Venom & Vampires: A Limited Edition Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Collection

by Casey Lane

  Mom.

  But it wasn’t my mother. It couldn’t be. She’d passed on. I knew that, understood and accepted the finality of it. She was not coming back. Grandma? Had Lida been out here to lay a protection spell on the grave?

  A foot scuffed through the needle mulch behind me and I whirled around to face the threat.

  “Pluto? What are you doing here?”

  So tightly was I wired, I hopped back in alarm. It wasn’t seeing him specifically. I would have jumped at seeing anyone or anything at all.

  He didn't take offense but instead stood patiently, waiting for me to settle. The foot moving through the needles had been on purpose, I realized, to let me know he was there.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t find my phone. I think I may have lost it when I was here earlier. I came back to look.”

  His hands were empty. “Don’t you have a flashlight?” I asked.

  “Back in the car. It wasn’t dark when I started looking.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’ll go get one from the back porch.”

  “No, that’s okay–”

  But I’d already dashed halfway there.

  It’s funny, it occurred to me Pluto looked different in the near darkness, bigger, more mature, more serious. He wasn’t my fake nemesis from high school anymore. He’d grown up in the last two years; not that he hadn’t been an adult at graduation, but the differences impressed me. Too bad I couldn’t say the same for myself.

  I also wondered what he was still doing here in town. With his intelligence and money, I would have expected him to escape town for college at Berkeley or Stanford the moment school let out on the last class of senior year. He should be halfway to a career in Silicon Valley by now, perhaps even running his own startup and getting ready to sell out to Google or Facebook for five bazillion dollars like all the other guys there. Why stick around a nothing touristburg like Lost Cliff?

  Whatever the reasons, I was glad he was here now. I’d missed our verbal jousting at school. Short of having someone I could turn to about witch problems, his presence was comforting in its familiarity. He’d never remarked on my frequently odd behavior anytime we were together and I was grateful for that.

  When I ran back, the flashlight’s beam bobbing along the ground, I found him bending down to retrieve a ghostly white rectangular object from under a fiddlehead fern.

  “Found it,” he said, showing me his iPhone, but added nothing more.

  “Terrific,” I said into the awkward silence.

  Here was another difference since high school. We didn’t quite know how to talk to each another anymore.

  “Well,” he said. “I better go. I have people I’ve got to...”

  “Right,” I said. “Can’t keep the Kardashians and the French premier waiting for you to show up.”

  “Oh, Saige,” he said, “Don’t you know? I’m hanging with Stephen Hawking these days.”

  He winked at me and walked off. In seconds he was lost to the shadows beneath the forest giants.

  Just before I turned back for the house, something white caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. Initially, I thought Pluto had dropped his phone again until I walked over to it and looked down. Though the length and width were similar to a phone, the object, partly buried in the ground, was several inches thick. I knelt down to touch its smooth surface.

  A salt block?

  I’d seen salt blocks in the past, put in pastures for horses and cattle to lick from in the winter, but those were way bigger than this one, about the size of a semi-truck battery and weighing in at 50 pounds. I shrugged. We were on forest service land. Perhaps rangers put the smaller ones out here for deer in need of extra minerals during the lean months. Lucky thing it was here. It must be what I’d felt, the protection. It had acted like an accidental spell guarding Coco’s grave.

  A door creaked open and a wedge of yellow light slid out across the back lawn, not quite making it into the trees. I returned to our yard to find Lida frowning at me from the back porch. I continued toward the house.

  “What did Mr. Danielson want?” she asked.

  “He dropped his phone when he was here helping me.”

  “What were you two talking about?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you had a conversation,” Lida said.

  I rushed up the back porch steps and squeezed by her in the doorway, bumping into her walker just inside.

  “Hardly a conversation,” I said, paraphrasing the words Pluto and I had just exchanged. “Hey, I lost my phone. I thought maybe I’d come back to look. Sure, let me get a flashlight. Oh, never mind. Found it. Great. Well, gotta go. Bye.”

  Lida didn’t appreciate my snide byplay. She snapped at me. “That’s it? Nothing more?”

  “What else would there be?”

  The illusion she’d used this afternoon for Pluto when he’d brought Coco home had not been applied, so she was her everyday self, stooped, shriveled of heart, her hair lank and uncombed. Guilt swept over me. She wasn’t taking care of herself. We might not be getting along, but she was my grandmother. I should be stepping up to do it for her.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’m perfectly capable. I don’t need your help.”

  Once a witch, always a witch, including reading my mind.

  I’d often wondered what Lida’s special gift was since she didn’t care to share that with me. The ability to cause her granddaughter to feel uncomfortable in her own skin would make a dandy guess.

  “Don’t you ever miss mom?” I asked.

  This stunned her. Her jaw dropped; her complexion paled.

  “How dare you suggest I didn’t adore your mother.”

  “I don’t know. You have a funny way of not showing it. I don’t think I ever saw you cry, so evidently no grief there. You’ve never talked about her since that day. Though why should I be surprised? You barely talk to me, let alone about losing her. What did I ever do to–?”

  Grandma Lida slapped me hard across the face.

