Dear Reader:
I heard you: Ruby and Stone needed an HEA. I think this is exactly where they should be.
Time Stands Still: A Serpent in the Embers Exclusive Epilogue
The bell over Slow Smoke’s door has a very specific ring if you’re a norm. A different one if you’re a hunter. And a completely different chime if you’re other. I didn’t know that when I first crossed the threshold. Only that the bell made a sound I couldn’t place, and moments after I stepped inside, Joy Sharpe, the statuesque redhead who owned the place, pulled a gun on me.
“What are you?” she’d asked.
“Hungry,” I said, confused by the question, but somehow not overly bothered by the barrel of the pistol facing me. “Cold. Thirsty.”
Her eyes didn’t flick to my face. They tracked my hands, my stance, the way I held myself, like she’d seen strangers walk in wearing human skin before and learned the hard way to ask first and apologize never.
I knew she’d had to have seen me standing outside its door for the last few hours. A homeless man of some size nursing a crumpled paper cup half-filled with coins and the odd dollar bill, I hadn’t noticed anything special about the shop that might indicate the owner would be nervous as a hare at a customer stepping inside. Just a few hardened and sweaty looking tough guys shouldering their way through the entrance and disappearing inside.
I shook my cup at her. It was true that while those men had entered, none had come back out. Maybe it was a front of some kind. A brothel maybe. Or a mafia money laundering outfit. I scanned her head to heel and decided she looked tough enough to be that sort. Wiry and slim, but with a grit to her posture that suggested she was completely at home holding that gun.
But at that point, I didn’t care. After several hours of pan-handling and getting no more than enough for a coffee and a muffin, I decided to cut my losses and step inside. I think she expected me to bolt at the eyeball of a pistol taking its aim at my head. That wasn’t my style. At least I didn’t think it was. There wasn’t much about myself that I actually remembered.
“Must be quite a cup of coffee,” I said with a half smile to suggest I was friendly. “Plenty of customers come in, but none leave.”
Her mouth twitched, but she laid the pistol on the counter. Encouraged, I took another step into the shop when she bent to pull out a mug from beneath the counter and poured an aromatic blend from a carafe and topped it with foam.
“I just need something warm,” I said, knowing exactly how I looked and smelled. I could even see it in her face, the way her nostrils flared. The way she angled her body as though she hoped to deflect some of the unwashed smell that wafted out of me with every movement. Hard as it was to walk inside a civilized building scented by aromatics and clean soap smells, it had to be done. I was just too hungry. Too cold.
After several nights of sleeping between cardboard sheets, I was more than ready to face down a nuclear bomb if it meant I’d have something warm to put in my belly. The disgust of a privileged woman and her patrons was nothing to the dark truth of hunger. But I did have my pride. And my sensibilities.
“A hot coffee and a warm muffin,” I said, holding out the cup to show her I had enough to pay for both of those things. I’d hoped for enough charity to get a full dinner, but it was what it was. “That’s it.” I stepped closer, encouraged that she’d not ordered me back outside like most places. “I’ll leave right after.”
She jerked her chin toward a stool. “Don’t pull anything funny, and you can have a bowl of soup. It isn’t much. Just my leftovers from dinner.”
Under her watchful gaze, I slid onto the stool and emptied the contents of my cup onto the counter. She pushed it back at me.
“You’re a long way from home,” she said, and something in the way she canted her head at me made her look as if she was looking through me.
“Maybe,” I said, collecting the coins into the rim of the cup and tilting it so they slid down to the crumpled bottom. “Don’t remember.”
A spoon rang against the counter as she dropped it in front of me. “You got a name?”
“Stone,” I said and didn’t offer more even though she waited with eyelids pinned open expectantly until she gave up finally, fluttered her eyelids and pulled an oversized mug with a large mouth from a nearby shelf. I had to swallow down several times as she poured cold soup from a container into the mug and slipped it into the microwave. Even my insides quivered with the anticipation of scooping a spoonful icy cold into my mouth. I hadn’t realized I was that hungry.
