Where the Wild Things Bite

by Molly Harper

  Make it through security OK? --Jane, she’d written.

  I wrote back, Yep, Burt says to tell you hi.

  I could practically hear her snickering through the screen. Small town.

  What are you even doing awake right now? Isn’t this super early in the vamp morning?

  Not going to rest easy until I know you’re home safe.

  Sweet but unnecessary, I wrote.

  She sent me a picture of a huge stack of papers on her desk. Tell that to the incident reports I gotta fill out after your “hike.”

  Fair enough. But as a warning, I’m thinking of doing some more traveling.

  If it’s not in my region, not my paperwork. Where are you thinking?

  Canada? Alaska, maybe? Somewhere cooler, I typed.

  Andrea knows some people in Alaska. I’ll check with her.

  Thanks. I’ll text when I land.

  Do that. Talk soon.

  I smiled when I switched my phone off. It would be nice to have a friend like Jane, someone who loved books as much as I did and seemed to understand my neuroses. And she had such a nice large group of friends, who all seemed to care about the people she cared about. What would it be like to have that sort of network of people who knew you so well? Maybe I would take her up on her offer to come visit sometime.

  I felt the seat sink under the weight of another passenger sitting beside me. I didn’t look up. I was amazed that I didn’t need to scan whoever it was, assess the threat. But honestly, after fighting off a crazy pilot, badly behaved wildlife, and shapeshifters, what was a small-town airline passenger going to do to me?

  “Fear of flying?”

  My eyes popped open. I knew that voice, capable of packing so much smug sarcasm into just a few syllables. I looked up and smirked when I saw Finn sitting in the seat next to me, wearing some very large sunglasses and a baseball cap slung low over his face. “Fear of awkward conversations before crashing,” I told him, echoing my first words to him.

  I reached over to the window shade and pulled it down. I gently took off his sunglasses and leaned in to kiss him. It went on and on, until someone in the row behind us made an uncomfortable ahem noise. I pulled back, licking away what tasted like sunscreen on my lips.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Very high SPF and a lot of caffeine,” he told me. “Please don’t walk away from me. I can’t promise that I’ll suddenly become a model citizen, but I can promise that I won’t lie to you. I won’t ever hurt you intentionally. Just give us a chance to figure out what we are when we’re not on a survival death march through the Kentucky marshlands?”

  I kissed him again, people in row eleven be damned.

  “You haven’t said anything,” he noted. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking of our next adventure,” I told him. “I’m thinking travel but in style this time. Room service. Beds with actual mattresses and sheets. No marsupials allowed.”

  “I know this great hotel in St. Thomas.”

  “I was thinking of somewhere cooler,” I told him. “Somewhere with fewer daylight hours. Andrea knows some people in Alaska. I was thinking that sounded interesting.”

  “That does sound interesting,” he agreed, twining our hands together as the flight attendant started the safety instructions. “But I have one request first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We stop at the first library we find and have sex in it.”

  I burst out laughing and buried my face in his shoulder. “You’re not going to let that go, are you?”

  “Never. And I’m never letting you go, either,” he told me, pressing his mouth against my temple. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay home for a little bit before striking out again?”

  I grinned and shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Want more Molly Harper?

  In the most recent installment in Molly Harper’s Half Moon Hollow paranormal romance series, Libby (a widow-turned-vampire) struggles with her transition, and finds out it sucks to be the only vampire member of the PTA . . .

  The Single Undead Moms Club

  CLICK HERE TO ORDER

  * * *

  Gigi is no longer an innocent teen. All grown up and looking for love, her family and friends worry she’ll go for the sexy, alluring vampire instead of a nice, safe human. But sexy and alluring, with a penchant for biting, could be just what Gigi wants. . .

  The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire

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  * * *

  Assigned to work on a dilapidated haunted house could be the perfect situation to bring Nina and Deacon together—if it doesn’t kill them first!

