Whiskey, Vamps, and Thieves (Southern Vampire Detective #1)

by Selene Charles

  He slammed his fist on my dash, causing me to jump and then growl as my barely leashed monster stirred deep within.

  I almost snapped at him that if he hurt Betsy one more time, I’d wring his neck, but he was sweating furiously and panting hard. I could hear his heart race, and his pulse pound. For Carter, there was nothing else anymore.

  Only this.

  Only stopping the bogeyman.

  He wouldn’t look at me, and I suddenly had to fight the tears. God help me, I was going to do it. I didn’t want to. I wanted no part of this case, but I couldn’t leave Carter to do it alone.

  I held up the sheet I still fisted. “If I’m gonna take this before the Alpha, I have to be sure. Just finding gray matter doesn’t mean it was him or her. But I’m willing to concede the fact that it’s dangerous. Dangerous enough to try to get the Alpha’s help.”

  His jaw set, and he pushed himself back on the seat. Carter was intense. At work. In life. In bed. I’d experienced every facet of him through the twenty-some-odd years of our partnership. But telling the Alpha that I thought we might have a bogeyman problem—without more than just the flimsy evidence we had—would get me nowhere.

  If I could definitively prove it was the bogeyman, the Alpha might—might being the operative word here—be willing to give me the use of the Wolf Pack for the hunt. But without something substantial, I’d be on my own.

  Bogey was dangerous, and if it really was him or her, I wasn’t risking letting it get away again. But that wasn’t enough, and I knew it.

  “For all we know, Matilda could have been on the lam and hiding out with this family. Stranger things have happened.”

  Carter grabbed my hand, placed my palm on his chest, and looked deep into my eyes. Looking into a vampire’s eyes, knowing how easy it would have been for one of us to entrance the other, was a sign of trust and faith.

  I shut off the demon inside me that wanted to do just that, that wanted to reach over, tip his neck back, and feast until my stomach was swollen with his blood. I wet my lips, swallowing hard.

  Carter’s nostrils flared, knowing the risk he took, but still he kept my gaze. “I just know, Scar. You have to trust me on this.”

  Snatching my hand back, I curled my fingers into a fist and placed it hard to my side as I glanced out the window, counting slowly to five in my head, willing the throb of bloodlust to subside before I finally spoke.

  “I do trust you, Carter. I always have. It’s why you still live.”

  He blew out a heavy breath, shifting infinitesimally over. It was only inches, but the sentiment was clear. I was the alpha here, and like a dog showing me his belly, he was telling me he understood completely where he stood with me.

  “I’m taking you back to the den now, Carter. I have preparations to make before this hunt.”

  He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, asking without words whether I’d speak with the Alpha.

  I merely shrugged. “I’ll try. But I can’t promise you anything.”

  “Fair enough.”

  ~*~

  We parked, and he was just opening the rusted, squeaky door when I grabbed his arm.

  He wordlessly glanced down then up. I didn’t let go.

  “You got yourself checked?”

  Sighing softly, he nodded with a hard dip of his head. “Yeah. I’m clean.”

  My nostrils flared as I lightly sniffed the air. A couple of years ago, Carter was diagnosed with a rare form of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Stubborn bastard that he was, he’d not let me take him to the hospital for treatment, insisting he could handle things on his own. As if cancer was just a “thing.”

  His brother, Doc, would drive him up and pass along the news to me, but that was a chapter of Carter’s life he’d wanted me to have no part in. Hard as it was, I’d respected that decision.

  I knew he’d gone into remission, but ever since then, he’d always smelled wrong. Not bad, just...wrong. Different, I guess, for lack of a better word. When we’d first met, he’d smelled of musk, man, and something woodsy.

  Smells to me were as unique as fingerprints to humans. Everyone smelled of something. I’d been the one to notice the shift in his scent.

  It wouldn’t even have been obvious to a bloodhound, but to me it’d been like a smack to my face. He’d still smelled of musk, man, and woods, but there’d been something rank. Almost rotten. Like leaves sitting on damp ground for weeks.

