Blue Moon: A Samantha Moon Story Read online

  BLUE

  MOON

  A

  Samantha Moon

  Story

  by

  J.R. RAIN

  Acclaim for the Stories of J.R. Rain:

  “Be prepared to lose sleep!”

  —James Rollins, international bestselling author of The Doomsday Key on J.R. Rain’s The Lost Ark

  “I love this!”

  —Piers Anthony, bestselling author of Xanth on J.R. Rain’s Moon Dance

  “Dark Horse is the best book I’ve read in a long time!”

  —Gemma Halliday, award-winning author of Spying in High Heels

  “Moon Dance is a must read. If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, be prepared to love J.R. Rain’s Samantha Moon, vampire private investigator.”

  —Eve Paludan, bestselling co-author of Witchy Business

  “Impossible to put down. J.R. Rain’s Moon Dance is a fabulous urban fantasy replete with multifarious and unusual characters, a perfectly synchronized plot, vibrant dialogue and sterling witticism all wrapped in a voice that is as beautiful as it is rich and vividly intense as it is relaxed.”

  —April Vine, author of Unbound

  “Is it possible to redefine two genres in one book? I don’t know, but J.R. Rain has left a lasting impression for the vampire and mystery genres.”

  —P.J. Day, author of The Sunset Prophecy

  Other Books by J.R. Rain

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  The Lost Ark

  The Body Departed

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  Silent Echo

  Bound By Blood

  Judas Silver

  Lost Eden

  VAMPIRE FOR HIRE SERIES

  Moon Dance

  Vampire Moon

  American Vampire

  Moon Child

  Christmas Moon

  Vampire Dawn

  Vampire Games

  Moon Island

  Moon River

  Vampire Sun

  SAMANTHA MOON

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Teeth

  Vampire Nights

  Vampires Blues

  Vampire Dreams

  Halloween Moon

  Vampire Gold

  Blue Moon

  Vampire Requiem

  JIM KNIGHTHORSE SERIES

  Dark Horse

  The Mummy Case

  Hail Mary

  Clean Slate

  NICK CAINE SERIES

  with Aiden James

  Temple of the Jaguar

  Treasure of the Deep

  Pyramid of the Gods

  Curse of the Druids

  THE WITCH SERIES

  The Witch and the Gentleman

  The Witch and the Angel

  SPINOZA TRILOGY

  The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo

  The Vampire Who Played Dead

  The Vampire in the Iron Mask

  GRAIL QUEST TRILOGY

  Arthur

  Merlin

  Lancelot

  ALADDIN TRILOGY

  with Piers Anthony

  Aladdin Relighted

  Aladdin Sins Bad

  Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman

  WALKING PLAGUE TRILOGY

  with Elizabeth Basque

  Zombie Patrol

  Zombie Rage

  Zombie Mountain

  SPIDER SERIES

  Bad Blood (with Scott Nicholson and H.T. Night)

  Spider Web (with Scott Nicholson)

  GHOST FILES SERIES

  edited with Scott Nicholson

  Ghost College (by J.R. Rain and Scott Nicholson)

  Ghost Soldier (by Evelyn Klebert)

  Ghost Fire (by Eve Paludan)

  Ghost Hall (by Michelle Wright)

  Ghost Tattoo (by Eve Paludan)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Bleeder and Other Stories

  Vampires Rain and Other Stories

  The Santa Call: A Christmas Story

  SCREENPLAYS

  Judas Silver

  Lost Eden

  COLLABORATIONS

  Cursed! (with Scott Nicholson)

  The Vampire Club (with Scott Nicholson)

  Dragon Assassin (with Piers Anthony)

  Daughters of Eve (with P.J. Day)

  Hear No Evil (with Michele Scott)

  Blue Moon

  Published by J.R. Rain

  Copyright © 2013 by J.R. Rain

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. All rights reserved.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Blue Moon

  Vampire vs. Bigfoot

  The Bull

  The Prophetic Heart

  Vampire Dawn: Outtake

  His Last Bow

  Reading Sample

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To Eve Paludan.

  A great writer.

  A great editor.

  An even better friend.

  “It is rare to catch a glimpse of us. But when you do, be afraid. Or not. For we are not evil. Just hungry.”

  —Diary of the Undead

  Blue Moon

  I don’t go into Starbucks very often, but when I do, I see him.

  He sits in the far corner, his back to the wall, cowboy-like, as in, no one can sneak up on him. He’s your typical Starbucks geek. Laptop, headphones, wires everywhere. A too-big phone sitting next to him. Like most Starbuckians, he appears to be hard at work on something, tapping away furiously, only sometimes pausing to look off into the near distance. Or the far distance. Or perhaps he’s checking out an ass or two. How the hell would I know?

  Either way, he seemed to work as hard or harder than most of the other Starbucks geeks. Typing, typing, typing. Fingers flying, keys being hit with vigor, energy and confidence.

