I sighed deeply as I grappled with my indecision.
A part of me, a big part of me, felt that it was cruel to accept Julian’s future proposal. I knew it was coming, if not tomorrow, soon, very soon. Julian was head over heels for me. He said he’d heard the song of mating when he’d seen me.
It cut me deeply that I’d not heard the same song. Though I had and still did feel great warmth and affection for him. Surely there were other marriages that had started off far worse than ours?
And it wasn’t as though Julian didn’t know. I’d confessed all to him a week past. He was hurt at first. But he eventually told me it didn’t matter. Not to him. All he wanted was to protect me. To shelter me. To make me feel safe again all the days of my mortal life.
I had to admit; the proposition was mighty appealing when he put it that way.
I wet my lips and heaved yet another sigh. Why couldn’t I love him the way a woman ought to love a man? Why did my traitorous heart still have to beat for a man so unworthy of my affections?
“Penny for your thoughts, sweet Annabelle Lee.”
I jumped and gave a tiny yelp. Twirling on my socked feet and then mock growling when I caught sight of Julian’s warm, laughing brown eyes.
“What are you doing here? I... I thought you were back ho—”
“I was.” He shrugged, dragging his hand over his thick brown hair. “But I missed you something fierce. I had to see you. So I came by, hoping maybe you were up, and then I smelled you.”
He growled low in the back of his throat, and I was surprised to note the zip of delight that suddenly skated up my spine at the deep-throated rumble vibrating through his chest.
No, I didn’t love him. Yet. But maybe someday I would. He climbed the steps and approached me, smelling of the woods he loved and smiling down at me with such fierce warmth.
Smiling deeply, I wrapped my arms around his thick neck and dared to be bolder than I’d ever been with him. With a gentle tug I drew him toward me, and a look of shocked but pleasured surprise scrawled over his rugged face before he leaned down.
Julian was a tall man, easily a foot taller than me. So I had to lean up on tiptoe to kiss his warm cheek. “Mm,” I sighed. “You’re always so warm,” I murmured, inhaling his scent of pine and woods deep into my lungs. Wanting even more of his warmth, I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed myself to him real tight. It was impossible to remain cold around him, he was the best kind of fire.
He wasn’t a pretty man. But then, I’d already sampled pretty and found it deeply lacking. The bridge of Julian’s nose had a hard crook in it, the result of one too many fistfights growing up, he’d confessed one night. His face was round, the edges sharp and rough. He had a deep cleft in his jaw that he covered with a thick, coarse beard. His brows were thick and a little wild at the edges. But he had a great smile. Perfect white teeth, full, kissable lips. No, he wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. Outwardly anyway.
His heart was good though. And that counted for more than all the diamonds in all the world.
Julian loved nothing more than to tromp through the woods. Of course, being a shifter, I supposed it came with the territory. I wasn’t much for camping beneath the stars, but I was sure I would learn to tolerate it. At the very least.
His body was taut as a bowstring, his hands on my hips flinched ever so slightly. Beta he might be, but he was still a wolf, and I felt the great restraint he kept himself in. I could do far worse than Julian Padfoot.
“Marry me,” he said, voice throaty and full of grit.
I gasped. Not that I hadn’t expected it, of course I had. But I’d not expected it like this. Tonight.
“What?” I asked, lips feeling cold and numb.
“Marry me, Annabelle Lee Black. Be mine. Take my hand in yours and make me the happiest man on Gods green earth.”
“I...I...”
He pressed a long finger against my mouth, stilling my words. “Don’t say anything yet. I know you need to think, just...just think, okay. Think hard. No man could ever love you the way I do.”
He didn’t need to say what he really meant. I’d told him the truth of Billy, of my past, one night along a moonlit garden stroll. Julian wasn’t happy about my story, but he’d kissed my forehead and told me that our past didn’t define our futures and that he would never hold anything against me so long as I didn’t hold his own past against him.
