Frost Bite (Pine Ridge Universe)

Chapter One

Brax swallowed his alcohol, hoping it would warm him up. “Might as well move to effing Alaska,” he hissed through clenched teeth as he shivered. He preferred New Orleans, had gotten by just fine for the last... one hundred and twenty years?

But then...

You sleep with one Voodoo Queen and then eat her favorite errand boy, and suddenly you’re cursed. Can’t kill. Can’t bite to feed. Can’t even hurt a human without the pain rebounding instantly at tenfold...

Marietta had clearly intended to starve him out and send him mad, putting him through enough suffering that he’d decide a sunny walk was in order, or maybe a quick jab with a wooden stake would let him leave this miserable planet.

It wasn’t much fun anymore, that was for sure.

But Marietta was almost as old as he was, and much more steeped in her archaic ways. She didn’t think about things like blood banks. She didn’t know vamps could feed on animals—if they wanted to turn into weaklings.

No, he was going to get himself uncursed somehow, someday; he just hadn’t figured out how.

The best way to stay alive in the meantime was to get the hell away from Marietta, who might up the ante if she figured out he wasn’t heading to his second death fast enough for her liking, and head to someplace where he could survive out of danger.

A place like miserable little Pine Ridge, where the monsters were irritatingly kind, good, and accepting of him, as long as he pretended to be reformed. A place where he could hunt deer and boar, and even the occasional bear—or simply ask the local butcher to put in a standing order.

There were other vampires in town to mimic and learn from. Husbands. Fathers. Civil-fucking-servants who volunteered for everything from gingerbread competition judging to organizing the local neighborhood watch. The only things missing were the neon vest and an ingratiating smile.

Brax shivered and considered his options. It was Christmas Eve. The temperature must have plummeted into the negatives. He didn’t think the butcher would be open at this hour, and any game was well hidden.

He stopped pacing and stared at the ceiling, suddenly aware of something new.

Icicles.

Inside.

Inside, not near any windows.

A sudden gust of freakishly cold wind blew through his sealed apartment, and he threw up his hands.

“It must be below freezing in here!” He grabbed his coat, a long dark leather trench affair that made him look mysterious and dangerous. Tourist-y girls in New Orleans had loved the look—dark eyeliner, pale skin, long brown-black hair, and large amounts of leather.

He’d slept with most of his meals.

“Don’t think about that, Abraxus,” Brax scolded himself as he shivered. That was another type of warm, another type of feeding he missed.

As if on cue, he heard a startled cry from his next-door neighbor, and his mind did forbidden things.

It pictured Penny, the neighbor in question, blonde and wiry, sun-kissed skin, a scowl, and a stake.

She’d made it very clear that she knew what he was, and unlike most other humans in town, who were either oblivious or friendly to the paranormal kind, she radiated hostility.

She always wore a huge silver cross, Gothic style, and had crosses placed at the upper corners of her door.

She wore short leather skirts, and every time she saw him, she made sure to flash her legs—to let him see the stake-dagger combo tucked into the top of her black knit stockings.

Every “Do Not Touch” sign a human could give, she gave.

But in spite of that (or maybe because of that?), she had become his current obsession. It was unhealthy, really.

Marietta was right. He liked to put himself in situations where he didn’t just press his luck; he flattened it.

With Penny, he used a steamroller.

Whenever Penny washed her clothes at the communal washer at the end of the hall, he would appear, a mostly empty basket in his arm, and try to make small talk. She’d answer in barely civil tones, and that was for the sake of the neighbors in the hall.

He’d tried to touch her elbow once and found himself with a stake beside his jugular.

Hunting her might warm him up. Might be fun, too. He couldn’t hurt her, but he could chase her—or he could if his feet weren’t slowly turning to blocks of ice.

Above him, he heard a loud thud and a sharp cry of “Oh, no!”

“Wonderful,” he muttered sarcastically. “Stupid, wannabe witch.”

The woman upstairs was not a proper witch, one with magic in her blood.

She was working on it from scratch, with grit, determination, and a staggering amount of magical accidents.

The number of talking mice and singing ants he’d seen since moving in was enough to put on a children’s movie extravaganza.

