Samhain Publishing

Sara believed Tristan died while stationed overseas. The last thing she expected on the eve of her engagement to another man was to be attacked by a monster…and have Tristan come to her rescue.

Excerpt from Missing In Action
© Copyright 2007 Amanda Young

The body of a young woman between the age of twenty and twenty-five had been found in the alley behind Club Metropolis. As with all the other victims, she’d been raped and drained of all her blood, left out in the open for someone to find.

The perp seemed to get off on taunting them. Though he was careful not to leave behind evidence of what he was, the suspected vampire had a calling card that was unmistakable. The throat of each woman was ripped out, the jugular vein torn and ragged, unlike the straight edge a knife wound would leave behind. There was always the possibility that the perp was a Were, but it was slim. Wolves were known to devour their prey, or at the very least tear large chunks of flesh from the victim. These murders bore no such evidence.

The fact that he’d gotten away with it again was Tristan’s fault. If he had been doing his job, instead of playing hide-and-seek with Sara, the woman would still be alive. Instead she lay lifeless on a cold slab in the city morgue. That he could have—should have—been there to prevent her death and hadn’t, burned at his soul like toxic waste.

With few leads to go on, he and Shame decided to split up. Shame stayed behind, doing research, seeing what kind of new information he could gather from the crime scene evidence. Tristan went out and did what he did best—the footwork.

Their most promising lead at the moment was on a man named Lester Morgan, who owned a local gossip paper. It seemed that whenever a new body was found, his reporters were on the beat before any of the other journalists knew what was going on. In one instance, the first murder, one of Morgan’s staff had even discovered the body and called in the police themselves.

It seemed like a piss-poor lead to Tristan but he knew better than to not scour all paths provided. It was entirely possibly that a wild-goose chase would lead him right where he needed to be. So, he sat outside the office of The Daily Tribune in a late-model green sedan with tinted windows and cased the joint. The building itself wasn’t anything special, just brick and mortar. What he wanted to see, were the people who worked there. While Shame swore by lab work and forensics, Tristan was old-fashioned. He wanted to see the employees and the owner with his own two eyes, try to get a feel for them. His gut feelings were seldom wrong and he made it a point to listen to them. Doing so had saved his ass on more than one occasion.

At five o’clock on the dot, people started to file out the front exit. No one looked out of the ordinary. Tristan was planning his next step, possibly breaking into the office, when he saw Sara exit the building.

She wore an apricot skirt suit, her dark red hair pulled back at the nape of her neck in a messy bun. His breath caught as she looked right at him, like she knew he was there, watching her, before she turned and headed straight for a beat-up old Volvo.
Though he wanted to know why she’d been in the building, he had to put his curiosity on hold. He needed to stay and check out the inner office. Maybe even follow Morgan for a little while and see if he was up to anything fishy. Tristan didn’t have time to mess around with anything else.

Fuck it.

He put the car in first gear and pulled out into traffic.
Tristan followed at a measured distance, careful not to be seen, as Sara drove out of town limits and stopped in front of a rickety old white house. Though it had seen better days, the house looked warm and inviting. A red and white swing set sat off to one side of the fenced-in yard. The rest of the lawn was littered with various children’s toys.

He wondered if she lived there, if the contents of the yard belonged to her children. Circling around the block, Tristan chose a driveway a couple of houses down and parked, waiting to see what would happen next. Whether she would knock or go straight in.

Tristan breathed a sigh of relief when Sara knocked on the front door. It wasn’t her house. A rotund woman with steel-wool-colored hair came to the door, a welcoming smile on her round face, and let Sara in.

Who was the woman? Tristan knew she wasn’t a relative. Like him, Sara was an orphan. Her mother committed suicide when Sara was five, leaving her to be raised in foster care.

Sara had only been inside a few minutes when she came out. She calmly walked down the sidewalk, toward her car. She wasn’t who caught his attention though. A little boy clutched Sara’s hand.

Tristan couldn’t tear his gaze away from the child. His entire world came to a crashing halt. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t fill his lungs.

He had a son.