Change is sweeping through the world, as humanity fights for autonomy, discord tears apart the foundations of the vampire order, and dhampirs return to the world after centuries of war between two powerful peoples. Dhampirs, creatures known to heral...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Tara woke up, and turned on her bed to see the clock blinking ten am. The last week had been hell at work, and she hadn't had the strength to go in for the last few days. The sun was too bright, the people at work too loud, and her job was empty.
Jesse hadn't come back.
The first day, she'd shown up like everything was normal, but instead of doing the interviews, she'd sat with a mage for hours before the pompous ass, Lorenzo de Fleur, had seen fit to respond to inquiry. The communication said they'd recalled Jesse to their territory because they'd needed him, and that they would figure out a suitable replacement in time. They hadn't sent anyone else in the week she'd waited, but Tara hadn't believed a word of the communication in the first place.
After trying to convince the mages for days that something had happened to Jesse, they'd eventually kicked her out as some crazy fanatic. The mages at the complex trusted this Lorenzo implicitly, and she came off as a vampire junkie, jonesing for a fix after hers had been taken from her.
It was all a load of bullshit.
Jesse had told her of his tentative position living where he was and that he was at risk after being on the wrong side of the last scuffle between mages and vampires. Whoever had control of him hadn't cared enough to even tell him what he'd been doing at the mage complex in the first place, and Tara hadn't liked the sound of the word 'stray' when Jesse had referred to himself.
Strays were animals that lived and died without much notice or care from others.
It wouldn't have been so suspicious if Jesse hadn't just promised to see her every day he could. Even if he was busy, mages and vampires could whisk themselves around on transportation spells that took seconds. There was no way Jesse wouldn't have visited her off of her work time if he was able.
That meant he'd been detained.... or worse.
It felt needy to be that choked up over a guy so soon after meeting him, but something just felt wrong. Seeing ghosts all her life, she'd learned to trust her supernatural instincts, and it was crying out that Jesse needed help. But who did she tell? Like Jesse, she was a stray, with no family left and no friends to lean on in times like these.
Tara sat up with a groan but immediately flinched back so hard that she bashed her head into the headboard. Whimpering like a wounded mouse, she lifted her eyes to an angry pitch gaze leering at her from under the ugliest wavy indigo hair she'd ever seen. Worse, in that position, Tara got a gander down the corridor between the woman's breasts, and she'd need a doctor to scrub her brain of that one. A sweep of the room didn't reveal Jesse, only his ghost, and Tara didn't think he was hiding.
"Hi," Tara said, rubbing her head. She'd rarely talked to specters for fear that they'd follow her forever, but this one was floating over her and giving her little choice.
