Dream of Me: Book 1 The Dream Makers Series (39 page)

With a whimper the wolf began to shake. 

The girl stroked the thing’s furry head.  They could have been dog and owner, taking a break from a walk in the park.  It didn’t make any sense to Jack.  The wolf’s eyes closed, and it collapsed in a heap next to her.

The girl in the fuzzy pink sweater returned to Jack’s side.  She yanked his blue plaid shirt down his arms, but left him with the T-shirt.  She rolled the blue plaid material into a ball and placed it onto the bleeding wound.  He ground his teeth together to keep from crying out.  No reason for her to remember him as a big baby.

“You’re beautiful,” he said with awe.  The art of breathing grew harder.  He gasped between words.  “What’s…your…name?”

“Are you trying to flirt with me?  Now?”  Her pink lips tilted at the corners, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.  “My name is Silver Reign.” 

He snorted, and a new wave of pain jolted through him.

“It’s not spelled like the kind of rain that falls from the sky,” she said.

He laughed until he tasted blood.  Funny how it didn’t taste good when it was his blood.  Resting on the ground, he took in the night sky.  There seemed to be a million stars shining just for them.  It was kind of a romantic end, like Romeo and Juliet, only the girl would go on without him instead of taking her own life. 

There was a shift in the atmosphere.  Worried, his eyes went to Silver’s face.  He warned her, “My friends are coming.  I can feel them.  You need to go.  I don’t want them to hurt you.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, silently reminding him of how easily she’d dispatched the werewolf. 

“Okay,” he amended.  “I don’t want you to hurt them.”

“I won’t.” 

As if on cue, he heard three pairs of running feet. “They’re here.  Go!”

He took one last look at her before she left.  Lily had been right.  The girl wasn’t classically beautiful and she wasn’t his type, but there was something mesmerizing about her.  His eyes drifted closed as familiar voices washed over him.  His three friends all talked at once. 

“Looks like the werewolf got him before he killed it,” Cowboy said in a matter-of- fact tone.  “Good for him.”

“We have to do something,” Summer insisted.  “Let’s get him to the house.”

“He should have listened to me,” Lily said.  “I told him to run when he saw the girl in the fuzzy sweater.”

Jack used every bit of strength he had to pry his eyes open.  He raised a hand and grabbed Summer by the hem of her jeans.  “I want to go home.”

Summer smiled with twinkling blue eyes that paled in comparison to Silver’s.  The chunky ends of her blonde hair rested against her freckled face.  Before she got too excited, he added, “I want to go to my real home, the house I lived in with my family before you turned me.”

Summer’s smile died, and she began to argue with everyone over where they were taking him.  Cowboy grabbed Jack from behind and lifted him to his feet.  Jack swung an arm over his friend’s shoulders while Cowboy’s arm snaked around his waist like they were running a three-legged race at the county fair.  Together they walked through the cemetery gates to Cowboy’s car.

Jack resisted the urge to look for the girl, not wanting to draw attention to her.  He felt the heat of her eyes on him.  At least his friends were too worried about him to notice her unusual scent clinging to the night air.  Cowboy opened the passenger side door, and Jack collapsed into the provided seat.  He bit his lower lip and prayed he’d live long enough to talk to Billy one last time.

“We need to take him to the abandoned house!” Summer shouted from the backseat.  “He needs us.”

The girls sat in the back of the speeding car.  Lily quietly sobbed for Jack while Summer leaned forward, pressing between the two front seats.  She had to talk loud to be heard over the engine, the music, and the rushing wind.  The passenger side window had been rolled down because Jack thought he might puke.  She said, “We have to get inside before the sun comes up, and Jackpot needs us.  Taking him home is pointless.  His brother won’t know what to do for him.”

Anxious, Jack waited for Cowboy’s response.  He wanted to argue with Summer, but he was too weak.  He couldn’t even sit up straight.  Every time the car leaned to the right or to the left, so did he, like he didn’t have a bone left in his body.  Life continued to drain out of him.  His lowered head bumped the edge of the car door with a painful thump every time they hit a rough spot in the road.

“It’s not our call,” Cowboy said.  “Anyway, it’s just after midnight.  We could walk and still reach both places.”

Jack relaxed, but Summer wouldn’t quit.

“His brother won’t know how to help him.”

Jack used his last bit of strength to push himself into a higher sitting position.  He half-turned in her direction and spoke between clenched teeth.  “I want to go home.  I want to see my brother before I die.”

The car sped along the empty two-lane highway between town and his family’s farm.  They were flying, but the darkness made it seem like they were moving in slow motion.  Jack hoped death was like this, moving through time and space faster than light.

“You aren’t dying,” Summer said, her voice cracking.  “Not every vampire dies after getting clawed by a werewolf.”

Jack scoffed.  “Right.  One out of every thousand manages to live somehow.  I’m sure I’ll beat those odds.  They don’t call me Jackpot for nothing.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Cowboy said, taking his eyes off the road for a second.  As usual his point of view came across loud and forceful.  “You have the right to die wherever and however you want.  Die with your boots on, buddy.  That’s what I always say.”

Jack patted his shirt pocket.  “You got a cigarette, man?”

He had taken up smoking ten years ago.  The smoke deadened their acute sense of smell for a while, and he liked that.

