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

by Selene Charles

  “I...uh, need—”

  His face twisted, as though he fought an internal and losing battle, and I wanted him to lose it. Wanted him to give in to selfish need and tell me that he felt for me what I felt for him. That he needed me as desperately as I needed him.

  The roar of a Harley cut through the night, kicking up a cloud of dust. I looked and knew it was James.

  One word from Mercer and I’d tell James to leave me alone forever. I’d choose him. I’d always choose him. I let that truth bleed into my eyes, let him see me vulnerable and raw.

  He grimaced, then looked away and shook his head. “I need to go, Scar. Just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Before I got to say anything back, he turned and loped down the steps, disappearing at a fast run back into the woods.

  “No, Merc, I’m not,” I whispered, then sniffed and wiped up another stupid tear.

  James rolled to a stop, parked the bike, and cut the engine. The quiet night was suddenly too loud and still.

  Hating Mercer right then, and hating myself even more, I didn’t know what to say to James.

  “Was that Mercer?” he asked, but I sensed him asking much more.

  He was asking if there was room enough for him. If I’d forgiven him. If I needed him.

  I felt things for him. Strong feelings. But all of it was dwarfed by what I felt for Merc. I wanted to curse James out, tell him to go straight to hell and leave me alone.

  But not because I didn’t want him there. Rather, because he wasn’t Mercer.

  And that was the stupidest reason of all. Mercer had made his choice. I’d offered him my soul, and he’d said no. If he’d given me even a sliver of hope, I would stay faithful to him. Would hang around for him. Would keep myself available for him...but he’d given me nothing.

  My heart broken and shattered, I knew what I’d always known about myself. I needed a pack. Needed to feel that I belonged to something or someone. And James was that. He was safe. And he’d proven himself to me when he’d gone and retrieved Carter.

  It was only because of his fast thinking that Carter still lived.

  Squaring my shoulders, I made a decision. To move on. Permanently.

  Mercer had raised me as a sister, and that was how I had to view him. Not as a potential lover but as a brother who was always there for me when I needed him most, just not in the way I wanted him most. That was it. That was all we could ever be.

  I knew the truth.

  The truth was I didn’t want to be alone, but I could survive James’s leaving. I’d done it once before. What I couldn’t survive was letting Merc all the way in and then losing him. It would kill me.

  And so I plastered a smile onto my face, opened the door wider, and said, “James, let’s talk.”

  He entered my house, tall and imposing and wary tonight, as though he didn’t know who to trust anymore. I knew that feeling well.

  We stared at one another in silence for several long, tense moments, and then...

  “I smell witch magick warding your room.”

  James didn’t phrase it as a question, so I lifted a brow and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good. Then follow me and close the door behind us.”

  “James.” I crossed my arms, doubting highly he’d come over for a booty call but unable to comprehend the meaning of his cryptic words.

  He shook his head, and his long legs ate up the distance between my living room and bedroom. “It’s not what you think, Scarlett. We need someplace to speak privately where there is no danger of anyone overhearing us.”

  Remembering I’d said the same thing to Mercer and he’d not trusted me enough to let me speak my piece, I followed.

  Once in the pitch darkness of that room, I shut the door. The mood in the room was suddenly tense and electric. My gaze flicked once to the bed before moving back to his shadow. I wet my lips.

  “So talk.” My words were a whispered command.

  He rolled his shoulders, still looking tense and unsure of himself, before finally taking a deep breath as he drew an inevitable conclusion.

  “If I were to tell you everything I know, it would make me an oath breaker.” His words were a heavy rumble that caused my stomach to flutter with threads of fear. “But I’ll tell you what I really suspect is happening. And I’m going to believe, Scarlett, that after this, you’ll understand I’ve really been on your side since the start.”

  My almost human-feeling heart beat furiously as I linked my fingers together and held them in prayerful supplication before me. “Okay.”

  Inhaling deeply, he spoke.

  “When that thing,” he snarled, “attacked you the other night, my suspicions became cemented. It’s what I went to Diane’s to try to prevent.”