  The scent of rot was no longer as powerful, but it would forever remain a part of him.

  I let go of his arm. “Good.”

  “You ever plan to stop mother henning me?” He lifted a brow, his words dead serious.

  “I worry about you. That’s never gonna change.”

  His jaw clenching, I thought he would slip from the truck and disappear back into the night as he usually did after we’d finished another one of our powwows. But this time, he reached over and very gently grazed his knuckle down my cheek.

  My lashes fluttered.

  Carter had come before James. In fact, James had been my rebound. God, I was a wreck when it came to the men in my life. They all left me. Made a girl feel self-conscious.

  That old heat that always snapped and burned between us roused deep inside my bones, and I wet my lips, looking into his lion eyes. He knew what I was silently offering. After James had sparked me the other night, I needed something. Needed release. I didn’t feel the overwhelming, manic passion with Carter that I’d felt with James, but there’d been something steady about him that I’d needed in my life at that time.

  Tonight wasn’t so much about Carter as it was about me. As intuitive as he’d always been, I knew he knew that.

  Leaning forward, he kissed my brow and, with that deep voice of his, said, “Good night, Scar. Let me know what the Alpha says.”

  Trying to hide my disappointment, I cleared my throat and gripped my steering wheel tight. “Mm-hmm, yup. I’ll call you tomorrow either way.”

  I sat there a good solid minute after he’d left, my mind too full and heavy to want to go back into the den just yet.

  I smelled peppery autumn leaves before I saw him.

  James’s silver eyes flashed in the darkness, and then he was knocking on my window and gesturing for me to roll it down.

  Confused about why he was there, I rolled the window down and hung one arm over the door in a careless, easy gesture, but inside I was anything but. The man seemed to have a homing beacon whenever I was around.

  Still dressed in his scuffed jeans and leather jacket he’d worn earlier, he grabbed hold of my door and stared at me for a moment.

  His look was intense and careful, as though he was sizing me up. Alert, I sat up straight.

  “What’s up, Viking?” I asked slowly.

  I didn’t smell the reek of anxiety or stench of malintent sliding through his pores. Whatever he was about, he wasn’t here to try to ambush me.

  Glancing quickly over his shoulder at the bar, he looked back at me side-eyed, and when his shoulders slumped, I knew he’d come to some sort of conclusion.

  “We need to talk. But no here.”

  Seemed as though I was about to get some more answers tonight. After whipping out my cell from my pocket, I texted Merc that I was gonna be out by the haunted shack with James. No point in being stupid about things.

  “Well, come on then.” I gestured at my passenger side. “Get in.”

  My phone beeped a second later with Merc’s reply: ...

  That was it. Nothing more. Nothing less. I stared at that ellipsis, trying to figure out whether it was code or not, but figured since he hadn’t screamed at me to get my ass back there pronto, whatever those three dots meant didn’t necessarily mean “don’t go.”

  James got in, and I turned the key. Betsy shuddered three times before finally giving a throaty purr.

  “I canna believe this piece of tin actually still runs,” he said with a note of laughter dancing through his words. “I’d thought for sure she’d be in the
junkyard by now.”

  I patted the wheel and rolled out. “She’s a good ol’ girl, you just gotta know what to do to make her sing.”

  He sniffed and gave me a look but said nothing else after that.

  Chapter 8

  Scarlett

  “Yer taking me to the haunted shack.” James wasn’t asking a question, merely stating a fact.

  Frowning, I gave him the side eye before turning back to the long stretch of empty road. “How’d you—”

  He grunted. “I just do.”

  It was not as though only Mercer and I had known of the place, but I’d weirdly always felt as if that were the case. As if it’d been just ours. I frowned.

  “Aye, I’ve been here. A long time ago.” He didn’t look at me as he said it, just drummed his fingers on the door as he stared out the window with a contemplative and serious look.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  He grinned. “Didn’t need to. I could smell the curiosity buzzing off you.” He tapped his nose, teasing me only briefly before looking back out the window with his brows drawn low.

