The Black Rose, page 1
part #2 of Four Elements Series
The
BLACK ROSE
by
J.R. RAIN &
MATTHEW S. COX
A Four Elements Novel #2
Other Books by J.R. Rain and Matthew S. Cox
WINTER SOLSTICE SERIES
Convergence
Containment
Catalyst
ALEXIS SILVER SERIES
Silver Light
Deep Silver
Silver Quarrel
MADDY WIMSEY SERIES
The Devil’s Eye
The Drifting Gloom
Dark Mercy
SAMANTHA MOON ORIGINS
New Moon Rising
Moon Mourning
Haunted Moon
SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES
Blood Moon
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE
Moon Master
Dead Moon
IMMORTAL OPERATIVE
Broken Ice
FOUR ELEMENTS SERIES
The Elementalist
The Black Rose
The Black Rose
Published by Rain Press
Copyright © 2019 by J.R. Rain & Matthew S. Cox
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Reading Sample: Silver Light
About the Author: J.R. Rain
About the Author: Matthew S. Cox
The Black Rose
Chapter One
Picking Up
Anxiety had lately developed a habit of following me into cramped spaces and standing a little too close.
Bad enough I’d taken a job from a vampire of all things—that would’ve put me on edge plenty on its own—but I couldn’t shake a persistent feeling that a category five shitstorm had its sights set on Shadow Pines. Pretty sure yours truly would get caught in the middle of it. Only question being if I’d end up in over my head. Hopefully, it wouldn’t get so deep I couldn’t breathe.
This town had been my home all my life, and not even all the creepy stuff going on here would chase me off. It helped that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Didn’t have much keeping me here either except for sentiment... and my job. No family left alive and only one real friend, Ron Moore. In fact, his dead wife made up a good part of why I hadn’t yet gotten the hell out of here. Daphne had joined the long list of names associated to ‘animal attacks.’ Ron always suspected the true killer had been something far less than an ordinary mountain lion. Back then—at least before I mysteriously gained the ability to manipulate fire, lightning, wind, and water—I’d never have believed him.
But, then I ended up believing in vampires. Kind of difficult to deny the existence of something when it gets in your face and tries to kill you. Like most things that happened to a private investigator, it all started off when a beautiful woman walked into my office. I’d stopped wondering how my life had become a noir film and decided to embrace the cliché. I even had a bottle of Jack in my desk drawer.
Speaking of said beautiful woman, she still happened to be in my office occupying a second desk closer to the entrance.
Crystal Bradbury, half-daughter to one of the town’s Founding Families decided to take a liking to me for some damn reason. Truth is, more than seeing vampires roaming about or having magical powers come out of nowhere, that was the part I found the hardest to believe. Some guys ranked a woman’s looks on a scale from one to ten. To me, Crystal was an eight—a sideways eight, as in the infinity symbol. And sure, I knew that came from her part-succubus nature getting into my head.
Yes, I said succubus. As in a kind of fey creature. As in an over-sexed fey creature.
She’s a perfect blonde bombshell, a bit on the willowy side, but her apparent vulnerability is all part of the trap, using it as a kind of lure. Unlike vampires, they show up on cameras, and depending on the nature of the observer, their looks can vary drastically. A succubus’s appearance changes in the mind of anyone looking at her, so she’s the picture of their heart’s desire. In Crystal’s case, her photo surprisingly matched—mostly—how I saw her, only my mind made her out to be even more perfectly beautiful. And really, outward beauty would fade over time for anybody. Sure it sounded cliché as all hell to think, but I’d fallen in love with the woman inside. Good looks, even for a half-succubus, didn’t last forever. ’Course, who knew how long that’ll take. Pretty sure she had a bit longer than a normal human lifespan ahead of her, but neither one of us knew exactly how much.
Getting intimate with her could be… exhausting. While Crystal’s human side still needed normal food, her succubus part also craved nourishment: the emotional/life energy released in the midst of sex. Back to that whole trap thing. Succubi and incubi preyed on humans much the way lions preyed on gazelle, only they consumed psychic energy rather than flesh.
Rumor claimed that full succubi killed their victims every time they had sex with someone, but Crystal doubted that. After all, her mother didn’t die when she conceived her. While it might have been possible that incubi—the male counterpart of what she is—worked differently from succubi, that didn’t sound right. Most of the hearsay surrounding succubi or incubi, in general, came from the Church, and they had a strong motive to overstate the dangers. Not saying I completely disagreed with them. Demons were dangerous. But, Crystal described herself as more of a fey creature than what most people thought of when hearing the word ‘demon.’ Even her true father—an incubus—she didn’t consider evil. More of a trickster.
So, yeah. Despite the sometimes ‘draining’ nature of my relationship with her, I’m in heaven.
