Dark of the Moon Read online

  Dark of the Moon

  Jim Hewitt has earned his living as a vampire hunter his whole adult life, until one fateful night when the hunter becomes the hunted. Now a fledgling vampire trying to accept his new life, he changes his name to Travis Black and moves to Susandale, a small town with a secret.

  In an effort to avoid marrying the man her wealthy parents have chosen for her, Sara Winters makes a deal with her father—if she can’t provide for herself for one year, she will agree to marry Dilworth Young III. To that end, she moves to Susandale and opens a bath boutique.

  Travis and Sara would likely have never met if Travis hadn’t chosen her as his prey. Was it mere coincidence that brought the two of them to the same sleepy little town? Or a happy twist of Fate?

  BOOKS BY AMANDA ASHLEY

  “Born of the Night” in Stroke of Midnight

  “Midnight Pleasures” in Darkfest

  “Music of the Night” in Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance

  A Darker Dream

  A Fire in the Blood

  A Whisper of Eternity

  After Sundown

  As Twilight Falls

  Beauty’s Beast

  Beneath a Midnight Moon

  Bound by Blood

  Bound by Night

  Dark of the Moon

  Dead Perfect

  Dead Sexy

  Deeper Than the Night

  Desire After Dark

  Desire the Night

  Donovan’s Woman

  Embrace the Night

  Everlasting Desire

  Everlasting Embrace

  Everlasting Kiss

  His Dark Embrace

  Immortal Sins

  Jessie’s Girl

  Maiden’s Song

  Masquerade

  Midnight and Moonlight

  Midnight Embrace

  Night’s Kiss

  Night’s Master

  Night’s Mistress

  Night’s Pleasure

  Night’s Promise

  Night’s Surrender

  Night’s Touch

  Quinn’s Lady

  Quinn’s Revenge

  Sandy’s Angel

  Seasons of the Night

  Shades of Gray

  Sunlight Moonlight

  The Captive

  The Music of the Night

  Twilight Desires

  Twilight Dreams

  Dark of the Moon

  Amanda Ashley

  Dark of the Moon

  Copyright © 2020 Amanda Ashley

  All rights reserved.

  This edition published 2020

  Cover design by Cynthia Lucas

  ISBN: 978-1-68068-222-9

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  This book is published on behalf of the author by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

  You can reach the author at:

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.amandaashley.net OR www.madelinebaker.net

  Dedication

  To my readers ~ thank you for your friendship through the years. I appreciate your letters, comments and support.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Excerpt from Night’s Illusion

  Excerpt from Dead Perfect, 2013

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The dream came every day and it was always the same. And even as it unfolded, never changing, the man who had once been known as Jim Hewitt wished it was just that, nothing but a dream …

  He had followed the vampire known as Ronan and the woman, Shannah, home, intent on destroying the one and rescuing the other. And he had come so close. Armed with a bottle of holy water and a sharp wooden stake, he had attacked Ronan as they arrived at his lair. The holy water had done its job, burning the vampire’s face, giving Hewitt the window of opportunity he needed to drive the stake into the vampire’s back. The scent of fresh hot blood wafted through the night.

  He hollered at Shannah to run away while she could.

  But Shannah didn’t run away. With a scream of rage, she grabbed him by the arm.

  Startled, he glanced at her. “What are you doing?”

  “Stopping you!” She yanked his hand away from the stake, her fingers curling around his wrist in an iron-like grip.

  “Are you crazy?” Hewitt exclaimed. “He’s a vampire!”

  “Yes!” she hissed, baring her fangs. “And so am I.”

  Startled, he could only stare at her, and then he lashed out as fear and fury swept through him.

  She laughed as he struggled in vain to free himself from her hold. And then she trapped his gaze with hers. “Stop fighting me,” she commanded.

  Unable to resist the preternatural power in her voice, his arms fell limply to his sides. Helpless to move, he watched her drop to her knees beside Ronan and yank the stake from his back. A torrent of dark red blood flowed from the nasty wound.

  And then the vampire sat up and uttered the most chilling words Jim Hewitt had ever heard.

  “Bring him to me.”

  The nightmare grew worse from that point on. Shannah released him from her spell and dragged him effortlessly toward the wounded vampire. Fear spiraled through Hewitt as he gazed into Ronan’s blood-red eyes.

  “I warned you,” the vampire said. “You should have listened.”

  Hewitt struggled in vain as Ronan sank his fangs into his throat. For a time, he seemed to be drifting between this world and the next. And then, as from far away, he heard the vampire’s voice.

  “Listen to me. You have only a few minutes to make up your mind. Do you want to live or die?”

  Hewitt stared up into the monster’s face. How could he be expected to make such a decision? He was a hunter. How could he choose between death or spending the rest of his existence as a vampire?

