20 Shades of Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Demelza Carlton

  Briony crept quietly past her to the lounge’s television, turning it on with the volume barely audible. The local news was on, which was probably good. So little seemed to happen around Wicked that Briony would probably be asleep in seconds. Alright, so that was probably unfair. Even so, there didn’t seem to be much in the local news beyond the usual round of minor events. There was a Fall Moon Festival coming up, and apparently it was due to be the biggest for years. The local high school football schedule was announced, and people were urged to support the team on their big days. There were a few more announcements about tryouts for local sports teams, but again, it was nothing that seemed important.

  When that was done and the news gave over to the weather, Briony decided that it was probably time to get back to bed. As quietly as she could, she switched off the TV and started to tiptoe back past her aunt, who was still snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Briony didn’t want to disturb her.

  She had made it almost as far as the stairs when the doorbell rang. Briony didn’t bother looking around for a clock. She already knew that it was far too late for people to be showing up looking for a room. On the other hand, though, it wasn’t like there were any guests at the moment, and Aunt Sophie would probably be glad for the extra business.

  “I’m coming,” Briony muttered under her breath as the doorbell rang again. “Can you not hold on one minute?”

  Briony hurried for the door, but she was not as quick as her great aunt. In the time it took Briony to cross the hallway, Aunt Sophie managed to wake up, leave her chair, and place herself firmly between Briony and the door. Briony found herself smiling at the thought of the sight Aunt Sophie probably presented as she opened it in that huge, furry robe of hers.

  She was certainly a contrast to the couple waiting on the doorstep. They were so glamorous that they could have passed for Hollywood celebrities, though possibly ones from the nineteen-forties, given the way they dressed. The man had slicked back blond hair, a suit that was complete with waistcoat and pocket-watch, and even old-fashioned spats on his shoes. The woman was resplendent in a red dress that matched her lipstick, while her hair fell loose in blond waves. Both of them seemed very pale to Briony, who was used to people who got out in the Florida sun. Also, there seemed to be something slightly odd about their eyes. Maybe they were wearing colored contact lenses?

  “What is it you want?” Aunt Sophie asked. Her voice wasn’t friendly. She probably didn’t like having to answer the door dressed as she was in the middle of the night.

  The man smiled. His voice, when it came, seemed a touch too smooth. “We’re sorry to call on you so late, ma'am, but we were just at a party. We have been driving back through the woods, but it occurred to us that we didn’t really want to drive all night. We were hoping that you might still have some rooms.”

  The woman clung to his arm as he said this. She directed a smile at Briony.

  “Oh, look, Philip. Isn’t she sweet?”

  Briony was a little surprised when Aunt Sophie edged a little further in front of her, though not as surprised as at what she said next.

  “I think it’s time you left. We don’t have any rooms. Try someplace else.”

  “That isn’t very friendly,” the woman said, frowning.

  “Like I said, try someplace else.”

  Something about the couple changed then. They were still smiling, but to Briony, those smiles looked a lot more predatory. The way their canine teeth suddenly looked a lot longer probably had something to do with it. They started to take a step forward.

  So fast that Briony barely saw it, Aunt Sophie reached into her robe and drew out two objects. One was a glass vial, which she waved as though the contents were dangerous. The other was, of all things, a large silver crucifix. It looked to Briony like a moment from some bad horror movie, except that the visitors did look scared, and they did reel back from the sight of the cross.

  They hissed like angry cats, but didn’t come any closer. Aunt Sophie uncorked the vial in her hand, and they scrambled backwards as if they were in a film that was being rewinded. They turned, running into the nearby woods and vanishing from sight in the darkness.

  Briony stood there staring where the couple had been a few minutes ago, her brain and body paralyzed to the reality of what she had witnessed with her own eyes. It couldn’t be true. They only exist in movies, books, and folklore. She bit her lips. She could scream, or faint, or try running up to her room and barricading the door, but those all struck her as stupid things to do. Instead she settled for a nervous grin, trying to remain calm for Aunt Sophie.

  “Um… were those… vampires?” She said it in the tone of someone fully expecting, and frankly rather hoping, that her great aunt would tell her not to be so silly.

  Instead, Aunt Sophie nodded as she shut the door. “They were.” She paused and then said with a wry smile. “Welcome to Wicked, Briony.”

  “And that’s the welcoming committee, is it?” Briony was starting to feel a little light-headed.

  “Oh, they’re nothing. Amateurs who can’t get the hang of the fact that you don’t wander around wearing evening dress if you want to prey on people. It’s the ones that look just like you or me that are the problem. Well, them and a few… other things. You get all kinds in Wicked.”

  They certainly did. Briony considered fainting, but thought better of it. Somehow with Aunt Sophie around, Briony felt she needed to hold herself together. Aunt Sophie wasn’t the crying or fainting type, and for some reason, Briony wanted her to see she can be strong, too.

  “Um… what’s in the vial?”

  “Holy water, obviously. I bless up a big batch now and then. I’ll tell you, Briony, my life got a lot easier the day it became possible to be ordained a minister over the Internet. Also, it’s kind of useful when we have couples come through looking to get married.”