My last attempt at romance didn’t work out too well. Couldn’t blame Justine for that, though. A couple of times, my investigations brought me to crime scenes where the local law—that’d be the sheriff’s office—investigated. Justine’s the sheriff. Strong-willed, fearless, and she had a pretty decent right hook. But… we didn’t work out. She kept asking me to do distasteful things—like find a normal day job, since working as a small-town private dick barely paid the bills, if that.
Dating a half-fey isn’t entirely without its issues either, though. We had the usual couple problems like random mystics trying to kidnap her and drain her soul to use in an enchantment to control the power players in town. Yeah, I knew what that sounded like… which is exactly why I hadn’t said anything about it to anyone but Crystal and her relatives. And, sure, the mystic hadn’t been all that random at all. Nigel Farrington, another old Founding Family stuffed-shirt, wanted to pull his family higher up in the pecking order by any means necessary.
Speaking of Crystal’s family, her grandmother—who I thought of as the Wicked Witch of the West’s less-friendly third cousin—showed an odd sense of indignation at Nigel’s plan. I had a good suspicion the old bat hadn’t really been upset he messed with Crystal as much as Nigel plotting against the other Founding Families.
Yeah, those old families were kinda messed up. Despite it being the age of the internet, the powerful families acted more like royalty from the Middle Ages or Victorian England. I supposed enough money made someone feel entitled to being treated differently. Hate politics. Every time I think about it, an f-word gets involved, usually in an effort to change the topic of conversation away from politics. And I don’t mean governmental type politics with senators or mayors or presidents—no, I meant the totally worthless inter-family politics and gossip going on around here. Someone’s daughter spending too much time with the wrong person’s son could ruin whole families and even cause deaths. Something as trivial as wearing a too-shabby outfit to a public event could set off feuds that lasted decades. Utter insanity.
Insanity I had no patience for or interest in.
However, Crystal being on the mend with her family had its benefits. For instance, with Nigel dead, she didn’t have to keep hiding out in Ironside, our sister town in the west, closer to the mountains. She also, evidently, had no true need of income anymore once the Bradburys allowed her to return home. Her mother must have made some kind of devil’s bargain with the old lady, but at least one of her half-brothers—Arthur—is on her side. The other one’s neutral. Funny how a little thing like discovering they’d been lied to changed their minds about her. Her entire family spent years thinking she’d lost control of her succubus power and made a meal of her father, Sterling. Only, that man hadn’t been her father… and she hadn’t touched him at all. She’d taken the shame of the lie to protect her family from the shame of it getting out that her father conducted an affair with Brittany Anworth. Bad enough the girl had been much younger than Sterling, the Bradbury and Anworth families also had enmity going back generations.
Anyway, with no need to leave town or worry about money, Crystal decided to hire herself as my assistant. No complaints from me. In the few days since she started, we’ve had no less than seven paying clients, all routine jobs without supernatural weirdness. And yeah, I’d been working them while keeping the ‘missing werewolf boyfriend’ case at arm’s length. It didn’t escape me that my upsurge in work happened the same day Crystal started as my assistant. She’s got a charming way about her—literally. We aren’t taking advantage of anyone, but if a potential client could afford to hire me and had a decent case, she’d nudge them past any hesitation. She also came in damn handy getting information out of reluctant witnesses. At this point, I couldn’t even really call her my ‘assistant’ as much as partner.
So, yeah... back to the vampire.
This particular bundle of immortal angst went by the name Tracy Randall. Far as I knew, the girl was twenty, but she dressed and carried herself more like an eighteen-year-old. Maybe being turned into a vampire made her appear younger. Maybe I’m prematurely old for twenty-eight.
Yeah. A vampire showed up at my office, didn’t try to kill me, and I didn’t feel any instinctual need to destroy her. Another side effect of my unusual elemental powers is a near-uncontrollable urge to kill vampires. I had plenty enough to be angry with them for, considering Ron’s wife, Crystal’s older sister, and all the fear and death they’d caused my home town, but this went beyond that. Me wanting to attack vampires had about as much thought involved as a dog biting at a sausage dangled in front of its snout. Only, with her, I hadn’t felt the same ‘smash it now’ compulsion.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose at that thought and gave serious consideration to reaching for the bottle of Jack in my bottom left drawer. Two things kept me from it. One: I wasn’t old enough to be a hard-drinking down-on-his-luck private eye (though my luck has actually improved dramatically in the past few days). Two: an entire town’s worth of vampires wanted to kill me. Getting drunk would only help them do it. My wits had to stay sharp.
That brings me back to the whole magical powers thing. A shooting star passed overhead one night a few weeks ago and Nature decided to hire me as her agent of balance. In a town like Shadow Pines, unexpectedly discovering I could make the wind blow on command or throw lightning from my fingertips stood out as only slightly more unusual than Bill Cooper getting drunk and driving his old red pickup truck in reverse down Main Street. Weird stuff happened here, and this time, I found myself smack dab in the middle of it.
I’d like to say being in love with a half-succubus was the oddest part of my life, but that would be a lie.