“I want to show you something. Will you come with me?”
I swallowed and looked behind me at the sleepy inn full of warm bodies. Julian and I had never been alone before. Not like this. We’d been in the parlor together, but the door had been open, and it hadn’t been after midnight.
My heart trembled remembering the vitriol and hate I’d received from those I’d once thought my friends when the truth of me had been found out.
Julian turned my face toward him and shook his head. “We’ll be careful. I vow it to the earth and the moon, my darling. I would never hurt you or treat you badly. You must believe me.”
My teeth chattered just a little. Where I’d not felt the cold just a moment ago, I now suddenly did. It gripped me, sank into my bones, and turned my blood into a river of ice.
Logically, I knew I should turn back, and yet I felt something deep inside me. A tugging. A pulling. I wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe even fate, but I knew I needed to go with him.
“I’m just in this nighty. Maybe I should chang—”
He shook his head, running a callused finger down my cheek and making me shiver. “I’ll keep you warm, I promise.”
Julian was never this insistent with me, the fact that he was now, spoke of his great desire that I do this thing with him. That I give him my unconditional trust and because he’d always been so patient with me I knew I could do no less for him. My smile was soft.
“Alright, Julian, I’ll go with you.”
His smile was exuberant and full of joy. He didn’t release my hand as he helped me to walk down the front stoop. And when my socked feet were just about to crunch into the snow drift, his strong arms swooped in and picked me up, hugging me tight to his powerful chest.
Cuddling with Julian sometimes felt like hugging a hearth. I moaned, instantly sliding my ice-cold fingers against the column of his throat.
He rumbled his approval.
“We won’t be long,” he kissed the crown of my forehead. “Rest your little head on my shoulder, Annabelle. I’ll keep you safe.”
I sighed, because I knew he would. I knew he always would.
Julian ran like the wolf he called his own. His footsteps were sure and steady, the sound of the rushing wind was lulling and I was shocked to note that when we finally got to where he’d wanted to take us, he had to shake me a little to wake me. Coming out of the grip of that dream was harder than it should have been. My brain felt foggy, like I was still floating in a hazy world full of shadows and darkness.
I shivered, feeling colder than I had just a moment ago. His arms tightened around me.
“My beauty, we’re here,” he said, breath warm against my cheek as his lips hovered within inches of my own.
I blinked my eyes open, unsure of what it was I was looking at. Slowly the dream’s grip on me began to lessen, the panic that’d been slicing through me vanished, and I wondered at the strange intensity of that dream. I could remember none of it other than a terrible feeling of unease. With a final shake of my head, I joggled loose the rest of the worry and focused on what it was Julian had brought me out here to see.
There was a large, Victorian style home with no lights on within. Several of the glass panes were broken out or boarded over. The wood trim was patchy and gray looking in the twilight. The steps leading to the front door looked rotted out and badly in need of replacing.
There was a terrible lean to the house as well, reminding me of pictures I’d once seen of the Tower of Pisa. But for all its failings, there was something rather charming about the gingerbread style façade. Three stori
es, it was huge, and I could easily imagine that with a bit of elbow grease and determination this once stately mansion could rise anew from the ashes of its now derelict state.
“What is this, Julian?” I looked at him, wondering at his large smile and radiant countenance.
He gestured with his free hand toward the failing structure. “This is...ours,” he said, sounding almost shy.
I frowned. Blinked. And then shook my head. “What do you—”
“Say yes, Annabelle. Say yes and I will give you everything in my power to give to always make you happy.”
I sucked in trembly breath, covering my mouth with my now shaking hands. He’d bought us a home? He’d bought—“You bought me a house?”
My words came out strangled and pregnant with tears. Easing one arm out from beneath my legs, he gently brushed at my tears with his thumb. He held me like it was nothing, like I weighed naught but a feather to him.
He had such power in his body, and yet I knew he would never harm me.
“I love you, Annabelle. I always will.”
