"Bindi..." His voice is full of promise. Or perhaps I'm imagining it. I hope not.
"Yes?" I take a chance and step forward.
Before I know what's happening, he reaches out and pulls me to him. His lips crush against mine. I melt into him, kissing him back instantly. I love the way his body presses against mine, like we fit in the best way possible.
The world around us ceases to exist, and it's impossible to think about anything other than Julian and our kiss.
Eventually, we break apart, and stare into one another's eyes.
I take a deep breath, trying to steady my pounding heart. But every second I'm looking at him is another one less that I can protest.
"Do you want to come in?" I ask.
Indecision wars over his face, but I can tell what he's going to say, even before the words are out of his mouth.
"As much as I'd love to, the answer is no."
"Is there anything I can do to change your mind?" Is he worried about it because of what I do for a living? I doubt it. He's not said anything negative about it all night.
He chuckles. "It's not that I don't want to." He reaches out and strokes my cheek.
I close my eyes, enjoying his touch.
"But this started as a fake date, I don't want to take advantage of you."
I blink a couple of times, trying to make sense of what he's saying. On the one hand, I get it. This started as nothing more than a favour for a friend, but that doesn't mean it hasn't become more.
But I'm not going to argue with him. To do so would disrespect his decision, and I can't do that.
"Do I at least get to see you again?" Asking makes me feel like a girl with her first crush.
"I'd like that. I'll text you about it."
"Please, do."
He leans in and presses a kiss against my cheek. "Thank you for tonight, Bindi. I had a great time."
"Me too."
We stare at one another, neither of us wanting to be the first to leave.
But dawn is coming, and we both need to get inside before the sun burns us both.
"You need to go," I say after a moment. "Unless you change your mind about going inside."
He nods. "I know. I'll see you later." He hesitates for a moment, as if he's going to kiss me again, but decides better of it.
I watch as he disappears down the street. I wish things could end differently, but hopefully, I'll get to spend more time with him and we can change the way things stand.
When he's well out of sight, I turn and make my way back into the Black Fan.
"Ah, good, you're back," Lady Catherine says. "I was starting to get worried."
"I'm sorry, I didn't realise it was as late as it is."
She must want to put the shutters down. They keep us safe from the sun, and anyone that can take advantage of our weakness.
"It's okay. We've all been there. Did you have a good time?"
"Is it weird to say yes?"
She'll understand. She's noble herself, even if she's disgraced. She knows what the balls are like.
"Not at all. The Yuletide ball was always my favourite."
"Maybe we should do a similar event here?" I suggest.
"I'll think about it. But you should rest, it's been a long night."
"I will. Thank you."
She smiles, then turns away to sort out the shutters.
I make my way into the next room, hearing the tell-tale whirs and clicks of the metal sliding into place.
Once I'm back in my room, I shut the door and lean against it. My fingers land on the snowflake necklace around my neck, and a small smile spreads over my face. Tonight was nothing like I expected it to be, and I'm glad of it. I hope Julian is too.
And I hope I get to see him again. There's so much more fun we can have if we spend more time together, and perhaps there's something real there too. I guess only time will tell on that front.
Luckily, we're vampires. Time is something we have plenty of.
THE END
Thank you for reading First Oath, I hope you enjoyed the glimpse into Julian and Bindi's story. There's more to come for the two of them in Bite Of The Oath, when they revisit their pact to be in a fake relationship: http://books2read.com/biteoftheoath
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You can find more from the Black Fan below, or you can sign up to my newsletter by grabbing a copy of First Bite: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/mbn2tga74s
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Bite Of The Past
Bite Of The Truth
Bite Of The Oath
More coming soon…
Drop Of Blood is also set in the City Of Blood.
About Laura Greenwood
Laura is a USA Today Bestselling Author of paranormal, fantasy, and urban fantasy romance (though she can occasionally be found writing contemporary romance). When she's not writing, she drinks a lot of tea, tries to resist French macarons, and works towards a diploma in Egyptology. She lives in the UK, where most of her books are set.
Join Laura Online
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Read More of Laura’s Vampire Books
The Black Fan Series
The City Of Blood Series
The Ashryn Barker Trilogy
The Grimalkin Academy: Stakes Series
The Carnival Of Blades Series
The Vampire Detective Series, written with Arizona Tape
Tales Of Clan Robbins Series, written with L.A. Boruff
Hell’s Silver Bells
A Blaize Silver Story
Margo Bond Collins
About Hell’s Silver Bells
Monster-hunter Blaize Silver and her new companion Wolf follow her curse to a small town in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, where the deep snow hides a deadly secret.
Hell’s Silver Bells
“I guess we’d better head out if we’re going to make Tucson by Christmas, huh?”
Wolf’s ears perked up and he tilted his head as he gazed at me with his almost-white eyes. Then he lifted one shoulder in a shrug and jumped into the passenger seat of my van to stare out the window.
Sometimes I forgot that Wolf wasn’t a dog. He wasn’t a pet. Hell, he wasn’t even really a wolf.