So, there I sat at my desk, staring out the front window of my office, trying to figure out how on Earth the guy “Mom Nature” picked to be the destroyer of all things funky and dead wound up inclined to help a vampire. It had to be her ‘girl in trouble’ eyes or maybe how she came off as a teenager. Didn’t hurt that she lacked the stench of the grave. So far, she’d been the one exception to the stink. Every other vampire I’d run into smelled like a corpse left out in the sun for a few days. There appeared to be a connection between the degree of ‘evil’ and the rankness of the smell. Tracy had an aroma of staleness around her rather than a stink. The girl smelled like a pile of paper that had been left in a college basement for a hundred years. While I couldn’t call it a pleasant odor, it didn’t count as a stench either. I figured that a vampire surrounded by staleness couldn’t be that bad.
So yeah, I’d been putting off working on her case. Honestly, her werewolf boyfriend might be in serious trouble. Couldn’t say it would bother me too much if such a monster took a dirt nap, but I should at least try to help her. A job’s a job, right? And this guy Michael I’d met who ran a blog about paranormal stuff seemed to think werewolves weren’t the mindless killers Hollywood made them out to be. Also, I had a conflict of personal ethics. Couldn’t tell the girl I’d take her case, then just let it sit, ignored.
Might as well at least try to find this damn werewolf.
Chapter Two
Ogilvie’s
As soon as I walked past Crystal’s desk on the way to the door, she bounced to her feet. She didn’t even have to say a word. Her giant eyes gave away her worry. She didn’t fear the werewolf, having lived around them in Ironside for years. No, she dreaded the vampires—or a dangerous mortal under their control—would attack me at any minute.
I stopped, giving her that ‘I’ll be okay’ smile.
“Nothing new came in so I’m guessing you’re starting on the werewolf case?” She looked me over somewhat like a mother sending her kid off for the first day of school.
I hooked my thumbs in my pockets, admiring her beauty all over again. “Yeah. Been holding off on it too long already. Gonna head over to where he works, see if anyone there has any useful information.”
“Okay. I’ll keep an eye on things here. If you get a hang-up call from me, it means I’ve been kidnapped.”
That almost made me chuckle, but I didn’t. “You’ll be fine. You’re no helpless dame.”
Smiling, she threaded her arms around my neck, leaning in close enough to kiss. “Max, no one uses the word ‘dame’ anymore.”
I wagged my eyebrows. “Private eyes do. It’s in the rule books.”
She kissed me on the lips. “So if I’m not a helpless dame, what am I?”
“You’re amazing.”
We kissed again. Hate to say it, but if she’d wanted to do more than simply lock lips, I wouldn’t have cared that anyone walking by on the street could’ve seen us. The office had a big front window that offered little privacy and even less protection… but luckily, I didn’t have to worry about vampires during the day. And I didn’t usually work the night shift.
“You be careful, Max.”
“Damn. Now you jinxed me.” I winked.
Crystal prodded me in the side. “I’m serious. If something happens to you, it’s gonna ruin me.”
It took a lot to get through my defenses. Hearing a girl like her say something like that not only punched a hole in my mental wall, it dynamited it. Shadow Pines had more unanswered questions than street dogs had fleas, but I did know one thing: I wouldn’t screw it up with her the same way I did before. If Crystal ever wanted me to give up on the PI life and get an ordinary job, I’d do it for her. Maybe that proved I never really loved Justine as much as I had been intrigued by her… I hadn’t been willing to compromise my wants for her.
Then again, was it true love if someone asked you to compromise who you were?
“I would never do anything to hurt you,” I said.
“It’s not you I’m worried about. It’s the vampires.” She squeezed me again, then let go. “Think you’re going to find him?”
I shrugged. “Admittedly, the odds of finding him would’ve been better if I started looking three days ago.”
“Is it the werewolf part, the hired by the vampire part, or that you expect this one to be pro-bono that made you put it off?” She appraised me with a mischievous eyebrow lift.
“Mostly one and two. A vampire showing up to hire me for a job right after we wipe out a nest of them had trap written all over it. But, that girl looked really broken up about him.” I shook my head and resumed heading for the door.
“You’re a good guy, Max Long. That’s why she chose you.”
I grinned. “She chose me because I’m the only PI in Shadow Pines.”
“Not the vampire girl. I meant Momma Nature.” Crystal sat at her desk.
“Heh. Perhaps. At least she thinks I’m doing something right.”
“Well, keep your eyes open.”
I nodded. “I am less worried during the day but not completely careless. Vampires might be weaker than heck when the sun’s out but they still have human thralls.” A thrall, of course, was a sort of mindless human slave.
“Stop worrying me, dammit, and go find the werewolf… or what’s left of him.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tipped my nonexistent hat at her and headed out to my beat-up brown pickup. Well, not so beat-up anymore. The Bradburys graciously covered the repairs for all the damage it suffered while looking into the death of Crystal’s older sister Dana.
