AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dearest Casey,
I wish I could give you more than a few short months and my name. I wish I could give you everything—a lifetime of love and laughter and a steady shoulder when times are hard.
Even hard times would be something beautiful, as long as I was able to share them with you. I would give anything for that future, Chicago. I would give anything to be your husband and Amy’s father for decades or more, but all I can offer you is this:
My love. My devotion.
And my honest wish for you to find someone else to treasure you after I’m gone. You deserve all the love in the world. I’m only sorry I can’t be the one to make sure you receive it.
Yours, now and always,
Edmond
I fold the note and place it inside my safe in my apartment at the Blackmore mansion, the one I know Casey won’t open until I’m gone. It hurts to write it, to say goodbye and wish her into the arms of another man, but this is what you do when you love someone.
You do what’s best for them, even if it breaks your heart.
Chapter One
CASSANDRA CHAMOMILE WONDERFULLY
A woman making ethically (and sanitarily)
questionable decisions in the name of love…
Four years and one
emergency engagement later…
“Really? You don’t say?” I lean closer to the goblin on the other side of the bar, breathing through my mouth in an attempt to keep from gagging.
Contrary to popular belief, goblins aren’t stinky by nature. When they’re sober, they smell just fine—a little earthy, but no worse than your average kid who’s been playing outside all afternoon or a particularly fragrant mushroom.
It’s their taste for liquor that’s the problem. Alcohol alters goblin body chemistry, transforming their sweaty puppy smell into a nasal-passage-scalding assault on humanity I can only describe as burnt hair meets fish shop garbage that hasn’t been emptied over a long holiday weekend.
The rest of the bar cleared out an hour ago, and I’ve nearly vomited twice. If Emily, my boss, catches me still serving a goblin in this state, there’s a good chance I’ll be sacked. I’ve doubled her business since I started tending bar at the Pug and Crone, but that won’t make up for many nights like this one. Receipts are at thirty percent of usual sales, and we close in half an hour.
I have to make tonight count.
I have to get the information I need from this goblin. Herbish Glowful is one of the few remaining original residents of Nightfall. She’s been here since the beginning, which means she knows all the gossip.
Including the dirt on Edmond’s maker…
“I do say,” she warbles in her deep, but strangely bird-like cockney accent. “Priscilla ain’t been back to visit her clan in nigh on a century. Herbish has been known to tell a tale or two, sweet, but not about them Blackmores.” She leans in, fixing me with wide, rheumy eyes. “Them’s not the kind you tell tales on, you hear? They may be family to you now, but don’t be forgetting—vampires are like hamsters.”
I prop my chin on my fist and sip air through my lips before asking, “In what way?”
“They eat their young,” she says flatly before tossing back the last of her rum and Coke.
Her words send a chill rushing across my skin.
Priscilla isn’t planning to “eat” Edmond but cursing a man who’s basically your vampire child to walk into the sun on his one hundredth bite birthday is pretty much the same thing.
My stomach cramps again, but this time I don’t know if it’s the goblin smell or anxiety pangs. Tomorrow night is Halloween. New Year’s Day will be here before we know it. If I don’t find a way to break Edmond’s curse before then, I’ll be a widow before I can convince my husband-of-convenience to be my husband for real. I’m running out of time to find his maker, let alone convince her to break the curse.
I have to keep Herbish talking. I sense there’s something she’s holding back, something I might be able to coax out of her with one more drink on the house.
“But hamsters only do that when they’re scared, right?” I plunk another ice cube into her glass and reach for the rum in the well by my hip. “The mothers eat the babies when they sense danger and need to abandon the nest or something?”
