Fox Trap Read online

  Fox Trap

  A SciFi Urban Fantasy

  Jayne Fury

  Contents

  Lies, Shifters and Space Vampires

  1. The Patriarchs

  2. Naked in an Alley, Again

  3. Tea & Biccies

  4. Blood in the Alley

  5. Teffia

  6. Amery

  7. Blood on the Pitch

  8. The Shield of the Patriarchs

  9. Am I Dinner?

  10. Mappwood

  11. Liar, Liar

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  Also by Jayne Fury

  Who is Jayne Fury?

  Lies, Shifters and Space Vampires

  Elly Morgan’s a PI on a mission to capture a murderer. But when she encounters him in an alley on her home moon, she discovers he’s more dangerous than she expected—too much even for a foxkin like her to handle.

  Detective Blaine Cornell’s tracking the same murderous quarry—and though teaming up with the beautiful ex-cop-turned-PI makes sense, the secrets he must keep from her put them both in a life-and death-struggle to save her kindred.

  If they can’t learn to trust each other, they could both lose everything. And set a blood-sucking fiend loose on the innocent inhabitants of the moons of Ghael.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  * * *

  Copyright © 2017, 2018, 2019 by Jayne Fury. All rights reserved.

  * * *

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Created with Vellum

  For Jason

  My Carolina Low Country boy who adopted me as his mum and who loves foxes of all varieties.

  One

  The Patriarchs

  The order was simple. Show up.

  Two days ago, Blaine Cornell – son of Patriarch Solblaine, of Clan Solblaine – found himself in the Hall of the Brotherhood with boot heels clicking down a shiny white tiled corridor. White like the teeth of the Sanguinary, his race of kindred. The swish of his long black oiled duster accompanied the tattoo.

  Shusssh, click-click, shusssh, click-click.

  The request came from the Council of the Consanguinity. Actually, the summons had come from Blaine’s father, who sat on the Council as he had for over a millennium.

  Men in crimson robes hustled to and fro, nodding or ignoring Blaine as he made his way to the final chamber of the corridor. The heady perfume of fresh kill was sweet. Seductive. Mouthwatering. Blaine caught himself in a swoon, stiffened, and bit down on his inner cheek to regain composure.

  There was always fresh blood in the chamber.

  Stopping at the door he waited, inhaling, testing himself. He was ready.

  A red-clad guard opened it from the inside.

  As the monstrous door swung open, the scent hit him like a starving man at a banquet. He winced, turned his chin to his shoulder, and covered his mouth and nose with a silk handkerchief he hastily retrieved from his coat pocket.

  Membership to the council was limited to the ten Patriarchs, the First Ones, brought here by the Forebearers who had come from Teeva’Oa to form the Will, which dictated the laws of the alliance of lunar races that circled Ghael. Only nine Patriarchs remained.

  He turned his head back to the ruling council members sitting on the high dais, waiting, unflinching, watching him. Save for The Solblaine. That Patriarch’s gaze was focused left. Instinctively Blaine followed the scan and caught a glimpse of the chamber in the corner of the expansive room. A chamber which, in all of his four hundred years, had always held the stasis form of the arch criminal, Patriarch Ysbal.

  It was empty. The door hung open, an impotent icon of its failure.

  Blaine whipped his head around. Shutting out scents and sounds, he centered only on each of the nine faces, in turn. Dread shot through his belly, forcing him to purse his lips as if to contain it.

  Nine sets of golden eyes stared back at him, unflinching.

  He looked at their hands, eye level to him; they, too, did not budge.

  “I think you’ve deduced why you’ve been called in, Chief Investigator,” The Solblaine’s voice cut through Blaine’s dread, centering his son’s attention up to the high dais. Blaine re-focused on his father’s face. It was a mirror image of his own. As a first born of the Patriarch, he looked as much like his father as any of his brothers, though he did have his mother’s blue eyes.

  “Where is the monster?” Blaine asked, his voice rising in accusation, loathing seeped out a bubbling tide of rage.

  “Ysbal Fortier has escaped.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “One of his clan, we suspect, has freed him.”

  “But… how?” Blaine flattened his lips. While his nostrils flared in anger, and his back stiffened, the hairs on his arms rose in anticipation of what was to come. Blaine glowered at the assembled men on the high white dais. “Is that what you want me to find out? Who set him free?”

  “No, we need you to find the criminal, Ysbal, and return him here to justice.”

  His father stood and nodded to the assembled Patriarchs who stood in unison with a grace of angels.

  Blaine regarded their movement with both awe and consternation as they departed from the room, leaving his father alone with him.

  As the last left, Blaine turned to his father and growled, “Why me? You’re all more powerful, faster, and more capable of getting Ysbal back.”

  “Because you’re our choice.”

