Sharon Ashwood - Frostbound

She closed her eyes. He studied her finely veined eyelids, delicate as a moth’s wing. “The answer depends on where you want to start.”

“The beginning.”

“When my brother turned thirteen, my father hung a picture over Max’s bed so that it was the last thing he saw at night. It was of a succubus devouring the flesh of her lover. It gave him nightmares. As long as I knew him, Max never bedded a woman more than once.”

Lore’s stomach rolled over. “Disturbing, but how did that get you here?”

“It says everything you need to know about where I came from. The rest was all me trying to make sense of everything my father did to us. I try to tell myself I’m not a victim, but it’s hard to believe sometimes. Home was like a prison, only stranger.”

She fell silent, as if talking had exhausted her. Lore kept his arm around her, feeling the tension in her muscles. She might be slumped against him, but she was wound to the breaking point. In the quiet, Lore could hear some optimist trying to start his frozen car.

“I know what it’s like to grow up in a prison,” he said.

“How did you get out?”

“One day, by pure chance, a doorway opened and a few of us escaped. It took a while before we could figure out the place we’d come to. Your world is so different. I’d never seen the sky or growing things.”

Talia put her hand on his forearm. It was a commonplace gesture, but it was the first time she’d made the first move to touch him. It made him feel humble and yet twice his size.

“As soon as I could, I went back for the rest. Many were held as slaves by the Castle warlords. We are stronger than many species, so the others kept children and wives as a guarantee that we would not turn on them. Many hounds would not leave their captive families behind. So I smuggled in goods that were scarce in there but plentiful here and bargained for every hound I could. Cloth. Books. Tools. Three pairs of shoes would buy a houndish child out of slavery. One by one, I got them out. Finally, I convinced the other species to help me rescue the rest of the pack who were still hiding in the dungeon corridors. It was a fierce battle, with many casualties. But no one was left behind as a prisoner.”

Talia blinked. “No one?”

“No.”

“You had nothing, and you got your people to safety. So why did this happen to me?” she whispered.

“No one asks to be the target of a killer.”

She seemed to choke for a moment. He saw tears leak from beneath her long, dark eyelashes. They trailed down her cheeks, glistening with a faint pink sheen. “That’s not it. I didn’t ask to be Turned.”

Lore stiffened, and she looked up. The stricken look in her eyes made her meaning clear. Few vampires were made, especially in these times when human law held sway. None were Turned without begging for it.

Unless Talia had already been murdered once before.

A cold, cold horror began to fill his chest. Beneath that, rage.

Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.

101.5 FM

“Good evening, this is the CSUP news on 101.5 FM in Fairview. At the top of our headlines tonight is the fire that destroyed the South Fairview Medical Clinic and the campaign office of Michael de Winter, the first nonhuman to stand for election to city council. Although preliminary investigations do not reveal traces of an accelerant, according to Fairview Police Detective Derek Baines arson is indeed suspected. The news has rocked all of Fairview. Already, accusations of a hate crime are finding their way into the national media. Queen Omara, sponsor of de Winter’s candidacy, is rearranging her plans and will arrive in Fairview as soon as the weather permits.”

Wednesday, December 29, 8:00 p.m.

Lore’s condo

Talia heard the front door click shut. She was alone, lying on her side, her face to the wall. She’d cried herself into exhaustion and Lore had finally left, believing her asleep.

The anger and tears had been for Michelle, but also for herself. She’d pushed her own wounds aside for years, but they’d reopened, needing to be cried out, too.

Lore had simply held her. He hadn’t tried to tell her everything would be fine, and that made her enormously grateful. She didn’t need his lies—but then he’d said hellhounds couldn’t lie. That allowed a slim margin of trust to grow between them.

But what was she supposed to make of him? Mandog. Dog-man. Demon guy. She’d never met anyone like him. Hunters hunted monsters, they didn’t get to know them.

So what if she was one of the monsters now? It was something she’d been careful not to examine too closely. Existence was a day-by-day bargain between self-disgust and her instinct to survive. She’d never looked at her fellow Undead as anything but walking corpses. Maybe that had been shortsighted, but a person’s world view didn’t change just because they’d been bitten. Waking up dead wasn’t a great advertisement for interspecies relations.

But Lore was something else. As jailers went, he could have been much worse. There was no mistaking the power that clung to him like a second skin, but he hadn’t hurt her. That counted for a lot.

He did seem bent on finding the truth. That gave them something in common.

On top of that, he was easy on the eyes. She was a sucker for the hard, strong kind of guy who worked with his hands. The kind you knew could fix the sink or the car or the horrible day you’d had with his oh-so-capable touch. She bet Lore was just that type. A haircut and some wardrobe advice, and he’d be a definite hottie. Oh yeah, and he could use some advice on the whole handcuffing thing. Definite turnoff if it wasn’t handled just right.

But what did you expect from a monster? A wry smile twisted her lips. What does the word “monster” mean, anyway? Did it really describe a guy who walked into the hell he’d escaped and bargained for the lives of his people? That was the stuff of legends.

No one was left behind. The words had power over her, because she had been abandoned when it counted most. Over and over again.

What had Lore asked? How did she end up in this mess?

The kickoff really had been the incident with Max and the succubus painting. Talia was just old enough to see the incident as a wake-up call. Killing monsters was the hub of Hunter culture, but so was despising anything that made a man weak. That included women. Lust happened, but it was something to be sniggered at or hidden in dark corners. Her father was already shaping the way Max saw his future loves.

Most of the Hunter women accepted that they were second-class warriors and not much else, but Talia’s mom had been from outside the tribe. The male grip on Max was hard to break, but she’d given her daughter ideas. It was her mom that had given Talia the courage to strike out on her own.

Against her father’s wishes, Talia left for university. She’d done brilliantly, found a job she loved, built the start of a sane life—but such a lonely one. There’d been no one to fill the place of the tribe and all the close-knit family bonds she’d had from the cradle. She still loved and hated them at the same time, and with such passion. Too bad there was no Toxic Homes Anonymous.

Hi, my name is Talia and I can’t stay away from my homicidally screwed-up roots.

Her mistake had been letting family bonds drag her home again. Going back had cost her life. I tried to be a good daughter. I should have tried harder to become a good wife.

No, that last one would have been a disaster.

She sat up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She’d survived her family, sort of. Even death hadn’t stopped her. She’d soldiered through that like she had everything else—but each battle took a little more out of her. Michelle’s loss had hit her hard. Grief had made it easy for Lore to capture her.