Hunger

by Barbara J. Hancock

  Winters stepped away from her and Holly knew love wasn’t enough for him. He needed trust and the only thing he trusted was his blade.

  In all the years of her life, from her earliest memories to a few short months ago, she’d had her mother’s love. They had laughed and cried and grown together. They had planned for the future and tried to memorize the past with scrapbooks and videotapes and too many photographs to count.

  Holly loved Winters, but she had loved her mom first.

  It was that love that had seen her through the worst transition of her life. Her mom, her family, had given her a foundation of hope and optimism and spirit. Her mom might be a lost cause, but Holly would never give up on her. Never.

  When Winters moved to strike, Holly moved faster. His grace, his speed, his experience was like ash in the wind. She was a vampire and she was the wind.

  As fast as Dillon, in a streak, she was there between the blade and her mother, and just as she’d seen Winters in a slow-motion dance earlier in the evening, she saw him now as the blade arched toward her chest. Slow, slow, painfully slow, she watched as he moved and the blade moved closer and closer ’til the tip touched her.

  And then it was fast.

  The thrust, the burn, the pain as it sank through skin, muscle and glanced past a rib was sudden, abrupt, like a flash of horror…right to her heart.

  “Holly!”

  She heard his shout, but it was a warning too late, a denial of the already happened. The knife he carried as if it was a part of him was buried in her chest. The blade he used to send the monsters to hell was buried, impossibly deep, in her chest.

  She coughed against the shock and pressure. She waited for the ash to claim her, knowing her mother would be next.

  Only, unbelievably, with only a man’s strength and a man’s reflexes, he had stopped the blade just shy of its vulnerable target.

  It was a hair from her heart.

  It was burning and invading, but in spite of the physical torture, it was emotional anguish that had her gasping. Her heart wasn’t pierced. She wasn’t turning to dust.

  She looked from the horror of the blade impaling her chest up to see the horror in his eyes.

  He grabbed the blade with his other hand, but she moved her hands to stop him before he could pull it away. She held it in place. He met her gaze. And his eyes softened again. They were copper once more.

  “Let go, Holly,” he begged. He could have pushed her hands away. He could have ripped the blade from her fingers, but he begged her to let go instead.

  “I won’t let you kill her.” He had stopped the blade a hair from her heart, but Holly still had to be sure.

  “I know. Just let go,” he persuaded. His hands trembled over hers.

  “Trust me,” Holly replied. She wouldn’t let go of the blade until she was sure she understood what the softness around his eyes meant.

  “I do. I will.”

  Both of their hands were on the carved, wooden blade. It separated their bodies by mere inches. She felt his warmth even as she felt the bite of the knife. As her body rushed to heal itself, Holly realized the blade would always be between them and that was a good thing. When you were a vampire, you didn’t need happily ever after. You needed “I’ve got your back”. She knew without a doubt that Winters would never let her deteriorate like the queen.

  She let go.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Her skin started to heal even as Winters pulled the knife from her chest, but the apology healed her all the way to her core. He was a hunter, he was a killer, but he was also the man who bought her strawberry shampoo. The man had leapt forward to stop the hunter right when the hunter was within sight of his goal.

  And the hunter had yielded to the man.

  Holly reached up to touch his face with her hand. Her fingers were bloody and dirty and covered with ash and worse, but he didn’t flinch away. His face was just as dirty. They were both covered with the evidence that showed they were no longer who they once had been.

  Jarvis Winters, the man, leaned into her touch. His eyes closed and the tension fled from his features. His body relaxed and she held him cupped in the palm of her hand.

  He’d been to a hopeless place. Part of him lived there night after night, dwelling with death. He’d been as blindsided as she had been. He’d been a fresh-faced rookie and his life had been torn apart. He was tired, battle-scarred and he needed something more than the blade to believe in.

  She would be that something, that someone.

  He needed her. All of her.

  And she needed him as well, the man and the hunter. She would help him remember what it was like to be Jarvis Winters. It wasn’t something a mere woman could do. She needed the strength of the vampire in her to meet and match the hunter in him, because only then could she reach past the hunter to the man underneath.

  He opened his eyes and lifted his head from her hand. His eyes were no longer black. They were the deep copper pools she had grown to crave. The twinge in her chest was forgotten as she looked into his eyes. He was a fierce warrior returning to hearth and home after battle…only he was the fire, the hearth needed to spark into life.

  He pulled her into his arms and Holly went there with a fierce, happy laugh. They would never have candlelight and roses, but they could have moonlight and the Fairlane’s bench seat.

  They had lost so much, but they had now gained some of it back.

  The world was a darker place than she ever imagined, but she was surviving. The queen was dead. Holly’s understanding of the Raveneaux legacy was only beginning, but the queen was dead.

  Her mom would be okay. She had to believe it. She would do whatever she could to help her. She had saved her life and that was a start.

  Dillon was gone…at least for now. She wouldn’t allow herself to go there. Thoughts of her Maker were best left in the shadows. He had tried to drag her there with him. He had tried to take away her hope and her freedom. He had been deprived of those things himself for many, many years. She couldn’t allow herself to worry and wonder over what he would do now that he was free.