I made a grab for it and she swatted my hand. “I thought you wanted something warm.”
A chuckle moved up my throat. “Lady, the heart wants what it wants, but the stomach is boss.”
A slim hand went to her hip and she snorted. “Emily Dickinson you’re not.”
“Who?” I asked over the grumble of my stomach as she turned to pop the mug into the microwave.
“The poet,” she said. “The woman who wrote that. I thought you’d know her name if you used her words.”
“Oh. I thought that was Aiofe.”
This time, her head snapped up and those eyes locked on mine with the aggression of that barrel still pointing at me from the counter top. It made me almost topple back off the stool. “Who did you just say?”
Everything went blank inside. My lips pursed as they tried to form the word again and lost the syllables. A dream of some sort. Threads of a tapestry that was fraying and disintegrating before my eyes. It was why I was homeless, I thought. A man lost to the shadows of mental illness.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Things are hazy.” I pointed at the microwave. “Can I still have the soup?”
Her expression softened but she didn’t lose that wariness. She gave me the soup, a coffee, and a biscuit and watched me eat with an unnerving attention to each movement of my hands. I met her father, a grisly, grumpy old fart named Terry who owned a bar above the coffee shop. The hidden stairs at the back that led from Slow Smoke to the Rio Grande explained exactly why the men from the day didn’t leave by the exit. I realized he might be serving something more than booze upstairs and kept my mouth shut.
Then she set up a nest in her back room with throw pillows and a blanket, let me stay there nights and wash up in her bathroom sink. The reprieve was a heaven of sorts for the entire week I repaid her with my labor. She didn’t ask more of me, didn’t press for anything except conversation, which I gave freely.
I told her what I could remember and what I couldn’t. Told her the things I could remember, like the way I’d just found myself standing in the middle of a street with a car racing toward me from one end and a bus on the other. The miracle of jumping out of the way of both even though no one should have been able to move that fast. I told her about the pan handling. The wandering I did with a sense that I was looking for something missing. A part of me that didn’t seem to be there anymore. The decision that mental illness had taken that piece and left me homeless.
And every night I slept in that back room, I woke with my heart racing like I’d been running, my body remembering things my mind refused to give back.
I worked in her shop for a week before the man came.
Gideon, she called him.
His stride as he entered Slow Smoke was overly confident. He had the air of someone who possessed the cockiness of a fighting rooster. All legs and arms and sinew. Wiry, though. And it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn he had a record. Something about him screamed violence.
He came at me as if he knew me, but I didn’t back away. His sort would take a single flinch as permission to roll a bloke over.
“Stone,” he said, and stuck his hand out like the gesture was a test.
I stared at it for a beat too long, trying to decide what he wanted from me.
That was when I noticed the gun tucked beneath his flannel and extended my hand.
He pumped once and squeezed hard, the message clear. I almost smirked, mostly because my body didn’t seem afraid. It just seemed ready.
Gideon’s grin didn’t reach his eyes. He pushed the grey slouch hat back off his forehead. It clung to the back of his hair.
“I thought you were dead,” he said.
Dead?
There were times in those first days I’d wished it was true, but that wasn’t what snagged in my chest.
He knew my name. The only thing I remembered about myself.
I swung a look over my shoulder at Joy. Had she told him about me? Was that why she let me stay?
“Do I know you?” I asked.
For a second he just watched me. Not my face. My hands. My stance. Like he was measuring what I could do with them.
Then he stepped in close, fast enough that I didn’t have time to decide whether to shove him back.
He didn’t hug me like a friend.
He pinned me for half a second, a shoulder slam dressed up as affection, his mouth near my ear as if we were sharing a secret.
“Easy,” Joy said, her tone sharp enough to cut glass, and when she did, Gideon’s embrace slackened. I remained rigid.
“Fuck,” he said, soft enough that only I could hear it. “Ava is going to be pumped.”
He pulled back and turned the smile on full brightness, the kind you use when you want everyone in the room to believe you.
