Fangs and Stardust (Hidden Tales of Blue Moon Bay Book 3) Read online

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  Jovee Winters

  Jovee Winters Publishing

  Contents

  Fangs and Stardust

  Fangs and Stardust

  1. Rose

  2. Dracula

  3. Rose

  4. Dracula

  5. Rose

  6. Dracula

  7. Rose

  8. Rose

  9. Rose

  Epilogue

  Other books by Jovee Winters

  Untitled

  UPCOMING Titles in no particular order

  Other books by Jovee: Blue Moon Bay cozy pnr mystery romance

  Hidden tales of Blue Moon Bay

  Fangs and Stardust

  Copyright December, 2019 Jovee Winters

  Cover Art by Renee George

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning, or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Jovee Winters, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in the context of reviews.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Jovee Winters. Unauthorized or restricted use in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patent Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2019 by Jovee Winters, Colorado Springs, CO United

  Fangs and Stardust

  Welcome to the Witches Dishes, where the food is so good you might just scream…

  * * *

  Rose Monroe is a hopeless romantic with a terrible stutter so meeting men has pretty much been a big fat losing game for her. And that's okay, she's totally decided her fate is just to become the cool aunt someday. She hates crowds and hates speaking, because well... speaking is hard for someone like her. But she's going to do whatever it takes to help herself and her sisters succeed with their new business. Even if that means going to Dracula's house in the dead of night. Really, how scary can he be? He's been asleep for over a thousand years, surely he's mostly petrified. Still, she's no shrinking violet and she can handle one lone vampire, surely.

  * * *

  But then she meets him and stares deep into his soulful dark eyes and she starts to think things she's never thought before. She should be focused on food. Because that's her job, right? Food. But in truth, all she can think about is what his fangs might feel like. And just how many women has he seduced in his time? And dear gods above, but what a sexy accent he has. Her hopelessly romantic heart might be in trouble, Dracula is pretty much her dream man come to... semi-life? But he's a lothario. Infamous for all the countless women he seduced and tossed away and no matter what Rose will never be just another notch on a man's belt.

  * * *

  Little does Rose know though that the man and the legend are two totally different things…

  Chapter 1

  Rose

  I knocked on the heavy wooden door before stepping back. Pulse pounding in my throat so hard I could almost taste the adrenaline flood through me. I was going to be speaking with someone very soon.

  And it didn’t really matter to whom I spoke; the point was I’d be forced to speak. A task I did not relish under the best of circumstances. The night was chill, with a bit of a nip to it that told me snow could very well fall before the sun rose again.

  I frowned, wondering if I’d been hoodwinked somehow. Surely a butler resided in the home of the wealthiest of all of Blue Moon Bay? I shifted on my heels, peering over the hedgerows that partially blocked my view through to the interior of the stately manor.

  Should I knock again?

  This was the home to vampires. Their hearing was exceptional. Or so I’d always heard. I frowned, unsure of what my next step should be. One thing I knew about the undead, t’was best to never get on their bad side.

  I’d wait a few moments longer before knocking again.

  Worrying my bottom lip with my blunt teeth, I stared up at the single lit window two stories above me. Looked like it was on the third floor. Maybe a study? Or library? I frowned and swayed closer toward the door, straining to hear the shuffle of footsteps, but all I heard was oppressive silence.

  Maybe they were still abed? But the note had specifically mentioned that no matter the hour I received the missive I was to come immediately. Right? Nervous now that I’d misread it, I glanced once more at the note still in my hand. The full moon burned so bright that I had no problem reading the flourishing scrawl.

  No, no, I’d been right. At any hour, it said.

  “Hm,” I made a noise in the back of my throat as my brows gathered in tight. Maybe wait a few more moments? If our business weren’t in such dire straights I’d leave. But I didn’t have the luxury of flouncing off in a huff. I needed to secure this male as a client. There was simply no other choice in the matter.

  I thinned my lips, feeling queer in my stomach and limbs. The grounds I stood on were so haunted that even if I’d not been a witch I’d have felt the chill of fleshless forms passing repeatedly through me.

  I shivered, wrapping my shawl tighter around my trim shoulders.

  But I was a witch and I did not fear the dead. They were simply lost souls, tethered to a past they could not move on from. But I could help them, if I was given the chance.

  In fact, Blue Moon Bay had its own beloved ghosts turned full time residents—now ghosts no more. Annabelle Lee and her partner, Dante Martin. They’d managed through great magick to perform a type of ritual that would ground them both in the world of the living and of the undead.

  Just because the souls were trapped now didn’t mean they had to remain that way permanently. But I wasn’t here to unbind souls from their tragic afterlives, no; I was here on a different sort of mission.

  I was here for food. Or rather, to try and convince a long comatose resident of Blue Moon Bay to host one of his legendary balls.

