There was only one streetlamp in the small lot, and nowhere near where I’d parked. Even on a nearly moonless night, I didn’t need light to see. I’m the kind of predator that prefers the dark to the light; it’s how I roll.
But loving the dark doesn’t mean that sometimes it doesn’t skeeve me out a little bit either. I might be a big bad now, but there were bigger badders in the world than I. I’d only taken a few steps before I sensed that I wasn’t alone. Standing still, I glanced over my shoulder and inhaled deeply.
Eyes fail you far more often than smell.
Eyes can see anything your brain imagines, whereas scent, is far more reliable. If you smell flowers and sunshine, there’s bound to be a fae somewhere.
The breeze carried the lush scent of perfumed floral musk mixed in with the fetid rot of decay.
I slowly withdrew my hands from my jacket and went into a fighting crouch. My ears picked up the faint reverberations of a checked growl.
“Here, kitty kitty,” I sing-songed even as my claws began to grow in shape and strength.
For the most part, I can hide what I really look like beneath a veneer of civility. It’s easier for me to look in the mirror and not freak out when I see a brunette with laughing eyes and a familiar face. But when I let the demon out to play, there’s nothing remotely human looking about me.
The higher the adrenaline surge, the more monstrous I looked. Right now I was pinging on all cylinders. My ribs were expanding, my stomach caving in, my cheeks hollowing out as my fangs began to drop.
Long, protracted nails scraped along the slick pavement to the left of where I stood. I twirled, moving as silent as a wraith as I became one with the darkness surrounding me.
Shadows crawled like long banded pythons outside the soft circle of lamplight. I cocked my head, sniffing and smelling nothing more. But my nerves were on edge.
I’d worked the beat long enough to know to trust my gut, even when that’s all I have. A vague inclination of unease wormed through it now.
There was something out there. But it was tripping up my senses, trying to get me not to trust myself. I’d smelled what I’d smelled, but now it was gone.
When I’d first joined the force I’d been young, naïve, and wild. Running into the fray without a second’s hesitation, confident in my vampness to fear nothing.
Until the day I’d nearly died for my hubris. Until the day I’d finally come up against something far deadlier than I.
Since then I’d learned to wait and listen. Sometimes all you needed was a little patience, and the bad guy wouldn’t wait to be caught, sometimes the bad guy would come right to your front door.
Scuttling backward until I too was covered in shadow, I knelt and waited.
Do you know what quiet sounds like?
I bet you think you do, but you’d be wrong. Very few of the living have ever heard absolute quiet. Where nothing stirs. No insect’s chirp. No breeze whips. Where no cars rumble quietly by, or couples chatter softly between themselves.
Quiet, the true kind, is bottomless. Like an empty well buried hundreds of feet into the earth, where blackness prevails, and no light penetrates, where no life exists. It is simply void.
That was what I sensed beyond the flickering glow of the lone streetlamp. An emptiness of nothingness that was far, far from it.
In this world that is impossible.
But not in the Veil.
A heavy iron door groaned open, squealing like the death throes of a cat in heat. Echoing like cannon in the quiet. Light suddenly flooded the parking lot, and a lone, shadowed figure walked out, the soft red glow of a cigarette burned brightly in his hand.
“Shit,” I bit out, then turned back to stare at the python coils of deepest darkness, but I already knew it would be gone. I wasn’t sure whether I felt relief or anger at not being able to more accurately pinpoint what it is I’d seen, but there was no point in crying over spilled milk.
Taking a quick sniff to assess my new situation, I realized it was Bruce, Coroner Green’s favored assistant and also his sometimes on again off again lover of ten odd years.
Bruce only smoked after the brain had been removed from a body. For a man who’s worked with the dead all his adult life, he sure is squeamish when it comes to gray matter.
Unfurling from my crouch, I cast one final look beyond the streetlamp and nodded to the night in acquiescence of our temporary ceasefire.
