Page 1 of Crave

1

Dallas

“NAME ONE THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.”

Cranking down the lid on a bottle of tabasco sauce, I switched to speaker and tossed my phone onto the counter. At just after 10 p.m., most of the lights were off in my pit-style barbeque restaurant, The Rusty Spoke, a vacuum cleaner whirring somewhere off in the background.

“With telling my best friend I’ve spent the last nine years wishing we could hook up?” I scoffed. “Gee, let me think—"

On the other end of the phone, my brother West sighed. “I get that this is epic—”

“Like, wreck our friendship epic.”

“—but you have to admit things have been getting a little out of hand.”

“As in?”

“As in every time one of you hooks up with someone else, the entire pack has to go to Threat Level Red trying to keep your special brand of crazy contained.”

“Total exaggeration.”

“So that time someone TP’ed your house like a giant cupcake?”

I coughed. “It was close to Halloween. Probably high school kids.”

It had been March.

“Uh huh.”

I could practically hear my brother’s smug smirk on the other end of the line. West Caldwell could be summed up in three sentences. Addicted to social media. Spent his weekends writing fanfiction without bothering to pause for sleep. No snark filter. Every Monday morning he put on his Clark Kent glasses and assumed his boy scout English teacher alter ego until the bell rang the following Friday afternoon. Which naturally we all gave him shit about.

“And the fact that they slashed your front door with blood-red Blair’s Bakery frosting?”

Yeah. There was that.

“Lacey Blair is a grown-ass woman. She can date whoever the hell she wants.”

“Funny how that time she tried to go out with the bartender from Austin, dude walked out to the parking lot at the end of the night and found the bumper ripped off his truck.”

“Wouldn’t know anything about that.” I bared my teeth, a growl creeping into my voice. Because guess what? No meant no. She’d told that guy to back off and he’d gotten handsy. Asshole was lucky he hadn’t lost more than his bumper.

“And now you and Ethan are having a standoff. It’s been what, three weeks?”

Four, but who was counting? I jammed the heels of my hands into my eyes, feeling a headache coming on. And yeah, that was pretty much a given any time we started talking about our younger brother, Ethan. There were seven of us Caldwell boys. Brody and Cal, the twins, were the oldest. Then came me and West, followed by Ethan. August was finishing up his engineering degree down at the University of Texas and River was currently off working as a bounty hunter and enforcer for the werewolf council.

“We’re not discussing him.” Checking the meat we had seasoned and set to go out to the smokers, I took things off speaker. “You said earlier something tripped the perimeter sensors the past two nights out at the ranch?”

West sighed, but let the subject of Ethan drop. “Yeah, and I’m telling you, I don’t like it.”

“Dude, this is Texas. Even the roadkill comes back to life after sunset. Don’t give yourself wood over some mangy ass coyote.”

“Can you be serious for once?” West started ticking off points. “No tracks leading in or out. No scent trace. We know the bloodsuckers are looking for Topher—”

“What did Brody say when you called it in?”

West growled under his breath, giving me my answer.

Most months not much happened in our hometown of Blood Moon, Texas. We were two hours outside of Austin, tucked up in the Texas Hill Country on the shores of Lake Buchanan. Pretty much the only thing that put Blood Moon on any map other than the one listing all the Dairy Queens in the state was the fact that we were only ten miles from the infamous exit sign where three years ago, supernaturals were outed to humans everywhere when a vampire panicked during a traffic stop, sank fangs into the neck of the closest deputy and vanished into thin air.