And that’s when I knew; when I knew I would have him for the rest of my life. Love wasn’t always a feeling, Mary had told me, sometimes love was nothing more than an action. A conscious choice and nothing more.
I nodded.
He kissed me. His strong, firm lips covered my own, and for the first time ever, I actually felt something. Gratitude. Bliss. Joy. The warmth that I always felt around him sparked for just a second, and I knew I could love him, that I would love him someday.
I framed his rugged face in my hands and memorized each plane, each groove and dip. I would make him happy too. I knew I would. I would honor him. Love him. We would have a happy life together.
Or so I thought.
Until I heard the bang.
The bang that changed Julian’s and my life forever.
One second I was treasured in his arms, and the next I was sprawled in the snow, dazed and confused as I coughed the snow out of my mouth. “Julian! Julian!” I called out his name.
When I looked down, I saw the crimson stain.
His eyes were open. Forever open. But never again would they blink or gaze upon me with love. A giant, gaping wound had blossomed in his chest.
Shock kept me rooted to the spot, disbelieving what it was I was seeing.
He wasn’t dead. Surely, he wasn’t dead.
I wet my lips, clenched my hands, feeling the cold sting of winter’s kiss on a deeply visceral level. I knew I would never feel warm again.
And as I knelt there, looking over the body of my friend and my hope for a better life, I felt the crack of something violent swing against my head. The pain was excruciating, leaving me breathless and knowing deep in my bones that it had been a killing blow.
As I felt the blood leak out the back of my skull, I began to finally warm up. Somehow, I knew that wasn’t good, but I was relieved not to feel that cold anymore.
A dark shadow loomed over me. Nothing but a black form in my blurry vision. I blinked, blinded by thick tears.
The shadow seemed to shake its head and then lifted its arm.
I knew what was coming, but I couldn’t look away. There was something about the way it moved, something so familiar. “Do I know y—”
And then I remembered no more...
WHEN NEXT I BLINKED nothing was at all the same, and I knew it never would be again. Something terrible and dark lurked in the shadows of the woods, calling to me, taunting me. Making me shiver. I had to get safe. I had to get away. I didn’t look behind me. Instead I turned and walked into the home that had been promised me. The home Julian had bought for me, and in that place I waited. For what, I didn’t know.
But I waited all the same.
Chapter 1
Annabelle Lee
PRESENT DAY
“This is stupid. I don’t want a roommate,” I said, glowering at Eerie Thistlebottom, one of the few who visited me regularly. She called us sisters. We weren’t blood, but we were bonded in death, so there was that I guessed.
I plopped down onto the velvet blue couch that had been sitting in my living room since the early seventies, or possibly eighties. It’d gotten infested with moths a few years ago. Eerie had wanted to burn and/or toss them out—she had a thing about bugs crawling through things.
But I thought the whirling dervishes added charm to my decrypt lair, so I’d banned her from tossing them out on pain of haunting her dead behind for at least a year if she tried. Truth was, my soul was bound to this place and I could never leave—she knew that—but as a ghost I had a hard time letting go of things. And besides, someone had painted an image of a matador getting ready to stab a raging bull onto it—it had a kitschy flair I sort of love-hated. True, two of the corner seams had popped and there was now white batting poking out like fluffy clouds from it whenever the moths flew, but considering I couldn’t actually sit on the thing it wasn’t that big a deal to me.
It looked like the kind of couch one smoked pipes on while eating from a fondue bowl with Igor Stravinsky playing on in the background and dancing mushrooms twirling about your living room floor.
Honestly, it was hideous. But I wasn’t all that fussy about décor, being that I was dead and all. And I didn’t exactly sit, since I couldn’t touch anything in the lay world. If I tried, I generally just plopped right through it to the other side. I’d learned through the years that hovering worked just fine and gave the impression of my sitting, which went a ways toward calming the silly mortals down. The illusion of my humanity was generally enough to get them to stop hyperventilating when they realized the owner of this house was none other than a ghost.
