After Dawn, What Came Next

Leave him alone. That was Chance’s best advice? Well, they’d see about that. She was going to turn this house, the barn, and the entire property upside down until she found her father’s tobacco stash, and the coffee, and the snack cakes he kept hidden somewhere in the basement. She was going to keep her father around as long as possible. Her dad thought he was pulling one over on her by skipping his medicine. He wasn’t. She crushed the pills and put them in his supper every night and sprinkled them in his the coffee grounds he brewed every morning. There were other things she could do to keep him around a very long time. But, she couldn’t even entertain the thought lest she actually go through with it.

Alexander shivered at the rippling waves of energy that told him his daughter was near. The feel of the energy radiating off of her gave him a glimpse of her emotional state. She was pissed. Caught him red handed in the act of smoking a cigarette. Tomorrow morning he could look forward to a phone call from Thomas. Of that, he had no doubt. He groaned and pushed his body weight off the post holding him upright and reached for the ridiculous cane.

Sometimes, being old had its advantages. He got whatever he wanted as long as it wasn’t on Alex’s list of contraband, certain to kill you items. Women, young women showered him with hugs and pecks on the cheek. Somehow in the process of getting older he had transformed from a gross middle-aged man into an adorable, huggable grandfatherly figure. He didn’t mind the adoring hugs and kisses or the lavishing of attention the young ladies dished out in heaping helpings. He didn’t mind playing the age card to get a prime parking space or cuts in the checkout line. And as far as mowing the grass and shoveling snow went, let someone else do it. He sure as hell had never turned down a senior citizen’s discount either. He got free coffee at the diner and the only thing he had to do to earn all these benefits was wake up in the morning.

He minded his daughter bossing him around as if she were his mom. He was still her father and she’d do well not to forget it. Thumping his cane against the weathered boards of the porch and squaring his jaw, he told her so in no uncertain terms. Alex glared at him, but kept her mouth shut about the cigarette.

The younger and elder Grays were so much alike in their stubbornness. Chance was shocked. For once, Alex had listened to him and not said a word about the cigarette. Her father hadn’t mentioned it either and had squared his jaw in hardened determination. It wasn’t the cigarette that truly was the issue or the problem. The two of them were at a stand off. She couldn’t let her father go and he wasn’t going to go until she could. And as for that suit, it would probably be a pile of moth eaten rags before Alexander wore it to his own funeral. Alexander Gray might be done with life, but as long as Alex was around, life wasn’t done with him.



































Chapter 43

Megan packed up the few mementos she wanted to keep from her former life. Wrapping them carefully in packing, she tucked them away into a box and taped the lid shut. She didn’t take much, just the things she couldn’t bear to leave behind. Mostly the bits and pieces she cherished amounted to what someone else would consider rubbish, but to her they were priceless. The old candy dish had been packed away along with family photos and scrapbooks from her childhood. She had her first tooth and her pompoms from the high school cheer squad, her grandfather’s christening gown tucked away in layers of yellowed tissue paper, and more memories than she could ever so neatly pack up or stash into a cardboard box.

It was over. Her last living connection to this town was gone. Her duties to the Guardians did not require her to travel to this remote place and she wasn’t likely to return anytime soon. The agent she had chosen to put the house on the market was a true force of nature. In less than twenty-four hours there had been an offer, and a good one, on the table. Tomorrow at nine in the morning the house she had grown up in and promptly abandoned straight out of graduation would be hers no more. Megan had no sentimental attachment to the house. The house was nothing but sticks and bricks, a solid thing built at the turn of the nineteenth century. The family living inside of it had made it a home. The family was gone. The house was gone. And as for her home and what family she had left, it was in the city.

The brothers had arranged for most of the leftover junk in the house to go to a local charity. Some of the items she didn’t want would fetch a fair price at auction, but most of it was nothing more than sad remnants of a dead person’s life. Nobody would care about the family vacation they had taken to California, but somebody might need a salt and pepper shaker set or a shot glass from Disneyland. She had thirty days to dispose of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. She had done it in one. Megan supposed she should go back over every nook and cranny in the basement and attic, just to be sure there was nothing else she wanted, but she already knew there wasn’t.

