Bound to the Vampire (Hillcrest Hollow Shifters #4)
Chapter 1
Jade
The town was… Yeah, I actually had no words to describe the town I’d managed to find only thanks to some serious swearing at my GPS and some very inventive driving.
I was a city girl through and through, and driving on what could barely be called more than a dirt road was not what I considered fun.
Now I knew why Mrs. Hightower had insisted I rent a four-wheel drive.
The Main Street was so quiet, it might as well be considered abandoned.
It was nothing like the busy Boston streets where I’d grown up, and I could already tell there wasn’t anything even remotely resembling a pub.
There was just a lone diner, with an interior that appeared not to have been updated since the sixties—down to the red vinyl booths and ancient linoleum floors.
If I squinted, I could easily imagine a waitress in roller skates coming out of the kitchen, balancing a tray of ice-cold milkshakes.
Actually, if that were to happen, it would be pretty cool, but I doubted it.
I wasn’t here to sightsee anyway. The mayor had hired me to do a job, and I was going to make damn sure I did it well, no matter the circumstances.
My résumé could not handle another mishap, I thought grimly.
Not that any of the mishaps had been my fault, but unfortunately, that meant diddly squat to future employers.
All they saw was a big black mark. I grimaced, my knuckles growing white as my fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
It was unfair, but that was life. No use crying over spilled milk.
The town was pretty in a weird, quiet way.
The diner I’d already noticed was pristine, if old, with glass so polished it looked like crystal.
The pavement was cracked, the streets uneven, but planters bloomed everywhere with pretty spring flowers.
A B it looked a freaking mess.
I sighed, hoped I was mistaken, but there was this big engraving over the large front doors that boldly stated “Library.” There wasn’t any way to deny it, this was the place.
How was I supposed to look at old books, restore, catalog, inventory them, when the building was at risk of falling down around my ears?
This was not at all the way it had sounded on the phone when I spoke with Mrs. Hightower.
She had some explaining to do. Then again…
how much could I afford to anger my brand-new employer?
That was exactly what had gotten me in trouble last time.
Smoothing my hands over my skirt, I decided I would have to see the interior—and the books—before I made up my mind.
The books were the most important part. Books meant everything, and if they needed me…
Some might call that an obsession, a weird quirk in my character—to put more stock in old, dusty tomes than real-life people.
Some, like my ex. You’d think a fellow librarian would hold similar sentiments, but he’d been more interested in necking in the stacks than dusting shelves. It had gotten old really fast.
This, though… this already was old. Ancient, in fact.
While that could mean a fantastic book collection just waiting to be discovered, facts were facts: this was a tiny town with more abandoned, empty houses than houses with actual living beings.
The town didn’t even appear to boast a school, so it was unlikely there were any interesting books at all.
I got out of the rental anyway, and something that came very close to the excitement at the cusp of discovery buzzed through my veins. In half an hour I was supposed to meet the mayor to go over the details, but I wanted to see the library for myself first.
The street was eerily quiet as I crossed it, and my skin prickled with unease.
It felt like there were eyes on me—dozens of them—but I could not pinpoint where they came from.
Was it the empty, pristine diner that couldn’t possibly stay in business?
Someone watching from that cozy B hand-bound volumes.
I tilted my head to the right and squinted, trying to make out some of the words. Latin, I thought, and maybe something Greek; that meant old. For it to be in a place like this, it had to be a private collection of some kind. It was everything I had hoped to discover before my meeting.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a cool voice snapped harshly from behind me.
There was such glacial disdain, and such elegant polish in that tone at the same time.
I leaped sky-high in fright and managed to slam my forehead painfully into the windowsill, saved only from serious harm by the thick layer of moss that coated it.
Spinning on my heels, I wobbled dangerously and then, to my shame, discovered I’d clasped both hands to my chest like I was a freaking damsel. “Ow! You... you scared me!” I yelped, feeling both guilty and shocked at being caught mid-spying by some local stranger.
Behind me, in the shade of the huge, overgrown hedge, stood a man.
He was wrapped in darkness—tall and handsome.
My pulse leaped in my throat, not from the scare this time, but from something else.
Even mostly in shadows, I could make out the sharp line of his elegant jaw and the width of his shoulders as they tapered toward narrow hips.
He was perfectly proportioned in every way, like some artist had drawn him based on Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.
His eyes were a striking pale blue, like glaciers, and just as cold, too. They pierced me with a suspicious glare that had ice skating down my spine. The only feature truly visible, those eyes seemed to glow in the dark the way cat eyes might, and the magical effect set me on edge.
I was intensely aware of the fact that I was alone with a complete stranger in the back lot of an empty library, inside an equally empty town. My body screamed at me in warning: Danger! Get out of here now. I was so convinced of the threat that I might as well have been facing off with a lion.