  She had avoided his shadows. She hadn’t given up. That was all that mattered now.

  Who would have thought that one of the lessons of immortality would be learning to live in the moment? Holly had spent the last few nights agonizing over the future. There was plenty left to think about, but she found herself too happy, too content in her lover’s arms to worry.

  Her mother had drifted back to sleep. Her lips were tilted up slightly at the corners as if she was having pleasant dreams. The night was quiet, but the lull was no longer threatening.

  The dark surrounding them was manageable. Holly knew it was.

  Winters had his arms around her and he was holding her tighter than she had ever been held in her life. The clouds above them in the night sky had parted so a shaft of moonlight bathed them in its glow.

  Here again, was the pause she needed to rest and regroup. What she had found with Jarvis Winters held the dark at bay. It held the dangerous world they’d discovered at a distance while they stood in a bubble of acceptance and warmth and peace.

  Holly brushed the rumpled hair back from Winters’ brow and held it back with both hands on each side of his handsome face…and it was handsome. At first, she had only seen the taut dedication to death and the scar. Later, she had been drawn to a warmth that was only hinted at from time to time when he wasn’t guarding against it. Now, she saw the crinkles around in his eyes that hadn’t disappeared even with disuse. She saw the softness around his mouth as he leaned closer. She saw his smile.

  As Winters kissed her, Holly smiled against his lips. She didn’t have to dwell in shadows. She didn’t have to give up hope. She didn’t have to consign herself to the world of monsters. She was Holly Spinnaker and she would be Holly Spinnaker…forever.

  Epilogue

  Moonlight gleamed down on Holly’s mother through a just-cleaned pi
cture window. Mrs. Spinnaker’s favorite chair was pulled close to the glass and her bare feet were tucked up under her. The overstuffed armchair, her loose white cotton gown and the toes peeping out from under its lacy edge, all combined with the expectant look on her face to make it seem like she was a child watching for Santa Claus.

  Holly smiled.

  Her mother had healed physically with only a fine tracing of scars around her neck. As her body had healed, as they had settled into this isolated old farmhouse in the hills of Virginia, her mother’s mind seemed to find peace, if not healing.

  Each night Holly brushed her mom’s shiny hair and talked to her about the past…birthday parties, holidays, crazy family moments. Gradually, her mother had begun to smile or contribute anecdotes on occasion. She allowed Holly to clean and polish her nails. Tonight, her peeping toes were tipped with a pale pink glimmer.

  Holly came forward with a cup of steaming tea and placed it within her mother’s reach on a nearby table. It wasn’t what their bodies craved, but it warmed and soothed. It filled the emptiness that always threatened to prick and tempt and ache. There were times when her mother would sip her old favorite, lemon chamomile, with seeming relish, but she didn’t even glance at it tonight.

  Her gaze was fixed on something outside.

  Holly looked out the window. A doe and its fawn grazed in the overgrown backyard. The sight caused her to tense, but when she looked back at her mother’s face she saw only a gentle smile.

  She breathed a soft sigh of relief.

  It was still hard to accept the change. The times when her mother’s eyes took on a predatory gleam were the hardest of all. Probably because she was afraid they mirrored her own.

  Jarvis stepped up at those times.

  He would take her mother on a nice walk in the woods and she would come back rosy cheeked and laughing.

  Holly still abstained…as much as possible. Jarvis never let her grow too weak or too thin. It was an occasional part of their intimacy that flushed Holly’s cheeks when she thought of it, but Jarvis was so warm, so strong and steady. He made it okay. He fully accepted who and what she was and loved her just the same.

  And he never mentioned Dillon.

  Jarvis would disappear for nights on end and neither of them ever talked about it.

  They didn’t speak of her Maker and Holly didn’t stop the hunt…though she wouldn’t help with it. Not anymore.

  Holly also didn’t speak of the wild flowers she occasionally found in beribboned bouquets when Jarvis was away. They would turn up on the back stoop, on the crooked rail fence, on the old rusted porch swing…no matter the season.

  At first, the bouquets had unnerved her, but when no other sign of Dillon manifested itself, her heart had stopped skipping a beat whenever they appeared.

  He was incorrigible and probably irredeemable, but she wasn’t afraid.

  A step in the hallway came as no surprise. She had known when Jarvis had arrived. Their connection was sometimes so intense that it stole her breath.

  She moved into his arms with no hesitation.

  He was rumpled and his skin was cool from the night air, but he was still perfect and warm to Holly. She breathed in his spicy aftershave and soaked up the heat as he stroked his hands across her back. She knew he hadn’t found Dillon and he knew that she was glad he was home, safe and sound and unsuccessful.

  She understood the hunter in Jarvis. She understood that he wouldn’t rest until her Maker was dead. He understood the girl in her. He understood that she had to hope even for the hopeless.

