by Sierra Dean
“Why don’t you ask the lovely little creature you were so recently bewitching with your terrible pick-up lines?” Charlie smirked. “Honestly, Holden, in almost two hundred years you would think you might have learned a few things about seducing a woman without making her want to throw up on herself.”
Felicia, who had been hiding behind him, squeezed his arm in one quick pulse, like it was an involuntary spasm rather than an intentional signal.
Job? What would Felicia know about—?
You idiot.
Of course. He’d wondered if she’d chosen him at random, or if the attack earlier that night had been premeditated. He’d liked her explanation of how she’d spotted him, because he’d wanted to believe she was what she said. But it made so much more sense if she’d been sent by someone.
Sent by Charlie.
Felicia must have felt him go rigid, because she released her grip on him and stepped between him and Charlie, but. The other vampire was wearing a smug, triumphant expression, but Felicia wouldn’t know that because she refused to look back at him, her attention all for Holden.
“I didn’t know.” Her voice was low, almost inaudible.
“Didn’t know? Didn’t know what?” Holden snapped. “That you were planning to kill me? Sure you did. You gave it the old college try.” He stuck a finger inside the hole in his shirt to remind her of the attempt. She flinched.
“I didn’t know you.”
“Awww.” Charlie stuck his hands in his pockets. “The mortal has feeeeelings, Chancery. You must have kissed the sense right out of her. The girl I met would have sold you down the creek just for having fangs. Or, you know, because I gave her ten thousand dollars.”
Felicia’s cheeks flushed pink. Now she wasn’t looking at either of them.
“Ten grand.” Holden nodded. “Sure. I get it.” He glared at Charlie. What was he attempting to prove with this? Holden had known Felicia wanted him dead, so what did it matter if someone had paid her? He knew what he’d felt between them, and knew she wasn’t the same woman he’d met earlier that night. He might be able to offer her something better than money. He was giving her a way to flex her slayer muscle and become what she was meant to be.
True purpose had to trump a big paycheck, didn’t it?
“I’m not going to do it.” Felicia turned to Charlie, her raspy voice full of intensity and anger. “You told me he was a killer. You told me he’d done horrible things.”
Charlie shrugged. “Sure I did, baby. I lied. I’m not sure what you expected. A noble vampire? Those don’t exist. Not even him.”
“Stop it.” Holden kept his voice low. “Just stop.”
“I’ve got to say, it’s been entertaining as hell watching you two tonight. The show had everything. Angst, action, a little romance.” He licked one exposed fang. A chill went through Holden. Had Charlie’s fangs been out the whole time?
No.
In a movement fast enough Holden didn’t have time to shout a warning, Charlie seized Felicia, jerking her towards him and sinking his teeth into her throat so quickly she didn’t have a chance to scream.
The bite was so ferocious he ripped her tender flesh open, sending a spray of blood across the front of Charlie’s white shirt. Droplets of red pebbled the ground at Holden’s feet.
“All it was missing was the dramatic death sequence.” Charlie released Felicia, and she crumpled to her knees, one hand limply held over her neck. She let out a little oh sound, and blood poured down her front, staining her pale skin bright red and falling to the filthy sidewalk, forming a glinting ruby puddle around her.
She stared at Holden, eyes wide with disbelief.
“I came here to finish the job she started, but honestly, the expression on your face right now is worth so much more.” Charlie chuckled, then kicked Felicia in the back, sending her sprawling face first onto the street. She didn’t have the energy to keep herself upright. “I’d say your little hunter has a minute or two left, tops, brother. Time enough to open a wrist or get one last kiss in. Your call.”
Seeing that he’d gotten blood on his shoes, Charlie sneered and wiped one against the side of Felicia’s leg.
Holden, realizing Charlie had no intention of killing him now, sank to the ground next to Felicia, rolling her over in his lap and clamping his hand over the mess that was her open throat. Charlie was right. This wasn’t something a hospital could fix. She’d be dead within a minute if he didn’t help her.
“Don’t think this thing between us is over,” Charlie said.
Holden glared at him, baring exposed fangs. “This won’t be done until I see you dead.”
Charlie’s lip curled. “Maybe your next protégée will fare better. I found this one lacking.”
Before Holden could reply, his brother vanished down the subway steps. Holden’s whole body trembled with rage, but he tried to tamp it down so he could tend to Felicia.
Her eyes were unfocused and her breaths coming up shorter with each one. Without stopping to consider the repercussions—certain exile from the council, possibly execution for both of them—he bit into his wrist, tearing open the artery. He held the wound to her mouth, oblivious to his own discomfort.
“You have to drink,” he told her.
Felicia’s mouth clamped shut, and she wrenched her head away as best she could with her restricted movement.
“Felicia, drink. If you don’t drink, you’ll die.” He heard the naked desperation in his voice. His chest hurt from the effort to keep what he was feeling buried. He was failing miserably, because wave after wave of emotion kept crashing over him, threatening to take him under and never let him back up again. She had to drink. There was no other option. She had to. “Please,” he begged.