  “That’s not an answer, Father. But you never give straight answers, any of you Patriarchs…”

  “Son, if you lived a thousand years, holding secrets that you could not share with anyone, you would understand my circumspection.” The Patriarch gave a wry smile to his son. “Come, inspect the chamber…”

  “Before we do that, Father? Let me understand what you wish.” Blaine’s stomach muscles knotted in a core of fear. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He forced a bit of saliva up but bile tainted the moisture. “You want me to find the cannibal and bring him back to the stasis chamber once again? Somehow, I am to find him and return him to the justice that the Patriarchs have meted out? Public humiliation? Father, I know Ysbal’s actions are an unspeakable corruption. But why not finally finish —”

  “—We do not kill,” Solblaine interrupted. “For no reason other than to feed. That is our code. You know this.” Solblaine glared with thunder in his golden eyes. Menace riding on his robust voice.

  “And just how will I neutralize him? He has the strength of an army of Sanguinary in his blood.”

  “He is no more powerful than you or me. His lie is that he believes he is unstoppable. He believed that when he drained the blood of seventy-four of his own sons.”

  “I remember, I was only a constable then…” Unbidden memories flashed in a stereotropic stop-time flitter of images. Ysbal running. A child. A choice.

  “He believed what he was doing and convinced his own family of it. He thought he could breed a more powerful Sanguinary race by taking his delusional “next step” in the evolution of our kind,” said Patriarch Solblaine. “Only a few of the mothers
got away and fled with their daughters who were deemed unworthy. They begged us to intervene,” Solblaine finished up the rest of the story. “But son, he is no more powerful a Sanguinary than you. Yes he is a Patriarch, but we can enhance your strength enough to match his. And you do have other assets. And you won’t be alone.”

  The weight of the words sank in.

  “We have an idea of where he may have gone,” Solblaine said.

  “And the Numina constabulary, my bosses?” Blaine demanded. He struggled to keep the waver from his voice. Ysbal. They wanted him to go after Ysbal.

  “That’s why you’re here. And we have contacted local authorities and the overarching Lunar Council of Ghael. You’re to go to the moon of Westmeath. There’s a group there that we have not worked with for many hundreds of years. The Assembly of Seannach.”

  Blaine’s brow scrunched in disbelief; his mouth curled with a skeptic scowl. His voice held a mocking tone, “Seannach are a fairy tale.”

  “No son, the fox kindred are real. And they are in very real danger.”

  “The foxkin? Real?” Blaine shook his head. He could hear the thrum of his blood in his ears. Impossible. Seannach?

  “Yes,” Solblaine said, his expression remained unchanged from the stoic mask his son was all too familiar with.

  “Not nursery room tales meant to amuse children?” Blaine’s emotions fluctuated between outrage and incredulity.

  “Yes.”

  “Why … why—I—I.” Blaine forced his lips to a halt and tried to form a question. He focused on the empty chamber. “And he knows of them?”

  “Yes,” Solblaine said and put a palm on his son’s shoulder. “You must understand, it is our sacred trust to keep all the Children of the Forebearers safe.”

  But Blaine wasn’t listening. He was rubbing his temples, trying to erase the vision of foxes wearing boots and pointy caps while brandishing swords. Amid his nursery recollection, a bubble of memory buoyed to the surface, one that he thought was safely buried.

  The echo of mad laughter. A terrible choice. Save one boy or catch a murderer…Ysbal’s voice whispered in a mocking singsong, “Davin, come to papa…” A sobbing boy collapsed into Blaine’s arms. He held the boy, Davin, as his father escaped to continue his murderous killing spree.

  After two hundred years of keeping that secret, Blaine had only one driving need. Truth. Tell the truth, find the truth, uphold the truth, and it would absolve him from his part in seventy-two deaths. He sought out clarity and clutched at something his father said earlier.

  “You said I won’t be alone?” Blaine said as he buried the lie back where it came from.

  “You’ll be working with a native investigator, one of Westmeath’s ex-police detectives in the private sector. The Assembly says she’s their best.”

  “What about being among them? Their animal DNA?” Blaine asked.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll have your off-world inhibitors. That will allow you to be among them without the blood urge. And you’ll have the Will on your side.”

  “I barely know how to use it. I’ve never needed to, before. I don’t know…”

  “The Will of the Forebearers is in you. It will choose the time and you’ll know what to do when it comes. You will be a true Guardian then.”

  Blaine felt a lump rise in his throat. He’d never aspired to be a Guardian, one of the elite defenders of the Ghael moons, from threats beyond. He brushed off the weight of the legend and turned back to the threat and what the Patriarchs had assigned him to do.

  “Is my contact a Seannach?” Blaine kept the apprehension out of his voice.

  He handed Blaine a chip. “Data on the current status of murders on Westmeath is on that. Patriarch Icarus is using an ancient text to decipher Ysbal’s intents. The Council believes Ysbal’s construed our transmogrification as a gift that he needs to feed.”

  “He’s feeding on them?” When his father nodded, Blaine’s stomach tied itself into knots. The slaughter had to be stopped. Davin’s face loomed in his memory… This can’t be happening.