  Dillon was out there, somewhere, and he was dangerous, but he wasn’t the mindless killer he had been. Deep down Holly recognized his need to reclaim the man he’d once been. Deep down Holly wondered how a rogue with nothing but a hundred years of horrible, bloody memory as his constant companion could possibly find peace.

  Then Jarvis pulled her closer and she forgot everyone and everything but the man in her arms.

  About the Author

  To learn more about Barbara J. Hancock, please visit www.barbarajhancock.com. Send an email to Barbara at barbara@barbarajhancock.com or join her Yahoo! group to join in the fun with other readers as well as Barbara groups.yahoo.com/group/embrace_the_shadows

  Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain…

  They Call Me Death

  © 2008 Missy Jane

  My name is Alexia Williams. In my world, North America is divided between north and south—but not the way it’s taught in the history books.

  After losing my family to the shifters, I joined the Combined Human States Army. Now I find myself on the front lines, defending the wall between my species and theirs. My mission is simple: keep the animals on their side by whatever means necessary—and I’m good at it. I don’t talk to them. I don’t sympathize with them. I sure as hell don’t admire them…until one saves my life.

  Andor isn’t like any shifter I’ve ever met. He’s a three-hundred-year-old golden eagle asking for help finding missing shifters who may be in my lands. I just have to decide between helping the animals or ignoring signs that my fellow humans aren’t what I thought they were. But how can I help a species I hate and fear? Even if Andor makes me feel alive again?

  In the land of the shifters…they call me Death.

  Enjoy the following excerpt for They Call Me Death:

  It was an unseasonably cold day in May when the world as I knew it ended and all hell broke loose. No one expected it. No one predicted it. No one had even gotten close to the truth revealed on live television all over the world. I was standing in my kitchen, hands wrist deep in hamburger meat as I prepared my famous meatloaf. My husband of two years, Hank, was changing our son’s diaper in the living room. We both froze at the sounds emanating from the television’s evening news.

  People were screaming. There were sounds of an animal snarling and ripping clothes, and possibly flesh. I ran into the living room where my husband held our son, Michael, tightly and watched in horror the live feed. Spots of blood on the camera lens tinted the scene a pale red. Through it, we saw the head of a news anchor resting on her desk.

  It took a moment to wrap my mind around the scene. Then it hit me. It wasn’t the cougar sitting on the newsroom desk, or even the way it looked at the camera with eyes that seemed too intelligent and understanding. It was the newscaster’s head lying on the desk while the rest of her body slouched against it.

  I wondered why people were running away and not calling animal control, or the police or…someone. Then I realized the only other people in the room were dead. My husband was shaking while my son wailed in his arms, disturbed by his father’s emotions.

  “What the hell happened? How did that animal even get in the building?” I asked quietly, disbelief clear in my voice.

  My husband turned to me slowly, almost dramatically so, as if we were in a bad horror flick. “It was human,” he said. “That animal was the other news anchor one minute and then…an…animal the next.”

  I wanted to laugh and throw something at him, or just scowl and walk away at the ridiculous statement. But we’d lived together for five years before we got married, and I’d learned Hank well. In all those years, I’d never seen him truly afraid of anything or anyone. At six-foot-two, with a muscular build, he could probably bench press our car with one arm. Nothing ever intimidated him, but what I saw in his eyes and heard in his voice was fear and complete conviction.

  We spent the next hour flipping from one channel to the next and on every one, the story was the same. Shape-shifters are real and they lived among us. In a world made up of billions no one had any clue how many of them there were at the time, but over the next few weeks, as more and more people in high places revealed their true nature and wars broke out on every continent, it became painfully clear there were many. Too damn many. The small town we lived in was overrun. We were near a national park and many of the shifters chose to live close to the sanctity of the trees. Our battle was short li
ved and most of the humans died. My son, my husband, the only family I had left, were killed before my eyes. I killed my first shifter that day, but she was not my last.

  It took three years for the worst of the battles to end and the lines to be drawn. Nearly a third of the world’s population came out by then, and they were all stronger and faster than humans. Many of the third-world countries were completely overrun, turning into totalitarian empires with an alpha male ruling the land. They figured it out amongst themselves somehow and an uneasy peace kept them settled. In the States, the country was pretty much divided in half. If you looked at a map, it was like the Civil War all over again. The south was human, the north mostly shifters. I say mostly, because some bleeding hearts decided it was okay to let the shifters run the country and stayed up there with them. They had a real live-and-let-live attitude about the whole mess. I might have been that way too if I hadn’t already seen so much death. By the time the country split and the two governments were established, I had more blood on my hands than I could ever wash off, and I ached for more.

  Some love can last a lifetime—their love was destined to last longer.

  Hunter’s Edge

  © 2008 Shiloh Walker

  Angel’s first words to Kel were I’m going to marry you. She was seven at the time. He was eight. And he didn’t laugh when she spoke the words. Best friends as children, lovers as young adults, they had an unexplainable bond. Their future looked set. Until the night they were attacked by a creature that couldn’t exist.

  Angel survived the attack—barely. But Kel didn’t. Or at least, nobody thought he did. His body was never found and Angel’s life would never be the same.