  “Your time is running out,” Ronan said curtly. “Make your choice!”

  “Live.” Hewitt forced the word from the depths of his soul. “I want … to live.”

  With a feral cry, the vampire bit into his own wrist. “Then drink,” he said, and his voice was like sandpaper over steel.

  Hewitt grimaced as dark red blood—vampire blood—dripped from the wound in Ronan’s wrist into his mouth. He choked down the first taste, hating what he was doing, hating the creature who had brought him to this.

  And then, to his amazement, he latched onto Ronan’s arm with both hands, drinking eagerly, afraid the vampire would
make him stop. How could something so repulsive taste so good?

  “Damn you!” he cried hoarsely, and then he pulled the vampire’s wrist to his mouth again and took his first step into another life.

  Chapter 1

  The man who had once been Jim Hewitt jackknifed into a sitting position, the nightmare still vivid in his mind. Not for the first time, he wondered why he had been plagued with the same dream since he’d been turned. He was a vampire now and everyone knew that vampires slept like the dead. Yet the nightmare tormented him night after night.

  Jim Hewitt had died that horrible night and the name he’d been born with had died with him. Changing his name had seemed like a wise decision for a number of reasons, but mainly because Jim Hewitt had been a vampire hunter who now preferred to remain incognito. He had considered several alternative names before deciding on Travis Black—Travis for the man who had fathered him. And Black for the monster who had turned him. It had been one of Ronan’s aliases. It seemed only fitting to take his vampire sire’s name, as well.

  “Travis.” He murmured it out loud, wondering how long it would take before he answered to it automatically. Of course, it was a moot point at the moment, since he was the only one who knew he had discarded the name he had been born with.

  If he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget the horror of waking that first night and realizing it hadn’t been a bad dream. Even now, four months later, he often roused from the dark sleep feeling lost and disoriented. He was supposed to track and destroy vampires, not hide from the hunters.

  As he did every night on waking, he cursed the vampire who had turned him although, to be honest, he had no one to blame but himself. If he had left the damned, blood-sucking creature and his woman alone, none of this would have happened.

  Exasperated, he plowed his fingers through his hair. He had hunted the undead his whole adult life, would have sworn he knew everything there was to know about them. Just proved how wrong a man could be, he thought bitterly, and once again, he cursed Ronan for turning him and then leaving him to fend for himself. A sire was supposed to stay with his fledgling for at least a year to help him adjust to his new life, teach him how to hunt, how to find shelter, how to defend himself, if need be. A sire wasn’t supposed to abandon those he turned.

  Travis swore under his breath. Sure, he knew about hunting vampires. He knew how to find them, how to immobilize them, how to destroy them.

  What he didn’t know was how to be one.

  “Dammit!”

  He had lost more than his humanity, he thought bleakly. He had lost his family, too, as well as the few friends he’d had back home in Nevada. There was just no way in hell his old acquaintances, mostly hunters, would accept him as he was now. Being a hunter hadn’t allowed him the luxury of staying in one place long enough to really get to close to anyone other than hunters, male or female.

  From time to time, he had thought about contacting Carl Overstreet. Not that he and Carl had been friends, exactly, but they had shared some wildly hairy moments together and survived.

  He had met the man while shadowing Ronan and Shannah. Overstreet, who had been a freelance reporter at the time, had written a series of articles titled Vampires Among Us ~ Truth or Legend? for a national magazine. Travis, still known as Hewitt back then, had met Overstreet in a bar late one night where they had struck up an alliance of sorts. They had both been after the same thing, though for vastly different reasons. Travis had wanted to destroy a monster. Overstreet had wanted to interview one. Travis had failed in his quest. The writer had succeeded and then quit the field.

  Travis shook his head. If only he had done the same. Hunting sure as hell hadn’t paid much, but he hadn’t been qualified to do anything else. Still, he had been thinking about looking for a more lucrative line of work when he’d gotten a hot tip from another hunter that Ronan was holed up in a little town in Northern California. He had followed the vampire and the woman from a discreet distance for a time and then one night he had followed his quarry into a bookstore where he’d learned that Shannah was a published author. It wasn’t until later that he discovered it was the vampire who was the writer and that the woman merely pretended to be him, though, at the time, he’d had no idea why.

  If only he had stayed in Nevada and found some mundane nine-to-five job, he wouldn’t be in this predicament now, a fledgling vampire with less than forty dollars in his pocket and not a single soul he could confide in.

  On the bright side, he no longer had to buy groceries. He didn’t have to worry about getting sick, so there was no longer any need for health insurance. Maybe dental, if he broke a fang, he mused with wry amusement.

