Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales by J. R. Rain Read Free Book Online

course, didn’t know about the werewolf part, which was how I intended to keep it. Anyway, I’d also helped find a missing camp counselor and an arsonist.
    My phone vibrated with another text. I looked down and saw that it was Nancy Pearson. Okay, maybe I was getting a little too close to my deceased ex-husband’s mistress. Chatting once or twice every few months seemed perfectly reasonable. But now, we were text message buddies? I ignored her text.
    “Are they still keeping you hopping over there?” I said into the headset.
    “Hopping? Yeah, that, too.” Ted snorted. “Got a minute?”
    “I’m stuck on the 91 Freeway, what do you think?”
    “Even on a Saturday?”
    “Even on a Saturday,” I said.
    “You see, that’s why I work in the woods. No traffic, other than a few drunken yahoos and…”
    “And what?”
    “Poachers,” he said.
    “Poachers?”
    “Right.”
    “On the king’s land?” I asked, shocked.
    He didn’t laugh at my sarcasm. “No, in the forest. We’ve found two dead bucks, field-dressed, and with their heads removed. They’re trophy hunters—for the antlers—and apparently, they wanted the meat, too, and might be coming back for it.”
    “Are you telling me this to make me vomit up my Mango-A-Go-Go Jamba Juice?” I said, to try to sound as normal as possible. Truth was, I found his description very intriguing.
Too intriguing.
    It’s the bitch in me. Such a sicko
.
    “Sorry about the mango-whatever-you-just-said, but we need a good man—or woman—working the case. I’m stretched too thin with the forest fires on the north side. You interested?”
    “Usual pay?” I asked.
    “Another year,” he said, referencing my free national park pass.
    “And how many am I at, now?”
    “Four, I think. Non-transferable, of course.”
    “Of course,” I said. “I’ll swing by tomorrow morning.”
    “On a Sunday?” He sounded impressed.
    “The poachers. That’s when they’ll come back for the meat. If they field-dressed the carcass, they’ll be back before the flies lay eggs in it.” Which sort of meant I should have even come out today, but now that I had the day off, thanks to my canceling potential client, I wanted to be with the kids.
    “You’ve got me there,” Ranger Ted said.

    “See you then.”
    Traffic inched forward.
    It was about ten minutes after we clicked off that I remembered Nancy Pearson’s text. It was another two minutes before I decided to actually read it while traffic was at a complete standstill.
    He’s going to kill me, Sam. At working house. Please help…. He’s here now. Shit, don’t call.
    Don’t call
. She was hiding. She was hiding right now. Or possibly hurt. Right now. Or even dead. Right now. All because I was too pissy to pick up my cell and look at her message.
    The working house.
    Yeah, I knew the place. It was a small home around the corner from my dead hubby’s strip club, a house where some of the girls serviced
certain
customers. The high-rollers.
    I looked at the traffic, down at the text, and pulled over to the side of the road. I slipped between the two front seats and settled along the messy back bench… and closed my eyes.
    And summoned the single flame.

    I appeared in the alley behind the strip club.
    I could do that: appear and disappear—or teleport, as Allison called it. Apparently, it was a rare gift among vampires. I had seen it used by the oldest vampire of all. Dracula, no less. I had watched him appear and disappear on command, masterfully, perfectly, and wipe out a clan of werewolves in the process.
    I wasn’t quite that good… yet.
But that’s the thing with immortals: we have all the time in the world.
    One prerequisite was that I needed to know where I was teleporting.
I might be undead, but popping up inside a wall has got to hurt.
    Now, as I sent myself into the alleyway, I prayed like hell that there wasn’t a parked truck here, and that I didn’t manifest under its hood.
    I was lucky this time. I