  My brows dropped. “What?”

  That was the very last thing I’d expected him to come over and speak to me about tonight. I’d just assumed that Mercer being as stubborn as he was, James would have been too. That no matter my doubts or suspicions, he’d never bring himself to honestly tell me the true events of that night.

  “There’s a trail of money and bodies a mile deep following in Clarence’s wake.” He sucked in a sharp breath and shook his head, and I knew he was skating dangerously close to words he could never say.

  I flicked my fingers, telling him silently to move on.

  “At first I suspected Mercer might be in on this, whatever it is,” he squeezed out. He cleared his throat and turned his back to me.

  “And now?”

  “No.” His word echoed with sincerity. “Not anymore. Not after seeing you two together again. Mercer would kill anything and anyone, even one of his own, to guard you.”

  I swallowed hard. Because when he put it like that, it sounded intense, almost scary, the depths of Mercer’s regard for me.

  After turning slowly back around, he dropped to a sitting chair I had propped in the corner of my room, his shoulders slumped forward as he shoved two blunt fingers through his hair. Clearly he was exhausted.

  Biting my bottom lip, I tiptoed slowly to him.

  “Money led you to Blanca? A lot of it? Am I right?” I knelt in front of him, between his legs, and planted my hands on his knees.

  His silver eyes burned through me like frost. His nostrils flared, but he said nothing. And that was when I knew he could say no more. So I worked my way through what I’d heard and hadn’t heard, telling myself that I’d done it before. Solved cases with less than what he’d given me.

  Scanning his chest with my sightless eyes, I thought back to that night. The ferocity of his attack against Blanca, the threats that she had only an hour to give him the truth. The wild fear that’d twisted his face into one of rage as he’d stabbed her over and over again in his mindless pursuit to stop her.

  I gasped.

  His attack on her hadn’t been planned. I could see that. Remember it clearly. He’d threatened, but he’d been calm and rational in his dealings. Until she’d attacked him. Why almost kill her once she was down?

  The only answer that made sense was that he’d hoped to stop whatever it was she’d done.

  My nails dug into his knees. He hissed but didn’t pull away.

  “You suspected she was after me. But the fae don’t take sides against or with us, James. They’re bought. They mediate. That’s it.”

  He stilled, as though waiting on me to figure out the rest.

  I looked up into the face of desperate hope.

  “Clarence paid her off,” I whispered as I remembered the words of that night. “She said she’d delivered. That he couldn’t double-cross her now.” Then I thought of something else. “Carter. You suspected Carter, didn’t you? It’s why you were so weird around him. Did you know he was a Sharp Elbow?”

  He nodded. “He stunk of rot. I’d been briefed of his having cancer, so I wasn’t sure, but I’d come across a Sharp Elbows before. The stench if unmistakable. I did wonder if it was him. But the more I looked in him the less I believed it.”
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  And here I thought he’d just wanted to mark his territory. I’d had no idea, and it pissed me off that I’d been so blind for so long. My thoughts continued to tumble one over another until I latched onto one in particular.

  Talanthia gloating that it’d told her what to do, where to be, who to kill...

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “Holy shit!”

  His hands clamped over mine as my skin raced with ice, making my heart beat so wildly and out of control it hurt. I clutched at my chest as beads of bloody sweat gathered upon my brows.

  “Look at me.”

  I did but knew what little color was left to me had drained out of my face completely, leaving me looking as dead as I really was.

  “Did Clarence take an oath to protect me?”

  His jaw clamped tight, and again, I knew James couldn’t tell me more. But I shook my head, answering my own question. “No, he never would have taken an oath to guard a vampire. Why did he ever take me in in the first place?”

  James shook his head, brushing a curl of hair tenderly behind my ear. “I dunno, lassie.”

  I swallowed hard. Clarence had sent the oath breaker after me. It wasn’t possible. I couldn’t believe it. Because believing it meant he’d had a direct hand in Lucille’s death too. A crime for which the pack would have no choice but to come against their Alpha and force his resignation. Which made it sound all so pretty and neat when the reality was, they’d kill him.

