My wolf spirit snarls. The growl escapes my chest into the night. This trap was within my property line. All that I hold dear is in my cabin two hundred yards away. I will not let her be harmed. This isn’t the first time I’ve been faced with an enchanted trap. The damage they do is irreparable.
I have to find whoever is setting glamoured wolf traps around Sleepy Briar. Hunting is a way of life this far north. But this trap, like the others, was set to cause maximum suffering before death. And for what? To harvest a “lucky” rabbit’s foot? Certainly, from the hare’s perspective, nothing good came of it. No, there was some deeper purpose, but I don’t yet know what.
After separating the victim from its snare, I carry both toward my cabin. Even though it is hidden behind thick clouds, the full moon’s tug on my wolf spirit is there. No doubt about it; I want to kill the perpetrator. It’s all I can do not to shift right now and begin my search. But first I have to stop by the cabin. If only to reassure myself of Riyah’s safety.
Around the side of my cabin, I hang the trap on a high hook. Disposing of the hare is a bigger problem. This amount of dark magic is no threat to my wolf, but I don’t want small scavengers sickened by the tainted meat. I’ll carry it with me high up in the mountains and dispose of it where no other animal goes. With any luck, the weather will break in the next day or so. I let my head fall back and I drag in the frigid air until I can’t hold anymore and then exhale slowly. Clouds of heated air form in front of my face and for the moment my wolf spirit calms. But for how long? He strains for release and keeping my beast tethered is slowly draining me.
As I round to the front of my cabin, the hair on the back of my neck prickles. Another wolf charges out of the blizzard, heading straight for me. The wolf somersaults forward, shifting from four legs and two hundred pounds of wolf to two hundred pounds of my cousin, Brody.
With his muscular build and strong jaw, Brody carries the Havoc family traits of arrogance and impatience. No doubt this is why he’s an excellent law student down in New York most of the time. Since childhood, his once fair hair has darkened to light brown. Maybe there’s hope for the rest of him to grow up too. Or maybe not.
Fucking show-off.
But Brody wouldn’t be here tonight unless there was trouble. Neither the hare nor I am having any luck today.
Chapter2
RIYAH
Setting the last photo in place, I step back to study my work. The lone table in the cabin, a long pine slab, is covered with colored paper debris. It looks like a craft store vomited.
None of that matters, though. I push the paper, scissors, glue, glitter, and stickers aside to create more space. The final scrapbook page has one picture centered and matted with contrasting shades of blue paper. A blond man, shirtless and wielding an ax, stands grinning next to a woodpile. Jax Havoc, in all his glory, is splitting wood in a blizzard. Crazy wolf shifter. But he looks happy in the middle of white flurries and brutally cold air.
The background of the photo is dark, and fuzzy with snow. Nothing is clear about the location or time of day. Jax is all that matters. He sticks out in the picture—as in Sleepy Briar in general—as if he is backlit.
I could never figure out what made him glow like that. Then I realized: he’s a living man. Not a dead one. I’m too used to being around other vamps.
I snapped that picture a week ago and I’ve barely taken my eyes off it since.
It’s a crazy idea born of wintery boredom, but I’m eager to show him the completed scrapbook I started a few weeks back. When I moved into my room, I found a shoebox full of old pictures on the top shelf of my closet. Armed with the box of scrapbooking supplies I brought with me, I’ve been working away over the last month on recreating Jax’s life in pictures.
Even blood-thirsty vamps have hobbies.
Running my fingers around the edges of the last picture, I wonder what he’ll think. I’ve been considering ways to present it. And ways he could show me his appreciation for it. A long night of screwing me crazy sits at the top of my list.
Unfortunately, Jax Havoc is a man of his word which makes for one horny and lonely vampire when that sexy shifter lives under the same roof as me. Or is it the other way around? Probably doesn’t matter when the result is me masturbating to the thought of him taking me instead of the actual deed happening.
You see, a few days after I arrived, my paperwork caught up with me. I wish you could have seen the look on his face. I thought I was pale. At first, Jax grew very quiet when he read the terms of my employment, and then the blood drained from his face.
They’re a mood killer. My paperwork, I mean. I serve as a physician in Sleepy Briar at the pleasure of the Vampire Medical Review Board. If they don’t like my job performance, I don’t get canned. I get staked.
As in dead as a door knob. No getting a second chance. Dust.
At the time of the Bite, when I was in medical school, becoming a vamp seemed like a good deal. I would receive eternal life and student loan forgiveness. In my human life, ever since I could remember, I’ve wanted to be a doctor. Now I can practice medicine forever—and debt free!
Win-win, right?
Fuck no.
In death as in life, the devil is in the details. In my enthusiasm for leaping to the head of the recruitment line, I missed the celibacy clause.
I know, right? Wouldn’t you think something like that would be more prominent? At least written in caps and bolded. Turns out most of the Vampire Medical Review Board has literally been around since the Dark Ages. If it’s good enough for them, their reasoning goes, then it should be good enough for us.
In the fine print, I discovered that sex with other vampire physicians (as long as it’s discreet) is ignored. What riles the board up isn’t sex, it’s the emotional attachments. I mean, when you are as old as they are I’m pretty sure any chances of feeling anything for another being is long gone. Like a human’s senses after they reach a certain point in their older lives. The board maintains that it is impossible to fully focus on one’s work if a personal life spills over into a professional one. I just think it’s a way of controlling the masses. Either way, sadly for me, their rule is law.
The great room in Jax’s cabin is still a bit chilly for my comfort. I throw a few more logs on the crackling fire. Two months ago, my plan was simple: move to Sleepy Briar and set up my medical practice. After being here for almost that long, I’m making slow progress in winning the area residents’ trust. And that’s with Jax’s support as community leader slash sheriff. Everyone is so suspicious of vamps. How tiresome.
I’m not patient by nature, which is probably why the review board gave me this assignment. Well, that and I probably pissed off the current president when I sent her a box of sex toys with expired batteries to protest the celibacy requirement.