“How did you do it?” he said louder. “How are you here right now?”
“Ava?” I asked. “Is that my girlfriend? A sister?”
The way his eyes flicked to Joy wasn’t friendly. It was warning. Or confirmation.
“See?” Joy said, but though it had the inflection of a question, it wasn’t a question at all.
Gideon looked back at me. “You don’t remember.”
I shrugged, strangely unbothered. “Maybe I don’t want to.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” he muttered.
And for a second a blast of images came at me. Strange. Violent. Blisteringly painful. I shook them off like an animal snapping water from its coat.
Whatever those things wanted to tell me about myself, I decided the amnesia might be a good thing.
Joy watched us with a narrowed gaze, then jerked her chin toward the door.
Gideon back-stepped and locked it.
A flutter of panic went through me. My hands curled into fists automatically. My feet planted wide.
By the time Gideon turned back around, every inch of my body was tense, and I felt my lips curling back from my teeth.
Joy inched toward the counter where that pistol sat in an unsnapped holster.
“He does that every now and then,” she said. “Whatever he was, he isn’t now. But his body remembers.”
Gideon waved dismissively at me, striding forward and rounding me as I stood there, feeling like I should be more confident than I was.
“Do you know what this place is?” he asked when he halted in front of me.
I didn’t like the way he looked at me. Superior. Cocky. Like he had something on me and was enjoying it.
“It’s a fucking coffee shop,” I said through gritted teeth, because I was beginning to understand that his earlier show of warmth hadn’t been relief. It had been satisfaction. The relief of an enemy realizing he was not recognized.
His grin slid across his face like an oiled egg on a pan. “Tell him, Joy.”
You’ve been here a week, Stone,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed anything odd about the way we do business? About the people who come in, the things they research on their laptops?”
Gideon snorted and I shot him a glare that made him step back.
“No one leaves the way they come in,” I said, not taking my eyes off Gideon. “They all go upstairs to the Rio Grande. Everyone either researches guns or weapons or myths. Legends. Stuff adolescent youths care about.”
Her hand hovered over her weapon for a moment, but then strayed to the carafe on the counter. She poured fragrant java into a large mug and carried it over to me.
“The shop caters to hunters,” she said, holding out the mug. It was an offering of sorts, a gesture to show me that she remained the friend I’d thought she was despite the way Gideon kept me under careful surveillance.
I looked at it, but didn’t take it.
She sighed. “The Hunter Network hunts and neutralizes horrible, awful creatures. Things that threaten humankind. Gideon has his own bunker back in Soul’s Harbor. Here in Lincoln, where the network was founded, we have this shop and the Rio Grande. The bar is a place for them to let off steam. The shop offers wifi and networking. A place to charge equipment. To grab a quick bite.”
She swallowed. “We keep tabs on who’s who. We only sanction the best into the network.”
Something dark funneled down to a pinpoint in my chest at the way she said it, the look on her face.
“You want me to join you? To hunt and kill things that shouldn’t exist?”
A look of surprise crossed her face before she shut it down to a neutral mask.
“No, Stone. That’s not what this is. You’re one of the things we would be hunting.”
I might have staggered back, except some instinct kept me rooted to the floor. Maybe it was the shock of the words or the processing of all that impossible information, but I didn’t think so. While I felt a rush of adrenaline, a drive to strike out, my limbs seemed to hold onto some long ingrained, maybe well trained habit.
I’d faced shocks before. I knew in that instant, though from what I couldn’t say. I’d faced worse, I was sure. And I knew that the Stone from weeks before he’d found himself standing in the middle of a busy street had seen and known awful things.
When I didn’t react, Joy pressed the cup into my hands.
“You’re safe here, Stone,” she said. “Whatever you were, you’re not him anymore.”
Gideon muttered something beneath his breath but I refused to acknowledge him. Instead, I curled my fingers around the warmth of the mug. I felt at home here. Joy had proved herself to me.