This…this right here, standing in the desolation of a life lived and passed, was what Carter had tried to warn her about. The living on and on and on while everything and everyone around you crumbled to dust and passed into nothing but the shadows that existed only in your memory. He had tried to spare her the emptiness of it, but at the time, so young and eager for what waited for her beyond every curve and bend in the road, she hadn’t understood. He called it the vampire’s lament, the living, the remembering, the being trapped with one foot in the past and the other on the slippery uphill slope of the present.

Carter was the poster child for brooding vampires everywhere. Megan had never understood why, before now. Lifetimes stacked layer after layer, like brick laid upon brick to form a wall that isolated you from the living and the world around you. It was a defense mechanism. A way of protecting yourself from all the things you could not change and all the people you so desperately wanted to love but couldn’t out of your own fear of the inevitable. Vampires could not populate the world with all the people worth saving. There were only a precious few that had the stomach for this supposed immortality. Those who did not know of their world, a life of death and shadows and endless night, had no place in it.

A life without death sounded good in theory, but it was a hell in its own right. Megan had not seen a sunrise in over twenty years. Not because she would burst into flames. That was total bullshit. The light, the brilliance of the sun was blinding and dawn, just as the orange ball of fire rose over the horizon was the worst time of day of all. She had not hazarded not so much as a bite of food or taken a sip of anything but blood in over two decades. To her, that was the crux of Carter’s vampire’s lament, to be so inhuman but yet so human, filled with such longing and desire, the unquenchable thirst and insatiable hunger, and the watching of everything around you change little by little while you remain stuck, frozen in a time the world had already long since forgotten.

The funeral had gone off without a hitch. She had opted for an evening visitation and memorial service. There was no need to drag things out into the next day. Tomorrow, just as the house was being signed over. Her mother would be lowered into the ground and buried. She would not say her mom looked good, cold and dead in the coffin. The body resembled the mother she had known, but it wasn’t her, not really.

Megan tried to put the nuts and bolts of death and what came afterwards out of her mind. The mental image of her mother’s lifeless body laid out on a stainless steel table and drained of blood. The washing, primping, and pumping of embalming fluid stained red to give her mother’s skin, waxy in death, a healthy rosy glow. The dress slit up the back and artfully tucked around her mom’s narrow shoulders. The white hair coiffed and curled to soften the sunken in cheeks and too thin face. The mortician had suggested something in a nice shade of pastel pink. Dark colors were too somber; he helpfully advised. Megan had always thought her mom’s best color was plum, but she had dug through the closet to hunt for something pink.

It had been an awful thing to see her mom lying there. To smell the rot of decay eating at her mom’s flesh and to know that in the end there had been nothing she could do to save her. The mortician…god what a nut case he was, but he was good at what he did. Although the body didn’t look like the mom she had known. He had managed to make her look as if she were sleeping peacefully. Almost as if she would wake up at anytime, climb out of that coffin, and put on a pot of coffee for the morning.

The mortician was an ancient man, older than most of his customers. Mr. Rayburn had been in business for as long as she could remember. The old funeral home still sat at the corner of Smith and Grey streets as it had for over forty years. He had handled her mother with compassion and kindness, gently prying the wedding band off her stiff, cold lifeless finger and giving her hand a soft pat before closing the coffin one final time. Megan had wanted to bury her mother with the ring, but the mortician had taken it off and deposited it in her palm, insisting that someday she’d want it.

Mr. Rayburn knew everyone in this town. He had coffee in the diner every morning, barring an upcoming funeral service. Although his voice was as rough as sandpaper grating a rusty metal pipe, he sang in the church choir on Sundays. The funeral home sponsored little league games and peewee football. He visited the nursing home at least once a week. No doubt in hopes of drumming up business. When he said “I’ll see you soon,” a person prayed to God he meant it figuratively and not literally. And old Mr. Rayburn had never, ever missed a funeral in his life.

