The Witch and the Huntsman Read online

  THE WITCH AND THE HUNTSMAN

  The Witches Series

  Book 3

  by

  J.R. RAIN

  and

  ROD KIERKEGAARD, JR.

  Acclaim for the novels of J.R. Rain:

  “Be prepared to lose sleep!”

  —James Rollins, international bestselling author of The Eye of God

  “I love this!”

  —Piers Anthony, bestselling author of Board Stiff

  “Dark Horse is the best book I’ve read in a long time!”

  —Gemma Halliday, award-winning author of Unbreakable Bond

  “Moon Dance is absolutely brilliant!”

  —Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, author of Understanding the Planetary Myths

  “Powerful stuff!”

  —Aiden James, author of The Dragon Coin

  “Moon Dance is a must read. If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, be prepared to love J.R. Rain’s Samantha Moon, vampire private investigator.”

  —Eve Paludan, author of Werewolf Interrupted

  “Impossible to put down. J.R. Rain’s Moon Dance is a fabulous urban fantasy replete with multifarious and unusual characters, a perfectly synchronized plot, vibrant dialogue and sterling witticism all wrapped in a voice that is as beautiful as it is rich and vividly intense as it is relaxed.”

  —April Vine, author of Unbound

  Other Books by J.R. Rain

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  Winter Wind

  Silent Echo

  The Body Departed

  The Grail Quest

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  The Lost Ark

  LavaBull

  Jack and the Giants

  Dolfin Tayle

  Dragon Assassin

  Lost Eden

  Judas Silver

  The Vampire Club

  Cursed

  VAMPIRE FOR HIRE SERIES

  Moon Dance

  Vampire Moon

  American Vampire

  Moon Child

  Christmas Moon

  Vampire Dawn

  Vampire Games

  Moon Island

  Moon River

  Vampire Sun

  Moon Dragon

  Moon Shadow

  SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES

  Moon Bayou

  Blood Moon

  Moon Magic

  JIM KNIGHTHORSE SERIES

  Dark Horse

  The Mummy Case

  Hail Mary

  Clean Slate

  Night Run

  THE WITCHES SERIES

  The Witch and the Gentleman

  The Witch and the Englishman

  The Witch and the Huntsman

  The Witch and the Wolfman

  OPEN HEART SERIES

  The Dead Detective

  Deadbeat Dad

  NICK CAINE SERIES

  Temple of the Jaguar

  Treasure of the Deep

  Pyramid of the Gods

  THE SPINOZA TRILOGY

  The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo

  The Vampire Who Played Dead

  The Vampire in the Iron Mask

  THE ALADDIN TRILOGY

  Aladdin Relighted

  Aladdin Sins Bad

  Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman

  THE WALKING PLAGUE TRILOGY

  Zombie Patrol

  Zombie Rage

  Zombie Mountain

  THE SPIDER TRILOGY

  Bad Blood

  Spider Web

  Spider Bite

  THE PSI TRILOGY

  Hear No Evil

  See No Evil

  Speak No Evil

  Flight 12: A PSI Novella

  THE GHOST FILES

  Ghost College

  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES

  Bound By Blood

  THE ABNORM CHRONICLES

  Glimmer

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Red Rain: Over Forty Bestselling Stories

  Vampire for Hire: First Eight Stories

  Blood Rain: Fifteen Dark Tales

  Black Rain: Fifteen Dark Tales

  SHORT STORY SINGLES

  The Vampire on the Train

  Vampire Requiem

  Ghosts of Christmas Present

  Easy Rider

  Dark Side of the Moon

  Blue Moon

  Vampire Gold

  Halloween Moon

  Vampire Dreams

  Vampire Blues

  Vampire Nights

  Teeth

  Vampire Rain

  The Santa Call

  The Bleeder

  YOUNG READERS

  (Writing as J.K. Drew)

  Little Wolf

  The Secret of the Sphinx

  The Emerald River

  The Angel and the Gift

  Forever Silent

  Dare to Enter a Distant World

  Dare to Rule a Distant World

  Dare to Escape a Distant World

  The Mystery of the Walking Statue

  The Mystery of Stonehead Island

  Deep Sea Danger

  The Legend of Eagle Eye Mountain

  Playoff Pressure

  Other Books by Rod Kierkegaard Jr.

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  The Department of Magic

  Obama Jones and the Logic Bomb

  The God Particle

  Family Cursemas

  Adultery

  SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES

  Moon Bayou

  Blood Moon

  Moon Magic

  OPEN HEART SERIES

  The Dead Detective

  Deadbeat Dad

  THE WITCHES SERIES

  The Witch and the Huntsman

  The Witch and the Wolfman

  VAMPIRES OF PARIS

  The Vampire Circus

  The Vampire Hunters

  The Vampire Bordello

  The Vampire Lovers

  The Witch and the Huntsman

  Published by Rain Press

  Copyright © 2015 by J.R. Rain

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  To Alisa...thanks for bringing us together.