She nodded encouragingly. “I’ve seen the way you move. You’re fast at times. Your hands are calloused. You have a warrior’s bearing.”
Gideon muttered again, and I swung a glare on him. “You have something to say, say it, little man.”
He swiped the hat from his head and stuffed it into his pocket. “I said Joy has no earthly idea what you are.”
“He’s a friend, Gideon,” she said, swatting his chest with the back of her hand. “That’s all that matters.”
“And the fact that he’s used and abused women from all over the world for centuries doesn’t matter now, I suppose?”
He sucked at the back of his teeth while I studied him through shuttered lids.
“He doesn’t remember that,” she said.
“And what if he does?” Gideon glared at me, the hatred clear in his eyes. “The moment he remembers what he is, the moment he feels his power. God.” He ran his hand through his hair and I noted his fingers shook. “The things he’s done. To Ava.”
“Ava is hot headed and impetuous,” Joy interjected. “And you’re not the only one with a version of that story, Gideon. So don’t you dare lay it at his feet like it’s simple.”
She planted her hand on my shoulder and the warmth moved through me.
“I’ve seen no powers,” she said. “Surely he’d have displayed some by now. And if he does have powers like you say, then all the better for us.”
“You’re not insinuating.”
“I’m saying Dad and I agree. If Stone wants to join the Network, we’d be happy to have him. We need more hunters. You know we’ve taken a bad hit these last weeks. Hunters are falling all over the country. And we can train him. He can learn from the hunters who come into the shop. We won’t put him in the field till he’s ready.”
I thought it was my grunt of shock that snapped through the air, but it was evidently Gideon’s, because he sliced his hand down so hard through the air it made an audible whooshing sound.
“You’re insane, the both of you. I’ll never vote him in.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Vote how you like. The network has more voices than yours. We’ll let them decide the same as we do everyone.”
Gideon’s fists curled against his thighs. “I don’t trust him.”
I snorted. “Same.”
Maybe this was all some sort of joke, but it felt real. I’d only known her a week, but Joy was not the sort to play like this. Impossible as it seemed, I had to believe it was true.
“But Joy trusts you,” I said. “And I trust her.”
Her hand smoothed its way down my sleeve, not in an intimate way, but in a manner that suggested she was relieved. When she tucked her hands behind her back, I knew she’d felt as if it was all decided but for some semantics.
She nodded toward the door, drawing my attention to the bell overhead.
“The bell chimes for norms,” she said. “It rings for hunters. When you came in, it rattled. Hard.”
This seemed an important point, judging by the way she paused, giving me time to recall the moment. I did remember the odd sound of the bell but had assumed some technical issue in the equipment itself, not an indication of anything abnormal about the person entering the shop.
“It rattles for those who are other.”
“He’s fae,” Gideon spat. “Dark fae at that.” He looked me over. “At least he was.”
This last came softly, thoughtfully, as though he saw something in me that he hadn’t before and could not quite work out what was different.
I lifted my chin in challenge. “I accept.”
Whatever he saw in my face then seemed to bother him enough to pivot sharply. As he strode to the door, he tossed back one last comment over his shoulder.
“You’ll be sorry,” he said, not to me but Joy. “I have a vote too, and I’ll tell the entire Network what I know about him.”
And then he was gone, leaving me to stand there blinking at the ominous energy he left behind, trying to sort through all the emotions churning through me, raising hairs, threatening to show me images I didn’t want to see.
Joy made it easier to bear. She patted my arm and suggested I get back to work while she went upstairs to speak to her father and fill him in on the developments.
“Gideon is a prick,” she said. “He always has been. But so are most hunters in one way or another.” She ran a thumb along her chin thoughtfully. “I suspect you aren’t always such a Labrador Retriever either, and we need members like you. He knows that as well as the rest of us do. We’ve lost a lot of good men and women these last weeks. And if you are indeed dark fae, all the better.”
She grinned. “Maybe a bit of magic and violence is exactly what we need right now to turn the tide back in our favor.”
