Michele Hauf - Beautiful Danger

As a member of an ancient order of hunters, Lark has found that eliminating dangerous vampires is about more than duty. It’s personal—a kill for every day her husband was held captive before his death. Staking her prey isn’t a challenge until she confronts Domingos LaRoque. Mad with vengeance and the blood of a powerful phoenix, Domingos tests her skills…and seduces her soul.

Once a talented musician, Domingos can’t escape the constant music in his head…or his need to destroy the werewolf pack that tortured him. Though trusting the hunter ordered to kill him could be his gravest mistake, the dark desires between them can’t be refused. Yet as he and Lark become allies to defeat a mutual threat, loving the enemy may be the ultimate sacrifice.

“So what’s my prize?” he asked.

His prize? If he expected what she had just denied the wolves, she would slay him right here and now, and be damned if she fell to her death.

“I can’t bite you,” he said, dashing his tongue along one fang, “because you’ve got that damned collar. Too sharp. Though pain—gives me a thrill. But I can do this.”

And he kissed her. Hard and urgent, forcing his sweet breath into her mouth. The vampire persisted, pressing his body against her knee, challenging her to hurt him, to deny him this stolen prize.

Training had not covered this sort of attack. She could feel his fangs pressing into her lip, but not cutting. Insanity! Never would she—

Suddenly the hard crush of their mouths softened. Lark dropped her knee. And like a moth with tattered wings surrendering to the flame, she granted the vampire his prize.

MICHELE HAUF has been writing romance, action-adventure and fantasy stories for more than twenty years. Her first published novel was Dark Rapture. France, musketeers, vampires and faeries populate her stories. And if she followed the adage “write what you know,” all her stories would have snow in them. Fortunately, she steps beyond her comfort zone and writes about countries she has never visited and of creatures she has never seen.

Michele can be found on Facebook and Twitter and at michelehauf.com. You can also write to Michele at P.O. Box 23, Anoka, MN 55303.

Beautiful Danger

Michele Hauf

Dear Reader,

This is one of those stories. I don’t know how else to put it. It combines many things that have meaning to me: music, Paris, trust, loss. Some tend to think that paranormal stories are all about the creatures, the cool powers and the weird lifestyles. But really, all my stories, no matter that they feature fangs, fur or wings, are about the people. What makes their hearts beat for one another? What is it that means the most to them? And if that important thing was taken away, how would they get it back? Domingos and Lark are two people who touched me to the core, and it was an amazing journey as I learned more about them in my attempt to bring their story to the page. I hope you enjoy Beautiful Danger as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Michele Hauf

The music from the cello-rock band Apocalyptica inspired this story so I want to thank them for filling my brain with fantastical images of beauty, danger and love.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Smoke billowed and clouded the halls and rooms in the Levallois pack complex. Werewolves, in both animal form and human form, retreated from what had once been their sanctuary.

The alarm sounded a droning cry but didn’t coerce the pack leader to work more swiftly. Remy Caufield, pack principal, stuffed a valise with valuable financial records taken from the safe, along with other documents he was unwilling to leave behind. Sure, the safe was fireproof. But he could not guarantee he would be first on the scene following the fire’s devastation to claim what was inside the safe.

The door to his office slammed open, and thinking the flames had raged this far, he held up the leather valise in a protective manner to block his face.

What stood in the doorway was not flame or a fellow werewolf.

The haggard creature who bounded into the office, right leg dragging limply, and wild black hair tangled about his head so only his eyes showed, was the pack’s pet vampire.

Well, pet defined the man ironically. They’d had the longtooth for countless months, and had used him well. The thing just would not die. It had become a sort of experiment to see how long the creature would cling to life. He had defeated every opponent put to him in the circular steel cage kept in the compound basement. And remarkably, the UV sickness, while it maddened the creature, only seemed to make him stronger in the ring.

The werewolves had made a mistake last night. Remy hadn’t known the vampire they’d matched against this creature was a phoenix. The phoenix was a powerful vampire who decades ago had survived a witch’s blood attack, which had once been poisonous to vampires. Drinking his opponent to death must have infused their pet’s blood with the nearly indestructible phoenix’s blood.

Domingos was his name. Maybe. Remy didn’t care.

“You’ve gotten loose?” he asked stupidly.

The vampire slapped his filthy hands on the desk before him and growled, showing his bloody fangs—blood that could only have come from Remy’s men.

“You will pay for this!” the creature raged. “I will return!”

Remy scoffed, but his heart cringed. The vampire’s eyes were black as hell and yet bright, so frighteningly bright. He looked into a strangely lucid madness.

“Serve me your worst,” Remy said bravely. “You won’t make it beyond the flames.”

The vampire grinned maniacally. For a second Remy thought he would leap the desk and attack. But instead the longtooth grabbed the office chair and tossed it toward the window. Glass shattered.

Leaping to the windowsill—they were three stories up from the concrete courtyard—Domingos turned and saluted. “I will kill every wolf in the Levallois pack.”

And then he jumped.

Remy slapped the valise to his chest, knowing he would see the vampire again.

One month later

The pack complex had not been rebuilt after the fire. The pack principal, Remy Caufield, had created a sort of family home in an eighteenth-century town house at the edge of the sixteenth arrondissement, close to the forested Bois de Boulogne.

Or so Lark had been briefed an hour earlier by her supervisor.

The Order of the Stake tendered a fragile relationship with werewolves. Knights in the Order exclusively slayed vampires, but there was nothing to keep them from tracking and killing a werewolf should it prove a threat to mortals. The Order, populated exclusively by mortals, allied with none from the paranormal nations.

“Ah?” The principal of the Levallois pack looked up from his desk as she approached to stand quietly before him. His dark eyebrows furrowed curiously. “I hadn’t expected a woman. I thought the Order was strictly men.”

“You thought wrong,” she answered curtly. “You have a job for me?”

“No introductions? I’m Principal Caufield.” He offered his hand to shake across the desk.