balls, powder and a short iron ramrod. Making quick order of reloading, she tossed aside the ramrod. She may need to fend off another wolf. The pistol would give Viviane the advantage of distance but once.
Bending over the coachman, she pressed his eyelids closed. “Rest in peace.” She thought to make the sign of the cross over his body, but the detail seemed bothersome.
Pistol in hand, Viviane tromped through the snow. The wolf—she paused, struck by what lay on the snow where once the four-legged creature had been.
“Sacre bleu.” It was—a werewolf.
A man, bare and bleeding at the neck, lay sprawled where she had snapped the wolf’s neck. In human form he was called were. Dark glassy eyes sought hers. Alive yet, despite what she’d thought a spine-severing move.
“I did not know,” she offered, nervous suddenly, whipping her head about to scan the periphery. No wolves lurked nearby.
The were’s eyelids shuttered. His head sank into the snow and his muscles relaxed with death. Blood spilled from his mouth to stain the scrap of white fabric he’d torn from the coachman’s neck.
Minneapolis, modern day
RHYS HAWKES MOVED THROUGH the Irish-themed pub with a swaying stride. It was past midnight, but O’Leary’s stayed open until two. The owner, not an Irishman but rather a German who’d married into the family, granted him carte blanche. The high-tech, temperature-controlled cellar was always open for Rhys to select a bottle of wine, whiskey, or to relax in the cool darkness after a long day at Hawkes Associates.
More than just a bank, Hawkes Associates stored treasures, housed certain volatile objects of a magical nature and offered the various paranormal nations, Light, Dark, Faery and otherwise, a safe and lasting place to keep—and exchange for new currency—their money and valuables as they passed through the centuries.
His firm was the only of its kind and had offices in New York, Minnesota and Florida, four more in Europe and one in China. The Paris office served as his home base.
He didn’t own this pub, but he was considering buying it.
Rhys didn’t get involved in the daily management details of the clubs he collected as if they were baseball cards. They were investments. And rarely did he mingle with the crowds. He was a lone wolf—make that vampire.
Still clinging to the same excuses.
Not an excuse, just an easier summation.
Tonight he was in business mode, eyeing the place for potential.
At the blue neon bar, two college guys exchanged what Rhys had decided were urban legends. The one about the man with the hook instead of a hand was common. But he’d never heard the one about the mermaid swimming the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. He kept the men’s conversation in peripheral range for the humor.
A waitress clad in a shimmy of green satin and beads snuck past him and slipped behind the bar. The scent of alcohol made Rhys nostalgic for the real whisky he’d once drunk in Scotland. Not his homeland, but a safe hiding place when the vampires had sought to extinguish the werewolves from France during the Revolution. He hadn’t been hiding; he’d been in mourning.
The world had evolved over the centuries, but the disease between the wolves and vampires could never be healed. Most days Rhys was fine with that. Other days he wished he could have done more.
Of course, his situation was the stickiest. There was no definite “side” for him. He had once been persecuted for his differences—by those of his own blood. He and his nemesis had battled for decades. Neither had claimed victory.
Until she had become involved. She had changed everything. And since then, nothing had been the same.
It was rare Rhys thought of her, and always those azure eyes.
But for a man who had walked the earth two and a half centuries it was easy to pine for a long-departed lover who whispered ghostly sonnets in his thoughts.
Rhys smirked at his wistful memories.
“Heartbreak,” he muttered. It clung like a bitch with fangs.
With one ear taking in the legends, Rhys’s ears perked up when he heard the men start talking about a Vampire Snow White.
“Yeah, you know. The chick buried in a glass coffin by some prince.”
“That was a cartoon, dude.”
“I know, but listen. They say a vampire chick fell in love with a man who was a vampire or maybe he was a werewolf. I’m not clear on that detail,” one of them said.
Rhys slid onto a bar stool. He smiled at the men and pushed the crystal peanut bowl between his hands. They regarded him with nods.
“Vampires and werewolves are fiction,” one man said.
“Whatever. So are urban legends, but you wanted one you’d never heard for tomorrow’s blog.”
“All right, give it to me. So she fell in love with a guy who might have been a vamp—”
“Or maybe a werewolf. But she was being courted by a vampire, too. An evil vampire.”
Rhys’s fingers curled into a fist. He felt the muscles at the back of his neck tighten. He wanted to grip the man and shake the rest of the tale out of him, but he checked his growing urgency.
“Anyway, so this vampire chick falls in love with the man who wasn’t what he seemed and they get married or something. I don’t know. I’m foggy on that detail. Only the evil vampire is pissed, see. So something happens to separate the two—the chick and her lover—and the evil vampire locks her away in a glass coffin and buries her like some kind of Goth Snow White.”
“That’s a dorky legend. Couldn’t she have broken the glass?”
“No, dude, get this. The vampire had a warlock put her under a spell. She couldn’t move, but would live forever. So she can see out the glass coffin, but can’t move or scream. So the legend says she went mad, and she’s probably still buried somewhere beneath the streets of Paris. You know they have all those tunnels under Paris.” “Huh. So what if she escaped?” “Don’t know, man. That’d be one freaky bloodsucking chick.”
The men tilted back swigs from their beer bottles.
“Sweet. But, dude, so not true.”
“Tell me about it. Vampirella gone mad.”
“I’d offer my neck to Vampirella any day. She is so sexy.”
“She’s a cartoon, too.” The storyteller swiped an arm across his lips. “You going to put it on the blog?”
“Yeah, we’ll see. Buy me another beer, dude, this one’s tapped. So what’s with the man who was a vampire or maybe a werewolf?”
“I don’t know. That’s how I heard it told.” “So you mean he’s different, like, where his hand should be—” the guy assumed a melodramatic tone “—was a stainless-steel hook!” Rhys
