Dark: A Dark Paranormal Romance (Blood Moon, Texas Shifters Book 1) Read online

  DARK

  By Kat Kinney

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  1

  Then

  2

  3

  Then

  4

  5

  6

  Then

  7

  8

  Then

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kat Kinney.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, scanned, photographed, transmitted or distributed in any printed or electronic form without explicit written permission from the author.

  Disclaimer: The book cover uses a model image. There is no connection between the model in the image and the character in the novel. The individual depicted is a model and used only for illustrative purposes.

  Cover design by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.

  www.gobookcoverdesign.com

  Cover Photography by:

  ©Lakhesis/Dreamstime.com

  ©Dmitrybakulov/Dreamstime.com

  1

  Hayden

  “ARE YOU HOOKING UP WITH HIM?” my sister asked suspiciously.

  Sighing, I switched to speaker and tossed my phone onto the seat. The stoplight overhead swayed in the wind, casting the rain-soaked streets of Blood Moon, Texas (population: more cows than people) slasher-flick red.

  “Yeah. I play the club scene every week down in Austin. Then tend bar Sunday through Thursday to make rent. But absolutely, I have to drive two hours out to the middle of nowhere if I want to get laid.”

  Releasing the clutch, I started to pull through the intersection. As if on cue, the engine of my aging Volvo went into Oscar-worthy death spasms. After twenty years, Axel’s doors no longer locked. Two of the windows didn’t roll down. The top of the gear shift was currently being held on with duct tape. But on the bright side, I never had to worry about coming out of a gig at 1 a.m. to discover my car had been stolen.

  “I just don’t understand why you’d want to see him now.”

  I pulled into a spot on Main. A picture of me and Ellie stared up at me from my phone’s cracked screen. In it, my sister’s wild curls sprang loose from a pair of chopsticks while I pouted my lip ring for the camera.

  “You’ve spent three years avoiding him,” Ellie continued. “I’m worried this is some sort of PTSD thing.”

  “Holy overreaction, Batman. For your information, the Daisies have been building our fanbase, recording demos—”

  “Riiiight. Which is why you beg me to sneak into Guillermo’s and get you poblano cheese tamales and a Mexican Coke whenever I’m back in town.”

  “Um, burn?”

  “Sorry, but you know Ethan Caldwell is probably hoping while you’re admiring each other’s new ink, you’ll somehow trip and fall on his dick.”

  Rolling my eyes, I tugged down the hem of my front-zip leather skirt. Ellie classified my style as Kristen Stewart-meets-biker-chick, which, okay, was fair. Dark hair. Pale complexion. And also, I looked freaking amazing in black. Think bitching moto jackets and ripped skinny jeans. Band tees and studded leather belts. I made exceptions, like for the pair of cherry-red Doc Martens Piper and Meera sent one year for my birthday. No cat familiar, unless you counted Axel.

  “He doesn’t even know I’m coming.”

  “Hayden.” Ellie hesitated. “You would tell me, right, if you remembered something else from the night you were mugged?”

  “What is this, an intervention?”

  “No, but—”

  “—because I think we should go all out like we did back when Meera first discovered how to retweet cat memes and Piper thought she was going to have to take away her phone. I’ll pick up Sour Cream Pringles and Chunky Monkey. You can order Pad Thai from the place on South Lamar.”

  “Ugh. Can you dial it down with the snark? I’m worried, that’s all. The fever, the confusion, the blackouts. And now your eyes—”

  I raked a hand through my hair, wanting to kick myself for having forgotten my sunglasses that morning. “It was just the flu. I’m over it.”

  “So what about—"

  “There’s nothing to tell. I was coming out of a club. Someone didn’t get the starving artist memo. Hope they didn’t blow the $7.32 in my bank account all in one place.”

  “Austin has cameras downtown now, and I’ve been reading up on facial recognition software.”

  Shit. Of course she had. My sister was valedictorian, had memorized the entire freaking manual from the Department of Motor Vehicles because the idea of missing a question on a test, any test, made her break out in hives.

  Clearly encouraged by my silence, Ellie plowed ahead. “If they could identify the person who attacked you—"

  “It was dark. And the cameras aren’t everywhere.”

  “And you know this because?”

  The phone fell silent. I picked at the chipped indigo polish on my nails. After four weeks, I could tell Ellie wanted to call me out, that neither she nor my aunts were buying that I couldn’t remember what happened that night. And that was the problem. Because for their own protection, I couldn’t tell them that when I woke up in the alley, my phone and guitar were only a few yards away. That as I struggled to my feet, dizzy and disoriented, I found a message scrawled across my arm in black Sharpie.

  HOSPITALS NOT SAFE

  After an hour spent curled up shivering in my front seat, I’d somehow driven home, where my aunts were already asleep. Shaking like a junkie forced into zombie withdrawal after binge-watching an entire season of The Walking Dead, I frantically scrubbed the message from my skin with alcohol wipes, stripped naked and checked myself over in the harsh flickering light of the bathroom mirror.