  Better Homes and Hauntings

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  * * *

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  Keep reading for a peek at the next hilarious Half-Moon Hollow romance from

  MOLLY HARPER

  The Accidental Sire

  Coming soon from Pocket Books!

  1

  There is no such thing as a dignified accidental vampire transformation.

  —The Accidental Sire: What to Do When You’re Forced into Vampiric Parenthood

  I was dead. And then I wasn’t.

  I liked dead better.

  I catapulted from absolute dark, inky silence to being completely and regrettably aware. I blinked into the soft light of the cool, windowless room where I’d slept. And while it was perfectly nice, it was not my dorm room. Where was I? Why did my head hurt so bad? Like I could feel every vein in my head and they were all angry.

  I rolled over on the strange bed with its crisp white sheets and hospital rails. Had I been in an accident? Was I in the hospital? I didn’t recognize the room, but it certainly wasn’t a dorm room. I would know if my dorm housed a medical wing, wouldn’t I?

  I bolted up and immediately regretted it. My head felt like it was being clamped between Tom Hardy’s muscular thighs . . .

  “Argh, I should be so lucky,” I mumbled, flopping back onto the bed. I was wearing my favorite purple Adventure Time pajamas. Someone had taken the time to braid my hair into pigtails.

  Other than the headache, I felt OK. I wasn’t nauseous. In fact, I was hungry . . . well, no, I was thirsty. My tongue was dry and gritty, begging for something, anything to drink. I would wrestle Morgan to the ground for one of her disgustingly healthy “green machine” smoothies. And I was of the opinion that kale was God’s way of making CrossFitters suffer karmic payback for all those humblebrag selfies.

  My gums felt raw, like I’d lost teeth. Smacking my dry lips together, I ran my tongue over my teeth. They were all there, which was a relief. It was hard to get dates with meth mouth.

  I could see too much. I could tell that I wasn’t wearing my contact lenses, but I could see every inch of this sterile, cold room. I could see every wrinkle in the thin cotton blanket. I could count every hole in the ceiling tiles. Also, everything smelled like industrial-strength cleaner. I closed my eyes and pressed my head into the blessedly scent-free pillow.

  I remembered the party. Ophelia Lambert, a nice vampire girl from my world literature class I’d been spending time with, had arranged a human-vampire mixer in the student lounge on the sixth floor. It was, hands down, the best party I’d ever been to. Ophelia had spared no expense turning our silly student lounge into a swanky nightclub, complete with fancy-looking mocktails that dutifully complied with the campus’s no-alcohol policy. And I’d been dancing with a sweet guy that Ophelia introduced me to . . . Ben. Ben Overby, a boy she knew from her hometown. I remembered dancing with him and his cute little jerks and kicks. I remembered that he kept his hands on my hips, but in a respectful, nongropey way.

  Ben had been sweet, sincere in a way that I hadn’t seen in ninety-nine percent of the boys I’d met so far this year. I felt like I could trust him when he smiled. I didn’t spend the whole dance trying to look for hidden double entendres when he spoke. He asked for my number as
I walked him to the lobby and I programmed it into his contact list as “The Most Interesting Girl You Will Ever Meet.”

  I heard a strange thrumming noise through the hospital room door. Thump-a-thump-a-thump. I rolled my eyes. Some douche-bro must have turned his car’s bass as high as it would go to get that kind of reverb all the way into the building.

  In slightly less head-cringey developments, I heard a single set of footsteps making their way closer to me. I heard the click of the door being pushed open. I could smell flowers, waxy and sweet, as a weak top-note over a much stronger scent of soap and . . . moss? My eyes opened, but I didn’t move a muscle.

  Ben, the boy I’d danced with the night before, was standing beside my bed, setting a pretty little bouquet of gerbera daisies on the nightstand. He was so much cuter than I remembered. It was like I was seeing his face for the first time. Everything was so clear: the smooth, tan skin of his oval face, the straight lines of his nose, the hints of gold and auburn in his hair, the distinct wrinkle forming between his—frankly, luminous—jade-green eyes.

