“You best be picking out your wedding dress,” he said. I didn’t reply, because womenfolk were descending around me, squealing and all talking at once. Barely audible, Occam said, “I love you to the full moon and back, Nell, sugar.”
“I love you too, cat-man. To the deeps of the roots and the heights of the trees.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Brooks Prater, endurance rider, for all the horsey stuff.
Teri Lee, timeline and continuity editor extraordinaire.
Mud Mymudes for all things planty and doggy, and for beta reading and PR.
Lucienne Diver of The Knight Agency, as always, for applying your agile and splendid mind to my writing and my career, and for being a font of wisdom.
Many thanks to my copy editor, Sheila Moody.
Thanks to Katie Anderson for the glorious cover design.
Thanks to Miranda Hill, editor at Penguin Random House/Ace, for all the answered questions.
As always, a huge thank-you to my longtime editor, Jessica Wade of Penguin Random House. Without you there would be no books at all.
Read on for an excerpt of the first book in Faith Hunter’s New York Times bestselling Jane Yellowrock series,
SKINWALKER
Available wherever books are sold!
I wheeled my bike down Decatur Street and eased deeper into the French Quarter, the bike’s engine purring. My shotgun, a Benelli M4 Super 90, was slung over my back and loaded for vamp with hand-packed silver fléchette rounds. I carried a selection of silver crosses in my belt, hidden under my leather jacket, and stakes, secured in loops on my jeans-clad thighs. The saddlebags on my bike were filled with my meager travel belongings—clothes in one side, tools of the trade in the other. As a vamp killer for hire, I travel light.
I’d need to put the vamp-hunting tools out of sight for my interview. My hostess might be offended. Not a good thing when said hostess held my next paycheck in her hands and possessed a set of fangs of her own.
A guy, a good-looking Joe standing in a doorway, turned his head to follow my progress as I motored past. He wore leather boots, a jacket, and jeans, like me, though his dark hair was short and mine was down to my hips when not braided out of the way, tight to my head, for fighting. A Kawasaki motorbike leaned on a stand nearby. I didn’t like his interest, but he didn’t prick my predatory or territorial instincts.
I maneuvered the bike down St. Louis and then onto Dauphine, weaving between nervous-looking shop workers heading home for the evening and a few early revelers out for fun. I spotted the address in the fading light. Katie’s Ladies was the oldest continually operating whorehouse in the Quarter, in business since 1845, though at various locations, depending on hurricane, flood, the price of rent, and the agreeable nature of local law and its enforcement officers. I parked, set the kickstand, and unwound my long legs from the hog.
I had found two bikes in a junkyard in Charlotte, North Carolina, bodies rusted, rubber rotted. They were in bad shape. But Jacob, a semiretired Harley restoration mechanic/Zen Harley priest living along the Catawba River, took my money, fixing one up, using the other for parts, ordering what else he needed over the Net. It took six months.
During that time I’d hunted for him, keeping his wife and four kids supplied with venison, rabbit, turkey—whatever I could catch, as maimed as I was—restocked supplies from the city with my hoarded money, and rehabbed my damaged body back into shape. It was the best I could do for the months it took me to heal. Even someone with my rapid healing and variable metabolism takes a long while to totally mend from a near beheading.
Now that I was a hundred percent, I needed work. My best bet was a job killing off a rogue vampire that was terrorizing the city of New Orleans. It had taken down three tourists and left a squad of cops, drained and smiling, dead where it dropped them. Scuttlebutt said it hadn’t been satisfied with just blood—it had eaten their internal organs. All that suggested the rogue was old, powerful, and deadly—a whacked-out vamp. The nutty ones were always the worst.
Just last week, Katherine “Katie” Fonteneau, the proprietress and namesake of Katie’s Ladies, had e-mailed me. According to my Web