Major Canines: The Thomas Hunter Files: Realm Travelers, #2

By Andrew Michael Schwarz

It's not only Tenebrosorum vamps that are after Hunter, or an assassin from another plane, but also San Francisco's ruling pack of werewolves.

Why? Because they all think he knows the whereabout of the key. He doesn't even know what he had for lunch with all that amnesia caused by the body swapping.

Add to that bouts of phantom pain, a keen taste for alcohol and a broken heart and he's going to have one hell of a time staving off the end of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Michael Schwarz
• Release date: May 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201832285

Book preview

Chapter 1

I awoke in a room with white walls, a white floor, and a white door. I was lying in a bed with white sheets, and I was wearing a white gown. I had a headache that felt like the mother of all hangovers. But there was another issue that had me concerned. I had no idea how the hell I’d gotten here. Or, where here even was.

I shook my head, blinked, squinted, and tried real hard to make my memory work, but I got nothing. I felt like that kid in grade school who gets sentenced to hand-copy a dictionary page. A lot was happening, but nothing was getting done. My mind was a whirl of speculation, and I couldn’t solve the most basic and fundamental problem of where I was.

Hello? I called out, meek and timid, almost afraid of the sound of my own voice. When I realized that my vocal cords were in good working order, I garnered a bit more courage and called out again.

A moment later I was rewarded with footsteps somewhere outside the door and about ten seconds after that, the door opened. A nurse dressed in a pristinely white and very crisp uniform stepped into my room. And what a nurse she was. Impressive height, pale, translucently beautiful skin, pecan hair and plum-colored lips. A fellow would have trouble getting well when he could get a view like that for being sick.

She came to stand over me, green eyes lighting up my world. I got a whiff of her lollipop perfume and it made me think of things that have nothing to do with perfume at all.

Hi, she said, a clipboard in hand, possessing a crisp sheet of pristinely white paper.

Hi, I said back, feeling childish lying there while she towered over me, not that I minded the view. The thing of it was that not even a trace of a smile graced her glossy lips.

And how are we doing today? she asked.

Depends, I said, my sense of the rightness of things not quite fitting into place.

On what?

I shrugged. The prognosis.

I am a magician, but I am also an investigator and right now my investigator’s Bullshit-o-meter was pinging off the charts.

Something the matter? the nurse asked.

I shrugged. I don’t know. Is there?

She waved that away. Any pain today?

I stretched a little and then shook my head. No. Should there be?

Well, you did come in in a fit state, she said.

Fit for what?

She sighed. To be tied, maybe.

I couldn’t read her, and I didn’t like that. Something inside me just wanted her to smile. At anything. She wasn’t frowning, per se, but I thought, God, wouldn’t she be so much more beautiful if she simply smiled?

She said, You remember your name?

Of course, I said.

Mind telling me what it is?

If you tell me yours, I’ll show you mine. That hadn’t come out right, but I let it ride.

You’re the one under care, she said, casually. Not me. Her eyebrow quirked up but her lips did not follow. To her credit those lips turned down a bit into a rather attractive moue, but no smile.

Where am I? I asked, suspiciously.

You don’t know?

If I did, I wouldn’t ask, I said.

A hospital, she said.

No shit. Which one?

She sighed and that moue fell out, replaced with something not nearly as cute. If you’re going to be difficult, I’m going to have to call the doctor, and you know what he’ll do.

It was my turn to frown. I don’t, I said. What will he do?

She made a gesture with her thumb, pressing it toward the open space between her index and middle fingers. The mime was clear: injection. The thing I didn’t like about that little charade was that she made the motion above the crook of her arm, like a junky. Injection of what? I wanted to say and didn’t.

I relaxed back into my pillows and tried to focus on centralizing my strength. I felt out of sorts and as such my power seemed to be leaking out of my hands and head. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my heart and chest and then my arms. A man can feel his power in his upper body if he tries.

Hmmm, I said.

What’s that? she asked.

Trying to figure out the gag, I said.

Gag?

Yeah, you know, the ploy.

And what have you figured out? she asked, her voice smokey.

That I don’t feel very comfortable here, I said.

No? she said. Well, you were screaming when you got here.

Was I?

She shrugged, noncommittally.

I wonder why, I ventured.

The pain, I guess.

What pain?

"Don’t you know? It was your pain after all."

I thought that over. Let’s just say, I don’t remember it all that well.