  “I know you’re still, uh . . . sleeping. Jane says you won’t wake up for a couple of days,” he said softly. “But I hated the idea of you being in here in this cold white room with no color. And it will be something nice for you to see when you first wake up. I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked, but Keagan said you like yellow.”

  “They’re perfect, thanks,” I told him.

  “What the!” Ben yelped, head whipping toward me as he stumbled back in alarm. He tripped over his own feet and landed hard against the white tile of the floor. “Ow!”

  Ben winced as he cradled his arm against his chest. He’d scraped his knuckles when he landed and the tiny wounds were weeping little ruby droplets of blood. I could see each of them in sharp detail, like he was bleeding in high-definition.

  Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but it immediately started to water. The whole room was filling with a scent that was better than fresh coffee or melting caramel or double chocolate cheesecake brownies. I threw my legs out of the bed and stepped closer to Ben, inhaling that wonderful, beautiful scent as deeply as I could, as if I could drink it. That thump-a-thump-a-thump noise came back, faster now, and the sound was pleasing to some weird instinct deep within my brain.

  That same raw sensation had me stretching my jaw as my teeth seemed to shift outward. My lip scraped across something sharp and the taste of my own blood filled my mouth. I pressed my fingertip against the long, sharp canine poking out over my bottom lip and winced.

  Oh, no.

  Suddenly memories of what happened the night before came flooding into my brain.

  I’d enjoyed dancing with Ben so much, I hadn’t wanted to walk away from him. Something about him made me feel like he saw me, not body parts that happened to have a personality attached, or a chance to brag to his friends. But me, as a person. And for a female undergrad at a state college, that was a pretty rare thing.

  After the party, I’d walked Ben downstairs to the lobby and we’d sat on a little bench outside the dorm, far from the smokers, enjoying the cool evening air. To my surprise, some vampires in the courtyard in front of New Dawn Hall were playing Ultimate Frisbee. I kind of thought the undead were beyond playing Ultimate.

  We talked about our favorite movies, our favorite bands. We talked about our fandoms. (I was a Ravenclaw and he was a Hufflepuff, which almost ended the conversation right there.) We talked about our favorite obscure gummy candy. (I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as gummy bacon strips.)

  It was almost two when he finally had to go, but he’d grinned kind of sheepishly and said, “So, I was thinking that we’d skip the whole ‘will he call or won’t he’ drama by my just asking you out now. And I’m not going to play around with some silly coffee date, either. I’m going straight to dinner. Maybe even a place with actual metal silverware.”

  “A true gentleman draws the line at plastic sporks,” I told him, my lips quirking as I fought a smile. It was a charming, if wordy, way to ask me out, and I could appreciate that. “And, if you were to ask me out, there’s a pretty good chance I would say yes, just to take the pressure off you.”

  The smile that broke over his face was blinding. “That’s good to know.”

  I waited, in silence, while he stared at me.

  “Oh, you want me to ask now?” he said. I pursed my lips and waggled my hand back and forth as he leaned closer. “Man, you’re pushy.”

  I burst out laughing, even as his arms slipped around my waist. This was what girls my age were supposed to do. Flirt with nice boys and stay out late, not worry about bills and my hours getting cut. “I thought Hufflepuffs were supposed to be all forthright. This whole conversation reeks of Slytherin sass.”

  “Oh, wow,” he said, his lips barely brushing against my own. “You are a nerd.”

  “Still better than being a Hufflepuff,” I murmured against his mouth.

  “You’re gonna have to let that go,” he said, his mouth closing over mine. As far as first kisses went, it was . . . pretty amazing. Sweet and slow and warm, with just a hint of tongue. I felt it all the way down to my toes, which were currently curling in my cute little black boots. We only broke apart when kids leaving the party came filtering out of the lobby and catcalled us.

  “It’s not likely,” I said, when he pulled away.

