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“Sounds good. Talk to you later.”

“Byee.”

Putting the light on my phone, I made my way toward the back, where the sound had come from. Thankfully, most things seemed to be intact. I swept my phone’s light across the shop. Nothing looked out of place, except one fallen book in the back room. Leaning down, I picked up a dusty text from my personal collection.

Like the other books around it, this one was a splurge. One I paid too much for as a baby collector of rare and special editions. Since there was no light to be had out in the shop, I sat down on the floor and propped up my phone to see, putting the book on my lap.

It was my first trip to Scotland for a semester abroad in college. My roommate and I found ourselves in an old bookshop, like something out of a movie. Gravitating to this book, its beautiful illustrations, the only thing I could understand since it was written in old English, I nearly passed out when the shop owner told me the price. My hand shook as I counted out the bills … my grocery money for the month.

At least, I thought it was something special since I couldn’t actually read it. But when I opened the dusty cover to a page a third of the way through the book, the strangest thing happened. Before, where the ink had always been faint and unreadable, the words shimmered … bleeding into new shapes I could suddenly understand.

“Þe blod þat byndeth shal neuer sleepe,

For loue maketh lyf and curs maketh kepe.

Whan hert is broken, shal tyme unbynde,

And þe heeler’s synne shal bide behynde.”

A healer’s curse. A love that turned to blood.

This is the story that started it all.

I blinked.

And kept reading.

Blane Derrickson, chief of Clan Karyn, blamed the Earl of Rockford. He demanded bloodwite which the earl refused to pay, denying his clan was involved in the raid. That summer was the bloodiest for all along the border, English and Scottish alike. I cursed them both. We’d buried another of our kinsmen that morning, the aspen coffin reminding me of the day I said farewell to Alec forever. Little did I know the power of my grief would turn the words into something more.

I asked the healer for the precise words she used, when she cursed both families. She said, ‘For the blood that was spilled by all, I curse both families to feel my own pain, the kind that lasts forever.’

Isobel continued. ‘Less than a sennight later, it began. They came to me, one by one. First Blane and then Lawrence. By day’s end Alec’s parents and siblings had all sought my help. One I was not able to give. Though my mother had been quite skilled, and my grandmother before her, their desire to drink blood⁠—’

What. The heck. Was this?

A curse. Drink blood. So a vampire origin story, or something like that? More importantly, why could I read it?

The words pulsed, as if responding to something in me. My heartbeat? My longing? I didn't know. I wanted to understand what happened to Isobel, but the pages grew warm beneath my fingers.

A pounding on the door startled me from my reverie. Reaching for my phone, just now noticing the light had gone off, I scrambled trying to find it as the pounding got louder.

Screw the phone.

I stumbled my way to the door, obviously not knowing my own back room as well as I thought. Since when was there a bookcase … there?

Stopping to re-orient myself, I wasn’t at all prepared for the pounding to stop or be followed by the door to come flying off its hinges, directly toward me. Thankfully, I could avoid it, and was about to ask Nolan if he’d lost his mind when the doorframe filled with a very non-Nolan man.

Jet-black hair. Cheekbones for days. Shoulders like a line-backer, he was simply the most gorgeous specimen of man I’d ever laid eyes on in real life. I immediately wanted to go to him, the pull as dangerous as it was magnetic. The very opposite of safe.

And … that wasn’t my shop behind him. I ran toward him to get a better look, but he proved as immovable as a wall.

“Hold on. You have nothing to be afraid of.”

Nothing to be afraid of?

“We’re not in my bookstore.”

I couldn’t breathe. Or think. Spinning around, the back room now partially illuminated, panic firmly set in.