1
Dallas
“NAME ONE THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.”
Cranking down the lid on a bottle of tabasco sauce, I switched to speaker and tossed my phone onto the counter. At just after 10 p.m., most of the lights were off in my pit-style barbeque restaurant, The Rusty Spoke, a vacuum cleaner whirring somewhere off in the background.
“With telling my best friend I’ve spent the last nine years wishing we could hook up?” I scoffed. “Gee, let me think—"
On the other end of the phone, my brother West sighed. “I get that this is epic—”
“Like, wreck our friendship epic.”
“—but you have to admit things have been getting a little out of hand.”
“As in?”
“As in every time one of you hooks up with someone else, the entire pack has to go to Threat Level Red trying to keep your special brand of crazy contained.”
“Total exaggeration.”
“So that time someone TP’ed your house like a giant cupcake?”
I coughed. “It was close to Halloween. Probably high school kids.”
It had been March.
“Uh huh.”
I could practically hear my brother’s smug smirk on the other end of the line. West Caldwell could be summed up in three sentences. Addicted to social media. Spent his weekends writing fanfiction without bothering to pause for sleep. No snark filter. Every Monday morning he put on his Clark Kent glasses and assumed his boy scout English teacher alter ego until the bell rang the following Friday afternoon. Which naturally we all gave him shit about.
“And the fact that they slashed your front door with blood-red Blair’s Bakery frosting?”
Yeah. There was that.
“Lacey Blair is a grown-ass woman. She can date whoever the hell she wants.”
“Funny how that time she tried to go out with the bartender from Austin, dude walked out to the parking lot at the end of the night and found the bumper ripped off his truck.”
“Wouldn’t know anything about that.” I bared my teeth, a growl creeping into my voice. Because guess what? No meant no. She’d told that guy to back off and he’d gotten handsy. Asshole was lucky he hadn’t lost more than his bumper.
“And now you and Ethan are having a standoff. It’s been what, three weeks?”
Four, but who was counting? I jammed the heels of my hands into my eyes, feeling a headache coming on. And yeah, that was pretty much a given any time we started talking about our younger brother, Ethan. There were seven of us Caldwell boys. Brody and Cal, the twins, were the oldest. Then came me and West, followed by Ethan. August was finishing up his engineering degree down at the University of Texas and River was currently off working as a bounty hunter and enforcer for the werewolf council.
“We’re not discussing him.” Checking the meat we had seasoned and set to go out to the smokers, I took things off speaker. “You said earlier something tripped the perimeter sensors the past two nights out at the ranch?”
West sighed, but let the subject of Ethan drop. “Yeah, and I’m telling you, I don’t like it.”
“Dude, this is Texas. Even the roadkill comes back to life after sunset. Don’t give yourself wood over some mangy ass coyote.”
“Can you be serious for once?” West started ticking off points. “No tracks leading in or out. No scent trace. We know the bloodsuckers are looking for Topher—”
“What did Brody say when you called it in?”
West growled under his breath, giving me my answer.
Most months not much happened in our hometown of Blood Moon, Texas. We were two hours outside of Austin, tucked up in the Texas Hill Country on the shores of Lake Buchanan. Pretty much the only thing that put Blood Moon on any map other than the one listing all the Dairy Queens in the state was the fact that we were only ten miles from the infamous exit sign where three years ago, supernaturals were outed to humans everywhere when a vampire panicked during a traffic stop, sank fangs into the neck of the closest deputy and vanished into thin air.
What happened next was pretty much what you might have expected. Mass raids. Government crackdowns. The price of silver and garlic supplements skyrocketed. Debates raged on social media. What sort of stake was best to carry? Silver? Oak? Ash with a garlic-infused leather grip? You’d think werewolves having witnessed this fanged clusterfuck would have redoubled our efforts to keep things on the down low. Instead, a year after #DashCamVlad, a bunch of hipsters from the Portland pack, not to be outdone on the supernatural head-desk meter, let things get a little too recreational at a campsite out in Oregon and got caught on camera shifting into two-hundred-pound werewolves.
Kind of hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube on that one.
Most of the time things in Blood Moon stayed pretty quiet. Although the paranormal craze had turned our tourist town into a destination for everyone who thought they wanted to meet a werewolf at the full moon (seriously, they didn’t) or have a meet-cute with their very own Edward Cullen (your average vampire looked nothing like Pattinson), we were far enough removed from the political infighting and backstabbing of the urban packs not to have to worry every time we went out alone at night. Most of the vampire covens kept to the major cities. The Feds were hunting for us every day and our governing council was doing everything in their power to keep us from being turned into lab rats.
Then last year, a rival pack from Austin had started abducting runaways around Central Texas and our pack had gotten caught up in the crossfire. Long story short, after a fight out in a corn maze at the local Harvest Moon Festival the night of a massive thunderstorm, we’d uncovered their link to a vampire coven that had been trafficking humans and forcibly changing them into shifters to use as blood slaves.
Topher Greer, one of the feral wolves the North Austin pack had abducted and held captive for over a year, had been assigned by the werewolf council to our pack with West as his temporary sire until he was stable enough to live on his own. Probably as our Uncle Guillermo’s sick idea of a joke. He’d trashed the safe room we were keeping him in three times, managed to break out twice, and channeled his best #WestCaldwellMustDie resting bitch face every time Cal came by for therapy sessions. Fun gig.
“I’m not wrong,” West said, and I heard the strain of the last few weeks in his voice. “Brody checked out that stretch of the perimeter both times the alarm pinged and said there were jackrabbits popping up like crazy. But you know when you get that feeling in your gut and every instinct you’ve got is screaming something just isn’t right?”
“The North Austin pack has been trying to rattle our cage for weeks. The Council just assigned them a new Alpha and they’re pissed as hell to be under sanctions. Someone pulled the fire alarm at Hayden’s gig downtown last week. Sold out crowd. We’re pretty sure they bought off one of the bouncers. And you should see the freak deliveries that keep showing up at The Spoke. This morning it was a hundred pounds of frozen salmon.”
“The first two I get. That’s some epic level pranking even for you.”
“Touché.”
“But who drives two hours out to the middle of nowhere just to trip a sensor then doesn’t wait around to see our reaction?”