  I always hated how little privacy I had living in such close proximity to shifters. Then again, considering I could do the same, I supposed that made me a stone-throwing, glass-house kind of girl. Of course, it never felt that way to the one being the busybody.

  Giving him a nondescript grunt, I turned down the road.

  The headlights cut through the thick woods, casting long, malevolent shadows along the old dirt road. The place held no fear for me anymore, though it had back in the day. Back when I’d been a baby undead and realized that ghosts and evil spirits really were real and the humans who’d believed in them all along were not crackpots after all.

  “You know,” he said, cutting through my trip down memory lane, “we’d have been here much faster if we had just run.”

  We were currently bouncing in our seat as the truck jostled across the uneven trail. I’d slowed down to less than twenty miles per hour at this point just to make sure I didn’t blow a tire.

  “You gotta figure I’m a baby when it’s all said and done, James.” I decided to be frank with him. “I might be one of the undead now, but there’s a part of me that still feels and thinks more human than not. Blood drinking aside.”

  I hadn’t been prepared for the intensity of his look as he’d studied me. That big—well, no, scratch that—massive wall of muscle looking like some ancient Viking throwback in a Ford model catalog was staring me down like a wolf on the hunt.

  Sizing me up. Taking my measure. I’d experienced that more times than I cared to count since joining up with the Silver Creek pack, but it had always somehow felt...more with him.

  As if he wasn’t just measuring me as one predator to another but taking up all the oxygen in our tiny space while doing so. Oxygen I no longer needed but suddenly felt that I did. I shifted on my seat, gripping the wheel tighter; he was stirring the beast in me too.

  “You know you gave me shit for never telling you my age. Fair is fair, no?” he rumbled, the sound reminding me of his motorcycle pipes, deep and throaty and pure testosterone. “What are you, Scarlett? Eighty? A hundred?”

  I snorted. “Don’t you know you should never ask a woman her age?”

  I’d never told him anything because I’d felt weirdly embarrassed by the fact that I’d only been in my thirties and lusting after someone clearly far older. I hadn’t known just how old. Six hundred was rather shocking. Of course, that was human nonsense that sometimes still clung to me.

  For Veilers, age mattered not at all. Why should it when just about everyone in my life should have been worm food by now if they’d been human?

  The trail took a gentle left, and suddenly the trees opened up, revealing thick chunks of gray rock slabs cutting up like broken teeth through the ground. Ahead, and by its lonesome, sat the long, rotted structure of the haunted shack.

  Ghosts were real. So were demons. And that old place was full of them.

  Very few people—Veilers or otherwise—came to this place.

  Evil lived here, peering through the empty eyes of the broken glass windows. Boards squeaked as phantasms walked past. And shrieks and cackling demonic wails lit up the night.

  As a human, I’d had enough sense to never stray close. As a vamp, I seemed to have lost the good sense God gave me because I found this place soothing in a macabre and twisted kind of way.

  A flickering blue light ghosted from window to window. The widow Delilah was up and restless tonight. Delilah—the cannibal queen of Silver Creek—was said to have consumed thirteen souls before the law found and finally hung her for her crimes back when the buffalo still roamed the plains.

  Her soul had haunted the place ever since.

  “Does it matter?” I finally turned to him, shrugging. “Never mattered to you before. Only thing you cared about back then was how quick you could get me out of my shorts.”

  He thinned his eyes. “Let’s just say I’m curious about you now, Scarlett.”

  “Nice. So you do admit I was just an easy lay. Fan-freaking-tastic.”

  The other night I’d been sort of happy to see him. But for the past few nights, one thing was becoming very clear, the hurt was still very much there. And I’d buried it down so far deep, even I hadn’t realized how much.

  Growling low, he said, “You know what I mean.”

  I rolled my eyes, flicking my fingers against the steering wheel. My head was still full of everything Carter and I had just spoken about. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to go another round with yet another testosterone-laden male.