Megan wondered exactly who was going to get the honor of laying out the mortician for his funeral. Somebody new would take over the business and probably level the old funeral home to the ground. It would probably be somebody who wouldn’t care what a corpse looked like or how much it did or didn’t resemble the departed as long as payment was received in full. Death itself was messy and horrific, but the business of death was clean and efficient. Mr. Rayburn needed to figure out who was going to do the honors, and soon, for death was coming for him and it rode a swift, pale horse.

The entire town had turned out to see her mother into the Great Beyond. Old ladies decked out in their finest with their feathers thoroughly fluffed had shown up in droves proudly toting the latest casserole nightmare to grace the pages of the Ladies Home Journal. Elderly codgers leaning heavily on canes and walkers or on the arm of a reluctant grand, sometimes, great grandchild, rolled in to pay their respects. Families, with their lineage as old as the town itself, stopped by and offered their condolences.

She shouldn’t have worried about anyone recognizing her. The old ones didn’t remember her and those who might have were already dead. Of her own family, they were scattered across the country. Nobody had showed up. Her cousins had taken the time to send the obligatory sympathy card and funeral flowers. The typical hideous chrysanthemums in cheerful shades of yellow and pink accompanied by pale daisies with sprays of baby’s breath and broad palm leaves.

It seemed everyone had a story to tell about her mother. Rheumy eyes twinkled with the light of a youth gone by with the reminiscence of the tales. Her mom’s prized peach preserves were quite the topic of conversation. The Ladies Auxiliary had asked for the recipe to publish in the next edition of their quarterly newsletter. It was an honor to make the pages of the newsletter, or so Megan had been informed by a rather stuffy, auspicious vest wearing member of the junior society.

Megan had looked for the recipe, but she hadn’t looked all that hard. Some things were meant to be secrets and go to the grave with the person who bore them. Her mom’s prized peach preserves were one of them and the blue ribbons they had earned her year after year at the county fair were on their way to recycling or reclamation or whatever it was people did with the crap left behind when someone died.

She wandered from room to room, occasionally pausing to peek through a box, just to be sure. The accumulation of a lifetime didn’t exactly amount to much, a few boxes of trinkets worth keeping, an empty house, and not much else. Megan would like to think the sum of her mother’s life had amounted to something more than so much nothing, but it didn’t. Her mom had been…well, a mom. She baked cookies, browsed magazine ads, kept a house, and of course, raised a daughter.

In the grander scheme of things her mother’s life would never be remembered. What a thing to be remembered for, one thing, one insignificant thing, her damned peach preserve recipe. The thought of it infuriated Megan. Her mom had never gone to the orchard to hand pick the peaches. She had gotten them from the farmer’s market and taken the credit for their sweetness. The recipe wasn’t even a treasured family secret handed down from generation to generation. Her mother had clipped it from the pages of some magazine and claimed it as her own. But, the smiles talking about the sweet, sticky goodness of those damned preserves had brought to weathered, wrinkled faces. Maybe, that was something worth remembering.

Megan wasn’t sticking around to witness the burial. The brothers had lent her the use of an SUV to haul her treasure trove of boxes back to the city. It was there that her life waited for her and she was determined not to linger here in the past, but to return to it. She wished whoever had bought the house luck. Maybe, the new family would bring some happiness to this sad old remnant of a life, not a famous life, but a good one that had been lived in it.





























Chapter 44

Fallon ventured downstairs to find herself promptly exiled to the dining room. She had been lucky enough to score a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a tall glass of milk before being tossed out on her rump. Everyone knew her talents lay in healing and nobody pretended that she had even the least bit of skill in the kitchen. She could barely manage to boil water let alone actually cook something resembling an edible meal. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, she could manage that though. Nash was the chef extraordinaire in the house. His kitchen, his rules, and he wisely banned her from performing any kind of a task that involved anything that might be remotely considered as cooking.