My shoulders sagged at the compassion that altered the edge in her voice, coming off as friendly instead of stern. I was grateful for the explanation, though I wasn’t sure I could tell her I didn’t care in the least if Gideon was a prick.
What I did do was feel for any sense of energy that might suggest there was magic in my blood or aura or wherever else it might be hiding, and when nothing came back that remotely indicated anything other than a vague hunger, I dropped a hip against the nearest stool.
“I don’t know about magic,” I said. “But I do feel pretty violent at the moment.”
I grinned, an effort to show the words as the joke I meant them to be, even if I didn’t feel quite so casual. Gideon would be a threat, an enemy, or an annoyance, but he would never be a friend.
She blew out a hiss of air through her nose. “Good,” she said. “It’s time we started playing dirty.”
She gave me a wink that took years off her middle-aged face, and then she too left the shop, except she went up the stairs to the Rio Grande instead of out the door and into the bustling street.
Being left alone created enough space that I could think. Without Gideon’s surly presence or Joy’s affable but tough energy, I felt free to let go a long, thoughtful exhale and scan the entire room. Now, as impossible as it all seemed, everything made so much more sense.
Not that I might be something other than human. That idea seemed too implausible based on the nights I’d spent cold and hungry, which seemed to be a very basic human physiological response. But the strange comings and non goings of men and women who looked often as surly as Gideon certainly made it seem as though there were people out there who believed in such things. All of them possessed a hard edge to their expressions that could not speak to anything less than warrior-like experience. Maybe a good deal of PTSD.
Just where I might fit could be assessed later. Right now, I needed Joy and this job and I did not plan to do a single thing to put that in jeopardy.
So much to process. It was a lot to work through. In a sort of afterthought, I flexed my fingers in front of my chest. Aimed my palm at the door. Concentrated. There was nothing but a bit of pain in each webbing from the strain.
I laughed to myself. Whatever they thought I was, it was not of a magical sort, that was for sure. And yet, the word fae held a familiarity as intimate as my own name.
I was still pondering the entire situation when the bell over the door shrieked in a note both bright and sharp as a bullet striking glass. It cut through my skull like an explosive. Not a rattle. Not a chime or ring. But something that felt like it was branding the bones beneath my skin. The other sounds were warnings. This was recognition. Like the shop itself had just decided something had walked in that it could not afford to ignore.
I felt it in my wrist the worst and I spun on instinct, my hands coming out in front of me in a way that seemed natural and habitual. Palms out. Feet planted. Defensive. Waiting. And in that instant, I thought I might have been a sort of warrior too.
The woman who stepped inside and shook out her hands as though she had just learned how to move them was slight enough of build that she should not have been a threat to a man of my size. Yet the round curves beneath her leather jacket and tight leather pants suggested they were underlined by muscle. A hunter, I thought. Her black hair, cut short, looked gelled into spikes of bristling tufts. Eyes that seemed to take in everything at once with barely a skim over the interior.
Tough, this woman, small though she might be, I still felt a shiver of threat she brought in with her along with the smell of car exhaust and night air.
The moment I caught her gaze, the floor felt like it dropped half an inch. I had to reach out for the counter to steady myself. A thump in my chest told me I’d missed a heartbeat.
For a second, I was not leaning on a stool in a warm coffee shop, but standing in the dark in front of an open stable door. For one breathless second, I breathed in the smell of hay and smoke. Firelight carved hard, flickering shadows onto a dense tree line and a medieval looking tavern.
Then it was gone and the coffee shop surrounded me again. But my whole body prickled in memory of that vision. My wrist hurt in a way that had me rubbing it against my thigh, expecting to feel some deep abrasion or splinter catching on the errant threads of my jeans.
I watched her pan the interior with a gaze very similar to the way the hunters did each time they crossed the threshold. Like a soldier. Taking everything in.
Yes. A hunter, I thought. Except the bell over the door had not chimed or rung. It had been so much louder.
“Can I help you?” I asked, forcing my feet onto the floor. “Latte, maybe?”
