Chapter 1
One
JULIAN
The drive to Vesper Point from Seattle is about an hour and a half. Less if I’m pissed and driving faster than I should, like I am today. I grit my teeth and grip the steering wheel so hard the frame groans under my hands.
“Relax,” I order myself. My words come out more of a growl than anything. A reminder that I’m fucking starving. I knew I should have gotten something to eat before I left the city. I force myself to relax my grip before I rip the damn wheel off and end up going through a guardrail.
The roads here are winding and narrow. Hairpin turns that vanish into trees and two lanes with the ocean rising up right alongside roads that rise and fall with the mountains.
If you weren’t paying attention it was easy to forget anyone else was on the road with you.
Cars just a few seconds ahead of you vanish into thin air from one moment to the next before reappearing again just when you’ve started to pick up speed.
A treacherous thing indeed when the weather is bad or a driver distracted while speeding.
As it is, I have all three going for me on my journey into Vesper Point.
A flash of lightning breaks through the gloomy sky.
If I was human, I’d be in a tight spot. The rain falls so hard and fast it’s impossible to see more than a few feet ahead even for someone going half the speed limit.
I’m going at least twenty over. Thank fuck, I’m not human or I’d be dead with how distracted I am.
How did I fuck myself this bad?
That’s the maddening thought pulling my focus off arriving in Vesper Point in one piece. I’m careful, smart, prepared and never, fucking ever, was I dumb enough to trust someone.
So then how did they get the drop on you?
My fangs grow in frustration and the sharp tips bite into my lip. I know how it happened.
I broke one of my rules like an idiot doe-eyed fledgling. I trusted someone.
Not just someone…my maker.
The only soul that had a prayer of getting their hooks in me because their damned hooks had been in me from the second they drained me.
Rosanna.
That heartless, fucking beautiful bitch.
She’d snapped her fingers and of course I’d let her ruin my life.
In Seattle, I was a respected doctor. A hospitalist. I was the one you called in when not even the specialists had a clue what they were looking at.
Flesh-eating diseases contracted through a miniscule cut while slipping near a waterfall in Hawaii?
I’d diagnosed it. Identifying heart failure because of hiccups?
Yeah, me again. Rushing a patient into surgery to stop aortic dissection? Just another Wednesday morning.
I may have been in Seattle for a minute but I wasn’t bored of the city or my job.
Call it a twisted sense of morality but doing good made the centuries pass a lot faster.
I’d been alive for three hundred years and before I’d become interested in medicine, the whole living forever thing seemed a bit much.
A hospital was a veritable fountain of life and death.
A buffet of triumph and sorrow. Every day I was reminded just how thin the line between living and dying really was.
When you were a vampire those kinds of things lost their meaning—and when that happened, vampires lost all sense of civility.
They reverted right back into the psycho hell beasts they were intended to be.
That wasn’t really my thing. It never had been.
I’d much prefer a life of luxury and mental stimulation to mindless feeding and fucking. Besides, there was the real reason I was working in the hospital.
The food.
For a vampire, a hospital is like a supermarket someone’s thrown wide open for a game show, free for all.
Instead of a ticking clock urging me to run through the aisles with a stupid cart with a bad wheel, I was able to peruse the menu.
All patients that crossed my path were up for grabs but as a doctor I had access to their medical records and blood samples.
I could, at my leisure, taste and sample my way through the day’s new arrivals.
If one struck my fancy, I’d pay them a visit for a meal.
Fuck delivery. It didn’t get any fresher than that for a vampire.
A blessing and a curse to be sure. It was that access that had brought Rosanna back to me after our stint in Budapest. I hadn’t seen her since the 20s and then she’d turned up on my doorstep and brought her particular brand of bullshit with her.
“Fucking Rosanna. Cursed cunt,” I mutter, cursing my maker.
She was still in Seattle and there she’d stay, far fucking away from me.
She wouldn’t bother me where I was going.
Rosanna had a healthy aversion to small towns and Vesper Point was the epitome of small coastal town living, or at least that’s what Aubrey told me.
As if summoned by my thoughts, my phone dings with a text.
I don’t have to look to know who it is. Aubrey.
Talented concierge and dutiful assistant for hire to the vampire elite.
I’d hired Aubrey just that week to get me the fuck out of Seattle.
Aubrey was the best. Efficient, respectful, and result driven, just as was to be expected when working with vamps.
She had to be. We weren’t exactly known for our patience or empathy, now were we?
How or why Aubrey had picked Vesper Point for my relocation was a mystery to me, but I wasn’t in the best spot to bitch so I took the move on the chin.
Another text dings through on my phone. Curious.
I wonder what has Aubrey double texting?
As much as that triggers my interest, I don’t pick up my phone.
Instead, I keep both hands on the wheel and do my best impression of a safe driver.
My switch to safety-conscious wasn’t by choice, it was by necessity.
Even if a human couldn’t see more than a few feet through the rain, I could.
The headlights up ahead are the reason for me not reaching to read Aubrey’s texts like I might have a mile or so back.
A wreck is the opposite of a low profile and all that.
What would even be the point of leaving the city I’d called home for the better part of a decade if I went crashing into a human the second I left town?
The road dips and the headlights vanish before they reappear again. It’s a truck. I sigh when they come over the hill too fast and hydroplane towards me for a second before they manage to pull their car back into their lane.