She wasn’t alone at the dining room table. With a family of this size, nobody was ever truly alone. The kitchen, not that she was allowed in it, and the dining room, were the beating heart of the house. At first she had thought the man scowling into a cooling mug of coffee was Tracker. The build was right, but there was something wrong about the rigid, uncomfortable formality of his sitting posture. Tracker was a sloucher, relaxed and capable of making himself at home, comfortably so, almost anywhere. This man was tense and stiff, and the hardened, intense set of his jaw was enough to make her hesitate to take a seat at the far end of the table, as far away from him as she could get.

Fallon had never met Tracker’s twin brother. With good reason, all things considered by her first impression of him, she was glad she hadn’t. The man was intense with a humongous letter I. He glanced up at her, staring her down as he let his eyes roam over her frame, sizing her up. She felt the urge to match his posture and sit in rigid stillness beneath his appraising stare. Instead, she took a bite of her sandwich and aimed a dismissive, evaluating glower right back at him.

She was used to pushy alpha males. Her father was the king of pushy and she had never kowtowed to him a day in her life. Even in this day and age of enlightenment there was still a certain amount of sexism in the medical field. In her first week of medical school she had learned to hold her own and had been doing so ever since. Her stare, she was proud to say, never wavered. Fallon ate her sandwich and drank her milk, draining the glass dry and not leaving as much as a crumb on the plate. The entire time, through the eating, drinking, and swallowing, her eyes never left his.

Catcher eyed the female. Not a bad specimen of the gentler sex, a half-breed, but one of impeccable family lineage on her father’s side. He squashed the instinctive urge to continue staring her down and flicked his eyes to the cheerful print on the tablecloth. She had a milk mustache, the white of it blending in with the fine pale blonde peach fuzz on her upper lip. He wondered if he should mention it to her, but decided against doing so. Janine probably had some kind of rule about such things. If you should or should not tell a woman she had food on her face or not.

He took a deep breath and practiced his smile. The tug of his lips curving up felt unfamiliar on his face. He should say something, but Janine hadn’t covered safe topics of conversation in her careful list of instructions. What should he say? Perhaps, he was better off to keep his mouth shut and let her do the talking. But, with a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, maybe, she was too preoccupied with chewing and staring him down to think of something to say herself. That in itself might be for the best too.

She was a little spitfire. He could tell that. Her hair blazed orange with highlights of gold in the lights over the dining room table. No woman could hide a blush and her cheeks were tinged a soft, creamy pinkish peachy color. He bothered her. Made her uncomfortable and awkward and maybe, just a little nervous. Catcher could smell his effect on her beneath the sweet floral layer of her perfume and the musky essence of her body’s natural scent.

She didn’t shuffle self-consciously in her seat or flick her eyes away. She met him head on and matched his stare moment for unblinking moment. Her eyes were an uncanny shade of navy blue. The pupils dilated into onyx bottomless pits and the irises flecked with gold. He watched her pink tongue dart out and lick away the milk mustache and the crumbs from her upper lip. The bracelet around her dainty wrist tinkled against the glass in her hand. The kitchen was a hubbub of activity as people rushed about to prepare the evening meal, but he didn’t hear it. He didn’t hear anything or notice the coming and going of anyone through the dining room. He had eyes and ears for nothing but her.

Trying to be human as humanly possible, Catcher studied her studying him. He knew of her. Knew her name, but had never met the woman behind the name. Who was Fallon Grey? The human side of him wanted to know, but he could not completely ignore his alpha male either. The arrogant, single minded beast inside of him demanded his wolfish due and would not be denied for one second more. Careful to restrain the beast within him, he let his alpha off the chain to play hide and go seek with Fallon’s inner wolf.

Fallon shivered at the blast of pure, raw masculinity Catcher exuded from every pore. His particular brand was filled with the promise of sinful delights and pleasures of the flesh. His was a wild untamed blend of wolf and nature. Of male and the heady essence of all the things only a man could do for a woman. She broke out in a sweat and for the first time since having the displeasure of meeting his acquaintance, squirmed in her seat.