Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) (15 page)

I also thanked God for Samantha Moon—ironically, without whom I could not have come this far against my vampire enemies.

I prayed for Lucian, the good vampire, whom we had freed and returned to his sweet wife and boisterous young family.

Finally, I prayed for my daughter, that whether she was now a vampire or still a human, she’d be able to look up in the sky tonight and see stars—I prayed that somehow, she would know I was looking up at them, too...

***

I had barely closed my eyes when I heard a wolf howl.

I shot up in bed.

Ambra, a light sleeper, sat up, too. “What’s wrong, Rand?”

“
Corbin! I stabbed him in the shoulder with my silver blade.”

“
I know. He tried to lead me away so he could turn me into a werewolf and make me his mate!”

“
But Ambra, when the moon sets, he’s going to be a bleeding, naked man, curled up in the snow. Wounded like that, the wolves might decide to tear him apart. I mean, we are going under the assumption that only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf, but do we know that
for sure
? I mean, what if the wolves…
eat
him?”

“
Rand, what are you saying?”

“
On a personal level, I am so freaking furious at Corbin. But on a professional level, we
need
him at the castle. He does so much for us.”

“
Oh, so you’re just going to forgive him?” she blurted, getting out of bed and grabbing  her clothes.

I quickly got dressed. “Ambra, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. I can’t be selfish in this, just because I love you romantically. The Brotherhood of the Blade and the Sisterhood of the Scythe will be irrevocably harmed if we lose Corbin the werewolf.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“
Then hear this: Does Corbin deserve to die for a few seconds of pulling you by the sleeve while in his werewolf form?”

“
He stalked me! He grabbed me!”

“
He wasn’t trying to kill you. He was trying to
love
you. How is he so different from me?”

“
Mon Dieu
. He’s a werewolf! You’re insane, Rand!”

“
So I’ve been told by the Navy and others.”

“
I’m coming with you.”

“
Absolutely not! No! No!
No!
” I ranted.

“
Don’t you
dare
tell me what to do!” She rose up to her full height and gave me a Clint Eastwood squint. I was daunted. She could be scary when she desired.

“
Don’t even go there, Ambra.
Not now.
Besides the fact that you’re injured and that you’re at the root of this conflict, this matter is now between him and me.
Stay here!
”

I rummaged through my closet and got out a big plastic vuvuzela, which Mikhail had given me for Christmas.

“What are you doing with that big plastic horn?” she asked.

“
It’s my weapon. I don’t want to kill any endangered species tonight.”

“
Are you talking about the wolves with the heirloom DNA or Corbin the werewolf?”

“
Both!” I shouted.

I hurried out into the night, just as the moon set. I ran hard through the crunchy snow toward the cemetery where I had stabbed him earlier, and he had crawled away. He couldn’t have gotten very far.

In the pre-dawn grayness, I heard wolves snarling and a man screaming in utter terror.

It was Corbin…

I ran toward the screams, blowing the obnoxious-sounding vuvuzela horn that I held to my lips with one hand and drawing my blade with the other hand. I crashed through the snow, sliding into home plate to save him from the wolves.

When I came through the foliage into the clearing, through the gray light that was still more night than day, I saw something that shocked me. I dropped the vuvuzela in the snow. I had bigger problems than parting a pack of man-eating wolves with a big plastic horn.

A tall, striking vampire with super-long black-and-white dreadlocks that almost skimmed the snow—and skin so white that it seemed phosphorescent—held up a naked Corbin in the air by the throat with one hand and held a curved bronze knife in the other hand.

Wearing a bizarre fur coat of many colors, and surrounded by a pack of snarling wolves closing in—wolves that she completely ignored—she seemed spellbound by the struggling prey in her hand. Corbin was naked and bloodstained on his shoulder where I had gotten him with my blade. His pink legs franticly kicked in the air and his hands desperately tried to peel her white, bony fingers from his neck. His face was turning from red to blue as she cut off his oxygen.

As I rushed at her with my silver blade aimed at her, and the wolves rushed her, too—apparently, to protect Corbin—I realized that her fur coat of many colors was actually made of swatches of
human hair
and that she was about to scalp poor Corbin. She must not have even realized that he was a werewolf, or else she would be aiming for his heart with something other than the antique greenish weapon.

As her bronze knife slashed through the air toward the flaming red hair of our resident Scottish werewolf, I instinctively knew who I was dealing with, and screamed out her name to distract the vampire from hurting Corbin:

“DELILAH!”

The End

***

To be continued in:

Radiance

Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #3

Return to the Table of Contents

***

Also available:

Witchy Business

by Eve Paludan and Stuart Sharp

(read on for a sample)

Chapter One

“You look like something the werewolf dragged in,” said Rebecca.

“
Very funny!” I replied, brushing off clumps of bloody wolf hair from my filthy jeans and quilted bush jacket.

Rebecca was my liaison with the coven who kept me supplied with investigation jobs that utilized my unique talents. She leaned in and plucked a dead leaf from my hair then tossed it in the wastebasket by her desk. “It looks like you had quite the night camping out in the Highlands.”

“It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.”

“
I’m very impressed that you solved the case of the missing werewolf and got the ball rolling on an agreement to settle.”