  On the dark side, he still had to pay rent since he didn’t want to take his rest in the ground. He had tried that once, he recalled with a grimace, and he had no desire to do it again. As his old grandmother had been fond of saying—there was no use in crying over spilt milk. For once he had to agree with her. He was what he was and there was no going back.

  Or was there?

  Rising, he began to pace the bedroom floor. He had never heard of a vampire returning to mortality, but that didn’t mean it had never happened. But if there was a cure, the vampire community was keeping it under wraps.

  So, how was he to find out if one existed?

  The Web, of course.

  Padding barefoot into the living room of the cottage, he booted up his laptop and Googled vampire cures. Page after page of links came up. The only problem? They all referred to the role-playing game “Oblivion”.

  He spent another forty minutes searching the Internet. He found numerous sites about vampires, how to become a vampire, how to recognize one, how to kill the monsters, not to mention numerous sites dedicated to the old TV shows, Dark Shadows and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and newer ones like Moonlight and The Vampire Diaries, as well as the works of Anne Rice. There were fan sites for notorious individual vampires, as well, both real and fictional—Dracula, Lestat, Rylan Saintcrow, Edward Cullen, Mick St. John, Rhys Costain, and Damon Salvatore. But nothing about a cure for actual vampirism.

  Muttering an oath, he signed off, then sat there staring into the distance, until a familiar ache started deep inside of him. His tongue brushed his fangs as his need grew stronger. The hunger had become his master, a cruel tyrant he was helpless to resist, an addiction he craved almost as much as he despised it.

  Dressing quickly, he left the small rental house. Blending into the shadows of the night, he went in search of prey—and rent money.

  Chapter 2

  Sara Winters closed the door behind her, turned the key in the lock, and let out a sigh. If today wasn’t the worst day she’d ever had, sales-wise, since she went into business, it was certainly in the top two. Opening a store of her own had seemed like such a good idea when she’d first arrived in Susandale. Gourmet chocolates and premium bath soaps and salts had seemed like the perfect combination. After all, practically every woman on the planet loved chocolate of one kind or another. And everybody had to bathe. And none of the other stores in town carried anything like what she offered.

  Maybe there was a reason for that, she thought glumly. Maybe the women in this part of the country didn’t like sweets and never bought fancy scented soaps, bubble bath or lotion. Or maybe they just didn’t like her, although that didn’t seem likely. She had hardly met any of her neighbors since she moved here three months ago, and those she had met seemed a little, well, eccentric.

  Now that she thought about it, the whole town seemed a little odd. Like the fact that she had seen very few children, which might have been understandable in a retirement community, but most of the people she had seen looked to be in their twenties and thirties. She rarely saw anyone on the streets before sunset, except the occasional tourist. Thank goodness for those, few though they might be, because they invariably stopped in to browse. And usually bought a bag of candy, if nothing else.

  Strangest of all, most of the other businesses didn’t
open until after sundown. Which made sense, she guessed, since few people were out and about during the day. She supposed that since Susandale was so small, most of the inhabitants worked out of town, or worked nights and slept days. Odder still was the fact that there was no school. Still, it was a small town. The kids were probably bussed to a bigger city nearby.

  Brow furrowed, Sara gazed up and down the quiet street. Maybe she would do more business if she kept the same hours as the rest of the town’s shops. If she didn’t start turning a profit, she was going to have to pack up and go back home. And she really didn’t want to do that. This was her one chance to prove she could live on her own, that she could earn her own way. Her father had agreed to give her twelve months to prove she could succeed. If whatever business she started failed within that time, he expected her to return home and marry Dilworth.

  It had been the thought of marrying Dilworth Young the Third and settling down into the same Stepford-wife kind of existence that her mother lived that had given Sara the courage to stand up to her overbearing father in the first place and demand that he give her a chance to strike out on her own. Certain she would fail, he had given her the money needed for the first and last month’s rent on her house, as well as the first month’s rent on her shop.

  She had chosen Susandale because it was a small town, as different from her home in Vermont as night from day.

  She was beginning to think coming here had been a major mistake.

  Feeling the need for some comfort food, she walked down the street to Verna’s Bakery—one of the few places that opened early—and bought a buttermilk doughnut and a carton of milk. Then, thinking it was too nice to stay inside, she sat at one of the little tables in front of the bakery and tried to decide what to do about her future while she watched the sun set. She wasn’t desperate enough to go back home, at least not yet. Maybe she should just pack up and move to a bigger city, she thought, nibbling on the doughnut. Maybe Boston or Chicago. Or San Francisco. She had always wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.

  She shook her head. In spite of everything, she liked it here. It was a pretty little town. She would give it another month or two. Tomorrow, she would change her working hours. Instead of doing business from ten to five, she would open at three in the afternoon and close at nine. And if that didn’t work? Well, she’d worry about that later.