He was a werewolf.
At least, that’s what I assumed. I’d never actually seen him change from a wolf into either a person or even a wolfman—that hybrid shape that looks so ridiculous in movies and is abso-fucking-lutely terrifying in reality.
But Wolf turned up to fight with me—and my cousin Grace—against the last werewolf pack we defeated together. And then he showed up again a little while later when the demon who cursed my family attacked us.
Grace died during that battle. If Wolf hadn’t been there to urge me away from her body, I would’ve had to answer to human authorities for her death. So I trusted him. Maybe even more than I should.
I took one last look across the Canadian border in Sweet Grass, Montana. That’s what I’d driven up here for in the first place—to stare across the border that so many other people found permeable, the one that, when I tried to cross it, hit me like a brick wall.
To look out through my invisible cage’s bars.
There was actually a Border Road—that was its name—but I’d learned years ago that it sometimes drifted over to the Canadian side, so I couldn’t drive very far along it. The curse that bound me was absolutely unrelenting in its boundaries.
Someday, I would make my way across that border—or any of the others that bound me to the United States’ southwest—without doubling over in sheer agony. To do that, I was pretty sure I needed to permanently destroy the demon who’d created the curse.
Not this week, though. Time to go home for the holidays.
“Okay,” I sighed. “I’m ready. Tucson, here we come.”
Not that Daddy wo
uld be thrilled to see Wolf with me. I thought he was going to have a heart attack the first time I showed up at his house with a werewolf in tow. Probably the only thing that saved Wolf back then was the news that the silver werewolf had helped save me from the attack that had killed Gracie.
This time I was hoping for some Christmas cheer to put a damper on Daddy’s killing instinct.
I turned the van around from the end of Church Street and made my way back to I-15. Before I pulled out, though, the demon-hunting compulsion sliced through me like a knife through the guts, like the worst case of cramps ever. I slammed on the brakes and managed to slide to the side of the street as I doubled over, wrapping my arms around my waist. Pain whited out my vision for several seconds, and when I came to myself again I was whispering, “Okay, okay. I’ve got it, got it. Colorado. Fine.”
With my acceptance of the knowledge the compulsion gave me, the agony subsided to a dull ache centered behind my ribs, higher than its initial stabbing attack. I realized that Wolf had moved down beside me, his chin resting on my knee, my hands buried in the fur along his ruff. He tilted his head to examine me.
“Looks like we need to stop in Colorado first.” My voice was raw with the aftereffects of the compulsion.
He nodded in his particularly unwolflike way, rubbed his head against my cheek, and jumped back up into the passenger seat.
It could have been worse—I didn’t usually even get that much information about where I was headed. Once in a while, the pain that came with the compulsion simply grew sharper if I headed in the wrong direction and abated if I moved the right way.
Hell of a curse my family carried—confined to the southwest, cursed to hunt monsters, deathly allergic to silver. Always paying for something one of my ancestors did a long time ago. But I intended to break that curse. I’d spent my life hunting the son of a bitch who’d cursed us, who’d decided that the curse needed to be passed down through the generations.
When I did finally come up against him, he killed my cousin Gracie.
Never again, though. Next time, I’d be better prepared to take that fucker out.
I didn’t think this was him, though—the compulsion to go to Colorado didn’t feel like the one that had sent me to Tombstone to face the earth demon.
“No, this feels like a straight-up monster-hunt,” I said aloud to Wolf. I didn’t expect any kind of response from him—not really. I had taken to talking to him aloud as often as possible. If he ever answered me, I’d probably scream my fool head off. In a lot of ways, it was like talking to myself or to a dog. I had to be careful not to let that tendency go too far. It was one thing to bury my hands and face in his fur when I was in pain. It was, however, something entirely different to rub my hand across his head as I walked by like I would a dog. I’d learned that the hard way. Wolf didn’t bite me, but he sure growled like he was about to.
Still, as we headed toward Colorado, I speculated aloud to the non-shifting shifter who’d become my de facto partner.
In the winter snow, it took us two full days to reach our destination, a tiny town high in the San Juan Mountains, nestled at the base of a canyon winding up into the mountains, its walls rising high above the town.
We stopped at a nearby campground, pulling the van into a secluded spot for the night even though the camp was technically closed for the winter. I doubted anyone would be out here to check on us.
In the morning, I’d go into town and see what I could figure out. Until then, I had a new-to-me book I’d picked up at a library sale in some nowhere town we’d passed through, a flashlight with rechargeable batteries that were all full up on power, and the silence of snow falling outside.
I’d gotten used to traveling with Wolf, but the van wasn’t really big enough for two people, or even one person and one werewolf. Several years ago, I had retrofitted the back end with a single bed along one wall, built-in drawers beneath that. The other wall held cabinets, drawers, and a tiny cooking area, complete with a hotplate and a basin for wash-water. Before Wolf joined me, it had been ideal for one person.