“I don’t know,” she said, a little antsy maybe. Like she’d come out of a coma or something.
Lost. That was what her entire demeanor shouted.
I could not help but imagine myself on that street again with those vehicles bearing down on me. I wondered if that was what I would have looked like. A shiver went through me at the thought she would feel that same way. Discombobulated and afraid.
“Something warm, maybe,” I said, remembering Joy always kept a bit of soup in a glass container in the fridge for just this sort of circumstance. Of course, I’d not known before that it was there to feed a hunter who might have been in the field without food for a bit too long. I’d just thought it was for homeless people like I’d been.
“I have a nice bowl of cream of broccoli soup.” I pulled a face, thinking about the heavy feel I knew it would lay on my palate, but I thought she might not care if she was hungry enough. She certainly looked a bit gaunt, as though she hadn’t eaten in days. For some reason that really bothered me.
I had an insane urge to gather her into my arms and warm her from my own body heat.
I shook it off, striding behind the counter so I could pull that container from the little fridge. Even as I turned my back on her, I could feel every step she made as she crept toward the counter. I knew she was eyeballing the closest stool with some trepidation without even turning around to look at her face.
I took my time, moving slowly, purposefully. A terrified squirrel could not have drawn a more cautious series of movements from me, but I thought it was apt.
“You from around here?” I asked conversationally. “I’m new myself. Been in town a few weeks no more so I know how it feels to be a bit lost.”
The energy in the shop shifted as I heard her settle on the stool. A small creaking sound leaked over the air. It was going to be alright. She had made a decision.
I swung around to see her staring at me.
“Is there cinnamon in that soup?” she asked, and her voice was husky and smoky and so damn sultry I felt my knees bow inward. Fuck she was gorgeous. Even beneath that haunted look in her eyes, the pallid, malnourished complexion, she had to be easily the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. My mouth went dry with something more acute than desire.
All I could do was shake my head as she ran her palms over the counter, testing the smoothness, pressing into it to measure its sturdiness.
“Maybe it’s you,” she said, and this time her eyes snapped with energy. It was all I could do to lay the bowl in front of her.
She looked down at it. “I thought you said it would be warm.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said and grabbed it again to shove it into the microwave. Her low, throaty chuckle sent sizzles along my spine. “I don’t know where my brain is.” I tried on a laugh but it sounded more like a wheeze.
Thankfully, she smiled back at me.
“I’m new,” she said. “Very new to the area.” A slight cant to her head. “I don’t know anyone.”
I stuck my hand out. “I’m not supposed to give you a last name, but my given one is Stone.”
She blinked. Dropped her gaze to my wrist, and by God if I didn’t feel something in there warm and spread up my arm.
“Stone,” she murmured. “It suits you.”
I thought she’d leave me with my hand jutted out between us like some awkward teen, but she took it with a surprisingly firm grip.
“I’m Ruby.”
Ruby.
The name sat in my chest like it belonged there on a velvet cushion. Everything about the way it shaped itself on her lips, the way it whispered on the air currents, tickled my ears, made me feel warm inside.
I could not help a low, flirtatious chuckle. “Quite a match,” I said, pointing to my chest with my free hand. “Stone and Ruby. Are you sure we don’t know each other?”
“I think I would remember you.”
The microwave chimed and I gathered the soup with pot holders.
“What brings you to Slow Smoke?”
It was another faux pas, asking a direct question like that, one I’d not quite understood until that day was one that hunters would balk at answering. But I had the feeling she was indeed from the Network, and I wanted more. More info. More time. More everything with her. Maybe she just had that glazed, shocked look because she’d come off a really awful hunt.
She pulled the soup up against her chest, cradling it without pulling down her leather sleeves to protect her hands from the heat.
“You ever get deja vu, Stone?” she asked.
A laugh bubbled up in my throat, half disbelief, half grim satisfaction at the realization she was struggling just like me to make sense of things.
“You have no idea.”