  “Son, it’s not an easy thing we ask of you. You’ll have to keep your knowledge of the foxkin a secret even to the Seannach. Their laws require secrecy or death.”

  “Harsh. Is it necessary?” Blaine said.

  Solblaine leaned his forehead towards his son. “Their Assembly has protected the foxkin for a thousand years.”

  “That’s… what the old children’s verses said about foxkin? Foxes sly. Foxes lie—”

  “Foxes’ secrets keep you alive,” Solblaine finished. He rested a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Keeping the secrecy is the only way they’re going to let us get in, get him out, and back into his prison.”

  “Or they’ll kill him,” Blaine said. “Which wouldn’t be on us or a transgression of our law.”

  “That is a corruption of law,” his father said, a warning tone rising in his voice.

  Blaine canted his head to look at his father’s hand on his shoulder. “If that’s the case, and I must keep their secret, I’m not safe, either, Father. The Patriarchs are asking me to work with the Seannach, but pretend I don’t know what they are.” Blaine said.

  “Yes, son. It means you’re going to have to lie. A lot.”

  Two

  Naked in an Alley, Again

  The thump-thump-thump of techno beat a hard tattoo against Elly’s chest, forcing her heart to pump in time. The light of the disco flashed in unison with each staccato tic-tic-tic of electric patter, driving her senses into overdrive, putting her scenting on high alert.

  It was a hot night in Ballylock, the biggest city on the tiny moon of Westmeath, one of the twenty odd moons of Ghael. The strip was hopping for ladies night. The gas-giant, Ghael, lit the sky with the reddish-gold glow of mating season.

  There, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw him, the one that matched the scent, the one she was hunting, the one that smelled of copper and books.

  Prey.

  Dark bangs shaded his eyes. The rest of his straight, black hair hung down in a sharp point between his shoulder blades. He had a perfect middle part that prolonged the illusion of length, splitting his bangs in the middle of his brow. Her gaze followed the line of his part down his nose and she was struck by piercing blue eyes and skin so pale the wandering blue lines of his veins showed across his temple and down his neck.

  His long face went with an equally long, lean body clothed in a perfectly tailored midnight blue suit that shimmered turquoise as he placed his drink back down on the bar and pushed it away with one long, bony finger.

  In the flashing lights and sweaty bodies that danced and jumped to the driving beat, this man was like a statue. His stillness made him almost invisible, except to the trained eye. The pulsing twenty-somethings danced as though they were one connected body of limbs, torsos, and heads; he oozed through them, towards her, but did not join the dance.

  Definitely the guy. The scent of her kin was strong around her. She made sure she was surrounded by the most potent of females, like the missing ones, some found dead by the Seannach Assembly’s constabulary goons.

  Idiots.

  Where they failed, she was now tasked to succeed.

  In the five years since Elly Morgan quit her police job and struck out on her own, she had become a free agent, taking bounty and private investigation gigs. Working for the Assembly didn’t suit her. Invisible authorities had a tendency not to pay, even if you survived the job.

  But when the Assembly of Seannach tell you to find the guy that was desanguinating and eating the organs of foxkin, you don’t say no. You go to work.

  The vixen pheromone perfume worked. He was on the move and slid through the crowd.

  Elly raised a brow and licked her lips. She swiveled hips and shoulders to the beat, swishing her bottom back and forth in an enticing dance that was already attracting the attention of every male in the room scenting for a mate.

  “Hey,” a voice to her right broke Elly’s
concentration on her quarry. She blinked, the guy was gone and a bushy haired blond was in her face, gyrating his body close enough so that she could feel every nuance below his waist. The scent of alpha hung heavy on him.

  To her left, Elly caught the dirty look of a red vixen, pure hate rolled off her, smelling like the gagging thick sludge of pond scum.

  “Hey, Amery,” Elly bunched her brow and gave a withering look up at the reynard. “I’m not your vix-fix tonight, hound. The red over there has stamped you. I can smell her stink from here. What’d she do? Pee on you?”

  Amery ignored the remark and leaned in closer, still gyrating his lower body against her. In a loud voice meant to penetrate the sound system, he shouted close enough to her ear that she felt the vibration. “You smell lush.” He extended the last word out into a loud whisper as his lips brushed her lobe.

  Elly turned her head to yell back into his ear. She got halfway through it when the music died. “Amery, You and I are …old his…tory…”

  She jerked her head around to check the room. The flavor of amusement, minty, rippled across Elly’s tongue as she picked up the blonde’s reaction. The woman smirked at her, a derisive wrinkle to her nose that marred the perfect smoothness of her brown butter tan. The music host announced the break, cutting the awkward moment in half. Everyone else in the nightclub was too busy making for the bar, or the skimmers in the lot outside where the air was cooler.

  Amery stood back and laughed. “Can’t blame me for another stab at it with old blood.”

  Elly shrugged and gave him a wink. “Better luck next time, dog,”