Page 1 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

1

RUNE

Past

The first time I watched the girl I called Little Flame, she was picking flowers in a grove on the outskirts of Crescent Haven. Her dark brown hair was wild and untamed, falling in waves that were nearly as long as she was tall. She was far too close to the vampire wards and the guard—the spells and hunters tasked with keeping big bad monsters like me far away from fragile mortals and their vulnerable, ephemeral hearts.

These safeguards generally held up. Against the average vampire anyway. Not against an unnaturally powerful one like myself.

I ran my tongue against my left canine and then my right, an unconscious tic normally, but one I was acutely aware of with a human child mere feet away. A pang of something buried surfaced from the abyss, as it often did when I returned to this sleepy mortal town.

Shame, maybe. Or the ghost of it, as the ability to conjure such emotions had left around the same time that my canines elongated and sharpened. In Crescent Haven, though, these phantom feelings were expected, welcomed even.

Mason might’ve been right about me being a mental masochist. And the irony was not lost on me.

The little girl crept ever closer to the most dangerous part of the land, as if she was drawn to darkness as an insect was to light. She didn’t seem to mind the nightmarish entity mere feet from her.

She couldn’t actually see me as I watched her, but any other human’s neck hairs would’ve prickled, visceral fear putting them on high alert. Especially a child, innately sensitive and attuned to changes in their energetic environment. She should’ve already run home to her family.

But not her, as if her fear receptors hadn’t been wired correctly. That would get her in trouble in this world. If she wasn’t able to sense my presence and get away as fast as her little legs would carry her, she was a dead creature walking.

I frowned from my place among the trees and shadows, peering around a tall jutting rock as the girl skipped from flower to flower. She gently plucked and handled them as if they were worth a thousand pieces of gold.

She was safe from me, but she shouldn’t have been able to intuit that. She should’ve only felt terror.

I rolled my neck from side to side, unclenching my jaw. When the child started to sing, my eyes snapped back to her.

Her tiny voice was perfectly pitched, lyrical and angelic, unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was the hair on the back of my neck that prickled, my slow, immortal heart that pumped harder, terror in my veins that ran ice cold.

As the gentle morning sun trickled into the grove, bathing her in warmth, I had the answer to my question of what had brought me to the forest, to this exact stretch of land at this exact point in time.

She stumbled upon a rabbit ensnared in a hunter’s trap, and I watched her struggle and fail to pull the animal’s jerking body out of the iron clamps. It was then that the answer to the deeper, long-standing question wormed its way into my mind. The one Mason asked me each time I left the city, hushed and low so that no one else could hear us.

Why did I keep coming back to Crescent Haven, after all these years?

Tears ran down the girl’s cheeks as she held the panicked, wounded animal in her small arms, heaving with the bittersweetness of mortality. What beauty and what torment. What love and what utter devastation. This child felt it all.

For a fleeting moment, I felt it too, through her piercing blue eyes. I kept my distance, never letting her see me, as that question rattled and rattled, her sob knocking something loose.

When she finally left the poor creature behind with sunken shoulders, I walked quietly to the trap and released him. I said a prayer I hadn’t spoken in decades as he hobbled away, one my mother taught me. A prayer to the goddess of the sun and humanity, Helia, for healing. I wasn’t sure if she would answer a monster’s prayer, even if it was uttered for one of her creatures.

I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. I was not a man that deserved granted wishes nor acts of grace.

I was not a man at all.

Crescent Haven had always been a place of ghosts and specters, ever since my canines first tore open flesh. This was the first time it had been a place for the spark of life. Not a spark—that didn’t do justice to her feelings as deep as the sea and her voice as otherworldly as the gods themselves. She was a flame, the pure fire of mortality that kept humans striving, yearning, living in all of its messy, perilous splendor, seeking beauty even as they faced death.

I watched the watery crimson glide off my broad hands to the earth.

All these years and all these visits to my homeland, searching for something I couldn’t explain, and I’d finally found it.

I was not a man, but with rabbit blood and a child’s tears in my palms, I could remember what it felt like to be one.

2

SCARLETT

Iwove through the market stalls in the town square, breathing in the scent of fresh flowers, warm bread and sweet pastries, and witches’ herbs. Merchants from all over the island were here, even from Aristelle, the city of vampires.

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