  “Whatever, Jamie,” I shot back, lifting a brow. “You must think I’m stupid or, worse, desperate. We kissed the other night. Get over it.”

  I’d been shot down by Carter tonight, Mercer was acting moody, and now James thought to make his play. I was irritable as hell, and he was going to catch the brunt of it.

  “Why question my partner tonight?”

  He snorted. “He’s not your partner.”

  “See. That shit. How the hell do you know that? Who told you?”

  A secret smile played along his lips. James was an enigma to me. He’d always been. I might have known every inch of his body, but his mind was a steel trap he’d never let me into. He was both mysterious and irritating, and he’d not brought me out here for nothing. He had a reason. I could wait.

  “I’ve got my ways.” He grinned, and I rolled my eyes.

  James was hot, but he was a fool to think I couldn’t see past the fake flattery.

  “Either tell me what you came to say”—I tapped a long nail on my bicep impatiently—“or I’m turning this damn truck around and you can walk back.”

  His nostrils immediately flared. He was sensing, no doubt, that sycophancy was going to get him nowhere with me.

  Mama hadn’t raised no fool. Here in the South, men were taught almost from the moment they could speak their first words to fawn and flatter a girl obsequiously to get what they wanted, and women had been taught to see straight through that bullshit.

  Southern girls might seem sweet as pecan pie, but we had bite, and right now, James was getting on my last damn nerve.

  His smile slipped. “What’d you see the other day? When you touched me. What’d you see?”

  I clenched my teeth. Few knew what I could do, and none of them had told. I’d stake my soul to the devil on that fact.

  Which left only one explanation. When I’d tasted his blood, I’d also tasted his power. It had been vast and immense. Strong enough to get my rock—what I now called a ticker—to beating again, however briefly. Shifters weren’t immortal in the way vampires were, but they could live to be several thousand years old—if they didn’t die in a brawl first. Which was how most shifters went since they tended to have the shortest fuses in the Veiler world.

  With age came power. James knew because James had felt the surge of his power being drawn out thanks to my own.

  “I’m no g
oing to tell, Scarlett, if that’s what you’re afraid of, but I need to know what you saw.” His words were low and coaxing.

  That time, his brogue did absolutely nothing for me. Glaring hotly at him, I shook my head.

  Without warning, and moving with the speed that few in the Veiler world could boast, he moved in a blur of shadow, and the next thing I knew, my hand was in his, and he was squeezing hard. Holding tight enough that if I forced him to let go, either he or I would break a bone in the process. Bearing down on my molars, I debated what I’d do. Answer. Or plan B, break a bastard for daring to—

  “Please.”

  The word came out a snapped growl and full of so much brokenness that I paused in my gleeful imaginings of snapping his spine in two. It was that raw plea that finally forced me to look him straight in the eyes.

  He met mine without flinching.

  I frowned.

  “Why do you care?”

  I neither denied nor confirmed; I needed answers first. Needed to know why he was there, if I could trust him, and what kind of business he had with the pack that’d brought him out of hiding after all these years.

  “Why are you here? Why’d you come back? And don’t even effing think about lying to m—”

  “Jaysus,” he snarled, but he also sounded exhausted, like the type of soul-deep exhaustion that couldn’t be feigned.

  Releasing my hand as quickly as he’d taken it, he sat back in his seat, staring out the window with a rock-hard and pensive look, as though contemplating what he might say to me.

  Delilah moaned, and the shack shuddered.

  Several years ago, Mercer had paid a witch to consecrate the land surrounding the shack. And since, neither Delilah nor any of the other haunts or demons inside could leave the grounds.

  I was safe enough here. But let me get within spitting distance of that shack and things would be very different. Not even vampires were immune to the wrath of those soul-sucking Veilers.

  Drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, I looked back at James, who’d finally seemed to reach a decision. Scratching the left side of his cheek, he eyed me for several long, tense seconds.