White Wedding Nightmares
Erica Ridley
The upside was that my bitten calf finally stopped bleeding red all over my Cinderella pumps.
The downside was that seemed to be because I’d lost my ability to see in color. What the hell kind of superpower was dog vision? I knew I should’ve waited for the amber glow to return.
I turned my exasperated gaze toward Seth.
He backed away. Not a good sign.
This was all Mark’s fault. He’d been coy about the liquid’s potential side effects just to scare me out of drinking it. Wrong choice. I never back down from a challenge.
Unfortunately, for a woman whose shoe collection was rivaled only by her equally impressive array of matching eye shadow, zombified would’ve been a better end result than colorblind.
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I swiveled to face my erstwhile fiancé.
He’d scrambled backward across the makeshift dance floor. Possibly a good sign. I cocked my head to consider the implications.
Since the zombies were gurgling fuzzily and everything was in black and white, one part of me—a big part of me—felt as though I’d fallen through the looking glass into an extremely low budget “talkie”. I half-expected random vertical lines to slash across my vision like scratches on old film reels. Even the Sinatra record kept lilting out of tune.
I took an experimental step forward. My leg no longer hurt, but it now smelled disturbingly like… lunch. For a lifelong vegetarian, my inexplicable hunger for still-living flesh was unnerving, to say the least. And for a chick that had been staking bad guys since puberty, kinda liking the sickly-sweet smell of fresh blood made me feel more than a little hypocritical.
I’d apparently gone vamp. Who would’ve guessed that purple slime meant the end of beach volleyball?
A shadow flickered across the town square, and a figure materialized in the darkness.
Seth and Mark didn’t dare take their wide-eyed gazes from the goth-vamp beauty I’d unexpectedly become. Assuming I was still hot. Some folks looked good with pasty-white complexions and some folks… didn’t.
I squinted at the man making his way through the crowd.
Lucien. Tall, pale, and deadly.
Get me out of here, I thought in his direction, testing my newly acquired vampire skill of instant mind communication.
If Lucien and I were on the same wave, he gave no sign.
He prowled forward, slowly, carefully, as if I might attack at any moment.
I was honked off, yes—he might’ve mentioned there was a warning label to the magic potion—but there was no reason to look at me as if I might devour him with my fangs. My inexplicable cravings were for living flesh, not dead meat. Well, and for sex. I’d never been able to look at Lucien without thinking about that. Rowr.
Although his expression remained wary, his eyes were compassionate when he touched his cold fingers to my face.
“You’re still my wife,” he murmured softly and pulled me into his embrace. “My love for you is unconditional.”
Okay, I admit that should’ve set off some warning bells. Not the bit about unconditional love—Lucien was that kind of guy. Romantic. Passionate. Carnivorous. I mean the way he treated me so gingerly, as if I were somehow less than desirable in my new and improved state. You’d think becoming a fellow bloodsucker would’ve upped my creds.
In any case, a girl can only take so much stress on her would-be wedding day. I craved the comfort offered in his strong arms more than anything else in the world. I crawled up him like a koala bear, wrapped myself tight around his hard frame, and held him close.
“I choose—”
I choose you, I’d been about to say. But then I got a good look at my arms. They were slender and strong and all that jazz, but they sure weren’t vampire-white.
They were hairy.
All of a sudden it clicked into place. The horrified glances. The hunger for raw meat. The dog vision, for heaven’s sake.
“Please tell me I’m not a werewolf,” I whispered desperately into Lucien’s pointy ear.
He squeezed me tighter. “You’ll always be beautiful to me, my love.”
Great. I was a friggin werewolf.
Guys only said evasive crap like, “You’ll always be beautiful to me,” when you asked them questions like, “Does my butt look fat in these jeans?” or “I should’ve waited for the amber color to come back, shouldn’t I?”
At least I could still play beach volleyball.
Nonetheless, this sucked. I was obviously still in (mostly) human form, but something wasn’t right. Ulfric could blend when he wasn’t going all canine. Why couldn’t I pass for mortal, too? I preferred to leave my long black hair on my head, not sprouting from my appendages, thank you very much.
“How do I turn it off?” I whimpered.
No, seriously. I whimpered. Cripes.
Being a werewolf was severely crimping my style. All I needed was for someone to throw a Frisbee at me for my humiliation to be complete.
“I didn’t make the stuff,” Lucien muttered defensively.
Oops. If you think human guys get off on fixing things, vampires take it to the next level. And I’d just implied my Alpha was incapable of both protecting and curing his woman.
My nose twitched. Ye gods, was I smelling things? When would the mortification end? After I dropped on all fours and sniffed Lucien’s exceptionally manly crotch?
But wait—I did smell something. Fear. Resentment. Victory. Mark was getting away!
His army of zombies had chewed a wizard-sized escape route through their ranks and was trailing Mark from the square like rats following the pied piper. Well, if they’d been cannibalistic undead rats that liked to snack on the brains of other rodents. And if the pied piper had actually been the son of Satan.
I launched myself from Lucien’s arms with more speed and less grace than I’d anticipated. Fast as a Greyhound, ferocious as a Poodle.
Nonetheless, I landed on Mark’s back, claws out, and knocked him to the zombie-laden dance floor. Lucien was at my side in seconds. Possibly because of the unconditional love and his Alpha-male duty to defend the woman he called wife. Or possibly because my claws had drawn blood—lots of sweet, sticky blood. And Mark sure smelled like dinner.
Be that as it may, there were many and varied reasons why I could live my entire life without seeing one of my ex-boyfriends locking his mouth on any part of another ex-boyfriend, food source or no.
We had to get Mark out of there, had to act while he was still disoriented. We needed to chain him somewhere deep in Lucien’s mansion where even the strongest sorcery would not be able to free him. Right now we had the upper hand. Lucien’s long fingers spidered around Mark’s neck. Seth was drawing nearer, wings unfurled, ever the avenging angel.
I felt like howling. Victory was close at hand.
A sudden blistering heat swept through the plaza, incinerating the zombies and jerking Mark free from Lucien’s stranglehold. What the…?!
My ex-fiancé opened his eyes and blinked at someone—or something—just over my left shoulder. His smile was wide and terrible, as if he’d planned this precise moment from the start.
“Father,” he said with a wry chuckle. “So glad you could join us.”
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