  Dracula—pronounced Dra-cue-lee-ah to those around here—wasn’t merely famous (or infamous as the case were) merely in Blue Moon Bay. His legend had started long before he’d ever settled in the New World.

  He was truly one of the ancients of the monster world, and because of that so much of his life was steeped in myth and lore. He was practically a fairy tale now.

  I clutched at the note I’d been sent only this morning. Wondering why of all the people in Blue Moon Bay he’d sent for me.

  Everyone knew who Dracula was, obviously, but I had no personal knowledge of the monster. Only the stories I’d heard growing up.

  That he was a lothario, the original Casanova. Violent and with a temper that was as mercurial as the shifting tides. Rumor in Blue Moon Bay was that he’d stopped drinking blood after his last awakening, over a hundred years ago. No one knew why, or even if it was true. For all I knew it was just more stories.

  Oddly enough though, I was not afraid.

  My sisters often thought of me as shy, or meek. In truth, I was neither. I had thoughts. A great many of them, in fact. But my tongue often betrayed my brain, and if I got too excited I stammered.

  Terribly.

  It was quite vexing to think in such complex riddles as I did but be unable to sp
eak from my heart. So, more often than not, I chose to simply not speak. Nodding instead of talking, or most times saying nothing at all. It was exhausting trying to convey my thoughts with any sort of eloquence, so I’d stopped trying long ago.

  But our enterprise, The Witches Dishes, was forcing me to step out of my self-imposed silence. If things didn’t change soon, our dream would be in ruin before we’d ever even had a chance at success.

  The wind rustled the dead leaves at my feet, making them sound like dry bones clacking and rubbing against one another as they skittered over asphalt. Behind me branches stripped of leaves creaked and groaned as they danced and clapped in the twilight sky. In the distance I could just make out the vague outline of bats winging through the night, catching their midnight dinner with their echolocation.

  Watching the winged beasts made me think of Generva and her bat familiar, Bertie. He’d been brain damaged ages ago, one too many strikes of lightning to his noggin, making it impossible for him to ever return to the skies. But he didn’t seem to mind his exile, so long as he had sweets to dull his memories of once flying free.

  I may have spoken with Bertie a time or two when no one saw us. But I did not speak in the tongue of the humans. When I spoke to creatures, animals of any sort, my stutter evaporated. It was liberating to be freed of the shackle that bound me, if only for a while. I’d never told my sisters what I could do, I was intensely private. Not that I necessarily wanted to be, I simply didn’t know any other way. Even with those I loved more than any other in all the world.

  There were gas lit lanterns flickering above the heavy wooden archway that led into his manor. This place was a gothic beauty and made my inner witch sing with delight.

  The stone was dark, almost black in the night, but I’d seen it enough times during the day to know that it was actually a dark gray streaked through with vibrant veins of silver. Gargoyles lined the steepled roof, their maws opened wide, exposing long menacing fangs.

  They were not the real things though, I’d tried speaking to them once, they’d never answered me back.

  In truth, I’d often found one reason or another to traipse through Dracula’s private land, cutting through his vast grounds when I decided to take a stroll from my cottage into town. It was the long way, and added at least an extra mile to my journey, but I’d always found this place to be romantically tragic.

  My sisters often accused me of being a hopeless romantic and in that, at least, they were not wrong. I had an affinity for tales of woe, tragedy, and love.

  Maybe because I knew that I would never find my own. I was content in my spinsterhood now, though acceptance of my lot had been a long row to hoe. My sisters often told me I was the fairest of them, which I found to be patently absurd, but no sooner would I open my mouth around a handsome male then I would begin the vexing and trying chore of trying to speak.

  The endeavor usually left me shame-faced, and the male’s buggering off with one lame excuse after the other as to why they were suddenly needed elsewhere.

  I sighed.

  “Bloody deuces,” I mumbled and lifted my hand, ready to bang my fist against the door like a gavel again if someone didn’t open soon.

  But just as my flesh was set to make the first strike the heavy sonorous squeal of rusted iron hinges moving sounded like cannon blast through the stillness of the night.

  And standing there was a male I’d never seen wandering through Blue Moon Bay before. He was tall, incredibly so actually. His head very nearly grazed the top of the doorframe and there was very little hair upon his head. His features were taut and almost sunken in, his face showed signs of a giant’s heritage, but there was human in there too. It was in the slope of his brow and in the shape of his eyes. An impeccably tailored black suit clung to his emaciated and humpbacked form.

  Dull black eyes watched me without an ounce of curiosity in them. I lifted a brow, only feeling my nerves increasing with each second he continued to stare at me.

  After several seconds of this nonsense I could no longer take it and cleared my throat, ready to try and bluster and stutter my way through this most awkward greeting when the very strangest thing ever happened.