  No marks. No scrapes from where I'd face-planted on the asphalt. No bumps or bruises. But there was something wrong with my eyes, the light over the sink suddenly so painful I had to switch it off and fumble for my toothbrush in the dark. Over the next hour, my vision alternated between blurring so much I thought I might faint and sharpening to the point I could count every fiber on Piper’s handwoven Moroccan bathmat. A concussion. It had to be.

  But as I sat on the floor of the shower, barely noticing as the scalding water slowly ran cold, a thought nagged at me. If it was a mugging, why hadn’t they taken anything?

  “There’s something off about that town,” Ellie said after a moment. “You know I wouldn’t even go back twice a month if it weren’t for my internship at the after-hours clinic.”

  So, the 4-1-1 on our hometown.

  In the three years since vampires were outed to the human world, there has never been a confirmed supernatural sighting in Blood Moon. But no one has forgotten that it was less than ten miles from here where the first vamp ever to be caught on dashcam footage panicked when officers started to snap cuffs on his wrists, sank fangs into the neck of the closest deputy and vanished into thin air.

  The internet, predictably, flipped its shit. Rumors ran rampant. The deputy was later found unharmed half a mile away in an empty cornfield. Even under hypnosis by a world-renowned psychiatrist, the officer was unable to recall anything that had transpired tha
t day from the moment he’d gone downstairs to turn on the coffee pot, leading to speculation vamps could perform some sort of mind control. Because he took the risk of flashing out as dawn approached, rumors swirled prickheads couldn’t be exposed to the sun.

  Grave shift workers were dragged in for questioning. The price of silver and garlic supplements skyrocketed on Amazon. New laws had to be established about the carrying of wooden stakes after a man went full-on Buffy on a crowded subway in New York. The next few months fell into a pattern of unexplained disappearances, public panic, mass raids and protests. And as far as anyone knew, no arrests. The vamps, for their part, had gone completely dark.

  Then last year, someone posted a video on YouTube of a group of hipsters partying naked at a campsite out in Oregon. Because, you know, Oregon. It was your typical drum-circle, one dude with skill for every three with weed, up until the end where two of the men appeared to shift into giant wolves. The video was quickly taken down and announced to be a hoax, but that didn’t stop the rumors.

  Some, Blood Moon, Texas among them, decided to capitalize on the paranormal craze, turning our small economically-depressed Hill Country town on the shores of Lake Buchanan into a tourist destination for all the closeted Potter-heads (cough, Ellie) and romance readers hoping to eat mushroom ravioli with their very own Edward Cullen. Which, whatever. #TeamJacob all the way. The school board even renamed the high school mascot the Howlers.

  I’d always dismissed the talks of government raids and supernaturals coming to kill us all in the night as mostly for the tinfoil-hat wearing crowd. The kind of thing you had time to worry about when you weren’t having to serve up mojitos until 2 a.m. in addition to picking up substitute gigs as a teacher’s aide when things got tight to make sure your sister could stay on her medication and didn’t have to drop out of school.

  Until the note on my arm. Until the memory that jerked me awake night after night of the dark figure looming over me in the alley. Until two days after I woke up alone behind a dumpster, when the fever struck.

  I twisted my hair around one hand, the muggy September air clinging to my skin. “I just need to see him. I’m sorry. I can’t give you a reason. I can’t even explain it to myself.”

  “That’s why I’m worried. You’ve been acting off since the attack. My therapist says sometimes certain behaviors can follow in the wake of a traumatic event—”

  “We’re. Not. Going. To. Hook. Up.”

  “You did before.”

  “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but I swear on my new set of strings I couldn’t pick his dick out of a line-up.”

  The phone exploded with the sound of barking. I let my head flop back against the seat, hoping my sister wasn’t being eaten by someone’s Great Dane. All minimum-wage jobs were a suck-fest. But did Ellie really have to pick one where she flung cookies at hundred-pound dogs while trying to convince them to let her give them a mani-pedi?

  “—saw the texts you used to send.” A door closed and the barking faded into the background. “You can’t tell me nothing ever happened between you two.”

  Suddenly it was as if all the air had been squeezed from my chest. I drew up my sleeve, fingers tracing the intricate swirls of the daisy inked on my forearm. “We hooked up once. Happy, Nancy Drew? And before you ask, I was nineteen.”

  For a long moment, Ellie was silent.

  “Hayden, you know I’ll always stand by you, right? If you’ve gotten into something bad—”

  HOSPITALS NOT SAFE

  I closed my eyes, fingers twitching through the opening chords to Killer Queen. I thought back through every misdirection I’d already tried. Drugs. Owing someone money. That I’d gotten hooked up with a gang. Going to the hospital wasn’t an option. But I couldn’t tell Ellie the real reason why. I couldn’t lose her, too.

  With our dad gone, it was just the two of us. And our aunts, although I was never sure how much to count on Piper in emergencies that didn’t involve split ends or midnight runs to the Walmart for Rocky Road. If Ellie had been wise beyond her years from the time she won the school science fair in freaking second grade (because, let’s get real, Zane Crowe was the one parent in town no one would accuse of doing the project for her), Piper was like the crazy older sister who would show up sporadically to take us on wild adventures.

