Long, sleek shapes came through the window. If I didn’t stare at them, I couldn’t see them, as fast as they moved: gray shadows. They came across the room and swarmed Clyde. Kara fell to the ground as they began to attack him. Wolves--an entire pack of them--filled the room and piled there. He began to scream.
“Take him out of here,” Kara choked, and--as if they understood her--the great, gray wolves dragged away his body with their jaws, as he kicked and screamed. They dragged him up and out the hole in the window, as if he were born on wave crests, out into the snow-filled night. His screams were swallowed by the storm.
He was gone.
I sat down on the floor as Kara's blood pooled there. I raised up my hand, and then it was pressed against the side of her face as she coughed. There was a bone sticking out of her ribs, and a bone sticking out of her chest. A clavicle, I realized numbly. He had broken her bones and she was dying in front of me. It was over.
“Megan...” she whispered, reaching up to my face. “I'm so sorry for everything. I thought I could...I mean, I tried to protect you...I promised you…”
“I…I don’t understand,” I whispered.
“He won't hurt you again,” she spat out, “for so long, he's tried. Not again, Megan. I promise you that.”
“Are you dying?” It was a small question with a small voice, for as I was watching her, the bone seemed to dive back beneath her flesh. The covering of her body morphed and churned beneath my eyes, and as I stared at her, she seemed made new again. Kara struggled into a seated position and massaged the back of her neck with long fingers, blinking owlishly.
She was naked. And whole.
There were no wounds.
“That? That won't kill me,” she sounded disgusted--and tired. She leaned back against the log wall, sprawling comfortably in her nakedness, looking at me. She carefully did not touch me. “Are you all right?”
“I...I don't know,” I replied quietly. I was shaking from the cold.
“We should get you warm--by the fire...” said Kara, putting out her hands to me, but I shrank from them. There was sadness in her eyes as she stood, as she indicated the door to the living room. “Please, Megan--just come in here. I can explain everything.”
“My grandmother,” I said.
“She's safe. They’re bringing her in.”
It's strange, but I believed her.
We made our way into the living room, and I shook as I burrowed back into the blanket. I kept my face to Kara, watching her carefully. She seemed to notice this, and moved slowly, sinking onto the floor before the fire, keeping her hands where I could see them.
There was a knocking at the front door, then. I shrank back, but Kara rose. “It's all right,” she murmured to me. “It's okay.” She picked up a blanket, threw it easily around her shoulders like a cloak and strode to the door. With a quick twist of her wrist, it seemed to unlock. My grandmother came into the room, then--she wore a thick coat, and she was smiling. She gave the biggest hug to Kara before she came to me and hugged me. I sobbed into her shoulder for a long moment, feeling the snow that was caked on her shoulders melt beneath my skin.
“It's all right, Megan. Everything's okay now,” she murmured.
“The others?” asked Kara.
“They're taking care of him,” she murmured quietly into my hair, stroking my back.
“Good.” The way Kara said it made my skin crawl--there was a growl in it.
“Now...” Before I could say anything more, Gramma was kissing the top of my head. “I think you need to give her some explanations, Kara.”
“I was just going to.” Kara offered the rocking chair to my grandmother, and she took it, smiling easily. They seemed to know each other much better than I'd thought. I stared at them both, from one to the other, until Kara cleared her throat.
“We’ve...protected you,” she said simply. “Your grandmother made a deal with my kind. She paid us a kindness,” Kara shrugged. “So we promised to always keep her and her daughters safe. We keep our promises.”
I looked at Kara--really looked at her. She made no movement, but let me study her. For so long, I had been so afraid of something I didn't understand. For so long, I had let demons control my heart...demons without faces. Monsters.
“Who the real monster is...” I muttered. Kara frowned.
“What?” she asked, softly.
“Clyde said that I must know who the real monster is,” I sighed, feeling small and cold and lost. “I guess I know.”
“You're safe, now, Megan,” said Kara stiffly. “We can go if you wish.”
Gramma looked at me, and then back at Kara. “She's in shock, dear,” she murmured to her. “Why don't you come back in the morning? We'll get this all sorted out.”
“There will be no morning,” she said. “The wind has changed--if we're no longer needed, we must go.”
The wind no longer blew outside--the storm had died down, as if by magic. Perhaps it had been. We all stood as Kara moved toward the door, as she took the knob in her hand. “It has been nothing but a pleasure, Megan,” she murmured back at me, eyes on the wood before her. “Good night.”
“Wait,” I said, standing. Everything and nothing weighed on my heart, and I needed to speak it, must speak it, or I would lose her. But what came out of my mouth was not what I intended: “You’re…the wolves…are real.” Relief flooded through me, and I needed to sit down again. But I didn’t. I stood and watched her.
And, then, I couldn’t help it. I asked: “...what are you?”
She paused, her back stiff. She didn’t look at us as she said: “I suppose you could call us werewolves, though that word doesn’t fit. Not exactly. We’re just…wolves, Megan.”
I said nothing as she slipped through the open door, as she was gone from our sight. As the door clicked, sealing her away into winter. Gramma and I looked at one another.
