Canine: Channeling Morpheus Short: Channeling Morpheus

By Jordan Castillo Price

What’s the difference between a faithful companion and a feral animal? Wild Bill suspects the line separating the two is shaky at best. Supposedly, Michael has been tamed, and he swears he gave up hunting. But when he comes home covered in blood and reeking of adrenaline, Bill fears Michael has crossed paths with another bloodsucker, and the urge to exterminate the vamp was too powerful to resist.

Michael doesn’t need to hunt vampires to stir up trouble. His run-in with threatening neighbors has left him baffled, demoralized, and teetering on the brink of yet another episode of depression. It tears Bill up inside to see Michael suffer—unfortunately, the sorrow also trips his most primal vamp triggers. Before he knows it, his own inner beast rears up, ravenous, insatiable, and ready to tear into the next thing that crosses his path…making him wonder if it was wishful thinking to hope that either of them had been successfully domesticated.

Canine takes place after Elixir and contains series spoilers

• Language: English
• Publisher: JCP Books LLC
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781935540762

Jordan Castillo Price

Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price writes paranormal sci-fi thrillers colored by her time in the Midwest, from inner city Chicago, to various cities across southern Wisconsin. She’s settled in a 1910 Cape Cod near Lake Michigan with tons of character and a plethora of bizarre spiders. Any disembodied noises, she’s decided, will be blamed on the ice maker.Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations.

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Canine

Channeling Morpheus Short 10.2

Jordan Castillo Price

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Cover art by Jordan Castillo Price

Canine. © 2015 Jordan Castillo Price. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-935540-76-2

1.0

Canine

It was barely dusk. Normally I’d take my time floating up, up, up through the syrupy grasp of vampire sleep, but instead I was already awake. Vamp senses are beyond keen. That doesn’t mean I pay attention to them every waking moment. Normally all the hypervivid sight, scent and hearing that’d drive a sane man over the edge are on standby, operating in the background. Not tonight. Tonight I heard the particular wheeze our pickup truck’s motor makes when you give it a rest. The rusted creak of the driver side door. Even the rasp of the worn leather soles of Michael’s motorcycle boots on still-hot concrete.

His gait alone probably would’ve tipped me off. Too heavy, too fast. But the main thing that tripped my trigger-line was his scent. He reeked of blood. And beneath that, tears.

If there’s one thing that stays the same, it’s that as soon as you get used to something, it goes and changes. I was fond of the abandoned eighties split-level we’d been squatting in the past two, three months. The bank that owned it was decent enough to leave the water hooked up—probably to keep the narrow strip of lawn out front greenish—and the walk-in closet where I holed up during the day was as big as some rooms we’d rented. But all the creature comforts in the world won’t do you any good if a pack of riled-up vampires is gunning for your head. We’d need to vamoose. Pronto. I’d drive like the devil ’til dawn, turn over the steering wheel to Michael and keep going until Sin City was nothing but a fading memory…and hope they didn’t have any Renfields on their team to chase us down after sunup.

I vaulted over the railing at the top of the staircase and came down with a clumsy, jingling clatter that knocked a photo off the wall. How close are they?

Who?

Whoever was in that viper pit you couldn’t resist poking. It was on the tip of my tongue, but my heightened vampire senses couldn’t help but notice that Michael’s adrenaline tang had already started fading…and the blood on his T-shirt wasn’t vampire blood. It wasn’t his, either. I would’ve known if it was. Let’s start at the beginning. What happened?

They blamed me. He squatted and picked up the fallen photo. Who the hell are these people supposed to be?

Never thought about it. The models who’d come with the frames, most likely. Part of the set dressing that was supposed to make the house look less dismally empty so the bank could