Moon Dance (Vampire for Hire #1) Read online

  MOON DANCE

  by

  J.R. RAIN

  Vampire for Hire #1

  Acclaim for 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, Rita and Golden Spur award-winning author of Scandal Sheet

  “Moon Dance is absolutely brilliant!”

  ―Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, author of Understanding the Planetary Myths

  “Powerful stuff!”

  ―Aiden James, author of Cades Cove on J.R. Rain’s An Uncommon Quest

  “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, author of Letters from David

  “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 The Midnight Rose

  OTHER BOOKS BY J.R. RAIN

  VAMPIRE FOR HIRE

  Moon Dance

  Vampire Moon

  American Vampire (coming soon)

  Vampire Empire (coming soon)

  THE JIM KNIGHTHORSE SERIES

  Dark Horse

  The Mummy Case

  Hail Mary (coming soon)

  THE RETURN OF ARTHUR

  An Uncommon Quest (coming soon)

  The Merlin Game (coming soon)

  The Lost Ark

  The Body Departed

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  WITH SCOTT NICHOLSON

  Cursed!

  Cursed Again! (coming soon)

  WITH PIERS ANTHONY

  Aladdin Rising (coming soon)

  WITH AIDEN JAMES

  Plague of Coins (coming soon)

  WITH RANDOLPH NEIL

  The Lost Valley (coming soon)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Bleeder and Other Stories

  Teeth and Other Stories

  Vampire Nights and Other Stories

  The Santa Call and Other Christmas Stories (coming soon)

  SCREENPLAYS

  Judas Silver

  Lost Eden

  THE SPINOZA NOVELLAS

  The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo

  The Witch Who Played With Fire (coming soon)

  The Zombie Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (coming soon)

  COLLECTIONS

  Rain Dance

  Rainy Nights

  Black Rain

  Dark Quests

  Knighthorse

  Vampire for Hire

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Vampires, Zombies and Ghosts, Oh My!

  (edited by Eve Paludan)

  MOON DANCE

  Published by J.R. Rain at Smashwords.com

  Copyright © 2009 by J.R. Rain

  Cover design by: Bren at [email protected]

  Cover credit by: [email protected]

  Smashwords.com 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. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to mothers everywhere:

  Our amazing, selfless, unsung heroes.

  Love you, ma.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Eve Paludan, Liisa Lee and

  Sandy Johnston for their generous assistance with this book.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  MOON DANCE

  1.

  I was folding laundry in the dark and watching Judge Judy rip this guy a new asshole when the doorbell rang.

  I flipped down a pair of Oakley wrap-around sunglasses and, still holding a pair of little Anthony’s cotton briefs in one hand, opened the front door.

  The light, still painfully bright, poured in from outside. I squinted behind my shades and could just made out the image of a UPS deliveryman.

  And, oh, what an image it was.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, a hunky guy with tan legs and beefy arms materialized through the screen door before me. He grinned at me easily, showing off a perfect row of white teeth. Spiky yellow hair protruded from under his brown cap. The guy should have been a model, or at least my new best friend.

  “Mrs. Moon?” he asked. His eyes seemed particularly searching and hungry, and I wondered if I had stepped onto the set of a porno movie. Interestingly, a sort of warning bell sounded in my head. Warning bells are tricky to discern, and I automatically assumed this one was telling me to stay away from Mr. Beefy, or risk damaging my already rocky marriage.

  “You got her,” I said easily, ignoring the warning bells.

  “I’ve got a package here for you.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I’ll need for you to sign the delivery log.” He held up an electronic gizmo-thingy that must have been the aforementioned delivery log.

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, and opened the screen door and stuck a hand out. He looked at my very pale hand, paused, and then placed the electronic thing-a-majig in it. As I signed it, using a plastic-tipped pen, my signature appeared in the display box as an arthritic mess. The deliveryman watched me intently through the screen door. I don’t like to be watched intently. In fact, I prefer to be ignored and forgotten.

  “Do you always wear sunglasses indoors?” he asked casually, but I sensed his hidden question: And what sort of freak are you?

  “Only during the day. I find them redundant at night.” I opened the screen door again and exchanged the log doohickey for a small square package. “Thank you,” I said. “Have a good day.”

  He nodded and left, and I watched his cute little buns for a moment longer, and then shut the solid oak door completely. Sweet darkness returned to my home. I pulled up the sunglasses and sat down in a particularly worn dining room chair. Someday I was going to get these things re-upholstered.