  If Clarence had caused the death of a pack member by actions such as those— whether alpha, beta, or something in between—it was an offense there could be no coming back from. He’d be killed and Mercer made to take his place.

  But it all made a kind of horrible and twisted sense too. The other night when I’d sparred against him, I’d seen the burn of madness, the type of madness that might lead one to do something as desperate and stupid as that.

  James’s finger rested under my chin, forcing me to look up at him. His gaze reflected the fear and anger in my own.

  And then I recalled what Talanthia had said, I was mostly here for him...

  For the second time tonight, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. I sucked in a sharp, agonized breath.

  Clarence’s madness.

  The deliberate and coordinated attacks against me.

  The broken oath.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  The last piece of the puzzle slid into place, and I shook violently. When a pup was born, the Alpha took an oath beneath the blood-red moon. An oath of protection. An oath that he would do whatever it took to keep that life safe.

  Clarence hadn’t been coming against me. Though he’d hurt me terribly, I had never been his real target.

  It’d been Mercer. His heir apparent.

  “Oh my God, I’m going to be sick.” I tried to jump to my feet, but James bore down on my hand with a powerful grip and shook his head.

  “What are you going to do, Scarlett? Huh, go against him yourself? Are you mad? Did you not see what he did to ye the other night? You’re no match for the Alpha.”

  I yanked out of his grasp. “Yeah, well, I can’t just stand by, either, and watch him murder what I love most in this world.”

  James’s lashes fluttered, and lines tightened around his mouth and eyes before quickly smoothing out. Hugging my arms to my chest, I paced the length of the small room like a caged animal.

  I had to tell Mercer. I had to let him know he was in danger. Had to...

  “You can’t do what you’re thinking, Scarlett. I won’t let you.”

  “Why?” I snarled, twirling on him with violence riding me hard. I wanted blood. Wanted vengeance. Wanted to hurt Clarence as badly as he’d hurt me. “You would just stand around and let Merc—”

  He jumped to his feet, glaring hotly down at me. “No! But you, a detective, you know you cannot move on a gut feeling alone. Why do you think the Oathbreaker hasn’t come yet, Scar? Fecking think.” He pounded at his temple with his finger. “Because until there is hard and solid proof, we’ve got nothing. It’s why the four haven’t come against him. This is serious, Vampire. I don’t give a fuck how much you love Mercer, that doesn’t play into this equation. Right now Clarence doesn’t know that we suspect, and that’s how it has to remain, until he screws up, until we can prove it—”

  “Blanca! Blanca can prove it.”

  She lived. He’d done a number on her, but she lived. If Blanca had been the mediator between Clarence and Talanthia, there was the connection, all the proof we needed to throw the bastard in chains.

  But James shook his head, his look sorrowful and angry. “Diane moved her back to the sithen. She won’t speak. Titiana won’t allow it.”

  Titiana was the Fairy Queen and a bad, bad enemy to make. After what James had done to Blanca, there was absolutely no way he could go to the Queen to plead his case. That door would be shut to us.

  I closed my eyes, going still as a rock as hot streams of bloody tears ran down my face.

  James groaned, walking toward me. A moment later, I was in his arms as he rocked us gently back and forth.

  “Don’t cry, Scar. I canna handle yer tears.”

  I wrapped my arms around his back, clinging tight to his leather jacket as my heart shattered. I loved Mercer more than anything in the world. To even suspect that Clarence could be so desperate, so insane to go to the lengths he had...it terrified me.

  I wasn’t safe here. But I wasn’t going anywhere, because Mercer was in big, big trouble and I had to protect him. At all costs, I had to guard him.

  “Shh. Shh, now, lassie. Stop these tears, you’ll ruin my leather.” His hand was gentle, but I heard the whisper of laughter in his words, and I couldn’t help chuckling wearily in return.

