched war zone with the large, centermost kitchen island being occupied by the freshly iced cakes on one side and by neat lines of cookies cooling on their racks on the other. What Laurette didn’t have to admit was that he was stress baking.

He turned his back on the kitchen island and faced the Bain Marie in front of him where luscious chunks of chocolate were melting to velvety softness.

Gertrude! Laurette barked. Bring some of the cakes into one of the sitting rooms. I need the space. And send Heinrich to go out and get more candy hearts. Wait. I can make heart-shaped pralines. With a touch of insta-lust magic in the filling. And marzipan! I am making pralines.

Milord, there are cakes in the sitting rooms already. Gertrude had marched up to his elbow, her pointy hat just reaching up to the middle of Laurette’s upper arm. She was finally wearing the Valentine’s Day outfit Laurette had chosen for his pixie servants this year, a warm, raspberry pink with a tasteful line of darker hearts along the neck- and hemlines. They all looked wonderful in it.

Well, I am not done baking yet, Gertrude. Find someplace to put the cakes. And I need more berries. Well. I cannot head to Faerie to pick berries before I do a test batch of the pralines. Why do the high holidays have to be so stressful if all you want to do is charm your lovers? And why do my lovers have to be so difficult! And send Kris out for more gold leaf. Tell them to get double what they did last time, and cane sugar as well.

While having two lovers and caring for them certainly turned Laurette’s days -- and his nights -- less leisurely, he wouldn’t want to change any of that. Hugo was a prize he had sought for so long, but while it was just the two of them, the stubborn vampire humanist with the time-consuming hobby of tending to people’s medical needs, had never crossed that borderline of friendship.

It had taken for Hugo to find Charlie and properly fall for the human non-witch born to a witch family to finally burn that border to ashes and make Laurette -- Hugo’s closest Elven friend -- into more than just a friend. And Charlie herself was dazzling in her own ways, her tastes contrasting Laurette’s, sometimes to his frustration when she wouldn’t let him tame her messy bun into something a little more sculpted, sometimes to his delight when she kissed Laurette as if she needed him like air or water.

Yet, she too was following her own hobbyist pursuits, heaping her attention on old manuscripts in the University Library’s archives. Laurette had never grown to like the building, and imagining Charlie there struck an odd chord with his sensibilities. He would have much rather built her a nicer library to consume her days. Ideally, however, Laurette’s human lover would see the benefit in focusing on creating words and books to hold them rather than tending to the writings of others. I hope I can convince her of that, he thought.

Gertrude took three slow breaths, which pulled Laurette from his thoughts. Would it be possible to send one or two of the cakes to the library? Perhaps milady would enjoy sharing them with her colleagues.

Laurette stirred the chocolate. Ah, ready to pour over the pomegranate cookies like hot wax over a bare thigh. That is actually not a bad idea. I need to write a card to go with the cake if we are sending it to Charlie at work. If I get her to finally move in here, I need to make sure she gets regular flower deliveries to the office too so she doesn’t think me complacent. In fact, I should just switch to regular flower deliveries for her, period. I should try making blood pralines to send Hugo, lest my silly vampire feels I single Charlie out with my doting. I would send him flowers as well, but he would complain that his delicate patients couldn’t tolerate the pollen or some silliness.

You do dote on her a lot, Gertrude pointed out.

Laurette turned to face the cookies with the melted chocolate, ready to do some drizzling. Of course I do. The darling is human still, because Dr. Hugo has morals or some such thing. Get Dinner in here for some bloodletting and see if we have a suitable card while you prepare the cake for the library. The champagne and peach, I think. The cookies looked appealing with the chocolate still warm and dripping off the edges. I’d like to have Charlie here to taste them so that I can taste the chocolate off her lips after. But this loneliness is what I get for picking lovers with hobbies. They called it work, of course, but that did little to change the facts. We are packing some of these cookies as well, Gertrude.

Of course we are, the pixie said. Then she finally went to find a suitable card and pass along his orders to the others. Dinner, the Fae who served as Hugo’s blood source while the vampire was spending more time at Laurette’s house, could be heard groaning when Gertrude informed him his blood was wanted in the kitchen. Dinner was not the most voluntary of blood sources.

It was a little over a week till Valentine’s Day, and Laurette was uncertain it was enough time to finish his preparations. After all, his ultimate goal was to sway at least one of his lovers to end their silly living arrangements and move into his house, and everything just had to be perfect for that.

* * *

Charlie had been busy cross referencing entries with the Mathematics Department’s own internal research library all morning, and by the time lunch was coming around, the video Corvin had sent -- a squirrel doing adorable squirrel things in someone’s yard -- was becoming more and more tempting.

Corvin was in the archives himself, so their office was quiet, which meant Charlie knew that if she kept working, she could be done with this in an hour or so, provided Corvin didn’t come up for a chat and to distract her.

A quiet knock at the office’s doorframe pulled Charlie’s attention away from the entry she’d been reading, and she realized she had been too absorbed to even notice that someone had approached. That someone was none other than Dr. Ferguson, who was -- according to Corvin -- medium to high-medium hot.

Charlie couldn’t argue with Corvin, not when the evidence stood right in their office door, tall and gorgeous with dark blond hair and dimples that showed up when he smiled a smile that reached all the way up to his warm brown eyes framed by laugh lines. Except I am no longer single but in a relationship with a caring vampire and a mildly overbearing Elf, and thoughts of Dr. Ferguson’s hotness level are where madness lies. Which was all good and well, but Ferguson was really trying with that smile of his, even after Charlie had been very clear with the man about how she was very much not available for