  The package was heavily taped, but a few deft strokes of my painted red nail took care of all that. I opened the lid and peered inside. Shining inside was an ancient golden medallion. An intricate Celtic cross was engraved across the face of it, and embedded within the cross, formed by precisely cut rubies, were three red roses.

  In the living room, Judge Judy was calmly explaining to the defendant what an idiot he was. Although I agreed, I turned the TV off, deciding that this medallion needed my full concentration.

  After all, it was the same medallion worn by my attacker six years earlier.

  2.

  There was no return address and no note. Other than the medallion, the box was empty. I left the gleaming artifact in the box and shut the lid. Seeing it again brought back some horrible memories. Memories I have been doing my best to forget.

  I put the box in a cabinet beneath the china hutch, and then went back to Judge Judy and putting away the laundry. At 3:30 p.m., I lathered my skin with heaping amounts of sun block, donned a wide gardening hat and carefully stepped outside.
>
  The pain, as always, was intense and searing. Hell, I could have been cooking over an open fire pit. Truly, I had no business being out in the sun, but I had my kids to pick up, dammit.

  So I hurried from the front steps and crossed the driveway and into the open garage. My dream was to have a home with an attached garage. But, for now, I had to make the daily sprint.

  Once in the garage and out of the direct glare of the spring sun, I could breathe again. I could also smell my burning flesh.

  Blech!

  Luckily, the Ford Windstar minivan was heavily tinted, and so when I backed up and put the thing into drive, I was doing okay again. Granted, not great, but okay.

  I picked up my son and daughter from school, got some cheeseburgers from Burger King and headed home. Yes, I know, bad mom, but after doing chores all day, I definitely was not going to cook.

  Once at home, the kids went straight to their room and I went straight to the bathroom where I removed my hat and sunglasses, and used a washcloth to remove the extra sunscreen. Hell, I ought to buy stock in Coppertone. Soon the kids were hard at work saving our world from Haloes and had lapsed into a rare and unsettling silence. Perhaps it was the quiet before the storm.

  My only appointment for the day was right on time, and since I work from home, I showed him to my office in the back. His name was Kingsley Fulcrum and he sat across from me in a client chair, filling it to capacity. He was tall and broad shouldered and wore his tailored suit well. His thick black hair, speckled with gray, was jauntily disheveled and worn long over his collar. Kingsley was a striking man and would have been the poster boy for dashing rogues if not for the two scars on his face. Then again, maybe poster boys for rogue did have scars on their faces. Anyway, one was on his left cheek and the other was on his forehead, just above his left eye. Both were round and puffy. And both were recent.

  He caught me staring at the scars. I looked away, embarrassed. “How can I help you, Mr. Fulcrum?”

  “How long have you been a private investigator, Mrs. Moon?” he asked.

  “Six years,” I said.

  “What did you do before that?”

  “I was a federal agent.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I could feel his eyes on me. God, I hate when I can feel eyes on me. The silence hung for longer than I was comfortable with and I answered his unspoken question. “I had an accident and was forced to work at home.”

  “May I ask what kind of accident?”

  “No.”

  He raised his eyebrows and nodded. He might have turned a pale shade of red. “Do you have a list of references?”

  “Of course.”

  I turned to my computer, brought up the reference file and printed him out the list. He took it and scanned the names briefly. “Mayor Hartley?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He hired you?”

  “He did. I believe that’s the direct line to his personal assistant.”

  “Can I ask what sort of help you gave the mayor?”

  “No.”

  “I understand. Of course you can’t divulge that kind of information.”

  “How exactly can I help you, Mr. Fulcrum?” I asked again.

  “I need you to find someone.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who shot me,” he said. “Five times.”

  3.

  The furious sounds of my kids erupting into an argument suddenly came through my closed office door. In particular, Anthony’s high-pitched shriek. Sigh. The storm broke.

  I gave Kingsley an embarrassed smile. “Could you please hold on?”

  “Duty calls,” he said, smiling. Nice smile.

  I marched through my single story home and into the small bedroom my children shared. Anthony was on top of Tammy. Tammy was holding the remote control away from her body with one hand and fending off her little brother with the other. I came in just in time to witness him sinking his teeth into her hand. She yelped and bopped him over the ear with the remote control. He had just gathered himself to make a full-scale leap onto her back, when I stepped into the room and grabbed each by their collar and separated them. I felt as if I had separated two ravenous wolverines. Anthony’s fingers clawed for his sister’s throat. I wondered if they realized they were both hovering a few inches off the floor. When they had both calmed down, I set them down on their feet. Their collars were ruined.