  “Yes,” Briony said, “it would be.” Briony kept her voice calm, making sure her eyes didn’t widen in surprise. What the heck was Aunt Sophie? Certainly Aunt Sophie had a double life the family didn’t know of…blessing a batch of holy water?

  Aunt Sophie put an arm around Briony’s shoulders. The bottle of holy water pressed up against Briony’s back, so it wasn’t entirely comforting.

  Vampires? Howling things outside her window? A vast woodland just steps away from this inn…where her entire family disappeared? Anyone with some kind of sanity would have high-tailed it out of the same place where your family disappeared, right? No, not Aunt Sophie. Briony couldn’t hold her question back any further. “Why does anyone stay in a place like this?” she suddenly blurted.

  Aunt Sophie just smiled. “I can see that this has been a bit of a shock for you, but you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep. C’mon, back to bed. You have school in the morning and you’ll want to make a good impression.”

  Briony let herself be shepherded back upstairs to her new room. With everything that had just happened though, sleep proved even more elusive than ever.

  Chapter 1

  As first impressions went, Briony suspected that she had made better ones. The lack of sleep didn’t help. Staying up until four in the morning because you were still trying to process the fact that there were vampires in the world. And that they can just come up to you, knock on your door, and smile charmingly at you like normal people was enough of a shock to keep Briony scrambling around in her room for anything she thought would help keep them away from her. She didn’t let on to Aunt Sophie how frightened she was of this newfound knowledge, especially the way Aunt Sophie acted like it was an everyday thing. This everyday thing was what worried Briony. She did not sleep a wink, which was not a good way to prepare for your first day at a new school.

  Then there was the way she was dressed. The simple dark dress and patterned sweater were ordinary enough, but most people in her class didn’t wear makeshift cross around their necks consisting of two carefully sharpened pencils stuck together with packing tape. Briony had hidden the cro
ss necklace under her dress, hoping no one would see it. She knew it was stupid-looking, but it was all she could find in her room. She figured, if there were vampires coming after her like last night, at least she had something that might work. She didn’t know much about vampires, except what she saw in the movies. She could’ve kick herself for not paying more attention. What were vampires afraid of? Silver?

  Briony looked down at her wrist. It was a last minute thing, but after raiding Aunt Sophie’s kitchen this morning for anything silver, she found some spoons, which she bent into a kind of bracelet. Not exactly what she would’ve worn to school on her first day, but it made her feel a little safer.

  And then there was the effect of the smell to consider. It was amazing how much garlic you could sneak onto your breakfast if you tried, and Briony had certainly tried. The end result was breath that might or might not have stopped a vampire from getting near to her, but which was certainly stopping everything and everyone else.

  The upshot of all this was a series of stares as she entered her classes, followed by the kind of whispering that never boded well. Occasionally, Briony heard words like “freak” and “weirdo” floating out from little cliques of girls, while the boys who might have spent time staring at her or trying to talk to her at her old school avoided her completely here.

  Frankly, Briony had bigger things to worry about, and if anything, that was the one good thing about the day. She was so busy worrying over and looking out for vampires that there wasn’t really any time to worry about the usual “am I understanding anything in class?” or “do the popular girls like me?” questions.

  The thing that struck Briony as strange was that everybody else wasn’t as freaked out about living in Wicked as she was. Didn’t they know that they lived in a town containing vampires? That the Wicked Woods in Wicked was home to vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and anything supernatural?

  As the day wore on, it occurred to Briony that no, they probably didn’t know. How could they? If people in one town knew that vampires were real, then people everywhere would know. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could keep to just one place. Someone would phone their cousin in the next town, or post footage on the Internet, or even just stick up a big sign at the edge of town saying, “Incidentally, there are vampires here.” Somehow, the news would get out, wouldn’t it?

  Well, there had certainly been nothing about it in Briony’s introductions to her classes, though to be fair, she had been so sleepy at the time that a teacher could easily have said, “Class, this is Briony, she’s new, so be sure to tell her all about avoiding the undead,” and she might not have noticed. Still, nobody had come up to her to give her any tips along the lines of “be sure to run if you see any bats.” Of course, practically nobody had come up to her at all, and it was lunchtime now. Maybe things would change in the school cafeteria, though Briony wasn’t particularly hopeful.

  It was nice to see that, in some respects, schools were the same everywhere. The cafeteria was a large space made smaller by the number of tables stuffed into it, and one look at some of the students’ faces told her that the food was going to be only just the right side of inedible. Briony grabbed a tray, and ended up with something generously described as spaghetti bolognaise. They ignored her request for extra garlic.

  Briony looked around for somewhere to sit, and found that things were familiar in another respect too. The school’s inhabitants clustered in little clumps and cliques that split along lines Briony could pick out easily. The jocks from the football team occupied a couple of tables shoved together, not far from a group of pretty girls who had to be cheerleaders. A set of geeky-looking kids sat further off, apparently arguing about some computer game Briony had never heard of. A couple of girls with flute cases bolted their food so that they could get to some kind of band practice.