“Clyde is gone,” she said simply. “We can go home if you want.”
“I want to,” I replied. So we did.
We gathered up our shoes and our coats--I left my heels there, slipping my feet into Clyde's gigantic boots, instead. I stuffed the toes with socks and moved about them as if in cement, but they would do for the long walk home. We put on our coats and slipped out into the night.
It was so cold here--so bright and so cold. The clouds were gone, replaced instead with a full moon and a bright sprinkling of stars. They shone down on us as we moved through the deep snow towards my grandmother's cabin. We huffed and puffed in the stillness, moving through it all. We said nothing.
Until:
“Megan,” said my grandmother. She put an arm about my shoulders as I looked, for the hundredth time, into the deep woods. “Are you still afraid of the wolves?”
“No.” I replied after a long moment.
I was surprised to find it was true.
I stared for a long moment at the shimmering snow and the wine-dark trees. The moon was bright enough to see by, and I could make out paw prints in the distance.
“I... I have to find Kara,” I stepped away from my grandmother. “And...and thank her. And...”
“And?” My grandmother smiled.
“Something more,” was all I could manage before I stepped out of the boots, and in only my socks and my pants and my overlarge jacket, ran away into the woods. For the first time in as long as I could remember--I was not afraid.
Someone I loved with all my heart was there. Perhaps had always been there. Loving me. Protecting me. With me, always.
I had never been alone.
And I would never be alone.
Love filled my heart as, somewhere, far away, I heard singing and the long, lonely strains of a violin. I raced between the trees, breath coming out in huge puffs, to join them.
To join her.
There were no more big, bad wolves.
The End
If you enjoyed Big, Bad Wolf, you’ll love Bridget’s Sullivan Vampires.
The following is a
n excerpt from “Eternal Hotel,” the first novella in the Sullivan Vampires series, a beautiful, romantic epic that follows the clan of Sullivan vampires and the women who love them. Advance praise has hailed this hallmark series as “Twilight for women who love women” and “a lesbian romance that takes vampires seriously! Two thumbs up!”
…So this was the staircase from last night, next to the front desk. The Widowmaker. It must be. I’d never seen a steeper set of stairs. From up above, they looked simply like the rungs of a ladder in a barn—so steep and so tall and almost impossible to even think of taking.
It’s not that I don’t like heights—I’m pretty okay with them. But these stairs were something else. I wasn’t taking these steps—I’d have to circle back somehow and find the other spiral staircase down to the first floor
As I turned, I caught the first floor out of the corner of my eye. Because of the cathedral ceilings of that first floor, it seemed much farther away then I’d thought it was.
It was then that something strange happened.
The ground seemed to spin under me for a moment, bucking and heaving like I was trying to walk on waves of carpeting, not good firm floor. Or did it really? Was it just a trick of the eye? Either way, I took a step backward as a shadow fell in front of me, but there was no floor beneath that foot stepping backward, then, and I was tumbling backwards, shock cold enough to burn me flooding through my body as, impossibly, I began to fall down the stairs.
A hand caught my arm. I hung suspended over the abyss of the air, my back to the emptiness, and in one smooth motion, I was pulled back.
Saved.
The hand was cold, and the body I brushed against as I was hauled out of the air felt as if the person had stepped out of a prolonged trip through a walk-in freezer. I looked up at the face of the woman who had saved me, and when I breathed out, I will never forget it: my breath hung suspended in the air between us like a ghost.
She was taller than me by about a head, and I had to lean back to gaze into her eyes. They were violently blue, a blue that opened me up like a key and lock as she looked down at me, her eyes sharp and dark as her jaw worked, her full lips in a downward curve that my own eyes couldn’t help but follow. She wore a ponytail, the cascades of her silken white-blonde hair gathered tightly at the back of her head and flowing over her right shoulder like frozen water falling. She wore a man’s suit, I realized, complete with a navy blue tie smartly pulled snug against her creamy neck. She looked pale and felt so cold as her strong hand gripped my wrist, but it was gentle, too. As if she knew her own strength.
I saw all of this in an instant, my eyes following the lines and curves of her like I’d trace my gaze over an extremely fine painting. And, like an extremely fine painting, she began to make my heart beat faster. That was odd. I was never much attracted to random women, even before I dated Anna, even before Anna…well.
But this wasn’t just my heart beating faster, my blood moving quicker through me. This was something else. A weightlessness, like being suspended in the air over the staircase again, the coolness of her palm against my skin a gravity that I seemed to suddenly spin around. When she gazed down into my eyes, she held me there as firmly as if her hands were snug against the small of my back, pressing me to her cool, lean body that wore the suit with such dignity and grace that I couldn’t imagine her in anything else.
I was spellbound.
She said not a word, but her fingers left my wrist, grazing a little of the skin of my bare forearm for a heartbeat before her hand fell to her side. I shivered, holding my hand to my heart, then, as if I’d been bitten. We stood like that for a heartbeat, two, the woman’s eyes never leaving mine as her chin lifted, as her jaw worked again, her full lips parting…
“Are you all right?” I shivered again. Her voice was dark, deep and throaty, as cool as her skin, as gentle as the touch of her fingertips along my arm. But as I gazed up at her, as I tried to calm my breathing, my heart, we blinked, she and I, together.