Eerie rolled her liner-rimmed and nearly colorless blue eyes. “Annabelle Lee, this place is huge. And stuffy. And moldy,” she shuddered—which I found endlessly amusing considering she was our town’s only zombie—“it needs better care than what you or I can give it. Now you know the Aunts are lifting the veil soon and casting out for humans, and I bloody am writing this advertisement.”
She shook the yellowed sheaf of paper at me.
I wrinkled my nose. “And since when do zombies fear a little mold?”
Thinning her eyes, she growled at me. The sound wasn’t the typical animal type of growl, really more of a grunt. Like the kind you’d hear in those old picture shows of black and white zombies with arms held out shuffling and groaning for brains. It was not a comparison Eerie had ever been overly fond of me making, but true was true.
I shrugged. I would not apologize to her. “Eerie Thistlebottom, now I tell you one last time, I do not want nor do I need a flat mate. Do not send that letter!”
The lights in the parlor popped, going out in an instant. I sometimes forgot myself, how my moods could manipulate the currents of the world around me. Especially here, in my sitting room where my soul was strongest tethered and bound.
Eerie lifted a pale white hand. “Listen spook, you don’t scare me. So just can it. You’re getting a roommate and that’s that. I have a life too you know.”
I gasped. “How dare you? I never asked you to come clean this place—”
“Pft.” She raspberried. “Your words mean nothing. And besides, I know you’re lonely. I see that chessboard. How many hours have you spent studying the moves, playing that same game in your mind for so long now an inch of dust has gathered round the pieces? Now this is simply ridiculous, Annabelle. You need a life.”
“Ha! I’m dead and have been, oh...” I shrugged, “I don’t know, a long bloody time. I’d say my life is long done.”
“Then move on,” she said, tilting her nose up in the air with challenge.
A sound like air being released from a tire spilled off my tongue. “How...how dare you.”
Eerie flinched.
We had both been teasing earlier, but Eerie’s words had hit below the belt. Teasing a ghost about moving on was just as cruel as teasing a zombie with brains. Although, Eerie didn’t eat brains come to that. I wasn’
t sure what she did eat. But I knew it wasn’t brains. At least none had gone missing in recent years. Though there was that one time—
“You’re right, Annabelle, that wasn’t a nice thing to say. Forgive me?”
I inhaled deeply. “I...I have Jules. He’s grand company.”
Her look was sad. “When he’s here. But he’s not always here, and well you know it. He’s gone more and more now.”
I wanted to argue with her, but she was right. Jules’s afterlife and my own were very different. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling that deeply penetrating chill of snow and ice that had never left me from the moment my life had become a daily purgatory.
I was mostly alone in this large home with few to keep me company. And not for lack of trying either, the townsfolk came up when they could. But they were amongst the living. Not dead like me or my poor, sweet, slobbering Jules. They had lives to lead, things to do.
Meanwhile I sat in this large home, day in and day out with nothing to do to help stave off the boredom of time passing me by. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. All I had was this.
Floating.
Thinking.
Thoughts.
Regrets.
And far too many of them.
“Do it,” I said with a wince before I’d even thought it through.
Eerie twitched. “What? Do you mean—”
“Blast it, Eerie,” I drilled her with a tight glare, “don’t ask me to explain because if you do I’ll chicken out and change my mind. Do it now or leave me be.”
Her jaw dropped, bright red, claret-wine lips looking clearly shocked. “You mean it?”
I glared at her.
A corner of her lips twitched. “You’ll be nice? Right?”
“Eerie,” I snapped.
“Annabelle,” she snapped right back. “I know you and your shifting moods, ghost. You’ll turn into a banshee and scare them off, and I’ll never forgive you.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know I can’t do that. Argh! Just do it and go away. I’ve got things to do.”
She thinned her lips, clearly not buying the lie. But she was wise enough to say nothing about it.