Walking swiftly, I moved up the steps. Bruce, dressed in dark blue scrubs—because he said it hid the blood better—was a thin, wiry man in his early fifties, with pockmarks in both cheeks from a bout with acne in his earlier years. He had thinning ash-blond hair and a soft chin.
As opposed to Coroner Green’s robust shoulders, strong body, and razor sharp facial structure, the two couldn’t have been more opposites. But what Bruce lacked in physicality he more than made up for in intelligence.
He could have been a doctor if he’d wanted to. He was one of those rare breeds of people, a true Mensa-grade genius who simply craved simplicity in his life. He’d never wanted the spotlight and so shunned it almost completely. It was a mark on Green’s character that he’d seen beyond the mask, to the true man beneath.
“Thought you said you’d quit,” I said, knowing he’d yet to notice me.
“Shee-yet!” Bruce yelped, losing his cigarette in his sudden flailing as he grabbed at his chest and glowered at me with cranky gray eyes.
His pulse was far too fast for simply shocked surprise, and the right ventricle of his heart struggled with each furious beat.
Bruce wasn’t long for this world, not if he kept up his bad habits. I raised a brow.
“Dammit, Smith, I told you about surprising me.” His fingers spasmed on his navy scrub.
His heart still hadn’t recovered from the shock. I wet my lips.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, it was hard to hear the jagged beat of a heart and not feel my mouth water. I was who I was. A predator. And Bruce, like it or not, was my prey.
The truth of our stations was encoded into my DNA and his. Even after working alongside one another for over a decade, he still always took an unconscious step back when I neared.
I didn’t take it to heart, if I were him, I’m sure I’d’ve done the same. I grinned.
“What you got for me?”
Blowing out an aggrieved breath, he toed the cigarette, killing the pretty red glow before gesturing toward the door.
“I think Green will want to talk with you about this one.”
I lifted a brow, hearing the note of shaded concern in his tone he tried to hide.
“Hm,” I murmured as I walked into the sterile and clinical looking morgue, “somehow I don’t think I’m going to like this, am I?”
As a homicide detective with the PIU I was as familiar with Green and Bruce as I was with my own family. There hadn’t been a crime I’d solved that they hadn’t had a hand in.
I really didn’t like the morgue.
I might be dead, but this place always gave me the creeps. Stainless steel silver beds with bodies lying still upon them. White tile floors. White walls. Large stainless steel farmhouse sinks with blood clinging to the drains even after a thorough cleaning and scrubbing.
It was impossible to remove all traces of blood to a nose as sensitive as mine. My stomach growled as I caught the first whiff of wine-scented smoothness.
Blood to me is like a well-aged merlot. Juicy, with flavors of chocolate and burnt cherries. Human blood is sweet. Once upon a time, it’d been my favorite. But now I tended to reach more for the Cabernet Sauvignon, tannic, hearty, and powerful—shifter blood, ever since Mercer had fed me his to keep me alive, my cravings had changed completely.
Green, who never worked without his headphones on and blaring classic seventies rock, was tapping his foot as he used the bone saw to crack the fae’s ribs apart. A look of total concentration twisted his features. The tip of his tongue stuck out the corner of his thin lips.
As he worked, I smelled something I knew should not be there and I shook my head in confusion.
“That can’t be right,” I said.
White powder drifted through the air, spraying cloudy in all directions. The discordant sound of metal slicing through bone was jarring, and then suddenly stopped as the ribs finally parted for the good doctor.
Setting his bone saw down, he happened to glance up and finally noticed me. Jerking his chin at me, in a silent gesture for me to help him take the ear buds out, he waited.
His hands were stuck inside the chest cavity, and his white smock was coated in flecks of pink and bits of matter invisible to most anything but Veilers like me.
Moving toward him, I flicked at his headphones and said, “Well?”
Green was a mature man of nearly fifty, with salt and pepper strands of hair, piercing and intelligent blue eyes, and a body that looked more suitable to that of a late-thirty, early-forty-year-old. Where Bruce didn’t take care of himself near as well as he should, Green did.