  The Witch and the Huntsman

  Chapter One

  “Hi. This is Allison. Thank you for calling The Psychic Hotline. How can I help you see into the future?”

  It was almost midnight. I was working the night shift, covering for my friend Bernice, who was on maternity leave having her third child. Or maybe it was her fourth. I’d kind of lost track.

  It was exhausting working a double shift, but hey, what are friends for? Also, the money came in handy and, honestly, I had nothing better to do with my evenings these days; after all, hunky hot guys weren’t exactly breaking my door down with invitations to dinner and dancing. Unless you count the odd homicidal maniac, but that’s another story.

  A complicated story, I guess. And okay, a weird one. You could say my life had been pretty normal until I’d met a suave and sophisticated older dude named Victor who’d totally swept me off my feet. With older men, there’s always a lot of baggage; you know, ex-wives, kids, substance abuse problems. That kind of stuff. With Victor, there was none of that. His only baggage was that he was a vampire...

  So I ended up being both his lover and his blood donor until the day he was unexpectedly and brutally killed by a vampire hunter. The thing was, even though vampires get all the press, we who serve them are equally marked by the experience. And we become equally addicted to the ac
t of giving our blood. Every time I did, I could feel my own latent psychic powers growing inside me.

  Which Millicent insists I shouldn’t be wasting on a psychic hotline service, even though I get a real thrill out of helping others. Instead, she says I should be studying and developing my skills as a witch. Yes, I’m a witch, a very powerful one, and now I’m part of a triad of witches. Who is Millicent? Millicent is my roommate, if you can call a ghost that. She hangs around the apartment most nights, bosses me around about my habits, nags me about my friends; so, yeah, roommate.

  And, yeah, she’s part of the triad. Apparently, magical circles didn’t care a lick if you were dead or alive. Anyway, it turns out that we’ve shared our lives over and over again, over the centuries. Friends, sisters, mentor, student, even mother-daughter; our relationships had taken many forms, but always we were two of three—a ‘triad’ of witches. Very powerful witches.

  Samantha Moon, a beautiful soul and one of my best friends, had once been the third member of our triad, but she had been attacked by a vampire, and had her life shattered. We met after Victor died, when she was investigating a case that involved him. There’d been instant chemistry between us in spite of the circumstances, and that’s when I became her blood-donor. Which is what I like to call it—vampires and their fan-fiction groupies have all kinds of derogatory sexual terms for this relationship, but Sam and I are strictly platonic BFFs, almost sisters.

  So even though there’s no guy around at the moment, like I said before: my life is complicated!

  But it’s not like I envy Bernice her happy family—or her normal and secure life or anything. Okay, maybe it’s exactly like that...

  Covering for her was a lot of extra work for me, but it also meant more pay, and I’ve been saving up to start my own gym. I’m really a personal trainer; my second career as a psychic is something I just drifted into because of my growing spiritual powers. Plus, working this gig is the one job in the world I can do on my laptop while curled up on my couch in my PJs, drinking hot chocolate.

  Aside from being like a crisis hotline operator. Although sometimes, like tonight, there didn’t seem to be that much difference...

  “Allison,” said my next caller, a teenage girl. “You totally aren’t going to like this. I...I’m pregnant. Oh, Allison, you’ve got to help me! Please!”

  Did I say teenager? She sounded like she was maybe twelve—and about to burst into tears. I don’t know about you, but those are the kind of words that push all my buttons. They set my thoughts racing. For one thing, she’d said my name like she already knew me, and so naturally that made me start thinking of who she might be. Did I have any nieces that age? Or daughters of close friends? How old was Bernice’s oldest? Could it be Tammy, Samantha Moon’s teenage daughter, calling me at work because she didn’t dare tell her mom? Jesus, what would Sam say?

  I projected my inner vision out into the night and caught an element of something discordant, not quite right. Something very wrong, in fact; because the moment I visualized my caller’s face and heard the muted giggles in the background, I realized exactly what was going on. Those weren’t sobs the girl was choking back; it was laughter.

  “Okay, I’m definitely getting something now,” I told the little phony, who started giggling herself. “Your name is Erin, isn’t it?”

  “Oh my God! How do you know that? Are you using caller ID or something?”

  “What good would that be? You’re using your sister’s phone. I see you sitting on a bed. You’re surrounded by three of your friends. You’ve been eating Smiley Face Potatoes and Pepper Pals Chicken Crispers and drinking Mountain Dew, right?” I could see the containers spread around on the carpet beneath a huge wall poster of Taylor Swift.

  “WTF? WTF, I mean, how do you know that? You’re freaking me out now!”

  “Because it just so happens I’m a real psychic, Erin. And that’s not all I’m seeing in your room.” I decided that a little life lesson in respecting things you don’t understand—like psychics on hotlines—might do her a world of good. “There’s a ghost in there, too. A very angry and vengeful spirit who isn’t going to let you get a wink of—”

  I heard shrieks and then a loud click! The line went dead.

  “Allison!” came the sharp, nasty voice of the night supervisor, Donna Parseghian, over my headset. Uh oh. I’d forgotten for a second that all our calls could be monitored at any time. “You were being outrageously unprofessional.”

