Havermouth, Present TimeShe finished the final room as dusk turned the sky into a painted display of glory and ate her oven-baked frozen meal standing at the kitchen bench, followed by a long, hot soak in the shower. She took time doing her face and hair and selected carefully from the small range of underwear that she had brought with her for the trip.As she finished dressing, she admitted to herself that her heart was racing. She was excited, in a breathless, anticipatory way. She wanted to know if the attraction between her and Talen the night before had been alcohol, magic and abstinence fuelled… Or if it had truly been as incredible as she had thought it to be. And there was only one way to test that out – through a repeat performance. She wasn’t entirely sure if moving from a trio of alpha werewolves to a vampire was an emotionally and mentally healthy evolution, or whether it was a regression, but it was the first time since the Triquetra that she’d had a sexual interest, an

Havermouth, Present TimeThe night was still young when she saw Talen to the door, and she stood, wrapped in her satin dressing gown, waving him goodbye as he reversed the expensive Ute out of her driveway, feeling very much like the domesticated housewife waving her husband off to work.Talen’s headlights caught in the iridescent light of a wolf’s eyes, and Aislen sighed heavily. The giant white and grey wolf sat in the hedges next to the driveway. As she watched, the wolf shifted until Heath crouched on one knee and lifted his head before slowly rising to his feet.“Well, I guess you had better come in,” she sighed. “Before one of the neighbors see you.”He walked, a silky shift of muscle under the moonlight, avoiding the gravel, climbing over the veranda fence with athletic ease and walking to stand before her, looking down. She lifted her eyebrows and stepped back, so that he could enter the house, closing the door behind him.It was a test, she thought as she led the way down the

Havermouth, Present TimeDaylight was glaring. The beginning of the end, she thought as she showered and dressed. She ate in the kitchen, looking out onto the uncompromising dessert of the back garden, and remembering how it had looked when she had last stood in the same position.Her mother had always had a penchant to greenery. There had always been some new exotic plant being coaxed into reluctant life under a palace of plastic-wrap and wire, watered precisely on the hour, to a measure – no more and no less.If Tiffany had paid as much attention to her marriage or her daughter, Aislen thought, and then pushed it aside, identifying it as internalized misogyny. Tiffany’s marriage breakdown was in equal measure the responsibility, if not more so, of Patrick, who had been the carbon copy of his era…“I have never…” His glower bore down on Aislen. He had been wearing the shirt that Aislen had zip locked in her suitcase. “Never been as ashamed to show my face around town, as I am in this

“Dear Aislen, if you receive this, it is because I have been murdered. I know too much, and the people here are ruthless and powerful,” the letter went on and Aislen could almost hear her father’s voice behind the words. “A man makes mistakes. We all make mistakes. I made a mistake with you, and I am sorry for it.“My mother, your grandmother, always said that people hide their secrets very well. Havermouth’s founding families are the same. They hide their secrets and protect their own. After you left, I was approached by a family whose daughter had had the same sort of troubles that you had. There are a lot of families in town, and a lot of families that have had to leave town, because of boys like the three that you fell in with.“Some of the girls were raped or blackmailed into having sex, and when their families took the matter to the police, they were told that there was nothing that the police could do for them. They just swept it under the carpet and if the family fought for ju

Havermouth, Present TimeThe Triquetra had been suspiciously absent all day, Aislen thought as she prepared for Talen’s arrival. She had almost certainly expected Rhett, having been visited by Cameron in the afternoon of the day before, and Heath’s disturbing visit during the night. That she had spent the entire day without seeing a single one of them made her wonder precisely what it was that they were scheming between them. Trouble was coming, her intuition told her. She’d worry about it in the morning, she decided. In the meantime, she had two more nights with her vampire lover, and she planned to enjoy every second of him. She showered and dressed in a matching set of underwear the sheer of them revealing more than they hid, before coaxing her hair into it’s natural thick ringlet curls with the diffuser hairdryer and applying a more natural-look, innocent, makeup. She saw headlights sweep through the front window and pulled on her satin robe as she made her down the hall. She l