“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper. The word was quiet enough at first he thought he was imagining it. But why would his imagination be so unkind?
“Drink.”
Weakly she pushed his hand away. “No.” This time the word was firm and loud enough he couldn’t pretend it had been something else.
“Felicia, you need to do this. Don’t you get it? If you don’t take my blood, you can’t be fixed. I can save you, but you have to drink.”
She shook her head, and the effort must have hurt her because she winced. “No,” she repeated.
“Please,” he pleaded.
She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly clear and focused. He lowered his wrist and stared at her for what felt like a lifetime, but what might end up being the rest of hers.
“I can’t…” She grimaced and licked her lips before trying again. “I won’t be like you. Not…not after my sister. Not after…him.”
“We’re not all monsters,” he urged.
She met his gaze again and tried to smile, but fell short. “I think… I think I would be.” Instead of letting him deny her supposition, she nodded, agreeing with herself. “I would be.”
He brushed her hair away from her face, tracing her whitened lips with his thumb. Had it really been only minutes earlier he’d kissed her? How could they have come from feeling so alive to being here? The fragility of human life had never felt more real to him than it did right then, bleeding out on his lap.
He blinked back tears, touching her face softly.
“Please,” he asked one more time, hoping she might reconsider. The time for her noble gestures was over. Wouldn’t she fight to stay alive if he was offering her the lifeline?
His answer came when she shook her head again.
“I need you…to know some…thing.” She was staring at him intently, and the honesty of the resigned expression on her face hit him like a punch in the gut.
“Anything.”
“I’m glad…I didn’t…kill you.” This time she managed to smile. “I’m glad…I know…you’re not like…him.” She closed her eyes and sighed, like the effort of all the words was too much and she needed to rest.
“Felicia?”
She didn’t move.
Hol
den jostled her, needing to see her eyes again. He had to have her look at him one more time. Had to know Charlie hadn’t been her last word in this world.
“Felicia.”
Her lips parted, and her body gave a delicate twitch as one final breath escaped her lungs.
She was gone.
His wrist, held uselessly next to her cheek, had already begun to heal itself, his spilled blood mingling with hers, but not in the way she’d needed. She was dead, well and truly, and nothing he did now could bring her back. Without the spark of life, vampire blood was useless.
Death can be tricked, but it can’t be beaten.
He sat back, her head still in his lap, and stared helplessly down the empty street. If anyone had seen what happened, they weren’t coming to her aid. No police sirens broke the silence of the night. He touched her cheek, the skin now cold, then lowered her head gently to the sidewalk.
In his head, he was already planning out the next hours, before dawn came. He’d take her body to the council. They’d make sure she was disposed of humanely, but in a way no one would come ask questions. He’d make sure they knew about Charlie. His brother was a rogue now. He would never set foot in New York again without being hunted down.
Maybe your next protégée will fare better, Charlie had said.
Holden shook his head, glancing down at his bloodstained hands and the lifeless woman lying at his feet.
He knew one thing with absolute certainty: he would never again put anyone else in harm’s way. He’d never train another girl to become a killer.
He was done with vampire hunters.
Thanks for reading Night Moves, I hope you enjoyed learning more about Holden’s past!
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Want to know what happens to Holden after Night Moves? Pick up The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters available now from Samhain Publishing. Keep reading for a sneak peek!
The Secret Guide to Dating Monsters
Are blind dates supposed to be this bloody?
A Secret McQueen Story
They say it's impossible to find a man in New York City. Secret McQueen needs to find two in one night. Of course, it’ll mean pulling off the impossible—find and kill a displaced rogue vampire without disrupting the first promising date she’s had in ages. As a werewolf hybrid used to walking a fine line of survival in the vampire world, though, Secret eats impossible for breakfast.
Somewhere between hello and the first round of drinks, Secret makes her move. Her target, Hollywood’s biggest star, shouldn’t be hard to spot. Just look for swarms of fans. Except every time her vampire liaison, Holden, helps keep her mission on track, her date runs further off the rails.
Either Holden has a hidden agenda, or he knows more than he’s letting on about her quarry. One way or another, Secret is determined to get her man, and meet Mr. Right. Or die trying.
Warning: This book contains a sword-wielding assassin whose barbs are sharper than her blade, a vampire with serious brooding issues but a skilled tongue, and an A-lister with a bad habit of eating his fans. This novella takes place approximately one year prior to the events of Something Secret This Way Comes.
Chapter One
As a general rule, people don’t like to date monsters.
I don’t mean in a my ex-boyfriend was such an asshole, he was a total monster to my friends or that girl was a monster bitch kind of way. What I mean is, ask your average New Yorker if they’d like to have a girlfriend whose primary source of food was human blood, and most of them will say no.
At less than five and a half feet tall with bouncy blonde, curly hair and big doe-brown eyes, I didn’t really look like an evil creature. But don’t they say it’s what’s inside that counts? Inside I was a mixed-blood nightmare—half werewolf on my mother’s side and half vampire thanks to my father. Which isn’t to say I inherited the latter part naturally. My mother had been seven months pregnant when my human father was turned. He attacked her, then fed her his blood to keep her alive afterwards.