  There were some Goths in one corner. Briony avoided them instinctively. After all, in a place like this, what kind of person wanted to dress like a wannabe member of the walking dead? Briony found herself thinking of her great aunt’s warning that the dangerous ones were the ones where you couldn’t tell, but she suspected that in at least some cases you definitely could.

  Inevitably, Briony found herself gravitating towards the group that looked like they were cheerleaders. It was where she fit in, after all. At her old school, she would have been sitting in the middle of a group like that, easily the prettiest girl in her class, with plenty of friends around her. She wouldn’t have been standing around, looking for the spot where she fit in, because she would already have known.

  Briony made it to the edge of the little group before one of them detached herself from the conversation to intercept her. She was dark-haired, blue-eyed, and expensively dressed. Just her shoes would have cost as much as Briony’s entire outfit, even if Briony hadn’t been looking quite so bedraggled from lack of sleep. Just from the way the other girls looked at the rich girl, Briony could tell that she was in charge. It was important at times like these to be confident and outgoing, even if you mostly felt tired. Briony did her best.

  “Hi, I’m Briony.”

  “Oh, how sweet, the weird new girl wants to sit with us.” It was not a promising beginning. “Well, I’m Pepper Freeman.”

  She said it like she expected that Briony would have heard of her already. Briony looked around at the rest of the group. They seemed to be content to watch the unfolding show.

  “You’re must be… let’s see… head cheerleader? You look the type.” It wasn’t the most diplomatic way of putting it, but then, Briony was a bit too tired for that kind of thing.

  “Of course I’m head cheerleader. And if we’re talking about types, what’s yours?” she got hold of Briony’s pencil cross, which had slipped out from under her dress and was in plain view. “Some kind of low budget Goth, maybe? Perhaps a weird hybrid of Goth and Nerd. Not exactly the most elegant of fashion statements, is it?”

  “Yeah,” said someone in the back, obviously Pepper’s groupie. Briony considered a comment on the other girl’s jewelry. It was certainly easy to spot. What kind of person wore what looked like genuine diamond earrings to school? Someone, or more likely her father’s credit card, had been very generous.

  “Look,” Briony said, “I don’t want trouble, I just want to eat my lunch.”

  “Then go somewhere and eat it, weird girl.” Pepper held her nose. “Presumably, you’ll fit in somewhere people can’t smell that garlic breath.”

  That got a laugh from the other girls. Of course it did. When your official head mean girl gave you the signal that you should be laughing at someone, you laughed at them, because the alternative was finding yourself as her next target. Briony knew how it worked. She was the Pepper Freeman at her old school, but she was never that mean…was she? Hopefully not. That didn’t make her feel any better as the laugh rolled out over her, though.

  If she hadn’t been feeling so tired, she might have been able to come up with some witty comeback that would have put Pepper Freeman in her place. If she hadn’t had enough garlic in her to stun passers-by, she would certainly have been able to at least reach out to them. It wouldn’t have taken much. It never did. As it was though, Briony found herself beating a hasty retreat to eat her lunch on her own, in that corner of the cafeteria that seemed to be reserved for loners and misfits. She didn’t even try fitting in with one of the other groups. There didn’t seem to be much point.

  After lunch, she was subjected to physics and English. Things didn’t get much better. Briony did her best, but her concentration waned when faced with the onslaught of sleep deprivation. And news of her brief conversation with the head cheerleader had obviously gotten round. Girls who thought that they fit in with that clique, or at least that they should, didn’t bother hiding their smirks as they looked at Briony. More than a few made their own comments about garlic, just quietly enough that the teacher didn’t hear.

  Briony had the worst school day in her life. She couldn’t just rise above it a
ll, because the comments and the looks kept coming. She couldn’t react either, because the moment she opened her mouth to do so, a teacher would give her a stern “you don’t want to get into trouble on your first day” look. The only thing she could really do was sit there and try not to let any of her frustration show.

  Briony was so grateful for the final bell that she practically sighed with relief. She wanted to run straight to her great aunt’s car, but she didn’t. Briony forced herself to walk slowly and confidently. The more scared she looked, the more people would start to think of her as an easy victim. That would only make things worse. You couldn’t let fear control you.

  Of course, Briony realized she had been doing exactly that all day. All that stuff with the garlic had just been crazy. And not being able to calm down enough to sleep was about the worst move she could have made. Fear, specifically the fear of vampires, had ended up making her a social misfit. At this rate, she would be lucky if her classmates ever accepted her. She shook her head, removing her improvised cross and vowing to find a breath mint at the first opportunity. So vampires were real, so what? She still had to go to school. She still had to find a way to fit in. If she let fear rule her, Briony knew that she might never have a social life again.

  Her decision made, Briony felt a lot happier. Things would be better tomorrow. Almost certainly. Even so, she was immensely happy when she finally slid into the passenger seat of the battered old Ford Aunt Sophie drove. Her great aunt looked Briony over with an expression that said she had a pretty good idea of exactly how Briony’s day had gone. Even so, she smiled.

  “Rough day, darling? Well, I thought, this being your first day and all, I should take you out to celebrate anyway. Maybe it will make you feel better.”

  Briony was too tired to answer as Aunt Sophie put the car in gear and set off. Wherever they were going, it had to be better than this.