  “Shame on you,” she said. “Shame.”

  Next morning I started awake from a nightmare, my heart beating in my throat like a trapped swallow, flapping crazily to get free.

  I’d dreamed of Coco. She was still alive. I could save her. The moment my headlights picked up her pale apricot fur, her little legs furiously trotting along the highway shoulder in the opposite direction toward town, I slammed on my brakes, opened my door and called to her. But she didn’t listen. She kept going. She was listening to someone else, responding to another call.

  It called her, drawing Coco toward her death.

  Shutting the car door, I cranked the wheel and burned rubber to get to her in time. In my dream, however, Coco vanished and it waited for me in the center of the road. It wasn’t afraid of the car. Thousands of tons of hurtling steel meant nothing because that couldn't hurt it. I tried. I tried so hard to see it, but though I stared, looked straight at the thing, my eyes weren’t working right. I. Could. Not. See. It.

  Sitting up in bed, I put my hand to my chest, willing my pulse to slow and my breathing to return to normal after the dream. I couldn’t take much more of this. Not without the ability to do something about it. Why couldn’t there be another witch in town I could talk to? Besides my grandmother, that was, who hadn’t said another thing to me last night after telling me to be ashamed.

  I wasn’t interested in breakfast. Instead, for once I opted to go to work early, starting before my scheduled time. No, I wouldn’t clock in. Andrea strictly forbade clocking in until three minutes before shift, but she sure loved getting free labor on either side of official work hours.

  While driving, I thought about Grandma Lida. Perhaps it was time to move out. After turning 18, I’d stayed partly out of family loyalty and because I thought she needed me, partly due to financial reasons. California rents are unreal, even in Lost Cliff. Lida claimed she was fine physically, st
ill able to manage on her own despite needing the walker. Who was I to argue? Not when it was clear she didn’t want me there. It was still her house. Her name on the deed.

  I drove into the city parking lot, choosing an open spot as far away as I could get from yesterday’s, turned off the engine, and laid my forehead against the steering wheel.

  Time to grow up, Saige, I could imagine my mother saying. Not every life is perfect every day. Show me how strong you are by dealing with what's in front of you.

  “Okay, Mom,” I whispered to myself and to her memory.

  Grabbing my keys and crossover satchel, I locked the car and hurried out of the lot toward Scented Miracles.

  Coming to a dead halt in the middle of the street.

  Though my phone read 7:18 am, the door to the shop was flung open. I could smell the jarring mixture of scents from where I stood, hundreds jumbled together into a noxious, perfumed cloud. But that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. It was the hole in the plate glass window.

  At least eight or nine feet off the ground, the hole was unlike any damage I’d ever seen done to a window. Monstrous jaws had not broken the glass. They’d eaten it. That’s the only way I can describe it. The thing had simply opened that grossly distorted maw with its scythe-like teeth and consumed a section of glass the width of a chainsaw blade.

  Though no lights were on, someone inside Scented Miracles sobbed incoherently. Coming to life again, I rushed across the rest of the street and peered into the store. Andrea, arms waving, eyes streaming, paced in a circle that grew smaller and tighter and more agitated with each revolution.

  “Saige!” she looked over at me and said.

  I didn’t reply at first. Nothing, absolutely nothing, recognizable remained of the store’s interior. Imagine a shop filled with thousands of candles, glass bottles, and jars; tables, shelves, and glass display cases; a checkout counter and cash register, even pendant lamps hanging from the ceiling. Now visualize someone fitting a razor-sharp Cuisinart blade 14-feet across in the very center of that store. Press PULSE to start the blade whirling and keep pressing it until there isn’t a piece of anything left larger than a woman’s thumb. Debris lay in a layer more than 1 foot deep and a yard wide ringing the outside edges of the room. Glass slivers speared the walls and atomized wax drifted in the air. Splinters of wood and bits of metal had embedded themselves deep in the ceiling and the impossibly hard terrazzo tile floors.

  “What the f–” I said.

  “Exactly,” Andrea moaned.

  I understood at once why Andrea paced in circles at the core of the vortex. It was the only clear floor space left, and she’d had to trudge through piles of stuff to get there.

  “How did this–”

  “Who the hell knows,” Andrea said. “Earthquake? A microburst through that hole up there?” She jabbed a finger in the direction of the floor to ceiling window where it had gained entrance to the store. “A tornado?”

  “An indoor tornado?”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “Do we have a shovel?” I asked. “Maybe a snow shovel?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can start cleaning up.”

  “No!” Andrea said. Just like that, the waterworks shut off and she stopped crying. One moment she was inconsolable, the next the hardened businesswoman. I’d never seen anyone who could change moods faster. “You’re not to touch a thing. Not until the insurance guy gets here.”

  “We could take pictures,” I said.

  “And you think he would believe them? Would you believe them?”

  “Saige?” a familiar voice spoke with concern at my back.

  I looked over my shoulder. “Pluto?”

  This was the third time we’d met in a day, the second time within minutes of me pulling into the city parking lot.

  “I was driving by and saw,” he said.