Talk about a guilty conscience.
As a result, my human cells were attacked and infected with the vampire disease. The trauma activated the werewolf genes already dormant within me, and voila—cute, perky and totally bloodthirsty.
I’d been raised by my grandmere, my mother’s mother, and she named me Secret, which is probably what my mother hoped I would stay. Instead I ended up in New York City as the employee of the vampire council, where my job title is bounty hunter but my real job is more assassin than retriever.
Not really something you can use as an opening line when introducing yourself to guys. Unless of course they have a weird Buffy the Vampire Slayer fetish, but I try to avoid that comparison whenever possible.
Then there was always the pesky problem of how none of it—vampires, werewolves or vampire slayers—was supposed to exist. Humans don’t like to think their bedtime stories are based in reality. Yet those tales, be they scary or fairy, from vampires to the grimmer of the Grimm, are rooted in truth. But no one before me has been afflicted with two kinds of monster curse in the same body.
Aren’t I lucky?
Due to my habit of sleeping like the dead throughout the daylight hours, and my own misgivings about what I am, I don’t get out much. The only men I saw on a regular basis were my business partner, Keaty, and my liaison with the council, Holden Chancery.
Keaty, pushing forty and every inch the cold-blooded killer, was not a dream match romantically. He was the best partner I could ask for, and handsome in an ex-CIA sort of way, but I would never be able to picture him as anything other than a f**ked-up father figure. And that’s saying something considering how f**ked-up my real father was.
Holden, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, being a tall, lean, handsome brunet with beautiful dark eyes and a killer sense of style. No, I didn’t mind looking at him. The problem with Holden was he was a vampire, and not only that, he was sort of my caseworker. I don’t know how the council felt about dating among the ranks, and I had never asked. It wasn’t the kind of question you brought up when meeting with a thousand-plus-year-old Finnish master vampire named Sig who was asking you to kill people while looking at you like he wanted to taste you.
So I was left with few options and no real desire to seek out alternatives. I may have been a twenty-one-year-old woman, single in the city, but I couldn’t wrap my head around getting into the dating scene.
It wasn’t like I was worried about eating my boyfriend or anything.
Well, most of the time. Every girl has her days.
During my time in New York I’d had two semi-serious relationships, and one of the men had lived with me until my peculiar sleeping habits got too weird for him. For over a year there had been no one in my life, and I’d gotten pretty content being unattached.
And that’s when my best and only human girlfriend decided to put her nose into my business. Mercedes Castilla was a detective with the NYPD and in her third go-round of being twenty-nine. Also perennially single, she seemed to have given up on her own love life and had taken over mine instead.
That was how, on a Saturday night in August, I found myself scrutinizing my rear end in a mirror and was less than thrilled with the results. Maybe vampire hunting didn’t give me an excuse to avoid the gym after all.
“Explain to me again why I have to do this?” I asked into the phone crammed between my shoulder and ear.
“You want me to tell you why you’re going out to dinner with a handsome, unmarried, well-educated detective?” Mercedes was sarcastic at the best of times, but tonight it was honed razor sharp. I gathered she was getting annoyed with my hesitations.
“Yes?” I replied, not entirely sure I wa
nted her to respond. I pulled on my favorite jeans and rechecked my butt. A slight improvement. Sighing with a little too much drama, I put my hands on my hips, arching my shoulders back to see if my cleavage had grown since the last time I looked. Was it wrong to cancel a date because of too much ass and too little boob?
“Secret.” Now her voice did nothing to hide her irritation. “You have cancelled on two different guys I’ve tried to set you up with. One of them was my cousin.”
“He could only meet me at five,” I grumbled.
“So?”
“You know my schedule.” Yeah, my not-burning-into-a-cloud-of-ash schedule. It was pretty strict.
“And you couldn’t have moved things around for an early dinner? I don’t think Keats is that much of a hardass.”
I gave up on my reflection—yes, half-vampires and all vampires for that matter have reflections—and flopped backwards onto my bed. Staring up at my water-stained ceiling, I prayed it might collapse on me before nine o’clock.
“Okay, tell me one more time what’s so great about this guy?” I wound my loose curls around my fingers and then let them unfurl on their own.
“I mentioned handsome and unmarried, didn’t I?”
“I suppose, given your apparent opinion of me, I should be happy your criteria was aimed somewhere higher than breathing, shouldn’t I?”
“Not breathing is a deal breaker.” The humor was gone, and her tone was dead serious. Mercedes hated vampires. That she was human and believed they existed was impressive enough, so I had opted not to tell her about my undead half. “Plus, he likes dogs.”
A short, loud gasp of shocked laughter escaped my mouth. She might not know about the vampire half, but she certainly knew about the werewolf one. “You’re hi-lar-ious.”
It was at about that moment I realized I was no longer alone in my itty-bitty apartment. It began with a shift of atmosphere, which gave me the sense someone else was taking up space belonging to me. There was no noise to confirm my suspicions, but there didn’t need to be.