Heir of the Dog Black Dog - Hailey Edwards Page 0,78

conjured it, staring out his window into the calm dark of the sleeping city.

Mom was tucked into her bed at her house, sleeping off the hellacious vertigo she blamed on the cruise ship. Courtesy of the conclave, her yard was sporting a half-gnome bodyguard able to keep her property under surveillance twenty-four seven. Yeah, I laughed too until the cherubic lawn ornament quadrupled in size and lifted my car over his head...with one hand. Sven Gardener was one scary dude.

The sharp trill of my current ringtone had me patting down the cushions to find my cellphone.

“Hello?” I breathed against the screen while sliding it up to my ear.

“Thierry.”

“Shaw?” My heart thudded painfully. He had been the one face missing from my welcome party. I even called him when he didn’t call me. All I got was a canned message from his cell carrier. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

“It’s broken.”

Relief that he hadn’t been avoiding my calls slid over me. “What happened?”

“I ran over it with the truck. A few times. Once I heard you had been taken.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said gently. “No one could have anticipated any of this.”

“I should have made the case a priority. I should have checked my phone more often. I should have—”

“No.” I pushed up straighter. “This was not your fault. None of it.”

“I shouldn’t have called,” slipped out on a tired breath.

Feeling hurt, I growled, “Why did you?”

“I thought I could...but I can’t. I might hurt someone.”

My pulse leapt again. “You’re hungry.”

No answer.

I rubbed my left eye with the heel of my palm. “I’ll tell security to let you up.”

Apparently Diode wasn’t enough to make the conclave comfortable. I had two new bodyguards. Mine were not as exotic as Mom’s gnomian guard. I had been issued a standard pair of sword-toting sidhe warriors. Unseelie, naturally.

“Security?”

“I guess you haven’t heard.” I pushed to my feet. “We’ll talk when you get here.”

“Thanks, Thierry.”

Don’t thank the fae sat on the tip of my tongue. Fae. I wasn’t all fae. I wouldn’t trade thanks for favors. That wasn’t me. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know if I could cash in markers even if I wanted to.

Tired of the caffeinated hamster running in the wheel of my thoughts, I swore. Enough semantics. I was too drained for this nitpicking, so I acted like a perfectly normal person and said, “You’re welcome.”

I hung up the phone before he got the chance to say more and padded over to the window. Whatever I hoped to see wasn’t there, and my chest felt heavier for taking that final glance. The temperature had dropped since I arrived, and standing so near the tall window meant that my breath fogged the glass.

Afraid my guards might skewer Shaw if he beat me to them, I turned to go. My hand was on the doorknob when a tapping sound made me turn. Black against the night, a large bird sat on the windowsill.

Above its head, in the fading puff of my chilled breath, was written a familiar endearment: a stór.

A neat trick for a bird, especially considering the condensation was on my side of the glass.

I crossed to him and ducked my head until I was at his eye level. “I’m not your darling.”

He fluffed his silky feathers and cawed once before vanishing into the darkness.

I don’t speak bird, but I think his cawing laughter called me a liar.

Thierry’s story continues in Lie Down with Dogs.

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Author’s Note

Dear Readers,

When I wrote Heir of the Dog as the first book in the Black Dog Trilogy, I planned Thierry's journey to span those three novels and no more. But then I attended the RT Booklovers Convention, and all that changed. Heir won the American Idol Contest, and that brought two agents with fresh ideas into the mix. The next thing I knew, the trilogy had expanded to include one more title – Dog with a Bone.

Dog with a Bone is a prequel to the series in the sense that the novella cuts a hole into the ceiling of Thierry's past and gives us a glimpse of those first steps that set the events of the trilogy into motion one year later.

With that in mind, I hope you have fun meeting Thierry as a bright-eyed cadet in Dog with a Bone and enjoy watching her mature through Heir of the Dog, Lie Down with Dogs and Old Dog, New Tricks into a woman who knows when laws are meant to be upheld and when they must be broken.

Best,

Hailey Edwards