He didn’t even want to think about the day everyone in the building walked and talked backwards—although most of them didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss.

Brax tossed the empty whiskey bottle from his hand as he went to the cubby-sized kitchen, going back to search his fridge in the vain hope that more blood bags had suddenly appeared.

He was no warmer. He was out of blood, having burned through everything he had, heating it up in the microwave and downing it to stay any sort of warm.

Vamps are cool to the touch even in the best of weather.

Frostbite wouldn’t kill him. Hypothermia wouldn’t kill him.

However, extended time in freezing weather could hurt him plenty, and healing from such damage was long and painful, not to mention disgusting.

It would also require tons of human blood, and oh, yeah, he wasn’t going to have any of that any time soon.

He made a snap decision. He was leaving this apartment before whatever the witch upstairs had done could trickle down to him.

Another freak gust of wind zipped through his apartment, knocking over empty plastic quart jars stained sticky red.

“All right. Wind and ice inside? That’s never a good sign. Not gonna find me here, a Brax-icicle,” he grumbled, hugging his coat around him more tightly and clutching his car keys in numb fingers.

“UGH.” PENNY SAT UP and looked at her phone with bleary eyes.

Four in the afternoon, Christmas Eve. She was supposed to go visit her parents, who lived just outside of the epicenter of little Pine Ridge, in a nice split-level off the highway.

If she kept going down the road from her parents’ house, she’d reach the big arena where the Lumberjacks played.

She wasn’t a fan of the minor league hockey team, hadn’t been since the time when she was a kid and saw the monster on the ice—and dozens more in the crowd.

She’d freaked. Her parents hadn’t believed her, of course.

She found out later that most humans couldn’t see what she was seeing.

The more she persisted, the closer they got to putting her in some kind of mental institution—which they did later, anyway—so she’d stopped talking and made it her mission to get the hell away from this town.

Other towns didn’t have a monster problem—or at least, not like this.

“Mom?” Penny put a hand to her head. No. Not Mom. Mom and Dad didn’t live with her. She moved out—unfortunately, into town, near the campus of NYU at Pine Ridge, because that was the college her parents could pay for, and that was the rent she could afford.

Why am I calling for Mom? Why is my head on fire?

Why is my hand on fire? Penny pulled her palm away to actually look at it.

“Nope. No flames. No fire. Not frying, fricaseeing, flaming—fever!” All the f words finally narrowed down to the one she needed to describe the problem. She felt like she was on fire, and the fire was inside, and that was a fever! That must be why she’d had to lie down and felt so sick.

Her eyes widened when she stumbled into the wall of her basement apartment. Her thermostat read ninety. She cranked it down.

It didn’t budge. The reading didn’t go any higher than ninety. She bet if it had gone up to 100 or 200, the needle would still be jammed all the way to the right.

In a daze, she shed her pajama bottom and sweatshirt top that she’d napped in. Walking around the apartment in panties and a tank top, she texted her mom.

Penny: Mom, I’m sick. Fever. Seeing if it breaks, and then I’ll be over.

Mom: Stay home tonight and rest. Get all better. You don’t want to give Daddy anything. Sleep, fluids, fever reducers, and stay warm. Don’t go out. It’s frigid outside.

Penny had to concentrate hard to make that make sense, and then was barely able to remember that her father had just had a kidney stone operation and her mother was being extra protective. Christmas would be small this year, just her parents, her brothers, and her. If she could get better.

“Cold water. Tylenol.”

Stay warm? Got that covered.

But when Penny turned on the tap in the kitchen, she knew that something about this screwy supernatural town had made her sick and delirious.

Steam blew out instead of water. She had no windows, but the walls were hot.

They were slick and damp, like the inside of an unairconditioned classroom on the hottest day of June.

I bet you it has something to do with that vampire next door...

I have to get out of here.

She slipped on the old pink canvas shoes she wore for running quick errands, like taking out the trash or getting the mail out of the lobby.

Some little part of her fever-soaked brain told her that she should not go outside in just underwear and a tank top, that it was too cold for such things, but she ignored it.

Mom said don’t go out. It’s cold. Frigid.

I want to be cold. Need to be cold. If I’m not cold soon, I think I’ll die. Literally melt. Like that snowman in the song.