  I studied him and frowned. He didn’t look himself. His hair was less than perfect, his clothes rumpled. His right brow, the slightly mangled one, drooped more than usual. A day old beard gave his face a dangerous look and his eyes were red. I didn’t smell any alcohol on him, but who could tell with the gag-inducing scent coming from the store’s blenderized interior?

  “That must have been one heck of a party Stephen Hawking threw last night," I said.

  Pluto didn’t hear me, engrossed instead by the debris zone inches inside the door. Naked concern filled his eyes, quickly absorbed by his Nordic machismo a second later. Finally, he looked my way.

  “I’m sorry, what?” he said.

  “Did you wake up on someone’s bathroom floor in that shirt?” I asked.

  “I was out late.”

  “I can see that.”

  He blew off my comment, not taking my bait to spar or banter. He shook his head at the mess, his expression grave. “Things are deteriorating,” he said.

  I had no clue what he was talking about, but the ultra-serious tone of his voice flipped a switch, frightening me. I gave the inside of Scented Miracles another study. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that can undo a person’s bravado. For me, it was noticing something about this disaster I hadn’t until now, the windows. Other than the entrance hole, both floor-to-ceiling windows were untouched. Not a crack, pit, scratch, or stain. Not even a smudge of wax.

  How powerful was this thing anyway? What sort of surgically precise energy did it possess? What couldn’t it destroy, maim, or kill?

  I’m the only one who can stop it? I asked myself. How?

  I started to shake. My hands actually trembled as I reached for the door frame to steady myself. I looked up helplessly at Pluto. Miraculously, he read my fear.

  “You need to get out of here,” he said and took me by the shoulders. “We’ll go get coffee.” He turned me toward the Starbucks on the corner. We started walking.

  “Oh, by the way,” Andrea stopped pacing inside the store and called after us. “You’re fired.”

  I owned enough financial preservation to pause and look back at her.

  “That’s right,” she shouted at me through the window. “I’d be nuts to reopen. Not when I can take the insurance money instead.”

  She had a point. She always had hated the place.

  “Tell me what’s going on with you,” Pluto said, once we ordered our coffees and had scored my favorite overstuffed leather chairs in our Starbucks’ only private corner.

  I babbled. I no longer cared how much of a freak it made me. I couldn’t hold it inside anymore. Not all of it anyway.

  “That thing that ate Coco,” I said. “I think it did what we just saw at my job.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” My expression dared him to disagree with me. “I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it’s not the first weird thing.” I mentioned the seagulls with the red voodoo pin prick feathers in their breasts, the human toe found in the tide pool. “They’re connected somehow. To this.”

  He nodded, humoring me obviously.

  “Plus, I feel it.”

  “Feel what?” he asked.

  “It. The thing. Did I tell you a woman came into the store yesterday who had seen it along the highway? No, of course, I haven’t told you. Well, she did.”

  “What did she say she’d seen?”

  “That’s just it. She couldn’t say. She was literally so scared she couldn’t vocalize what it looked like. But I knew right away she was talking about our thing. My thing, I mean. Whatever it is out there that wants...that wants…”

  My jabbering slowed, my hysteria running out of steam.

  “What does it want, Saige?” he asked.

  “Me? I think?”

  Pluto smiled at me, just a slight curve of the lips like he already knew the answer when I didn’t and I’d almost gotten it right. It was such an unexpected reaction to everything I’d just said, I didn’t know what to make of it. We were silent for a bit, each taking a swallow of coffee. I studied his face, the stark Norwegian c
heekbones in contrast to his full lips, the square, male model jaw, and the deformed, paralyzed brow that marred everything. His eyes, how had I never noticed his eyes before? They weren't gray or brown, but a mix of the two, the color making me think of a stone standing tall and strong and magical in the sun.

  “Tell me about your mother,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve met your grandmother, but you’ve never talked about your mother. She died before my family moved to town, right?”

  I hesitated.

  “Please. I’d like to know.”

  “When did you move here?”

  “Right after I turned nine.”

  I nodded. “It happened when I was eight,” I said. “I loved her. More than anything.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Not in the picture.”

  My father had run off on us when I was a toddler. He’s not dead. I know that much. Every year or two I’ll get what I call a guilt card from him. Not a text or a phone call or God forbid a visit, but a card by snail mail. It’s always one of those greetings with no greeting inside, just a blank, and the messages he scrawls out read like the obligatory writings of a second cousin who’s been told to keep in touch, rather than a dad’s. I’ve long since given up hope of there being a check in one of the envelopes. As far as I know, he never paid child support while I was growing up. Not once.

  “He was gone before I was three,” I told Pluto. “My grandmother never approved of my mother marrying him, and I think that’s why Lida doesn’t love–” I paused abruptly, switched subjects. “My mom, though, I think she loved my father even after he abandoned her. She was like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Love. She was pure, undiluted love.”

  “How did she die?”

  “We were out on the cliffs. It’s stupid, but the name Lost Cliff really does fit this town.”

  He sighed, his sympathy immediate. He knew what I meant. Anyone who had lived here for any length of time knew about the disaster.

  “She was part of the cliff accident here,” he said.