  “But it was a prank call from a slumber party! I was just teaching them a valuable life lesson. How not to waste other people’s—”

  “You need to come in and report to me in person at our offices tomorrow, Allison. Let’s say noon.” Click.

  Great. I knew I was in a whole boatload of trouble. That was all I needed now; to lose my job. Because everything else in my life was just going so well.

  My so very, very weird life.

  After I got off the phone, I wondered just how this reporting to her office thing was going to work. I’d never been disciplined by the powers that be before, not since high school, anyway. Would Donna just fire me? Would she cut me off the hotline’s computer network now, right this minute? I knew I badly needed to sit in my Spirit Chair, to meditate, get back in harmony with my own powers and Mother Gaia, and commune with the senior partner of the triad of witches I was a part of, Millicent.

  But Millicent was dead, as I’ve said, and can only project her ghostly etheric spirit to me, and this got weaker and weaker as the moon waned. Tonight was the new moon, and even though I sent a super-strong signal of need out to her, I was getting nothing back. Ivy, the third and youngest member of our triad, was in Baja, California on a film shoot, and Samantha, my best friend and the vampire from whom I drew my psychic power after being fed on, was also off somewhere with her recently reconciled boyfriend, Kingsley.

  Her werewolf boyfriend. So the darkest phase of the moon was their happy time. See? It isn’t just me. All my friends’ lives are pretty darned weird, too. I know I live in Beverly Hills, but still.

  The Hotline ringtone buzzed from my computer, shattering the silence. Guess I wasn’t immediately cut off, after all.

  “Hi,” I answered it. “This is Allison. Thank you for calling The Psychic Hotline. How can I help—”

  “You’ve got to save me, Allison!” The voice at the other end was low and urgent, almost a rasping whisper. And it was no kid’s voice, either; this was a grown woman. And it seemed to me there was something familiar about her voice. When I reached out to touch her consciousness, all I could see was a blankness of white.

  “Have we spoken before?”

  “Marisa. My name is Marisa. Yes, you helped me once when I was getting over the trauma of losing my mom. I had you on speed dial. But I don’t have much time now, Allison.” I had absolutely no memory of what she was talking about, which was weird. Her voice sank even lower, if possible, so now I really did have to read her mind. “He’s coming for me.”

  “Who?”

  Snow. I was seeing snow everywhere, that was why everything was white. A ski lodge? Suddenly I was sure I’d caught a glimpse of ski lifts in the background. But where was she calling from where people were skiing in the middle of the summer? Switzerland?

  Normally, I don’t see things through other people’s eyes. I get ‘remote views’ of their faces, of where they’re calling from, their environment. But this was different. This time, I was seeing the world as Marisa was seeing it, feeling her terror, even thinking her thoughts. Too bad they were so full of panic, I couldn’t make much sense of them.

  “Who’s coming for you, Marisa? Talk to me!”

  “Him...the Huntsman. It’s really her who’s making him do it—you’ve got to help me. Oh my God, he’s found me! Please call the cops for me, Allison! Please...”

  And then our connection went dead. And I don’t just mean our cell phone connection; I mean our spiritual link, too. I could no longer see anything through Marisa’s eyes.
My consciousness was jolted back to my own living room.

  It was as if she’d never existed.

  Chapter Two

  I just sat there, trembling for a half minute before I realized I had to do something.

  But what? The only clue I’d had was that view of white snow. And maybe some dark lines. Trees—a forest? Had I briefly glimpsed a mountain in the background? That wasn’t much to go on—I didn’t even know what state or even country she was calling from. The computer keeps a record of all our incoming calls, and her number was still on my laptop screen, but her cell had the same west Los Angeles/Beverly Hills exchange as mine: 424.

  And I was pretty damn sure there wasn’t any snow here.

  Normally, I’d rely on Millicent to bail me out, but she was still silent, though I kept having the feeling she was trying to get through to me. Maybe even urgently. Inhabiting the spirit plane, she probably knew a lot more about my mystery caller than I could find out even if I put a private investigator like my vampire friend Samantha Moon on the case. But what I needed now more than anything was a fix on Marisa’s cell phone number—and I knew only one person to call if I had any shot at getting that.

  Detective Smithy.

  I had his card. He was the homicide detective at my local police station, and we’d worked on a couple of cases together. Neither of which had exactly turned out so well, maybe, but at least the two of us had a healthy professional relationship. And after some of the crazy stuff we’d been through together, he didn’t scoff at the supernatural.

  He was a bland-looking guy, a little older than me. I’m in my mid-thirties, so I guess that made him anywhere from thirty-sevenish to forty-two-plus. Which was about the size of his waistband, too, in my estimation. If not for that and his squirrelly cop mustache, Smithy might have even been kind of cute. I have to admit that whenever I was around him—and we weren’t, you know, battling demons or something—I felt an almost overwhelming urge to rip off most of his clothes, give his upper lip a good close shave, and then subject him to a couple of intense hours of weight training at the gym.