  “Good. That Veiler almost killed me. Ruining a leather jacket is the least you deserve.”

  He kissed the top of my head and rumbled from deep in his chest, “Aye, I guess I do. But you have to believe me when I say I had no idea it might go this far. That night at Diane’s, I thought...I thought...” He shuddered.

  I looked up at him as he slid his hands over my cheeks. I gripped his wrists tight. Our eyes connected like iron shavings and magnets.

  “You thought nearly killing her might stop this. You thought you’d given him a clear warning, cease and desist.”

  “I can prove none of this, Scarlett. For all I know, we’re wrong. That money’s been legitimately paid off elsewhere, and Clarence is being framed.”

  It wasn’t true, and he knew it. I knew it. But I also knew that he was trying to spare my sanity tonight, trying to remind me that I needed to stay strong because I lived in a place where tempers were explosive, violent, and deadly at the best of times. Where an Alpha could never be weak, where an Alpha—even one as respected and feared as Clarence—might stoop to any level to make sure he retained his power, no matter the costs or deaths left in his wake.

  “Yeah. Of course,” I said softly, but deep down I was sick. I didn’t want to believe this any more than he did.

  Didn’t want to imagine that Clarence could have really done something that heinous, that brutal. Shifters lived a violent existence but always with a code of honor. To imagine that he could stoop to such levels was unfathomable.

  Maybe I was still in denial, and that was okay for tonight. Even if Clarence was behind all of this, he’d not move again, not so soon. His game had been thwarted, and he’d be a fool to rush into anything else so soon. The pack expected him to grieve Lucille, and he would. He’d be forced to.

  I knew now. Which meant, I knew how to look. Where to spot the seemingly benign coincidences as something more premeditated and planned. I wasn’t going to let Mercer out of my sight.

  James’s mouth brushed petal soft against my cheek, licking at the stains of blood there, and my body began to ache down deep. In the end, he’d proven himself to me. James wasn’t my enemy, and I needed him more than ever.

  With a hungry moan, I m
oved a fraction of an inch, enough to line our lips together. A powerful groan rippled through him, and for a while, it was easy to forget about everything else.

  ~*~

  Three hours later, we were all gathered beneath an ancient sycamore tree to scatter the remains of Lucille’s ashes to the four winds.

  Clarence stood stoic before the crowd, looking at none of us, his eyes glowing a violent shade of electric neon.

  I stood at the back of the crowd, surrounded by a mix of men and wolves.

  James and I had had sex.

  It’d been inevitable, of course. I was a creature of needs and desires. I’d needed touch tonight, and he’d been there for me. Then it dawned on me he’d been there for me all along, in his own way.

  Emerson, Steven, and Mercer stood to the left and slightly behind Clarence, each of them having already taken a turn saying goodbye to Lucille.

  Little Steven’s eulogy had been the hardest to hear. Fraught with pain and hurt, the little wolf had only begun to taste what death would feel like. Tomorrow I’d drop by the house and take him out for ice cream.

  I’d tried twice to get Merc to look at me, but he never would.

  James slid his large black head beneath my hand, and I sighed, trembling at the soft texture of his fur sliding beneath my fingers. He sniffed my palm, giving my fingers a quick lick as though he sensed I needed reassurance. My body ignited under his touch.

  I did love James. In my own way.

  I smiled sadly.

  A line soon formed among the shifters. Condolences were being offered, and all I wanted to do was leave.

  It felt wrong to be here, to be among the grieving, knowing it was because of me that Sharp Elbows had targeted Lucille. Targeted all of my family—human and shifter. But it was expected, and besides, as much as Mercer might have hated me right now, I’d never abandon him during his hour of need.

  So I walked slowly and numbly forward. When I finally arrived, I mumbled a soft “I’m sorry” to Emerson.

  His blue eyes reflected great sadness, which honestly surprised me. I’d never imagined that Emerson might actually care for Lucille, considering she hadn’t been his birth mother. But then, shifters had a bond I could never fathom.