by M. J. O'Shea
“We need to get a rug for the floor here,” he said, cringing at the frigid old boards and lifting his feet back up to balance on the bed frame.
“I know. I’ve been meaning to for a long time.”
“Or we could just get a new place altogether.” He gave me a shy smile, as if he thought I’d be sorry to see my ratty apartment go, and brushed my bangs off my forehead.
“We can? I mean, I wouldn’t mind just moving to your place. It’s way better than this.”
“No. I think you and I need somewhere that’s just ours. No nosy roommates, just you and me.”
“And you can do that? My bookstore job wouldn’t exactly pay much rent. I can barely afford the dorms.”
“Yeah, umm. Money’s not something you’re going to have to worry about anymore.” His cheeks turned pink. “We can start looking in a few weeks… when I finally let you out of bed, of course.”
I smiled in anticipation and reached up to brush my hand over his abdomen, a little claiming touch. He leaned over and kissed me; then he stood and held his hand out with a smile.
“C’mon, love. Let’s go get hitched.”
I smiled back and put my hand in his. Right where it belonged.
THE WOLF stood, shining and beautiful, at my side, basking in the pale cold light of a winter moon. I could’ve sworn I saw him grin, panting from our long run through silent city streets.
I reached out to him, unable to keep away for even a second longer. My touch was full of wonder and need, as it always had been. As it always would be.
The wolf was everything to me—my love, my soul, all that I had ever dreamed.
And he was mine.
Forever.
Chapter 1: Normal Sucks
“YOU DID what? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
I held my cell away from my ear and let my older brother Colin scream to his heart’s content. It was too late. There was nothing that Colin, his vampy friends, or any of the rest of my family, could do….
I was gone.
“CHARLIE…? CHARLIE…? Charlie Fitzgerald?” Huh? Oh crap. I looked up from where I’d been staring blankly at the fake wood grain on my desk, inscribed by years’ worth of kids who were as bored as I was in their final months of high school. My teacher was standing there with his hand stretched out, eyebrows raised. “Do you have last night’s assignment with you?”
“Yes, of course.” I grabbed my homework from where it was folded in the back of my book and handed it to Mr. Carlson, my history teacher. He took it and deposited it with the rest of the papers in his inbox before he strolled to the front of the room and powered up his LCD projector.
“Okay, guys, there were some pretty wretched scores on the Jamestown unit. Maybe you were just easing into the year, but it’s October now and quite a few of you need to pull your grades up on this unit or else your first report card will be grim.”
I wanted to gag.
If there was anything in the entire world more boring than US history, I couldn’t name it. The subject was lame when I had to learn it in fifth grade, just as lame in junior high school, and now that I was a senior in high school—and ready to get as far away from school as I could—it was torture of the worst kind. I couldn’t think of how many times I’d had the same argument with my mother about graduating from school. It wasn’t as if I needed to get into some prestigious college, or any college for that matter. I’d known what I wanted to do with my life since I was a little boy. The choice was easy.
I wanted to be a vampire hunter.
Yes, you heard right. I said vampire hunter. And here’s where you think: “Sure kid, doesn’t everyone who ever watched a few episodes of Buffy have fantasies about staking bloodsuckers and roundhousing demons?” And you’d probably be right. But, you see, it’s different for me. Because I’ve known for years that vampires, and vampire hunters, really exist. Sounds crazy, right? I swear to effing God it’s not.
My family, the Fitzgeralds, are one of the oldest hunter families in the world. There are a few others—my cousin Noah’s family, the Harpers, are one of them—and we’re all aware of each other. We’ve been active for centuries, slaying supernatural dragons (and from what I heard, actual dragons back in the day) and it was so my turn to grab a piece of the action.
If you want to get into technicalities, I wasn’t even supposed to know hunters existed, let alone that my family was among the chosen few. Well, at least I wasn’t supposed to know as early as I managed to find out. My brother Colin hadn’t been told formally until he was seventeen; neither had any of the cousins… at least, I think that’s the way it always worked. I suppose it was for our safety. I thought it sucked.