Oh, well, in that case, I am sure it was the very worst kind of pain, she said.

She turned around and I won’t lie, I took the moment to let my eyes wander. Nice, I thought. Too nice.

She faced me with something metallic and shiny in her hand. A bedpan. She flipped it over to the smooth-sided bottom and held it out in front of me.

She said, You’re quite the mess.

Though the image was distorted, I could make out two black eyes and a split lip as though I’d been in one hell of a barroom brawl. I could also make out something else that scared the holy shit out of me. It wasn’t my face in that reflection.

Immediately my heart rate ticked up. I swallowed and tried not to show emotion, though I was dead certain I was pouring fear out my ears. Then I did something I was surprised I remembered. I looked down at my wrist and, pulling the white bracelet up, turned it over as carefully as if I were turning over a rock to see if a black widow spider were clinging to the underside.

Right below the bracelet sat two scars side by side. One for Aries and one, a triangle with a circle inside, that I didn’t remember the meaning of. I gritted my teeth and tried to steady my breath. A cruel joke had been perpetrated and the punch line was me.

What’s the matter? the nurse asked.

I brought my arm down and lowered the underside of my wrist to the sheets. Nothing, I said.

She knelt beside the bed so that I couldn’t help but look into those green eyes. That disapproving frown had come back into her pouty lips and she said, Who are you?

I squinted and wondered why she was asking like that. Who wants to know? I asked.

I do, she said.

I smiled tightly if not a trifle triumphant. My name is Edward Bradshaw, but my friends call me Eddie.

She shifted about in that uniform of hers such that I got a hint of what it was covering up. Now, she said, tapping a very well-manicured fingernail on the bedsheet, I think it’s a very bad idea for you to tell fibs, wouldn’t you agree?

I furrowed my brow. Hmm, I said. I’m afraid I wouldn’t.

Those pretty eyes went dead cold. "Well, let me say this another way: you are Thomas Hunter."

I frowned, hesitated, brooded. Then said, Who, me?

She stood up and gazed down at me in such a way that I thought she might just order me to the principal’s office. Then I realized she wasn’t staring at me so much as she was staring into me and something was happening with her eyes to give them an electric quality and finally, she said, Yeah, and that’s when it happened. She smiled. At last. And I saw at once why she had held it back. It wasn’t the kind of smile you wanted to take home to mama. It wasn’t the kind of smile you get to see on Christmas morning. It was sly and deviant and a little dirty and if I’m being honest, it made me want to be a little dirty, too.

I felt the drool slide down my chin and I didn’t even bother to wipe it away. Didn’t care. I couldn’t move my arms anymore or feel my chest or my power. I felt as though she had just slugged me with a shot of Thorazine. She hadn’t. But I was under the spell of another, and, perhaps, more potent influence.

I stared helplessly and dumbfounded as her mouth jawed open in a very unhuman manner. I was thinking, Wow, that’s so amazing.

Her teeth distended in a most beautiful obscenity, growing out before my very eyes into fine, delicate points. They were simply gorgeous, those teeth, and so very, very white.

And then a single voice screamed one word inside my head.

Vampire!

Chapter 2

Vampire. Tenebrosorum. The Dark Ones.

I remembered all about them but I so didn’t care.

Sitting here drooling into that shamelessly beautiful face of this vampiric, dark, and dazzling beauty, this female embodiment of desire and lust and all things so deliciously consuming, I was just taken and smitten and totally hypnotized.

All I could do was gawk at her, pouring out admiration and affection, hoping and praying that I might be worthy enough to serve her in some small way. These thoughts weren’t so much coherent as they were just throbs of adoration and love. I wanted those big, huge, white canines to pierce effortlessly through my neck to the pulsing jugular or carotid, femoral—whatever, I didn’t care what vein or artery and I couldn’t have told you the difference anyway. All I knew was I just wanted this vampire girl to suck me dry.

And she didn’t waste any time.

Before I could drool half a teaspoon she was on me. Her uniform appeared to shrink on her body, specifically around her chest. My resistance could not regain its footing. In other words, she had me hooked but good.

Her tantalizingly bare knee came up as she climbed onto the bed with that nurse’s skirt riding up high on her thighs. Peeling the sheet back, she straddled me in a manner that told me what she was and wasn’t wearing under that uniform. Her head went back, nurse’s cap tossed to the floor, wavy brown hair tumbling down around her shoulders.