  The nearly skeletal butler’s lips stretched into a tight grimace. And he reached out a hand to me. I was so shocked by the sudden change in his demeanor that I didn’t even flinch when his ice-cold knuckles brushed along my chin.

  “You are come, mistress,” he intoned with a voice that rang out like a choir of angels, it was shockingly beautiful.

  “Wha… what?”

  His grimace stretched tighter and that’s when it dawned on me, the strange man wasn’t grimacing, but smiling. Warmly. At me. His black eyes now sparkled with dancing lights, he was practically giddy. I frowned.

  “We have waited so long for you.”

  “Giles, do not make the mistress stand out in the cold a moment longer.”

  If voices were food, than his was dark silky chocolate. My breathing stuttered and my gaze shot up, past the butler’s shoulders and toward the stairwell behind him.

  I could not make out a form, but I saw a long shadow upon the walls growing longer and longer as he took the steps at a slow, steady pace.

  I clutched at my breast, my pulse was beating so hard I could practically taste it upon my tongue.

  “You are welcome here, madam.” That silky voice spoke to me again and I had to clutch at the doorway just to keep myself upright. Finally I saw dove gray pressed trousers and black patent leather shoes upon the steps.

  I watched, feeling outside myself, wondering at the strange emotions rushing through me. Wondering why I had a lump in my throat, and heat burning behind my eyes. Why my heart was suddenly racing like a speeding locomotive in my breast and why I was experiencing flashes of memories that weren’t my own.

  But always featured a man and a woman in a moonlit garden.

  My nostrils flared and I smelled lavender and toasted cinnamon. My breathing stuttered.

  The legs slowed just as the light revealed the long lean form of his chest and arms. He was not built like a goliath; he was trim and tall, but moved like an athlete. I looked at his hands. I’d always had a thing for men’s hands, some might call me weird, but there was nothing sexier in life than a man’s hands and the veins that ran down them. But he wore gloves and kept his hands hidden from me. However, where he’d stopped on the stairs a brush of moonlight kissed his neck and I felt myself growing soft and weak in the knees. My insides quivered and my soul seemed to actually cry out within me. His skin was pale, but not the lackluster quality of the ghosts that haunted his grounds, more like the soft sheen of crushed ivory pearls. Smooth and supple.

  You are come home, Rose. Finally…

  And though I knew that sentiment odd and not at all natural, even so it felt true. The breath I’d not realized I’d been holding scissored out of me in one continuous exhale.

  “You may enter,” Giles intoned in a deep baritone voice that snapped me from my trance with a start.

  I glanced once more at the stairwell. Then finding my nerve, I lifted my left foot and took that first step, and the moment I crossed the threshold I felt a jolt. Like a quick burst of flame that’d coursed all through my body.

  My mouth parted and my flesh prickled with gooseflesh. I wasn’t sure what that had been but I knew a spell when I felt one. Why was Dracula’s home warded? And then I wondered if maybe it stemmed from his kind once upon a time being hunted to near extinction by vindictive humans. But surely the king of Vampires shouldn’t need such plebian safety precautions?

  I glanced back at the stairwell, but like the wraith his kind was, he’d long since vanished. I frowned.

  “Follow me, mistress Rose,” Giles said in his formal baritone.

  I looked back at him only to note that he was gesturing for me to precede him through a parlor door just ahead.

  With a nod I did as asked, feeling strangely… safe. Though I couldn’t figure how. To become a resident o
f Blue Moon Bay all had to swear an oath to do harm to none, which meant if Dracula resided here he too must have once made the blood oath, or at least someone who spoke for him. To do harm to any would mean a swift reckoning by the ancient power that’d been woven through the spell.

  I was led into what looked like a study library. There were shelves lining every inch of the walls and on the shelves countless books. Some ancient looking, some more modern. And at a glance it ran the gamut from self-help to pulp fiction.

  My lips stretched at the idea of an ancient such as he curled up before a fire and reading a vampire romance book, of which there were at least three.

  Brows twitching, I couldn’t help but wonder just what the devil kind of man Dracula truly was.

  But I wasn’t sure that this place wasn’t mostly for show. There was nothing in here that felt comfortable. Like a worn pair of comfy slippers that one would slide into at the end of a long night, the shelves were dusted, and there was a tea tray sitting on a small square reading table that was loaded down with tea cookies and an ivory pitcher of what was likely hot water, but there was a strange coldness here.

  No rugs on the floor. No chairs that were clearly worn down from constant use. No spines that looked well read. The books—apart from the row of ancient leather-bound tomes—could have just been bought yesterday they looked so new.

  He was a vampire though, so maybe he preferred a colder aesthetic? I thinned my lips, suddenly overcome by the strange feeling that that wasn’t true of him at all. Though I didn’t understand the emotion. There were other vampires in town, but apart from a cursory good morning wave now and then I’d never actually taken the time to befriend any of them. Or them me, to be honest.