I’d learned about the family business when I was nine or ten by overhearing a conversation that was not meant for junior ears. I guess that’s one of the nice parts about being the ignored youngest brother to superstars Colin the Fantastic and Callum the Magnificent. I heard all sorts of things I wasn’t supposed to know about, like hunting vampires, killing werewolves and banshees, everything that was way better than anything in my boring, lameass life.
And that’s how I’d decided years before that I was going into the family business as soon as I could.
“Charlie.”
This time my name was being hissed quietly from behind me and followed by a pencil poking my neck. Jesus, wasn’t anyone going to leave me alone? It was Xan, my oldest and best friend. He poked me again. Probably with one of those natural-colored recycled pencils he used. Hippy-ass granola. At the moment, he was kind of annoying me. Nothing could ruin a good sulk like Xan’s perpetual sunny mood.
“What’s up?” I whispered back, wishing Xan would leave me alone.
“Do you have the answer to number seven?”
Who cared about number seven? Who cared about high school? It was only October, but I was so ready to be out of there. I’d turned eighteen over the summer (and gotten a card from my brother Colin that said happy seventeenth. Dumbass). I felt like I was marking time until I could be done with the charade of normalcy and move on to my real life. I was already mentally sharpening my stakes.
The fam hadn’t bothered having the big “you’re a Fitzgerald and we hunt vampires” conversation with me on my seventeenth birthday, like I’d hoped. It was common knowledge at home that the cat had been out of the bag for ages. Probably when I’d started running around with homemade stakes in fifth grade and pretending to slay the couch. My mom hadn’t liked that one too much. All those years ago, my mother had explained to me that it didn’t work like that in our world—that there were rules to be followed, and you didn’t go around staking random vampires or shooting werewolves with silver bullets at first sight. I’d been disappointed. I was even more disappointed when the long, detailed birthday talk had been skipped when I’d turned seventeen. And eighteen. I was going to have to find everything out for myself. It didn’t matter. Forget my family. I was happy to do some investigating.
“Charlie? What’s the answer to seven?”
Oh yeah. I’d forgotten about Xan. “Um….” I scanned down his paper. “The First Continental Congress met at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774.”
“Thanks.” Xan scratched the answer onto his paper with his pencil.
The noise was suddenly completely annoying. The noise, school, my teacher’s endless assignments, even my life-long friendship with Xan had become annoying, predictable, blah, blah, blah. I wanted something new.
“Hey, Charlie,” Xan whispered again.
“Yeah?”
“Am I coming over tonight?”
“Sure.” Why not? It was Friday, and I didn’t have anything better to do. Xan and I ended up together 99 percent of Fridays anyway, plunking away on one of my gaming systems and eating pizza. Why change the status quo? I probably wouldn’t see much of Xan after I was out in the world hunting badass vampires anyway. A few more normal teenage weekends wouldn’t kill me.
“Wanna play World of W
arcraft?”
“That’s fine. Whatever you want, dude.”
He poked me again. “Do you have the answer to number eight?”
I snorted. “Jesus, Xan, you’ve got to do some of your own work.”
“I don’t want to be here any more than you do.” He whacked me in the back of my head with his pencil.
“HEY, WHAT’S your problem today?” Xan shoved me off the curb onto the street. It was a good thing it was one of the many quiet, tree-lined streets in New Haven that didn’t have a single moving vehicle in sight.
New Haven was safe, but it sure as hell wasn’t somewhere exciting—like, say, New York, where my brother had gone a few months ago to talk to my cousin Noah one night and basically never came back. The overnight trip had turned into this crazy, awesome rescue mission to get my aunt Bianca back from some nutcase—(something else I wasn’t supposed to know about but did—and ended up with Colin living in the city and hanging out with Noah and his friends. And here I was stuck in suburbiaville. It was crap.
