And Rick was mostly sane, though he could still feel the moon. He had three weeks to learn whatever he needed to be able to shift. The wolves had done it. So could he. And then he was going after Jane. They had some talking to do.
Read on for a special preview of Raven Cursed,
the next Jane Yellowrock novel,
Coming January 3, 2012, from Roc.
Chapter One
Lots of Things That Go Boom and Kill Bad Guys
I rode into Asheville, North Carolina, for all the wrong reasons, from the wrong direction, on a borrowed bike, with no weapons, ready to work for the vamps again. It was stupid all around, but it was the gig I signed up for, and I was all about satisfying the client, keeping him safe, eliminating the danger, and finishing the job. Or staking the vamp, depending on the job description. Finish the Job had become my second mantra, right behind Have Stakes, Will Travel.
I was not at all happy that I’d taken this gig, once again working for the Blood-Master of the City of New Orleans, Leo Pellissier, though this time was different. Of course that’s what I always think—that there’s a new and better reason to keep up a business relationship with the chief fanghead. Money counts, and the MOC pays extremely well, but I’ve begun to think it’s also because I’m a masochist and curious—as in, curiosity killed the cat.
At the thought, my Beast chuffed with amusement. Not dead. Am good hunter. Smell cooked meat and running deer and mountains. Free-flowing water. We are home.
Yeah, we are. And that thought put a smile on my face despite my misgivings. I’m Jane Yellowrock. I’m licensed and experienced in the security business, but I made my street cred as a rogue-vamp hunter. I am, according to most, the best in the business. I am also a Cherokee skinwalker living with the soul of a mountain lion inside me, the one I call Beast. I may well be the last of my kind, since I killed the only other skinwalker I ever met when he went nutso and started killing and eating people. My occupation has a definite ick factor.
The job at hand was to set up and provide security for the vamp parley taking place in Asheville, and it wasn’t likely that the location was accident or coincidence. Lincoln Shaddock, the most powerful fanghead in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, had been applying to Leo for sixty years for the right to become a Master of the City. Leo—who was a lot more powerful territory-wise than I ever guessed—had turned him down until now. Leo always turned down vamps who thought they deserved to be the master of a city, because he was power hungry and had a god complex—that was nothing new. Now the chief bloodsucker of the South was willing to discuss a change in status for a vamp who wanted my hometown? No way was that a total fluke.
One factor that could have influenced the MOC was that a young vamp in Shaddock’s scion-lair had found her sanity in just two years. That was a record. That was huge. Vamps had been trying to find a way to shorten or defeat the devoveo for two thousand years. But was it huge enough for Leo to reverse course? I had my doubts. No, there was something else. I just didn’t know what. Yet.
Leo never had just one motivation for anything, but layered motives, some focused on his political organization in the world of vamps—like the parley with the witches in New Orleans, which was not going so well, last I heard. Some focused on ancient history. And because the chief MOC of the South was intensely curious about me, maybe some focused on me. Vamps, politics, blood, and sex were all parts of a single whole, and since I was on retainer to Leo, I was now a part of that political maneuvering. Lucky me. My own curiosity was sending me right into the middle of it all, maybe because so many things from the last job seemed like untied ends blowing loose and frayed in hurricane winds. My life, once so uncomplicated, had become a storm that should have sent me running away. But I hadn’t run. I had to Finish the Job.
The new bike took the hills of I-40 with a little wobble. It was a chopped Harley masterpiece named Fang, with a gleaming royal blue paint job and hand-painted saber-toothed fangs on the gas tank between my legs. It was beautiful, comfortable, sexy as all get-out, and had saddlebags to hold my traveling gear, but it wasn’t the best bike for mountain riding. I’d not be buying Fang, no matter how much the owner hoped I would.