  He’s also a big guy. Not as big as Kingsley—few are—but certainly big enough. He might have been handsome if not for his slightly-too-big head. Also, I didn’t like his half-ass beard, somewhere between a real beard and something Don Johnson might have worn in the 80’s. Pick a beard or not, big guy. At least, that’s what I say.

  Anyway, the only reason we’ve been hitting this Starbucks is that Tammy has developed a penchant for coffee. Go figure. The madness all started when a relative gave her a Starbucks card last Christmas. Who gives an eleven-year-old a Starbucks card? At any rate, her new favorite drink is a caramel macchiato, and so these days, when I’m in a particularly good mood (or if I’d recently cashed a client’s check, which is just as rare) she and I would hit up the local Starbucks.

  A vampire at Starbucks. Why not?

  Not often, granted. A nine dollar coffee filled with enough sugar to fuel a Smart Car wasn’t something I was very keen on. But...my daughter liked them. I suspected sitting in a Starbucks, drinking her flavored coffee, also made her feel like an adult.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but she seemed happy, and I liked when my kids were happy. So sue me.

  Anyway, business must have been good this month because we’d been in nearly every week—and each time there he was:

  The blond guy with the pseudo beard and big head, his back to the wall, was pounding away at his keyboard again. Who he was, I didn’t know. But I found myself drawn to him. I suppose he wasn’t hideous to look at, but he certainly wasn’t my type. I don’t generally go for blondes, and I most certainly don’t go for half-assed beards.

  Still, there was something about him. I’d noticed it before but had mostly ignored it. After all, I had enough men in my l
ife. Too many, some would say.

  I was certain my interest in him wasn’t romantic. No, there was something else about him. Something intriguing...and familiar. I generally keep a low profile, and I’m certainly not one for catching up with old friends. Old friends asked a lot of questions.

  Was he an old friend? I didn’t know, but I was sure I knew him from somewhere. And, as we ordered our drinks today—a carmel foo foo drink for Tammy and a bottle water for me—I found myself glancing over at him again and again.

  And, yes, today I had cashed another client check. Wahoo! A nice-sized one, too, although my client, I suspected, had seriously considered not paying me.

  Bad idea.

  You see, I had been promised a bonus if I found something—a hidden treasure of all things—and I had. Except a crazy ghost had had other plans. Yes, a ghost...who very much didn’t want me to reveal the location of his treasure. So, instead of disclosing the location of the buried fortune, I had shown my client evidence of its existence. I had, after all, been hired to find the treasure, not reveal the location.

  Yes, a loophole in my agreement. My client had not been pleased. That might cost me a bad review on Angie’s List, but that was a price I was willing to pay. In the end, a dead man got his wish, I got my bonus, and now here we were at Starbucks. Life goes on.

  As Tammy placed her complicated order, sounding like a true Starbuckian, I glanced over at the blond guy writing in the corner. He wore one of those 1920’s paperboy caps. Sometimes called duck-billed caps. Nerdy, but kind of cute, too. He wore his at a slight angle. Jaunty.

  As we waited for our drinks, Tammy launched into a rather elaborate and disturbingly well-thought-out plan to have Anthony, her younger brother, move in with their dad so that we girls could have the house alone. When she was done, I told her that a) that wasn’t going to happen and b) she would miss Anthony whether she wanted to admit it or not.

  “I won’t miss his farting.”

  “No one would miss his farting, Tammy.”

  “Maybe he can live with dad half the time.”

  “Or not.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Not even Anthony’s stinky butt.”

  Tammy giggled, and when our drinks were ready, I led Tammy over to a table and told her to sit and wait for me.

  “You’re going to talk to that man,” she said. My daughter, you should know, is a world class mind reader.

  “Yes,” I said, “and it’s not polite to read other people’s minds.”

  “Well, you keep looking at him.”

  “I know.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  * * *

  “Hi,” I said, except I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me. So I leaned down and waved just over his laptop.

  That got his attention. He gasped a little and looked up. He was wearing pink—yes, pink—headphones with the words “Virgin Airlines” written on them. He pulled them off, slipping them down around his neck. As he did so, I caught what might have been some New Agey music. I didn’t take the big guy as an Enya type, but go figure.

  “Hi,” I said again.

  He smiled and sat forward and promptly knocked his iced coffee off the table. As it went flying, I reached down almost casually and caught it before it got very far. I returned it to its wet ring on the table next to his keyboard.

  “You better be careful,” I said. “I hear iced coffee is hell on keyboards.”

  He stared at the coffee that, just a few seconds earlier had been flipping through the air. He looked up at me, his mouth hanging open a little. I get that a lot these days.

  “Er, right. Thank you...” his voice trailed off. “That was incredible.”

  I shrugged. “Lucky catch.”

  “No, I mean...that might have been the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Then you need to get out more,” I said. “This seat taken?”