I hopped back up onto the sidewalk. “You’re a jerk. Why’d you push me?” I pushed Xan back, and he chuckled and punched me in the arm. Pretty typical for us.
“Because you weren’t answering me. What’s your problem?”
How the hell was I supposed to explain my problem to Xan? I’d never told him about my family. Every instinct I had told me it wasn’t a good idea to share, even if there was a chance in hell he’d believe me. Which there wasn’t.
Xan lived with his mother and her partner. They were earthy and granola-ish, but they weren’t the mystic type. At least, I didn’t think they were. I didn’t know his family all that well, but I had the feeling Xan was a bit embarrassed by them. I’d never seen where they lived and the few times I brought it up, Xan cringed and shook his head. From then on, I assumed it was some sort of weird ex-flower-child commune and Xan didn’t want my suburban sensibilities to be damaged. I was mildly curious, but happy to have him come to my house.
“I guess I’m just feeling restless. I want to get the hell out of New Haven.”
“Do you want to drive into Hartford and walk around?”
I scoffed. Hartford wasn’t going to cut it. Not even close. “No, not really. That’s just another version of boring.”
“I’m guessing video games aren’t going to make you feel better.” He nudged me with his shoulder. It would’ve been better if Xan wasn’t so damn understanding. As it was, I felt like an asshole for being annoyed with him.
“No. Not really.”
“What about the city? We can take the bus into Manhattan. Maybe Colin would want to hang out.”
Hmm. Not a bad idea.
“You think your moms would be okay with it?”
They were lenient to a point, but they both seemed to have a violent distaste for the noise and lights of New York.
Xan shrugged. “They’ll be fine as long as I’m with you.”
“Am I the great protector?” I chuckled.
Xan gave me an odd smile. “Yeah, something like that. Are you going to call Colin?”
I pulled my cell out of my backpack and dialed. Colin picked up on the third ring.
“Charlie? What’s up? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
I shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see it. “Oh, same ol’ boring crap. You know.”
Colin chuckled. “Yeah, I know. How’s Mom and Dad?”
Wouldn’t he like to know? “They’re fine. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind seeing you once in a while. Dad went on a business trip last weekend with Uncle Jeffrey. I think it went fairly well.”
“Aren’t you even going to pretend you don’t know about the hunting?” I could hear his ironic smile through the line.
“Um, not anymore. I turned eighteen last summer, douche wad, not seventeen. Thanks for the card, by the way.”
“Oh.” Colin’s silence was awkward.
I decided to give him a break. I was over it anyway. “Doesn’t matter. They’d have told me by now either way. Listen, Xan and I are dying to get out of New Haven for the weekend.” I am, at least. “What would you say to us crashing at your place in the city? We’ll bring sleeping bags and try to stay out of your way as much as possible.”
“It’s fine with me. I’m going to hang out with Noah and some of our friends tonight. You guys are welcome.”
I’d always liked our cousin Noah. He was my age—quiet, sweet, and if I wasn’t mistaken, we had something in common in the liking guys instead of chicks department. I wasn’t that good at detection yet, but from what I remembered? Totally. “Sounds great. What time do you want Xan and me to be there?” I elbowed Xan with a smile. It was hard not to grin.
“How ’bout eightish? We usually don’t meet until nine or so.”
“We’ll be there!”
Colin gave me his address—since the punk hadn’t bothered to invite me down before—and I managed to hang up before I gave in to a very undignified fist pump.
Suddenly the weekend didn’t seem quite so lame.
Chapter 2: Things Aren’t Quite As They Seem
“OKAY, YOU two, be cool,” Colin said. “This is my friend PC’s apartment. He’s a great guy, but he doesn’t put up with a lot of stupid crap.”
I didn’t know how to react to that. An eye roll seemed less than was necessary. Did my brother think I was an idiot? Like I was going to start a food fight or something. Some things never changed. And some things did, apparently. Colin had always been kinda in love with himself, but he’d never treated me like I was a moron before. That was new and particularly annoying.