“Idiot humans,” I mutter as the truck bounces by. Five bucks says they slam into a tree in half an hour.
My phone trills with a call. Aubrey’s name flashes across the console and I accept the call. It’s perfectly acceptable to be handsfree while driving. I tap the screen to accept the call and practically feel my car insurance lower from how damn mindful I’m being.
“Aubrey,” I greet.
“Julian! Hi, how’s the drive?” She sounds chipper.
Happy and bubbly. The exact opposite of what someone might imagine when they think of a vampire assistant but that’s probably why Aubrey is so good at what she does.
No one would ever look twice at her and wonder what she does for work. Discretion is her speciality.
“Wet,” I tell her and frown up at the sky. There’s a boom of thunder and the telltale flash of lightning a second later. “I’m in the middle of a storm. It’s slowing me down some.”
Aubrey hums. “Bummer. I guess that’s why you weren’t answering my texts.”
“Driving safety is important,” I remind her.
“How very responsible of you, Doctor Vale.”
“You had it right before.” I sigh and slow around another curve. “Just Julian.”
“Right. Julian. I wasn’t calling just to check on your drive. I was calling with an update on your…situation.”
Situation. That’s what we’re calling almost losing my job over the loss of 500 pints of blood because my fucking maker set me up and stole it.
I nod even though Aubrey can’t see it. “Yes, that. What’s the update?”
“Your maker has been apprehended by the authorities.”
A pang of remorse hits me. The authorities in the vampire world are even worse than the barely graduated high school asshole human cops that harass anyone they don’t like the look of.
For us order and hierarchy are maintained by a council of a select few.
We call them the Varcolacus. Between the five of them they have enough power and enough foot soldiers that stepping out of line isn’t just frowned upon, it’s the quickest way to earn the Final Death.
If Rosanna’s been taken by the Varcolacus her days are numbered. No doubt they’ll give her the Final Death. I lean back into my seat while I wait for Aubrey to keep speaking.
“She’s going on trial in six month’s time. I, well, I thought you should know.”
“How did she get caught?”
“She got sloppy. Was trying to unload too much of the blood at once. The hospital had already started their investigation. Your leaving definitely caused notice but when Rosanna hit the blood market with the quantity she was trying to move they locked onto her. No one knows who she is to you so I think with a bit of time you’ll be in the clear to return to Seattle. Maybe after her trial and sentencing.”
That’s another thing about hospitals. They know vampires exist. At least, the ones high enough up the chain do. Humans at large are ignorant about the supernatural. They have no idea that vampires exist. They barely even understand that witches are real, so what can you really expect from them?
There are some that know our secret. The ones in power do and the ones with money certainly do.
Hospitals liked both power and money, which made my job risky.
I prized my privacy above all else. Passing as human helped me maintain the life I enjoyed but one wrong move from me as a doctor could bring that all down by putting me on the wrong people’s radar.
So far, my involvement in Rosanna’s theft was surface level stuff.
Maybe they thought I was her boyfriend or family member.
Someone whose key card got swiped and abused without them knowing.
That was the story I was pushing. It was thin but was holding.
Now more so than ever with Rosanna foolishly trying to sell on the market.
“How could she be so stupid?” I ask. My question is more rhetorical but Aubrey answers me because I pay her to answer me.
“She got greedy. From what I heard, she made good money the day before. Thought she could settle up and leave town once she got her payout.”
“It was always one more big score with her.”
I’m not surprised Rosanna’s greed did her in.
I’d spent over two hundred years with Rosanna.
In all that time we were always scheming.
Working on her next big job. She’d been a whore when they’d turned her and she’d never lost that mentality.
It didn’t matter how fine a palace I gave her or how sumptuous a feast. I could lay an entire city at her feet and she’d still be trying to gamble it away for something bigger. Something better.
There was always more in Rosanna’s world. How fitting that hunger for more would bring her the Final Death.
Aubrey doesn’t chat long. I’m grateful for it. I’m in no mood for conversation after finding out about Rosanna. Aubrey goes over the details for my new home address, the particulars of letting myself in and what to expect when I arrive in Vesper Point.
“It’s a small place. Everyone has been there for generations but they’re friendly folks. You’ll fit right in. I bet you’ll get invited to at least three dinners as the new doctor in town.”
Great. Just what I want. Human dinners.
“Anyways, if you run into any trouble at all just give me a ring. I have staff on standby that can clean up any complications if you need. Remember, you paid extra for that add-on so don’t hesitate to make use of the service.”
She means in case I need a body disposed of. I usually handle my own garbage but after my mess with Rosanna, I’ll call them if I need to.
“You’ll run into a few supes in town but they’re local.”
I didn’t expect that. Aubrey never mentioned any supes when we went over Vesper Point for my relocation. “Like what?”
“A few witches. A shifter family or two. I think there’s a selkie down the street from you, oh! I almost forgot the merfolk.”
I make a face. Fucking mermaids. I’ve never met one and I aim to keep it that way.
“Any vampires?”
“Yes but just one. He works at the hospital with you.”
I grit my teeth. “How perfect.”
“It’ll be fine. He’s an old-timer. Bet you won’t hear a peep from him. Might even make a friend,” Aubrey threatens. We wrap up the call and she disconnects, satisfied that I’m as prepared as I can be for Vesper Point, though I’m not entirely sure how prepared I need to be for such a small town.
I mean, what really could go wrong in a place as sleepy as this?