Lose You Not

by Kristie Cook

  Lose You Not

  A Havenwood Falls Novel

  Kristie Cook

  Contents

  About This Book

  Havenwood Falls Books

  Other Books By Kristie Cook

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About This Book

  The sequel to Forget You Not, this full-length novel continues the story of Michaela and Xandru—because finding someone means you can lose them again.

  With her past memories mostly restored, Michaela Petran begins to pick up the pieces and resettle into life in Havenwood Falls. But resuming where she left off with the man she loves and the plans they’d made is no simple matter. Suddenly head of the family and leader of the moroi vampires, she faces an onslaught of unexpected obligations, making her feel like she has no choices in her own life. And even if she could have everything she wants, she can’t help but fear it’ll all be ripped away from her once again.

  For five years, Xandru Roca ached for Michaela to return, but never believed it would actually happen. Now that he has a second chance with her, he’s afraid he’ll blow it by hanging on too tightly. But if he’s not careful, she might again vanish from his life.

  As they try to bridge the chasm between them, family matters demand their attention, pulling them apart. After all, there’s still a strigoi curse, dictates of the supernatural Court, and dark magic wreaking havoc on their siblings. Family and love always come first, but while they try to save one, they risk losing the other.

  Havenwood Falls Books

  Forget You Not by Kristie Cook

  Old Wounds by Susan Burdorf

  Fate, Love & Loyalty by E.J. Fechenda

  Covetousness by Randi Cooley Wilson

  The Winged & the Wicked by T.V. Hahn & Kristie Cook

  Alpha’s Queen by Lila Felix

  Ink & Fire by R.K. Ryals

  Lose You Not by Kristie Cook

  Tragic Ink by Heather Hildenbrand (Feb. 2018)

  Nowhere to Hide by Belinda Boring (March 2018)

  More books releasing on a monthly basis

  Also try the YA series, Havenwood Falls High

  Stay up to date at www.HavenwoodFalls.com and subscribe to our newsletter

  Other Books By Kristie Cook

  Soul Savers

  A Demon’s Promise

  An Angel’s Purpose

  Dangerous Devotion

  Dark Power

  Sacred Wrath

  Unholy Torment

  Fractured Faith

  Genesis: A Soul Savers Novella

  Awakened Angel: A Soul Savers Novella

  Supernatural Chronicles: The Wolves (A Soul Savers Tie-In Novella)

  Wonder: A Soul Savers Collection of Holiday Short Stories & Recipes

  The Book of Phoenix

  The Space Between

  The Space Beyond

  The Space Within

  Havenwood Falls

  Forget You Not

  The Winged & the Wicked

  Lose You Not

  Copyright © 2018 Kristie Cook, Ang’dora Productions, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Ang’dora Productions, LLC

  5621 Strand Blvd, Ste 210

  Naples, FL 34110

  Havenwood Falls and Ang’dora Productions and their associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Ang’dora Productions, LLC

  Cover design by Regina Wamba at MaeIDesign.com

  Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the owner of this book.

  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For the Havenwood Falls family

  and my own

  The only people who truly know your story are the ones who help you write it.

  ~ Unknown

  What is family? They were the people who claimed you, in good, in bad, in parts, or in whole. They were the ones who showed up, who stayed there regardless.

  ~ Unknown

  Chapter 1

  Michaela

  “Badass vampire. I’m a badass vampire. I can do this.”

  Chanting the words out loud, I followed a horrendous stink down the third-floor hallway of Whisper Falls Inn, built by my father in 1854 and inherited by his twenty-four-year-old daughter, yours truly. Armored in elbow-length rubber gloves, an old hoodie, sweatpants, and shit-kicker boots, I pulled a scarf up over my nose and mouth, then held the broom upside down, ready to swing. I stopped at the end of the hall, in front of one of our two suites, this one in the uppermost turret of the Victorian mansion. Nobody had seen the guest since dusk last night, but the room key showed up on the front desk early this morning, and by noon, this odor had permeated all the way downstairs to the lobby. I had no idea what the guy had done in there, but judging by the putrid smell, it couldn’t be good.

  This was what my life had become.

  “I swear to all, if there’s a dead body in there, I’m going to be fucking pissed.” I rolled my shoulders, then yelled, because I didn’t know where in the building she was, “Mammie, I’m going in!”

  Before I could lose my nerve, I slammed the door open and jumped back, just in case something pounced.

  “Oh. My. God!” I screeched, bile rising into my mouth. I threw my arm across my face. “Oh god, oh god, oh god.”

  The only thing that pounced was the smell, a gazillion times worse now. My eyes watered, and my chest heaved as I fought the urge to puke. I tightened my grip on the broom handle and slowly made my way into the suite, my gaze sweeping the circular room. Blinking against the tears, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The sitting area looked untouched. The bed was rumpled, obviously slept in last night—before the jerk took off without checking out—but nothing gross stained the bedding, despite the stench. Like feces. Or vomit. Or other bodily fluids.