I thought I was watching a commercial or a soft-core porno. I was seeing a dream that I didn’t want to end. Her teeth grew ever-longer and I could see how finely shaped they were. Like all the rest of her, I thought, so finely shaped.

Her pallor was restored with a delicious ruddy heat. I could almost believe her a living woman. As long as she kept her mouth closed, that is. Which did not seem possible.

She swept down upon me, all hair and perfume and warm breasts, and because I was so smitten I tilted my head to one side baring my neck to her. In a soft and slightly inebriated tone, I said, Care for a drink?

I was all set to become a blood donor when three events took place.

The first event was not so much an event as an unexpected development. The vampire hottie straddling me with her mouth nuzzled up against my pulsing vein did not clamp down and seal our connection with her luscious lips as one commonly sees in movies. Instead, she licked my neck.

I took it as a sort of pre-meal appetizer, but later I would come to understand it as something they do to prepare the skin to heal. It meant she wasn’t planning to kill me.

Also, when I say licking, I do mean licking to the fullest extent. This was not some little flicker of the tip of her tongue. This came as a big, wet, juicy, full-tongued lapping as could be expected from a Labrador Retriever. But this was not a Labrador Retriever, this was the hottest thing that had happened to me since Cinemax after midnight.

The second event I recorded was the sound of footsteps outside the door. They came softly, but they came as many. I was about to put these two things together when the third event transpired.

A flutter of curtains caught my attention, and it was odd to have my attention caught in such a wise because of everything else that was going on. Then something like a clamp fasten around my left eye.

I imagined prongs settling in around the eye cavity. Once settled, it seemed they began to turn. There came into my vision a certain style of semi-visible lines in the shape of concentric dials. The outer dial moved clockwise while the inner dial turned counterclockwise. That pattern repeated with the next set of dials inside those outer layers. The motions reversed, then the dials locked into place and disappeared.

Somehow perceiving this, my vampire date pulled her head back and gazed down with a curious stunned glare. A high whine sang somewhere in the back of my head or behind my head, I couldn’t tell, and then my eye changed channels.

A superimposed screen laid over the physical world such that I could detect thin auras around the objects in the room as well as the black aura of my assailant. But there was something else my eye now imparted to me that did not so much have to do with auras but with the penetrating of them. I saw through the vampire.

In place of the unprecedented outer beauty I perceived quite something else. Not a demonic visage but something closer to an X-ray slide.

Tubes from the canine teeth traveled through the sinuses to the back of the throat and then angled down. The tubes joined in the upper chest cavity and extended down to the heart, or where the heart should have been. Because in place of a heart was some kind of misshapen tumor that wiggled and squirmed.

Oh my God! I shouted and pushed back, the vampiric charm spell now broken. Oh my freaking God!

I shoved at her, and she fought me, her strength far superseding a mortal of her size, but the sight of that thing inside her chest fueled my will to escape.

I slid out from under her and crashed to the floor taking a barrage of medical machines with me. She fell on top of me, hissing, hair flying, hands splayed open with claw-like fingernails.

I reached behind my head and met with the metal lip of something slightly substantial. My fingers curled around the lip and I brought the object forward. I recognized the bedpan as it solidly connected with her face. The pan gonged gloriously and the vamp flew back into the wires of monitoring equipment.

I gained my feet but only in time to watch the door swing open. Two male doctors in white lab coats, wearing stethoscopes around their necks, entered the room. Two nurses in traditional garb followed behind. Their demeanor was surprisingly casual, but it took all of two nanoseconds for their eyes to flick from me to the downed nurse in the corner. After that, everything changed.

A beautiful transformation overtook them. The males smiled crookedly with steely eyes gazing into me. I thought, Oh I guess I wouldn’t mind swinging the other way once in a while. Then, the women beside them grew healthier in the bosoms and flush in the cheeks and I thought, Actually, maybe I’m bi-curious.

All opened their mouths to bare their beautiful white teeth and I started to drool all over again when my eye, thank God for small wonders, went into action. The thin, ghostly lines and dials blipped into view, targeting and zeroing in on each of them systematically. A moment later I wasn’t looking at bi-sexual GQ anymore, but esophageal x-rays and squirming heart bundles.

Not attractive, I observed.

Seeing my obvious immunity to the spell, their demeanors, again, shifted. Their shoulders hunched, arms bent, and their hands splayed wide. They hissed at me from across the room, their mouths gaping with