She smiled and scooped a spoonful of soup into her mouth, wrangling a large chunk of broccoli with her tongue in a way that made my cock twitch. She chewed unabashedly too, watching me over the rim of the bowl with an intensity that might have made a lesser man nervous.
“I was sent here,” she said. “Bumped into a guy wearing an old grey hat. He said to come here. Said I might be interested in what’s inside.”
She licked her lips, letting her tongue linger at the corner before she spoke again.
“You that interesting thing, Stone?”
She put the bowl down onto the counter and leaned back, her palms on either side of the bowl.
An old grey hat. Had to be Gideon.
“I could be,” I said. “I get off in about an hour if you want to find out.”
Oh, fuck, that was forward, but it was nothing to the way my hand shot out across the table and caught hers, instinctive and unthinking, as if letting go might mean losing her.
That was when everything shifted.
That dizzying sensation again, like I was falling through Alice’s rabbit hole. The darkness seethed with shapes and forms. A fire blazed at the end. I tumbled through with legs and arms flailing. Reverent fingers stroked through my hair. I felt such sadness that I could swear my cheeks were wet with tears.
She jerked her hands free of mine. Visibly shaken, she pushed away, jerking to her feet.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” I asked.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked, but there was wariness in her tone, interest too. Not fear. “What are you?”
What, not who.
“I’m yours,” I said, so quick I didn’t have time to think about how it sounded. But it did sound right. It felt like a vow carved into my bones.
For a second, the words hung in the air, sucking up all the oxygen. I was afraid I’d gone too far. But then she laughed and climbed back onto the stool. She leaned on her elbows and forearms and watched me.
“Pretty cocky aren’t you?”
I leaned onto the counter as well, echoing her posture, a grin tugging at my mouth. “You can find out just how cocky in about an hour.”
One heartbeat. That was all that passed before she quietly picked the bowl back up and looked inside. “If this bowl was filled with tea leaves, I might say something about treading into dangerous waters.” She peered over the rim at me, her eyes swimming with mischief. “There’s a nasty riptide. Maybe sharks in the dark depths. Can you handle that?”
She eyed me over the rim until I felt my cheeks grow hot.
“You’d be surprised what I can handle,” I said.
A gust of wind rattled the windows, breaking the tension, drawing our attention to the pane of glass that separated us from the darkened city street and the chill of the air as it wrapped us in a cocoon of fragrant aromas and golden light.
For a breathless second, I felt it like a living thing rising from some unseen depths to swirl up through the grates and cracks in the city’s concrete. And though neither of us said anything, I was sure that in the plastering of leaves against the window, I could make out the outline of wings in the detritus. She made a sound, almost of recognition, and her fingers brushed mine. A whisper of touch perhaps to test that connection again.
There was no blast of images this time. Just the quiet certainty that I’d found my place, and that I would burn the world down to keep it safe. To keep her safe. And there was peace in that. Knowing that whatever came next would not be an ending. It would be a beginning.
-The End-
I plan more for Ruby and Stone, and if you’re sharp-eyed, you probably already guessed it has to do with the Hunter Network.
Get more exposure to it through the little novella duet that starts with Graves Files Case One.
Graves Files Case 1
Name's Vicki Graves. I'm a hunter. If you need me, it's already too late.
Name’s Vicki. I hunt vamps, witches, demons. Pretty much anything that goes bump in the night. You got a demonic pest? I’m your gal to kill it. I ain’t picky. I’ll take it out or die trying.
And today just might be that day.
This case is personal, you see. I didn’t want to believe that after all these years I might find out what happened to my family. Chase and Johnnie uncovered new evidence. Said it would give me closure.
I wasn’t keen, to be honest. Nobody wants to open up that sort of wound for inspection, but they were adamant. They worry about me.
Which is exactly why I’m facing down a seethe of vamps in a dirty, out of town garage. And I half expected that, really.
What I didn’t expect?
To be doing it with nothing to protect myself but my sexy high heel boots and a crumpled piece of paper.
Looks like today’s the day I really get to see whether I take em out or die trying.