  The odor wafted strongest from the bathroom. Of course. I gave myself another pep talk as I inched my way there, which gave Madame Luiza, aka Mammie, plenty of time to find me and glide into the room.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. And considering she was a ghost, if she could smell it, it was bad. “Be careful, Michaela.”

  With her Romanian accent, my aunt said my name with its original pronunciation—Me-hay-la—rather than with the hard k everyone else gave it. Of course, everyone else tended to give me a nickname: Kaela, Kales, even Kaekae.

  Because that was totally badass.

  “How bad can it be?” I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin.

  “I’ll go in first,” Mammie said. “Nothing can make me deader than I already am.”

  Before I could protest, she disappeared into the bathroom and returned only a heartbeat
later. If ghosts could be green, she would have been. Her purple ball gown, in which she was perpetually dressed, appeared to be no worse for the wear, but that didn’t really mean much, considering. Her cheeks puffed out, as though she fought a gag, and she clamped her hands over her mouth. She couldn’t actually puke, but with that kind of reaction, whatever that bathroom harbored was way worse than I thought.

  “Badass vampire,” I repeated in a firm whisper before forcing myself through the bathroom doorway. And then I froze, staring at the scene in front of me. “What the fuck?”

  “Language, dear,” Mammie admonished, her voice muffled behind her hands.

  “Really, Mammie? There’s absolutely nothing else to say!”

  A pinkish gelatinous goo stuck to nearly every surface, as though a giant troll had sneezed, spraying pink snot everywhere. It was splattered all over the faded and stained wallpaper, clung to the chipped porcelain sink and old-fashioned tub, and slid slimy trails down the warped mirror. Something large and plasma-y filled the toilet, pouring over the edge and slopping onto the yellowed tile floor.

  I spun the broom and jabbed at it with the stick end. It shook like jelly. I lifted it with the broom handle, and my stomach lurched.

  “He molted?” I shrieked. “That son of a bitch molted in my inn? And what the hell molts like this?”

  The substance was not at all like a reptile skin. Not papery and dry. More like a big, bloodless placenta.

  But mammals didn’t molt.

  “Skinwalker,” Mammie whispered. “It must be. I knew he was no regular shifter.”

  “Skinwalker?” I echoed.

  “They shed their skin to take on another—a whole different appearance. Sometimes a whole different life. They’re very rare. I’ve only ever met one before, back in the 1920s.”

  “So what’s all over the walls and everything else? Do these skinwalkers explode, too?”

  Mammie patted her silver bun as she glanced around, then shrugged. “Maybe if their new body is larger than their old skin?”

  “Ew! Gross.” I shuddered at the image while trying to hold back the vomit that kept making its way up the back of my throat.

  Groaning, I poked and prodded the gunk, working it out of the toilet, because it obviously was not going to flush through the pipes. Finally, the end of it flopped out of the bowl and onto the floor, splashing at my feet and sending Mammie out into the bedroom part of the suite. I tried pushing it out of the way with the broom handle. At first it jiggled, but barely moved. So I gave it a harder shove, and the handle slipped right through the substance like a knife through warm butter and drove into the wall. Little black things—and some not so little—poured out of the hole and scurried over the wall.

  “Ahhhhh!”

  I ran out of the bathroom screaming, with Mammie right on my heels, shrieking even louder. We flew through the hall, down the steps, rounding the flights, not stopping until we hit the lobby three floors down. I fell to my knees, panting and heaving, my whole body trembling as my hands pressed into my chest, as if they could slow my heart.

  “Spiders,” I choked out. “Fucking spiders.”

  Mammie burst out laughing.

  Lifting my head, I glared at her with narrowed eyes.

  She tried to rein herself in. “I’m sorry, dear. If you could have only seen your face. Are you sure you’re moroi?”

  “Hey!” I waggled a finger at her. “You were running and screaming, too.”

  “I was not running,” she denied, but a smile twitched at her lips. “I can’t run, dear. Ghosts fly.”

  And for some reason, that statement broke through my fear, and laughter consumed me until I was crying. Once I was able to compose myself, I pushed up to my feet.

  “We’re burning the whole place down,” I declared as the front door opened.

  A teen and a tween, both dark-haired, entered, the smell of an early summer evening carried in with them—pine, freshly mown grass, and wildflowers.

  “You’re what?” Gabe, my twelve-year-old brother, asked, his eyes wide in his thin face. They were still brown because he was still human, meaning his moroi gene hadn’t been triggered. That usually happened at around twenty years old.

  “Gabe decided he didn’t want to hang out with Cody after all, so I brought him home,” Aurelia, our sixteen-year-old sister, also still human, whined as she followed behind him, both of their slender bodies clad in shorts and tanks.

  What they called summer here in the mountains was a lot closer to the winters I’d grown used to during my five years in Atlanta. So while everyone else already wore summer attire, I was still comfortable in hoodies and jeans. And technically, summer didn’t start until next week. Maybe by the end of July, I’d dare a pair of shorts.