  “Anthony, we do not bite in this household. Tammy, give me the remote control.”

  “But Mom,” said Anthony, in that shriekingly high-pitched voice that he used to irritate me. “I was watching ‘Pokemon’ and she turned the channel.”

  “We each get one half hour after school,” Tammy said smugly. “And you were well into my half hour.”

  “But you were on the phone talking to Richaaard.”

  “Tammy, give your brother the remote control. He gets to finish his TV show. You lost your dibs by talking to Richaaard.” They both laughed. “I have a client in my office. If I hear any more loud voices, you will both be auctioned off on eBay. I could use the extra money.”

  I left them and headed back to the office. Kingsley was perusing my bookshelves. He looked at me before I had a chance to say anything and raised his eyebrows.

  “You have an interest in the occult,” he said, fingering a hardback book. “In particular, vampirism.”

  “Yeah, well, we all need a hobby,” I said.

  “An interesting hobby, that,” he said.

  I sat behind my desk. It was time to change the subject. “So you want me to find the man who shot you five times. Anything else?”

  He moved away from my book shelves and sat across from me again. He raised a fairly bushy eyebrow. On him, the bushy eyebrow somehow worked.

  “Anything else?” he asked, grinning. “No, I think that will be quite enough.”

  And then it hit me. I thought I recognized the name and face. “You were on the news a few months back,” I said suddenly.

  He nodded once. “Aye, that was me. Shot five times in the head for all the world to see. Not my proudest moment.”

  Did he just say aye? I had a strange sense that I had suddenly gone back in time. How far back, I didn’t know, but further enough back where men said aye.

  “You were ambushed and shot. I can’t imagine it would have been anyone’s proudest moment. But you survived, and that’s all that matters, right?”

  “For now,” he said. “Next on the list would be to find the man who shot me.” He sat forward. “Everything you need is at your disposal. Nothing of mine is off limits. Speak to anyone you need to, although I ask you to be discreet.”

  “Discretion is sometimes not possible.”

  “Then I trust you to use your best judgment.”

  Good answer. He took out a business card and wrote something on the back. “That’s my cell number. Please call me if you need anything.” He wrote something under his number. “And that’s the name and number of the acting homicide detective working my case. His name is Sherbet, and although I found him to be forthcoming and professional, I didn’t like his conclusions.”

  “Which were?”

  “He tends to think my attack was nothing but a random shooting.”

  “And you disagree?”

  “Wholeheartedly.”

  We discussed my retainer and he wrote me a check. The check was bigger than we discussed.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” said Kingsley as he stood and tucked his expensive fountain pen inside his expensive jacket, “but are you ill?”

  I’ve heard the question a thousand times.

  “No, why?” I asked brightly.

  “You seem pale.”

  “Oh, that’s my Irish complexion, lad,” I said, and winked.

  He stared at me a moment longer, and then returned my wink and left.

  4.

  When Kingsley was gone I punched his name into my web browser.

  Dozens of online newspaper articles came up, a
nd from these I garnered that Kingsley was a rather successful defense attorney, known for doing whatever it took to get his clients off the hook, often on seemingly inane technicalities. He was apparently worth his weight in gold.

  I thought of his beefy shoulders.

  A lot of weight. Muscular weight.

  Down girl.

  I continued scanning the headlines until I found the one I wanted. It was on a web page for a local LA TV station. I clicked on a video link. Thank God for high speed internet. A small media window appeared on my screen, and shortly thereafter I watched a clip that had first appeared on local TV news. The clip had gone national, due to its sensationally horrific visuals.

  A reporter appeared first in the screen, a young Hispanic woman looking quite grave. Over her shoulder was a picture of the Fullerton Municipal Courthouse. The next shot was a grainy image from the courthouse security camera itself. In the frame were two men and two women, all dressed impeccably, all looking important. They were crossing in front of the courthouse itself. In football terms, they formed a sort of moving huddle, although I rarely think of things in football terms and understand little of the stupid sport.

  I immediately recognized the tall one with the wavy black hair as Kingsley Fulcrum, looking rugged and dashing.

  Down girl.