Page 1 of Fanged Embrace
1
River
Chasing imaginary women through the city in the middle of the night was not on my agenda. When I’d shimmied into my tightest pair of leather pants and painted my lips red earlier that evening, my only goal had been to congratulate Hunter and Addison on an engagement well-executed and maybe shake my ass a little on the dance floor.
Instead, I’d ditched the bachelor party—successfully dodging Maxine’s loaded questions and Dylan’s strategically planted foot. I’d earned a quizzical stare for my efforts, but there had been no time to explain. It was that vision, that sudden jolt of future threads tangling in my head.
The others probably assumed I was having one of my weird River moments (which, fair) but this time felt urgent, more so than any trifling glimpses I’d had in recent months.
So I bolted. I hopped in a cab and rattled off the name of the dingiest bar I could think of, hoping that maybe the place was the same one from my vision. Why that bar, though? My glimpses rarely came with addresses pinned on them, but theflickering sign I’d seen in the vision matched the bar’s neon swirl, so I guessed.
All I could do was hope that she’d be there—the woman in my vision. The one who would, somehow, factor into saving us all from… whatever was about to happen.
The visions had come on suddenly, hitting me full force in the middle of my conversation with Maxine. Usually, my brief glimpses into the future made some kind of sense. They were traceable threads, pieces laid out for me to follow or avoid. But this time, it was different.
The swirling images behind my eyes had been bad. Very bad. Shadows looming over the Leyore coven, distant screams, an overwhelming sense of suffocating dread. It made little sense, and only one sliver was clear to me. Amidst the flashes of carnage and chaos I saw myself, standing in front of a woman I didn’t recognize, cradling her in my arms.
I heard a voice—my voice—whispering in her ear: “It’s over.”
The words echoed in my mind, distant and distorted, lingering like a half-remembered tune. I couldn’t even conjure the woman’s face—just the flutter of short, dark, messy hair and the smell of stale beer, background chatter. A neon sign. A bar.
As I stumbled out of the cab and surged through the doors of the building in front of me, I had to hope I’d gotten it right. It looked like the same bar.Maybe.
I waded through a smog of cigarette smoke and scanned the grim interior. The place was almost empty, with what I assumed were a few decrepit regulars hunched around the plastic tables. No sign of the mystery woman. Of course. My visions rarely misled me, but they never cared to be convenient either.
I was still scanning faces as I stalked through the bar, and this landed me on a collision course with the broad shoulder ofa stranger in my path. “Shit—sorry!” I blurted out as a splash of amber liquid sloshed over his glass, dousing the floor between us.
The man blinked at me, mild surprise crossing rugged features. He was tall, sporting sandy hair, a khaki T-shirt, and a warm, easy smile despite the spillage.
“Hey, don’t sweat it.” The guy wiped a hand on his jeans and tilted his glass to inspect the remaining contents. “I shouldn’t be drinking anyway.”
“Still. Sorry…” I was already looking away, looking around. Maybe I’d missed her. Maybe she’d been here and left already. Maybe?—
“You looking for someone?”
I snapped my attention back to the khaki-clad stranger with a flush of embarrassment at my abysmal manners. “I—kinda, yeah. But I think they’re a no-show.”
“Well,” the guy flashed a smile with a casual shrug, “I’m waiting for a friend of mine. Happy to keep you company if you wanna stick around for a while.”
“Thanks, but I should…” I paused, contemplated the fact that I’d ditched a party with my friends to come all the way to a random bar on the other side of town—all because of a mystery woman who may or may not have something to do with the destruction or salvation of the Leyore coven. It had been a long shot to begin with. “What the hell, sure.”
“Great! You’re doing me a favor, actually. I’m pretty sure everyone else in this bar is nearing ninety—one more conversation about golf and gardening and I was gonna start wearing suspenders and plaid.” The guy cracked a wider grin and hauled out a barstool on my behalf. “I’m Arlon, by the way.”
“River.” I slid into the seat, dumped my bag on the counter, and tried to calm my tits. Maybe my visions led me here for a reason, maybe the goal was to just go with the flow. The future,after all, is a fickle thing—you can only know whatcouldbe, not whatwillbe. Sometimes, you have to let the threads of possibility unravel on their own.
“Cool name.” Arlon waved down a bartender and ordered another beer despite his earlier statement. “Well, River, maybe you can help me out. I’ve been watching that old guy in the corner for like ten minutes now and I can’t figure out if he’s drunk, dozing, or shuffling off this mortal coil. What say you?”
I snuck a glance over my shoulder. The old guy in question had his chin propped on his chest and his peak cap pulled low over bushy eyebrows. I caught the barest twitch of a wrinkled chin. “Definitely dozing. Though considering the beer foam on his mustache, I think ‘drunk’ is also on the table.”
“Very observant.” Arlon raised a comical brow over his beer mug. “Okay—guy by the jukebox, is he going for ABBA or AC/DC?”
“Neither. Look at those tattoos, he’s a Pink Floyd fan for sure.”
Right on cue, the jukebox shuddered, and the intro to ‘The Wall’ warbled about the smoky space. I offered Arlon a wink and he nodded, thoroughly impressed with my methods of deduction.
I ended up chatting with Arlon for a while, way longer than I’d planned to. Turned out his friend was runninglatelate, and he was interesting enough company that I lingered. I felt nopingof fate, no vision flaring to life, but there was a quiet sense that maybe I was supposed to be there all the same.
But eventually, the conversation fizzled and I checked my watch. It was getting late—which meant it was about time I made my polite excuses and walked my sorry ass home before my tight-ass leather pants cut off circulation to my toes.