  He blinked some more, then shook his head. He had been prepared to work today. He had been prepared to lose himself in whatever it was that he was writing. He hadn’t been prepared to have a nosy woman with superhuman reflexes sit across from him.

  I set his leather saddle bag on the floor beneath the table. Cool bag. I sat opposite him.

  “I’ve seen you here before,” I said.

  “I’ve seen you, too,” he said.

  This actually surprised me. Never once had I seen him look up from his keyboard.

  “Are you a writer?” I asked.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Either that or you really, really hate your laptop.”

  He grinned. I grinned. We studied each other some more. My inner alarm remained silent. Always a good sign. We did this for another twenty seconds. The silence was not uncomfortable or unpleasant.

  I continued studying him. Full lips, short beard, hint of gray in his beard. Lots of laugh lines. Could probably use some lotion on his skin. Strong hands. Nails chewed. Bad habit. He wore a v-neck tee-shirt. Chest hair poking out. A ring on his right hand. A thick squarish watch on his left. North Face jacket hanging on the chair behind him. Nice jacket. Nothing about him suggested that I knew him.

  And yet...I did know him. I was sure of it. “You’re probably wondering why I’m sitting here,” I said.

  He reached for the recently-saved coffee. As he drank, he continued to take me in, his eyes going from my hair to my face to my body, scanning. They might have lingered on my boobs a little. I’ll give him a pass. This time.

  “I think I know why you’re here,” he said. I waited for it, expecting the worst. And by worst, I meant some cheesy come-on line. Instead, he surprised me by saying, “You think you know me, and it’s killing you.”

  I nodded, impressed. “Something like that.”

  “Or maybe you're here because you like my beard.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He sighed. “Well, I like it.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “Ouch,” he said, but smiled anyway.

  He set his drink down and glanced at his laptop when a ping sounded. I would know that ping from anywhere. It was an instant message, or an IM. Fang and I had used IMs often in the past. The big blond writer ignored the IM. On impulse, I reached out with my mind to see if I could get a read on him and was surprised that he was completely closed off to me. Another immortal? Interesting, as only immortals were closed off to me.

  He nodded after a moment and said, “Yeah, you seem familiar. Actually, you seem really, really familiar.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “No,” he said. “Just the ones who sit across from me at Starbucks and who look so damn familiar that it’s driving me crazy.” He paused and pretended to think about it. “So, I guess maybe once a day.”

  I laughed. No, I snorted, which made him laugh. I heard Tammy giggling behind us. My telepathic daughter would be picking all of this up. Yes, my kids are weird. And, no, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

  “Did I used to date you?” I suddenly asked.

  He laughed some more and looked me over again. To the betterment of his health, he didn’t linger on my boobs this time. Good boy. Someone raised him well. He said, “Oh, I would remember if I used to date you.”

  “Is that a compliment?” I asked

  “Very much so.”

  “Good, then I won’t have to give you a public nugie.”

  “A public nugie?”

  “Yeah, you want one after all?”

  He raised his hand and laughed hard. Easy to get along with. Effortless familiarity. God, I knew him from somewhere. I tried again to penetrate his thoughts. No luck. An immortal? Geez, he didn’t seem immortal. He seemed very normal. Too normal.

  When he was done laughing, he said, “You sound kind of badass.”

  “I have to be.”

  “And wh
y’s that?”

  “I’ve got two kids.”

  He nodded. “Mad mom in minivan and all that?”

  “Close,” I said, thinking of my minivan parked just outside the doors here, a minivan with a fresh dent along the passenger side fender, a dent that was the result of me backing into a shopping cart. Lord knows my inner warning system goes haywire when someone has ill intentions for me, but far be it to alert me when I’m about to put a $700 dent in my van.

  Stupid warning system.

  I studied him some more. The beard. The blue eyes. The chipped front teeth. The overbite. Jesus, this was driving me crazy.

  “It’s driving you crazy, isn’t it?” he asked, grinning. He seemed to be enjoying this a hell of a lot more than I was. The bastard.

  “Bonkers,” I said. I chewed my lip. Tapped my nails on the circular, slightly scarred table. I asked him where he went to high school. He told me. No dice. But his high school hadn’t been very far, just a city away.

  “What year did you graduate?” he asked.

  I told him. He shook his head, reached for his iced coffee. When he was done sipping from it, he set it back into the wet ring. Bullseye.

  We next went through friends, jobs, boyfriends, and girlfriends. There was no connection anywhere. No friends of friends. Nothing. His name, I learned, was Jon.

  “Maybe we sat next to each other on an airplane trip,” he offered. “Or shared a seat on a train.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe our eyes met across a crowded room, and we’ve never forgotten each other.”

  “Romantic, but no.”

  “Maybe I know you from another life,” he suggested.

  Okay, that hit me. Another life. Another time. Another place. And something in the here and now was tugging at me, reminding me that I knew him. Great. “Maybe,” I said.

  “But there’s no way to know for sure,” he said. “And that sucks.”