“
It’s all taken care of, Rebecca. I got Ferguson Black’s statement and gave the edited version of it to the insurers. I got the victim’s statement, too. It’s dealt with.”

“
This was your first case involving a werewolf. Did Ferguson Black try to put the bite on you?”

I laughed. “Absolutely not.” Mostly because I’d used my talents to ensure that he didn’t. “By the time I finally found poor Fergie, he was lying in a ditch, covered in blood.”

“His blood?” The note of suspicion in Rebecca’s voice was typical. Part of her job was keeping an eye out for those supernatural beings who were potentially dangerous.

“
Of course it was his blood. He’d just been in a car accident.” Actually, Fergie had been so relieved to see me that—even stuck in his wolf form—he’d just wagged his tail and whined. I’d told him who I was and that I was there to help. After he’d finished licking my hands, I’d called in the Highland rescue service.

“
You still haven’t said how you ended up looking like…that,” Rebecca said with obvious distaste.

“
Because the weather was so bad last night, the rescue chopper couldn’t come right away, and I didn’t want them there before I could help Fergie to transform, anyway. We had to hunker down while the sky drizzled on us for the night.”

“
That explains the bad hair day and your wet doggy odor.”

“
Rebecca!”

“
Mea culpa. So, what did you do with him all that time?” That question came with a smirk. Since when did Rebecca have a mischievous edge?

“
He was too big for me to carry out of there and his leg was badly broken, so I just worked on keeping him calm until after the moon set and he could transform again. As you may imagine, that was where the conversation paused for a bit.”

That was mostly because werewolves’ clothes didn’t transform with them as they changed, leaving me to spend the night in a ditch with a naked Scotsman.

“I can imagine,” Rebecca said.

“
I got to watch him transform, though.”

“
Ah, a learning experience.”

I shrugged. “You could put it like that. I didn’t know if I should run away or get out my iPad.”

Rebecca leaned forward. “Did you get any photos?”

“
No! I was just kidding about getting out my iPad. That would have been…rude. I mean, yes, I’d saved him, but to video him?”

“
I was thinking it might tell us more about the process,” Rebecca said. “How it works, what happens to the clothes. There’s too much we don’t know.”

That was the other part of Rebecca’s job, scouring my reports for details to take back to the coven. I wasn’t sure but the odds were that either Fergie’s clothes hadn’t survived the transformation, or he’d torn them off afterward. I did know that things had been pretty embarrassing for a moment or two when the rescue chopper came.

“So, you spent the night next to a naked man,” Rebecca said. “Did anything happen I should know about?”

“
Hardly.” I shook my head. Mostly Fergie and I had just talked. About what he was doing out there, about his work as a solicitor up in Thurso. I guessed that another woman might have been tempted by him. I’d just lent him my jacket to keep off the cold. “He was kind of sweet.”

“
He was an idiot, going out driving when he knew the moon was rising. What did he think would happen?”

“
His elderly mother had phoned, saying she had fallen and couldn’t get up. What was he supposed to do?” I countered. “He was trying to race to her house before the moon rose. He just didn’t quite make it.”

Rebecca sighed. “Causing a pile-up in the process. We’re just lucky you were there to contain it.”

“And that he wasn’t more seriously hurt. He could have been killed.”

“
But, Elle, werewolves don’t die, except from silver. And all that running about in the wilds…honestly, there are days when I wish supernatural creatures would think more.”

“
On some level, he was thinking. He got away from the accident and made sure no one found him. And after he transformed back into a man, he called his sister on my cell to go get their mother off the floor.” I paused. “I’m sure glad that I’m a witch and not a werewolf. I mean, they can’t control their powers.”

“
I know. But we do take care of them under our tolerance directive.”

I nodded. “It’s a good directive of the coven.” One I might have voted for, if I were high up enough in it to have a say in such decisions.

“Elle, are you positive that nothing about this case will be getting out? Publicly, I mean?” Rebecca asked, the way she’d asked practically every time I’d finished a job for the coven.

Then again, as my liaison with them, it was kind of her job to dog my steps and ensure that the details were contained. We didn’t want normal humans to find out more than they should, now did we?

“No one else was hurt, the payout is arranged, and no one saw anything that they weren’t already explaining away for themselves by the time I got there.”

“
That’s good news.”

“
As always, my lips are sealed, Rebecca.” A yawn escaped me. “Sorry, I’ve been up all night and all morning.”

“
You’re taking the rest of the day off?”

“
Please.” I didn’t actually have to ask her. The coven was my main source of jobs, but not my full-time employer. Besides, after a day and a half trekking through woodland and heather, a hot bath and a nap was about all that I felt up to.

“
I am impressed with the way you took care of every detail,” Rebecca said with a smile. It was a politician’s smile, but a friendly one. Anyone working for the coven for long enough ended up with a smile like that. That was just the way Rebecca was. If she wanted to get close to you, it was because she had an agenda, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t being genuinely friendly, too.

Her personality worked with the rest of her: she was always so professionally dressed. Today, she towered over me in her heels and a tailored pants suit. Rebecca was always powdered and perfumed, plucked and waxed, if not Botoxed—she could have graced the cover of any fashion magazine with a little airbrushing around the corners of her eyes. She was right at home wearing haute couture. I had to work a little harder at finding my middle ground between fashionable and comfortable.