Cowboy drew a pack from his jacket while he continued to drive with the other hand.  He pulled a tobacco stick out with his mouth and lit it with the car’s built-in lighter.  Then he turned and put it between Jack’s lips.  Jack half-dragged on it.  The smoke filled his lungs, giving him a small burst of energy.  He straightened his spine.

Summer rubbed his shoulder.  “Please change your mind and come with us.”

“Crank up the tunes, man,” Jack said, feeling a little like his old self again.

“You got it, buddy.”  Cowboy turned up the volume on the radio.  The rock music throbbed through Jack’s body, and drowned out Summer’s annoying voice.  He closed his eyes and let the music own him.  For the moment his happiness returned to him.

A few minutes later he was back at the farmhouse.  When they left him in front of his childhood home, Cowboy flashed him a backwards peace sign.  “Vampires rule, buddy.”

Jack nodded but didn’t flash the sign back.  He didn’t feel particularly grateful to be a vampire at the moment.  Pain radiated throughout his entire body.  He wasn’t sure if he could make it up the porch steps to the front door without help.  His friends abandoned him.  They had to hide from the sun.

He struggled up the porch stairs.  Grabbing the wood railing, he lifted a foot and searched for the first step.  A splinter caught his pinky, tearing the skin open.  Compared to the agony the rest of his body was in, the pain in his finger barely registered.  Every breath he took sent razor blades slicing through his lungs.  He was dying again, and he was alone. 

Then he wasn’t alone anymore.  Like a tiny miracle, he felt her before seeing her. Silver Reign stood behind him, her hand pressed against his back.  Her soft voice soothed his senses and drove some of the pain away.  “Billy isn’t here,” she said.  “I’m taking you home with me.”

“How did you know where I was?”  He turned his head and stared at her.  The outer edges of his vision blurred.  Her entire form seemed to shimmer with an incandescent light, and his mind drifted to a surreal place.  “Are you an angel?”

“Not exactly.”

.

Kasi Blake’s blog:
http://kasi-kcblake.blogspot.com

@kasiblake

Other books by Kasi Blake include:

Werewolves Rule

Shifters Rule

Wizards Rule

Bait

Hunter

Warrior

An excerpt from Burden, Book One of the
Bayou Bear Chronicles
by Lila Felix

Available on Amazon, Barnes &Noble, iTunes, and Smashwords

Hawke

“I need a minute, file out please,” I commanded, sitting back in my tattered leather desk chair, scratching my almost full beard. Rubbing my belly, I tried to scour away the itch of frustration, to no avail.

Frustration was my leech and its teeth penetrated deep.

I really should take better care of myself.

But my appearance reflected my attitude of late, ragged, teetering on the edge of mania. I’d gone too long without a haircut, opting instead for buzzing the sides myself and letting the top grow longer than I’d ever let it before.

“Yes, Alpha,” they all replied, swiftly moving from the cedar paneled office—except River. As more than my beta, my best friend, he always thought himself exempt from most orders, and he was. I frequently needed an ear that felt like it was on my side, and not just because the rules told him he had to be.

My father had been Alpha before me, and his father Alpha before that. Every day I uncovered another piece of the effed up puzzle—the real story of the turmoil my clan was in—the legacy they’d left me. And it seemed while they were excellent Alphas in terms of protecting the lands and growing the clan—they weren’t proficient at financing or piddling things like paying property taxes. They allowed their females no say over anything, which went against everything we were taught as young males. They failed to practice what they preached. Their mates had to grin and bear it. A female probably would’ve pointed out the details that my father and his father ignored. And now, one year after my father died of cancer and my mother followed soon after, I stood in a falling apart house, up to my eyeballs in debt with every male and some female clan members working two and three jobs to help out. My clan was crumbling through my claws.

Something has to give.

River was the same age as me, though our appearances aged us considerably. He growled out a sigh and plopped down in one of the huge chairs, built specifically for us, thick and sturdy. He beat his hands on the top of his head to some rhythm. He was deciding how to tell me something.

“Hawke, we can barely handle what we’ve got. Let’s face it, we are up to our muzzles here. Clan members are paying for bills usually taken care of by clan funds. We are working ourselves to the bone. We do what we can, but it’s just not enough. And now the LaFourche Clan Alpha wants to merge? I don’t know, boss.”

I hate when he calls me boss.

“I can’t help it. I have no money left after paying over two hundred thousand dollars in property taxes, insurance, flood insurance and everything else we were up to our asses on. The effing government was about to auction off our land. I have little to nothing left.”

I stood and took the two steps to the window to face the swamp. I could almost hear the fluttering of the catfish’s fins in the murky bayou, the teeth of the nutra rat chattering, and the bowing branches of the Cypress tree in the beginning winds of a Louisiana thunderstorm. The swamp called to me, begging me to allow it to soothe the beast and the stress. I wished it could. But I didn’t even have time to run anymore—I hadn’t shifted in weeks. The neglect of my inner animal made my skin crawl and itch.

Let me out
, he pleaded.

He didn’t answer my rhetorical plea for him to further his rebuttal, so I continued my side of the debate, “What else can I do? Have you seen the other clan members? They’re as mature as a newborn cub. If I don’t take over as their Alpha, they’ll scatter to the winds. And with the other clans vying for our land already—they would take over the LaFourche land and be a heartbeat away from our boundaries. I won’t have it.”