“Considering you’re a vampire with a sense of smell that rival’s my Chewy’s”—Chewy was his five-year-old brindle-colored bloodhound—“I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m about to tell you.”
I stared down at the corpse’s face and sniffed. Hours after his death, still no scent of decay. He smelled of wild magick and flowers. The scent of the fae. I shook my head harder. “How is it possible that he’s human? Humans stink, they rot. Faes vanish. What the eff is going on here, Green?”
His hands gave a soft, but firm yank before he slid his hands out of the fae’s chest, bringing its heart with him. And again I shook my head, because if there was one organ in the human body I was intimately familiar with, it was the heart. It was the seat of life for me. I stared at each chamber studiously, noting the imperfections, the slight defects that proclaimed it louder than anything else all too human.
In particular, the lower chamber grabbed my attention.
Green’s stare on my face was hard, curious. “What do you see?” he asked softly.
Before becoming the Silver Creek coroner, Green had briefly tenured as a professor at some fancy university. Though he no longer worked as a prof, he’d never stopped teaching.
I flicked a glance at him, before returning to the heart and pointing. “There’s a hole.”
Large enough to stick my finger through. How the hell hadn’t he keeled over from a heart attack years ago from something like this?
Green nodded. “Yes. He has a ventricular septal defect, or what we in the profession call, VSD’s. And this one’s a doozy. This man should never have reached adulthood with something this big. Not without treatment.”
“Or magick.” I nodded, beginning to understand. “Not human. And yet”—I trailed my finger down the side of his smooth face, noting the beautiful symmetry and structure of it, the delicate proportions that would make him irresistible to any collector—“not fae either.”
He shook his head. “What you’ve got here is a fae—”
“Touched,” I finished for him.
Fae touched were humans who’d lived so long among the fae that they’d begun to take on characteristics of them. They could live as long as any true fae, except for one glaring problem.
To resemble a fae they would need to live in fairy at least a century, if not longer, meaning if they ever attempted to come back onto human soil they’d keel over dead without the benefit of fairy magic to keep them alive. This fae would have been dead the moment he’d crossed lands.
“And judging by how beautiful he is, I’d say he belonged to someone high up the food chain,” I finished my thought.
“An aristocrat, perhaps?” Green supplied as his left thumb gently stroked the heart over and over.
I’d long since learned that humans who played with the dead for a living had a touch of the macabre to them too. Point of fact, I was rather partial to massaging hearts myself, sorry, did you think I was a girl scout?
I thinned my lips because this kind of beauty wouldn’t be wasted on just anyone, not even an aristo. No, this kind of beauty would belong to only one.
Queen Titania herself.
“Dammit,” I snapped, realizing this was far worse than I’d initially imagined. I didn’t just have a dead fae on my hands, but a beloved court pet. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Green grimaced. “Yeah. Might want to get Carter on the phone before he crosses over the Veil and smacks headlong into one pissed off Queen.”
Digging my phone out of my pocket, I speed dialed Carter. Carter ran like clockwork. Two rings, and he always picked up. Long enough for him to see who called.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Voice message.
I squeezed my eyes shut and hung up, shoving my phone back into my pocket. A sick feeling twisted my gut. If Carter wasn’t answering it was because he couldn’t. I might not always like him, but that didn’t mean I wanted anything bad to happen to him either.
The sudden jarring ringing of my phone made me yelp. I answered on the second ring without looking at the caller ID.
“Carter?” I sounded frantic even to my own ears.
But instead, I heard the gritty tone of Harlen Morte. “Scarlett Smith, what the hell have you gotten yourself into this time?”
I’m not really sure how to describe Harlen. In his late fifties, with a shocking head of snow-white hair…the kind of color you’d pay a fortune at a salon to try and achieve, it was so pristinely white that it rivaled that of freshly fallen snow. He was strong. Stout. A man used to working with his hands all his life. He had purple eyes.
Not neon purple.
Not lavender purple.