“Yeah. Whatever, dude. Let’s just go in or not go in.” I wondered if all Colin’s friends were as full of themselves as he seemed to have become.
Xan and I had been bouncing ever since we’d ridden out of New Haven on the bus and headed for the city. It was exciting and bright—cool as hell to have a new adventure in the city with no parents or teachers to tell us what to do. Colin was a downer, though. I hadn’t been treated like such a baby since I was in middle school. I started to wonder if it were really the best thing that he’d been gone half the time for the last few years, even when he was still living with us.
My brother knocked on the door. It was opened nearly instantly by this kid with tumbly red-brown hair and big golden eyes. This is PC? The super cool badass guy I have to impress? He was cute and bouncy, and if anything looked even younger than Xan and me.
“Why’d you knock, yo? I told you to just come in whenever.”
I already liked him. He seemed a hell of a lot better than Colin.
“Zack and Noah here?” Colin scanned the room.
“In a little bit. Zack said they were running late.” PC shuddered. “Pretty sure I don’t want to know what that means.”
Colin laughed and ushered Xan and I into the room. “So, PC, this is my little brother Charlie and his best friend Xan. They were tired of New Haven and wanted a little adventure in the city—you did tell Mom, right?”
I groaned. “Jesus Christ, Colin. Way to make me sound twelve. Yes, I told Mom.”
“It’s nice to meet you finally, Charlie. And you too, Xan.” PC stuck his hand out to me and then Xan, who took it, then paused and looked at PC silently.
“Hey,” Xan finally said. He sounded casual, but I knew my friend too well. There was something up with Xan and PC and I wanted to know what it was.
“What was up with that?” I whispered as soon as the others walked away.
Xan shrugged. “Not sure. I’m getting a weird vibe off of that guy.”
“What kind of vibe?”
“Not sure. Just different.”
“O-kay.” I didn’t know what to say beyond that. Xan had never seemed judgmental about someone before. It was odd to see him with hackles raised. It was odd to see him with hackles period.
“Uh, nice place,” I murmured to PC when we got closer. I had to say something. Plus, the place was nice. It was filled with cool antique
s, expensive-looking furniture, and rugs that I knew weren’t reproductions from a discount store. Not exactly the kind of place I imagined a kid who looked like a heartbeat out of high school living.
“Thanks.” PC grinned. “It’s good to know that some people in your family have taste.” He punched Colin. PC was right, though. Colin’s apartment was pretty sparse.
“Where are the others?” Colin asked.
“Amanda’s in the shower. Leila and Jason went to pick me up some pizza. I was the official greeter of new guests.” He dropped into a mock courtly bow. Xan and I laughed. I really did like this PC guy a lot. Colin could take lessons on how not to be a stuck-up douche.
“Who are Amanda and—” I forgot the other names.
“Amanda is one of Noah’s cousins from the other side of the family. Remember the Harpers? Jason and Leila rent a room here too. You’ll like them, I think.”
I vaguely remembered a girl named Amanda from when I was a kid. “Is she the blonde one? Skinny, tall, kind of geeky?”
Colin turned red and PC chuckled. “You haven’t seen her in a while. But back off. She’s got the hots for your brother here.”
Colin elbowed PC and PC snickered. It was clearly an old game. I just smiled.
“It’s okay if you do want to steal her,” PC continued. “Colin can’t seem to get his head pulled out of his ass.”
“Oh, um, I’m not really into chicks,” I mumbled. I’d seen his reaction to Noah and Zack, who I assumed wasn’t just his buddy. Colin was okay with it, but I doubted he’d stick up for me in public.
PC smiled, thank God. “No prob. They’re kind of annoying, aren’t they? Is Xan here your boyfriend?”
I laughed out loud at that. “Uh, no. He’s straight and we’re just really good friends.”
“I can talk, you know.” Xan elbowed me.
“Have a seat, guys. Dinner will be here soon, and I think we’re going to go out later. It shouldn’t be a problem to get you guys into the bar.”