  Think shopping trips to vintage clothing stores. Spa days at the nail salon. Outings for ear piercing and sushi. And one time when Ellie begged, a trip to the local animal rescue for a pet rabbit named Marigold (sidebar: he was so a Bunnicula) that looked like a furry cheese puff with ears. And of course, Piper would also have been the one who, when the radio fizzled out spectacularly one steamy July day on the way home from the pool while the three of us were screaming Katy Perry at the top of our lungs, turned her attention to slapping the dashboard instead of watching the road.

  Three guesses as to what happened next. Ellie and I were okay. The pecan tree was okay. Except for a bumper and a headlight, even Axel was okay, although to this day, you could still see the stain in the backseat from my cherry-mango snow cone. Those Swedes knew how to put together a car.

  The phone has gone silent. I tensed, waiting for what I knew was coming. Ellie blew out a breath.

  “Look. I know you haven’t been going to gigs when you leave at night. I checked your schedule.”

  I stared out at the rain-soaked street, tears burning the backs of my eyes. Since our dad bailed on us four years ago, Ellie and I texted every day. She laughed off my overprotectiveness. But we both knew she was full of it. That was the thing about scars. We guarded them fiercely. Denied them until our last breath. But hard as we fought, they never really went away.

  Which was why there was no way I could tell her about the empty field east of town. Or the twenty-three goodbyes I recorded for her on my phone. And most of all she could never, ever find out about the last message, the one I found when I woke up in my car, sick and shaking, and had to cut the duct tape from my wrists with a piece of broken glass.

  Realizing all the while she would never be safe as long as I was still around.

  I blinked. Raindrops streaked down the windshield, blurring until they sparkled like fireworks. My index finger twitched. I gritted my teeth.

  “Hayden?”

  A spasm jolted through my wrist, causing me to drop the phone. Retrieving it, I punched the button to end the call.

  I had no words for the sick, chemical need that had leached into my skin as the moon rose two nights ago. Or for that hour that would forever be etched in my memory where I’d driven in circles, tears streaming down my face. Searching. Starving. I wished there was brain bleach for the minutes I’d spent parked in the back of that strip mall lot, waiting for that lone person to walk out to their car, unable to explain what I was doing, some depraved part of me understanding when they left.

  And something compelled me to follow.

  At the last second, I managed to swerve off the road. Puked in the grass. But the thoughts didn’t stop. They weren’t mine, that much I knew. I would never hurt someone. And yet pulsing in the base of my skull, relentless as a migraine, that silent command thrummed. My heart raced. My fingers shook from the need to root around in the floorboard and find my keys. Pull back onto the highway. Find someone else.

  Instead I fished around in the center console until I found the roll of duct tape from fixing the gear shift and the knife Meera insisted I have on hand, just in case. As far as what happened next… I didn’t want to die. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I wound the tape around my wrists, not allowing myself to think beyond the certainty that I couldn’t unwillingly do to someone else what had been done to me, that I couldn’t risk the possibility I might break free, drive home, and hurt Ellie.

  And that meant I had to make sure. A single shallow cut. Ensuring I could do it only as a measure of last resort. I promptly blacked out from the pain. It was only when I awoke sometime later curled in the front seat, still shaking with ra
w, feral hunger, that I realized the flow of blood had stopped. That my skin had somehow knit itself back together while I slept.

  That just like in fairy tales, I was now the monster who couldn’t be destroyed.

  Rain plastered my hair to my cheeks the moment I stumbled outside. Across the street, the lights from the lone business still open blurred in and out of focus.

  Dark was your typical retro-hipster coffee bar, serving commuters desperate for a caffeine fix on their way into Austin and locals searching for an after-hours hangout. Funky, recessed lighting. Stained concrete floors. Built-in bar by the window. Tables tucked in out-of-the-way nooks for the writers who didn’t want to be disturbed. Indie rock or demos from the new bands playing the club scene down in Austin piped in while you were waiting in line for your double espresso. Dark even had an open mic night every other Thursday that drew a decent crowd for coffee and dessert.

  But what made Dark different from every other coffee bar out there was Ethan Caldwell. Local legend said he once poured a Texas longhorn in a paper to-go cup for the coach of the UT football team. At fourteen. I’ve never doubted it. Ethan was amazing when it came to pretty much any kind of art. He hated it when people crowded the counter with their cell phones out and started snapping pictures of his coffee creations before the steamed milk could dissolve into the espresso. But who could blame them?

  Your typical coffee shop fare like hearts and tulips, he poured so many times a day, he no longer had to look. It was his signature art that drew people into Dark, the images that got shared and tagged and spread out over social media. The delicate snowflakes sprinkled with cinnamon he made every December for the Yule Festival. The skull I watched him pour for a little girl on Halloween. Swans and angelfish and celestial moons. And one time even a wonderfully detailed finger flipping the bird just for his brother Brody.

  If anyone would have taken the time to pour latte art fifteen minutes past close, and in a freaking take-out cup, it would have been Ethan Caldwell.