Now I found myself drawing the curtain between the front and back parts of my living quarters more often. Not that Wolf wasn’t a perfect gentleman—he was. Any time I started to change clothes, he politely averted his eyes, generally moving to the front passenger seat, which he had claimed as his own.
At night, he slept on the floor beside my sleeping pallet. After he joined me in Tombstone, I stopped at Goodwill and picked up extra blankets for him. There had been a few times, though, when I had been tempted to move down there with him on a particularly cold night.
This was one of them.
One of the problems with my monster-hunting first alert system was its lack of specificity. Horrible pain in my gut didn’t really help me know what I was going to be facing. Hell, even where I was going was often only a guess.
As far as I knew, there was nothing in the tiny town of Creede, Colorado, that warranted my presence. Whatever the danger here might be, it wasn’t obvious at first sight.
A single street made up the bulk of the downtown area, and it was lined with tourist stores carrying overpriced silver jewelry—the kind that made me jerk my hand away in pain when it burned me as I flipped through the display.
This time of year, the entire town was blanketed with white snow. I took Wolf into a local store—San Luis Sports. They were nice enough there to help me figure out cold-weather gear. I had the basics, of course—a warm coat, a scarf, a hat. But this high up in the mountains, I was feeling the altitude in all kinds of ways. Not only was it bitter cold, but I kept running out of breath. I hoped I’d be able to acclimate in time to fight off whatever monster had called me here.
In the meantime, the new hiking boots I bought wiped out most of the last of the money I’d earned at a waitressing gig a while back. Monster hunting didn’t really pay the bills. I was going to have to find work.
I took a moment to assess my clothing. Anywhere else I’d have to head back to the van to change. Lucky for me, the Colorado mountain aesthetic is more about function than form. In my flannel shirt, jeans, and sweater—and now new hiking boots, too—I fit in perfectly with the people I saw strolling along the main street.
The guy running the register was blond, probably in his late twenties—around my age—and everything about him screamed ski instructor. Mr. Cutie Blond’s nametag said he was Steve. I figured if anyone would understand the need for seasonal work, Steve would.
“Hi. Blaize Silver.” I held out my hand for him to shake as I introduced myself. “I’m new in town and looking for work. You know of anything?”
“Not much around here in the winter,” he said with a shrug. “The ski resort up at Wolf Creek can sometimes use extra instructors over the holidays.”
I snorted. In addition to not paying bills, hunting didn’t lend itself much to recreational sports. Most of what I could do involved killing things. “Not really a skier,” I said.
“Maybe your dog could be their mascot,” Steve suggested.
This time Wolf was the one who snorted, and the blond guy blinked. I glanced at Wolf out of the corner of my eye. “Do you have any snow boots for a dog?” I asked lightly. Wolf lifted his nose up in the air and turned his back on me. I snickered.
“Sorry.” Steve sized up my offended companion. “I don’t think any of our pet sweaters will fit him. He’s huge.”
I changed the subject. “So no other work ideas, then?”
“You might check with Nanci down at Rarities,” the guy said. “They sometimes take on extra help during the holidays.”
I hoped he was right and I’d be able to find some kind of work.
Rarities was at the other end of the street, a cross between an art gallery and a jewelry shop. The woman inside was pretty, blonde, somewhere in her fifties, with a wide smile and a voice a little deeper than I expected. “We don’t get as many tourists up here in the winter,” she said. “But I could use some help with inventory.
It wouldn’t be much—just today and tomorrow, if you could start right now.”
“That’s perfect.” I tried not to let my relief show, but it probably came through, anyway. “I’m only in town for a little while. I’d like to make gas money to get to Arizona to visit family.” I shrugged off my coat. “Is it okay if my dog stays inside, too? He’s well trained.”
“Sure.” She leaned down and scratched his head. Wolf endured the attention stoically, though he shot me a reproachful look.
I ignored him.
Two days. That was how long I had to learn why the curse had brought me here.
As it turned out, it was easy to figure out what we were dealing with. Maybe a little too easy.
I spent that day working with Nanci. She was talkative and laughed easily, and while we worked, I was able to entertain her with some of my less supernatural stories of being on the road. At the end of the day, she paid me in cash.
After we left Rarities for the day, we stopped at the one open restaurant, where the owner didn’t allow Wolf inside—so I got him an order of enchiladas and beans, too. “That’s it, dude,” I said when Wolf whined for more. “Unless you can start pulling your financial weight around here, you’re going to have to go catch rabbits or something.”
He peered at the snow outside and huffed.
“That’s the price you pay for traveling with a Silver.”
He ignored me and went to sleep.
When I got up the next morning, I saw why the campground was closed in the winter. The road that we’d used to come in, already barely a track when we’d parked the night before, was all but obliterated by new snowfall overnight. Luckily, I had a shovel in the van—not a snow shovel, unfortunately, but it was enough to do the job. Especially with Wolf’s help, periodic though it may have been. I think he enjoyed rolling around in the fresh snow as much as he wanted to help get the van out of its space.
Holidays Bite: A Limited Edition Collection of Winter Holiday Vampire Tales Page 4