Book about a girl with magic, who can teleport and is mated to a powerful vampire

Question

I was wondering if anyone could help me find this book I read a long time ago (I think some time around 2009). I absolutely loved it, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called. I can’t remember it in detail, but I’ll try to tell you as much as I know.

It’s about a girl with magic that can teleport, and at some point she gets glass stuck in her behind and has to have it plucked out.

She’s mated to a powerful vampire, who claimed her as his own to protect her from other vampires, who wanted to kill her because they feared her hidden power. She fought it for a while, but eventually falls for him.

He also hates the guy she hangs out with, whom she discovers, in one of the later books, is secretly a very old demon. In the first book, she doesn’t really know how to use her powers, and the demon helps her train and fight evil.

At some point they are in a desert of some sort in a car, racing to get out before it swallows them whole.

It’s been over 10 years, so I could be wrong about this next part, but I remember the cover of one of the books in the series having a girl with tattoos all over her holding a sword and standing in front of some flames.

Answer 1

That sounds a lot like Karen Chance's Cassandra Palmer series: https://karenchance.com/books/

• Cassandra can travel through time/space, i.e. seemingly teleporting. This makes reading the book sometimes difficult, because times / places change very fast.
• She 'married' Mircea Basarab, a powerful vampire. She already 'belonged' to him because she was raised by one of his vampires, though she ran away as a teenager. She always liked Mircea but mistrusts vampires in general. At firsts she rejects him (as Vampires are quite controlling), but falls in love with him in one of the sequels.
• A wizard trains her in the first books. This is the demon you remember. In one of the latest books, she discovers he is half-demon and hates his demon-parent (and all demons).
• 'Racing in a desert': I think this is in one of the sequels in which she and the wizard race the ley-lines (high-energy lines spanning the earth, which wizards use to travel quickly). They are being followed by a swarm demons, who want to kill them. Might also be the end of said book in which Cassie uses the power of the ley lines to kill a very powerful enemy. But it has been some time, so I do not remember clearly.

What does not fit: Your memory of her holding a sword. Cassandra is not the sword type. She has tattoos though. They are like magical booster / shields / self-defense weapons in the books.

Answer 2

I think this is a slight misremembering of the Mercy Thompson books. The first book is Moon Called and it was published in 2006 so it fits your date:

Mercedes Thompson, aka Mercy, is a talented Volkswagen mechanic living in the Tri-Cities area of Washington. She also happens to be a walker, a magical being with the power to shift into a coyote at will. Mercy's next-door neighbor is a werewolf. Her former boss is a gremlin. And she's fixing a bus for a vampire. This is the world of Mercy Thompson, one that looks a lot like ours but is populated by those things that go bump in the night. And Mercy's connection to those things is about to get her into some serious hot water...

Mercy's love interest is the alpha werewolf Adam not a vampire, but everything else fits. The vampires hate and fear Mercy because she is a walker and her power allows her to find the vampires' hiding places during the day when they are vulnerable.

Mercy's boss at the garage, Zee, is an ancient Fey (not a demon) who we find later in the series is immensely powerful though he hides it behind the facade of a harmless old man.

The cover showing Mercy holding a sword and standing in front of some flames could be Fire Touched, though it's a spear not a sword:

Mercy gets covered in broken glass in Iron Kissed when she is standing in front of a plate glass window and an attacking demon shatters it. She has to have the broken glass picked out of her skin (by Adam, which leads to a rather more intimate encounter :-) but I don't think the book specifically says the glass is in her bottom - it just says it's all over her skin:

I looked like something out of a bad horror flick. Naked, I was covered from fingertip to elbow and toe to knee with marsh muck: it always amazes me how much swamp there is in the Tri-Cities, which is pretty much a desert. The rest of me sparkled, as though I'd covered myself with some glitter lotion instead of having a window broken over my sweat-covered body. Here and there were larger chunks of glass that dripped off me every time I moved—my hair was littered with them.

And everywhere, I was covered with tiny cuts that oozed blood. I picked up my foot and removed a largish splinter that was responsible for the small pool of blood that was growing around me. All the cuts were really going to hurt tomorrow. Not for the first time, I wished I healed like the werewolves did.

The Mercy Thompson books are unlikely to ever win the Man-Booker prize but they are well written and entertaining and I strongly recommend them to anyone who just wants a fun and enjoyable read. I loved the first book and read the sequels the day they became available on Amazon, though I feel the series went on for a few books too long.

Answer 3

Sounds like the Sookie Stackhouse series of books, also known as The Southern Vampire Mysteries. They were written by author Charlaine Harris, and were first published in 2001.

From Wikipedia:

The Southern Vampire Mysteries, also known as The True Blood Novels and The Sookie Stackhouse Novels, is a series of books written by bestselling author Charlaine Harris. The first installment, Dead Until Dark (2001), won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001 and later served as the source material for the HBO drama series True Blood (2008–2014). The book series has been retronymed the True Blood Series upon reprinting, to capitalize on the television adaptation.

In The Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood Series, Harris develops a detailed mythology and alternate history that approaches supernatural beings as real; at the beginning of the series, vampires' existence has only been public knowledge for a couple of years, while other supernatural beings, such as werewolves, shapeshifters, faeries, etc., exist but do not go public until later in the series. The setting is contemporary, and the stories occasionally reference popular culture.

The series is narrated in first person perspective by Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress and a telepath in the fictional town of Bon Temps in northwestern Louisiana. Harris was originally contracted to write 10 books, but she revealed at Comic Con 2009 that she has signed a contract for three additional books. On May 14, 2012, Harris' Facebook administrator confirmed that the 13th book, Dead Ever After, would be the final book of the series.

It was also a TV series called True Blood, which aired from 2008-2014.