I knew, then.
I’d heard that voice before.
I’d seen this face before.
“Have we…met?” I stammered, eyes narrowed as I gazed up at her in wonder. We couldn’t have. She shook her head and put it to the side as she looked down at me, as if I was a particularly difficult puzzle that needed solving. I would have remembered her, the curve of her jaw and lips, the dazzling blue of her eyes. I could never have forgotten her if I’d only seen her once. It would have been impossible.
I took a gulp of air and took a step back again, unthinking, and her hand was there, then, at my wrist again as she smoothly pulled me forward, toward her.
“The stairs,” she said softly, apologetically. I’d taken a step closer to her this time, and there was hardly any space between us, even as I realized that my hand was at her waist, steadying myself against her. I took a step to the side, quickly, then, my cheeks burning.
“I’m sorry,” I managed, swallowing. “And…thank you…” Her head was still to the side, but this time, her lips twitched as if she was trying to repress a smile.
“I’ve been meaning to remodel these steps. Not everyone knows how steep they truly are,” she said, and her lips did turn up into a smile, then, making my heart beat a little faster. I took a great gulp of air as she held out her cool fingers to me, palm up.
“I am Kane Sullivan,” she said easily, her tongue smoothing over the syllables as the smile vanished from her face. “You must be Rose Clyde,” she said gently, the thrill of her voice, the deepness of it, the darkness of it, saying my name, the way her lips formed the words…I nodded my head up and down like a puppet, and I placed my hand in hers. Her fingers were so cold, as she shook my hand like a delicate thing, letting her palm slide regretfully over mine as she dropped my hand with a fluid grace I had to watch but still couldn’t fully understand.
I was acting like an idiot. I’d seen beautiful women before. But Kane wasn’t beautiful. Not in that sense. She was…compelling. Her face, her gaze, her eyes, an impossibility of attraction. I felt, as I watched her, that buildings, trees, people would turn as she walked past them, unseeing things still, somehow, gazing at her.
I knew her, then.
The painting. The woman in the painting from last night, with the big, black cat, lounging and regal and triumphant and unspeakably bewitching. The naked woman, I realized, as my face began to redden, warming beneath her cool, silent gaze. She was the woman from the painting. But as I realized that, as we silently watched one another, I realized, too, that that would have been impossible. It had been a while since college, it was true, but I could still tell when a painting was a few hundred years old.
The woman in the painting could not possibly have been Kane Sullivan. And yet, it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else.
“I’m…I’m sorry,” I spluttered, realizing—again—how much of an idiot I must look to this incredibly attractive creature. Her lips twitched upward again, and her mouth stretched into a true smile this time, the warmth of it making the air around her seem less frozen.
“You’re fine. It’s not everyday that someone completely uproots their life and charts a course for places unknown,” she said, turning on her heel and inclining her heard toward me. As she turned, I caught the scent of her. Jasmine, vanilla…spice. An intoxicating, cool scent that was warm at the same time. Unmistakable and deeply remarkable. Just like her. I stared up at her with wide eyes as she gestured gracefully with her arm for us to walk together, like she was a gentleman from the past century. True, she was wearing a sharp man’s suit (that I was trying desperately not to stare at or trace the curves of it with my eyes—and failing), but there was something incredibly old fashioned about her. I kept thinking about that at that first meeting. Like she was from a different era, not the one of smart phones and the Internet and fast food french fries. No. The kind of era that had horse-drawn carriages, corsets and bustles and houses that contained parlors. We began to walk down the corridor toget
her, in the opposite direction I had come, me sneaking surreptitious glances at her, her staring straight ahead.
The spell of the moment was broken, but a new spell was beginning to create itself, weaving around the two of us as we walked along the corridor. As she spoke, I stared half up at her, half down the hall stretching out in front of us. All of my actual attention, though, was on this woman.
Every bit of it. She was just like that. So…compelling. She was a gravity that pulled me in, hook, line and sinker. I didn’t know then how much of a gravity she had yet to become to me.
You can get Eternal Hotel, the first in the Sullivan Vampires series, available now!
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About Author Bridget Essex
Bridget Essex has been writing about her beloved vampires for almost two decades. She has a vast collection of crochet hooks and teacups, and likes to listen to classical music when she writes. Her first date with her girlfriend was strolling in a garden, so it’s safe to say she’s a bit old fashioned.
Bridget has a black cat she loves very much, and a brown dog who actually convinces her to go outside. Her little house is often much messier than she’d prefer, but she has the perfect excuse: she’s a writer. This excuse doesn’t work nearly as well on her girlfriend as she’d like.
You can find out more about her work at http://BridgetEssex.wordpress.com
Learn more about Rose and Star Press, publishers of lesbian romance and fiction of distinction, at http:///www.LesbianRomance.org
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