  “So . . . dinner,” he said. “In a place without sporks. When would be a good time for you?”

  “Saturday would be good,” I told him.

  “Six?” he asked. I nodded and he gave me another quick peck on the lips. “Awesome, I will call you. And if I don’t call, you text me, call me a dumbass, and I will send apology cookies.”

  “Cookies?” I asked as he backed away.

  “Flowers have been overdone,” he called back.

  I giggled—honest-to-God giggled—but I managed not to do the awkward little wave my arm ached to give.

  Suddenly, I heard a quick bark of warning, but before I could even respond, I felt a crushing blow against my chest. I was knocked off my feet and thrown into the wall behind me. I felt my head collide with the stone with a sick crack before I collapsed to the ground like a broken doll.

  Ben screamed my name but I couldn’t even lift my head. His voice grew closer, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I had never known pain like this in my life. My chest felt hot and wet, on the inside and outside. I couldn’t feel anything below my waist. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move enough air through my throat to produce words. People gathered around me, staring down at my twisted body with expressions of horror on their faces.

  Ben lifted something off my chest. It appeared to be a forty-five-pound dumbbell weight. The vampires were playing Ultimate Frisbee with a forty-five-pound weight. And they’d missed.

  My brain was going dark, as if I was slipping away into some corner deep inside my head, where it didn’t hurt so much. I could feel the grass under my back getting slick and hot while I got colder.

  Ben was screaming for help, for someone to call 911. I managed to lift my arms enough to feel that my ribs were definitely going the wrong direction. Tina, our dorm director, suddenly appeared over me, her frizzy brown hair forming a cloud around her head. Through the haze of pain and blood pounding in my ears, I heard her squeaky voice say, “This is bad. I can see her ribs poking out through her shirt. This is really bad.”

  That was exactly what I needed to hear.

  I opened my mouth to point out how unhelpful this was, but blood was bubbling up between my lips, making it hard to push air through to form sounds.

  Please, help me. Please.

  I didn’t want to die. I was too young. I hadn’t seen anything of the world. I’d barely left Kentucky. I’d barely lived.

  “You’re going to be OK,” Ben told me sternly, like he could command me to get up and shake it off. He cupped my chin in his hand and moved my head gently so I was forced
to meet his eyes. “Meagan, just keep breathing. Stay awake.”

  I was trying. Couldn’t he see how hard I was trying? The tiny flow of oxygen I was drawing in through my nose seemed like a championship effort.

  “Meagan,” Tina said, wiping at my mouth and smearing her hands with bright red. “I’m not a doctor, but you have a lot of injuries and they are pretty bad. The chances of you surviving this . . . I don’t know if the ambulance will get to you in time. You signed your consent form before you moved in, but I have to ask you again: Do you want to be turned?”

  I nodded my head, or at least, I thought I did. I couldn’t really feel much anymore.

  Anything to make the pain go away. Anything to avoid dying. Please.

  “Can I get a vampire volunteer?” Tina yelled. “I need a vampire to act as an emergency sire! Get over here and present your Council card!”

  My eyes fluttered shut and I heard Ben cry for me to stay awake, to keep my eyes open. Everything felt heavy and cold, dragging me down into the darkness. Someone lifted my arms and slashed at my wrists, pain that barely registered against the agony in my chest. I was cold and tired and I hurt so much. It seemed so much easier to just go to sleep, to let go and drift off, even as something cool and coppery dripped into my mouth.

  The last thing I remembered was Ben yelling, “Meagan!”

  The memory faded and here was Ben again, standing in my hospital room, bleeding, and my fangs were out. Because I was a vampire. This was bad. This was so very bad.

  “How are you already awake?” Ben asked, pushing to his feet and stumbling toward me as I backed away.

  Thump-a-thump-a-thump.

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head, clamping my lips around my teeth. “But I think you need to get away from me. Ben, you’re bleeding.”

  “What?” He glanced down at his hand. “Oh.”