  “He could have walked,” Aurelia continued. “It’s not like it’s all that far, but noooo, whiny baby insisted on a ride. Oh, well. Lena didn’t want to do anything, and Laurel was being a snot anyway.” Her nose wrinkled as she finally got over herself and noticed her surroundings. “What died?” Her eyes flew wide open, and she had the decency to throw a hand over her mouth in embarrassment as she looked at Mammie. “I didn’t … I mean … what stinks?”

  “Spiders. And gross stuff. You don’t want to know,” I answered.

  “Spiders?” she and Gabe said at the same time. Except Aurelia sounded as freaked out as I was, while excitement colored Gabe’s tone.

  “Hey, don’t you have a hot date tonight?” Aurelia asked me as her chocolate eyes gave me a once-over, her nose scrunching even more.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” said a deep voice, preceding its owner from the front vestibule.

  His tall, muscular frame emerged into the lobby, clothed in a dress shirt and black pants, rather than his usual T-shirt and jeans. The lavender color of his shirt, along with his dark hair and beard stubble, brought out the brightness of his gray-green eyes—the eyes that always got me. The eyes that had been the one aspect of Havenwood Falls I’d never been able to forget, even when the Luna Coven witches magically wiped my memory and replaced it with a false past. Something deep inside hadn’t allowed me to completely forget Xandru Roca.

  Like always, my heart went all trippy and my breath caught when I saw him.

  The look he gave me in return was not quite as enamored. I glanced down at myself.

  Oh, shit. “Is it that time already?”

  “Rough day?” he asked.

  “You could say that.” I glanced upward, as though I could see through two floors to the third one. “We have a problem.”

  He gave me a small smile. “You go get cleaned up. I’ll check it out.”

  “No, don’t. You’re all dressed up. You really don’t want to deal with that.” I turned to my brother. “Gabe, since you skipped out on your chores this morning, you get to take care of room 313. It’s totally your kind of thing.”

  As I headed through the large dining room for one of the several pairs of French doors in the back, I heard footsteps ascending the grand staircase off the lobby—two pairs, one much heavier than the other—and Xandru saying, “No worries. I got your back.”

  Well, at least we’d both stink on our date tonight.

  The sky was just beginning to darken as I strode across the rear lawn of the inn to the two-bedroom cottage the kids and I shared until we figured out … well, until we figured out life. We’d all been through a lot in the last several years and still weren’t sure about our new normal.

  Three months ago, I’d been tending bar at a club in downtown Atlanta and serving breakfast to drunks in the middle of the night, thinking I was some mutant form of vampire with a depressing past and no family. My true memories of growing up in Havenwood Falls, Colorado, population five thousand-ish, with a family who loved me and friends who still did, had mostly returned by now, although I still experienced some blank moments. But they were still just memories, not the life I’d stepped into when I came back. This new life was … I didn’t know what it was yet.
>
  Like I said, we were still figuring it all out.

  Like what we wanted to do with the family estate. The mansion in Havenwood Heights provided a lot more space than the cottage at the inn, but without Mom, Dad, and Mammie, we all agreed it felt like too much room. Yet, at the same time, the memories there of when our family was whole made the walls feel like they closed in on us. I couldn’t be there for more than an hour before the emotions became too much to bear—mostly sadness, but also a lot of anger.

  Maybe not facing it all was a form of denial, but we chose to cram into the small cottage, the largest of the five that lined the back of the inn’s property.

  When they were even there, Aurelia usually slept in my bed and Gabe in the smaller bedroom, but they often took a room in the main house with Mammie to watch over them or spent the night with friends. Because of the nightmares, I tried not to sleep much at all, but when I did, it was rarely at night. The tattoo I received as my registry with the Court of the Sun and the Moon, a requirement for all supernaturals in Havenwood Falls, was infused with magic that allowed me to be outside in the sun, but after the novelty wore off, my biological clock reverted to my vampire ways. I favored the late afternoons and nights. I’d always been a night owl anyway, even before I’d been turned. So the arrangement was working for us. Sort of.

  Considering everything, I felt like we were managing life quite well.

  Just as I pushed the cottage’s front door open, a loud splintering of wood followed by a scream came from behind me. I spun around just in time to see two bodies falling from a hole in the third-story turret and crashing through the glass ceiling of the conservatory just below it.

  Screaming, I sprinted across the lawn and tried to open the outside door to the conservatory, but it was jammed. Much of the large, glass room’s framework was made of copper piping, which they pumped steam through back in the day to heat the space, along with other metals for the fancy scroll work on the trim. Patina and tarnish had started to cover the metal, and rust had eaten some of it away, causing places to bend and deform, including around the door. Focusing my mind on the metal, I bent it out of the way, allowing the door to swing open. When Xandru’s brother Tase had triggered my moroi gene by giving me his blood, he’d passed on to me the Rocas’ ability to control metal. It came in handy sometimes.