More like indigo, a violet so deep it bordered on blue. He sort of made me think of Morgan Freeman. Kind of lanky. But you knew he was strong too. Definitely nothing frou-frou about him either, he was as blue collar as it got.
His great-granddaddy going back several greats had bought the local junkyard ages ago, passing down the property from one Morte to the next. Harlen was the only Morte I’d ever known.
That wasn’t the hard part when it came to describing him. The hard part was knowing he was human but also wondering if he wasn’t sometimes more. There was something steady about Harlen, but there was also something bigger.
I shook my head trying to shake the marbles loose. “Harlen? How the hell did you—”
“No time for questions. Get your ass down to the junkyard now. We’ll talk more when you get here.”
And then he hung up, leaving me to stare at my phone like it’d just sprouted an eyeball.
Chapter 3
It never crossed my mind not to do exactly as he’d said. Harlen knew things. I don’t know how he knew things, but he did. He swears he ain’t Veiler, but he’s something. Harlen hadn’t always been a part of my life, in fact, his intrusion into it has been fairly recent, but for some reason when he tells me to come, I do.
I’m not sure why that is; it’s almost like I physically can’t ignore him. For a while there I’d sworn he must have been my vampire maker, except for the fact that he’s totally human.
Maybe.
Jury is still out on that one. What he isn’t though, is vampire.
The junkyard was exactly what a junkyard should look like. A graveyard full of rusted and withered metal scraps and old hollowed out cars, trucks, and haunted mobile homes of yesteryear.
And weirdly enough I liked it here even though it looked like a movie stage for a slasher flick.
Rolling to a stop, I parked the truck and spotted Harlen almost immediately.
Dressed in coveralls stained with oil, he lifted a hand in greeting as he rocked steadily on his front porch rocker.
The junkyard was also his home. He lived in an old clapboard shack with wood now stained a bluish-gray from years of sun damage. Imagine a turn of the century farmhouse now old and gone to ruin, that what was what Harlen called home. Rusted tin roof that sounded li
ke two giants rumbling when it stormed outside, squeaky floorboards that when you walked on them, you were sure would flip up and smack you in the face one day, and hardly any furniture other than an old brass bed and a dresser with a few toiletries on top. Harlen was a simple man.
But he did like art.
His front yard was littered with manufactured pieces of refurbished metal that’d been twisted and painted over to resemble strange, and ghoulish-looking shapes. Some reminded me of bats in flight, others of deformed creatures just waiting for their unsuspecting prey to walk past so they could snatch it up and dine.
Someone had strung blue lights across his front porch; I doubted very much it was him, every time I’d ever come around the old man had his butt parked in the same old chair, wearing the same stained clothes, and usually muttering nonsense all to his lonesome.
I didn’t doubt the junker was half mad, but as Hatter once told Alice, all the best of us are.
Clapping my hands to the banister, I nodded in greeting.
Harlen was tapping a corncob pipe against his palm, not looking up at me. “Vampire,” he said, “I hope you’re not thinking about heading into that sithen.”
My brows lifted and then dropped quickly. “Harlen, I swear to Go—”
“Let’s not,” his lips stretched into a quick grin, before licking his front teeth and finally looking at me with the stern stare of a curious daddy who knows his daughter’s up to no good.
I really wish I knew why Harlen had decided to take me under his wing, chalk it up to yet another mystery I’ll probably never solve in my lifetime, why so many men in my life seem to want to play the white knight when it comes to me.
I’d thought him crazy at first, and I’m still pretty sure he is, but he’s also always been right in a roundabout, senile kind of way.
“You made an oath to the Ever tree. Shouldn’t a’done that.” He tsked under his breath.
My brows dipped. “You’re a wizard, right. That’s how you know all this stuff? Which line are you?”
His chuckle was brassy and deep. “Goin’ ta rain tonight. Feel it in my bones. Mmhmm.” He nodded, then began to tap his foot as though listening to a melody only he could hear.
Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More Page 127
