Chapter One
Nocturne Falls
The Black and Orange Ball
Ruby Hart tugged at the too-short hem of her foolishly conceived disguise for tonight’s costume party and surveyed the room. From the decorations dripping from the ceiling, corners and walls, to the massive food table laden with every imaginable offering, along with all the other awesomely dressed-up guests, this year’s annual charity ball was shaping up to be absolutely amazing.
The home of Nocturne Falls’s grand hostess, Elenora Ellingham, was spectacular. Candles lit up each and every room in the house. They graced the elaborate chandeliers. They were present on every surface, high and low within view, making the grand place cozier and more comfortable, to Ruby’s mind. The theme of this year’s ball, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, encompassed just about any costume created for such a grand charity ball.
Grabbing a drink from a tray carried by a passing waiter dressed like a pirate, she took a sip of outstanding champagne and searched the room for her quarry. Amazing party aside, she had a job to do.
She’d been hired online to locate someone who’d, essentially, run away from home, although he was no child. Her job was threefold—ensure the runaway was okay, discover if he needed anything and, finally, deliver a message from her client. Fine by her. She was also supposed to secure a response from the runaway to be forwarded back to the mysterious client through the elaborate means of secrecy whereby she’d been contacted.
The over-the-top confidentiality made Ruby wary, so much so she’d even considered turning down the job. Then the firsthalfof the promised fee arrived. It amounted to triple her normal fee. She’d receive the remainder of her fee upon delivery of the runaway’s response to the client’s message.
A check of the source of the funds didn’t uncover nefarious connections, so Ruby agreed to do the job. Besides, she wasn’t really in the financial position to refuse. She was, after all, running a business. As the operator of a new and very specialized enterprise in Nocturne Falls, she needed some satisfied clients to spread the word. Her books remained on the sparse side.
The sealed letter her anonymous client had forwarded with the first half of her fee waited in her office in the mercantile building owned by her family. It would be given over to her quarry, if she could find him—no,whenshe found him.
Failure was not an option, according to her bank account.
Once the missing person gave her his response and she delivered it to her client, her anemic bank account would get another injection of much-needed cash. All she had to do was find the tattooed guy. It couldn’t be that difficult. He sounded hard to miss, even in a town full of residents who would make heads turn almost anywhere else. As a new resident in Nocturne Falls, he must have attracted notice. One would think. He was proving more elusive than expected. The brief description the client provided could fit any number of supernatural beings—Supes, as they were called here—in Nocturne Falls, but she’d hinged her hopes on his distinctive tattoo.
Moving her paranormal investigative business to Nocturne Falls from overseas and starting over in a new country, while a great idea in many ways, was expensive. Considering that the vast majority of Nocturne Falls’s residents had plenty of secrets and a strong desire to keep them added an extra challenge to the equation. She’d never been a quitter, though. She wasn’t ready to tuck her tail between her legs and ask her newly discovered family for money…at least not yet.
The primary reason for moving her business to the Halloween-themed town hadn’t changed—to be closer to her aunt and her two half brothers. She of all people knew familywasimportant. Especially a family that accepted her for who she was and didn’t try to make her into someone she wasn’t.
Been there, done that, had the T-shirt.
First, her mother died in childbirth. Then, when Ruby was just days old, her father abandoned her to the tender mercies of her maternal relatives to drink himself into oblivion. Or so she’d been told. Effectively orphaned, she’d grown up near the Romanian border, raised on the mantra that her father had been weak, inferior and unworthy of her mother, who came from a wealthy, pedigreed witch family. Ruby was bright. As she matured, it became clear that as far as her maternal relatives were concerned, she fell into that category, too. Unworthy.
Ruby endured all the trials and unpleasantness until she got old enough to ask pointed questions about her own history and her parents. When her relatives refused to help, she had to dig. She found she had a talent for investigation and turned that talent into her profession.
Her maternal grandparents hadn’t been happy when she discovered the existence of her two younger half brothers—conceived while her shattered father grieved for her mother—in another country and wanted to connect with them. They forbade her to make contact, as if they only had to speak the words and she’d bow and scrape like a servant to appease them. When she refused to comply, they resorted to using smaller words, as if she was a five-year-old who willfully misunderstood and required supreme patience. Well, she wasn’t a child, nor was she a servant, regardless of how they treated her.
That had been the last insult Ruby was willing to accept.
Imperiously, her grandparents told her she would be banished from their lives and cut off from their financial support if she pursued her quest to find her bastard brothers. No doubt, they fully expected never to have to follow through on their threat, certain as they were of her lack of spine. She had no idea why people who made it clear time and again that she was a necessary obligation, not worthy of their love in the least, thought she would be cowed by the threat to expel her from their world. It wasn’t like she was ever really part of it anyway. How could she miss what she never had?
She relished telling them goodbye and left the country that afternoon. All of her worldly possessions fit into one large knapsack. They didn’t come after her. She hadn’t expected them to.
All that Ruby had to remind her of the father she couldn’t even picture in her mind was an old-fashioned pocket watch. The face was scratched up, but the timepiece worked. It was the one thing that survived the purge of her father’s possessions after her mother’s death. She only had it because the midwife who attended Ruby’s birth tracked her down a few years ago to give her the pocket watch and the story of what truly happened the day she was born, without her grandparents’ venomous spin.
Greta said Ruby’s mother defied her parents to marry Ruby’s father. She became pregnant within the first month, and the couple’s love grew with their unborn baby.
Ruby had come early while her father was away. Her mother clutched the pocket watch in her fist during the delivery that took her life. Her maternal grandparents told her father upon his return that both mother and child perished. They kicked him out of their home and their lives. The grief and guilt he felt over the loss of his wife and infant daughter consumed him.
Her mother’s family had lied, not only to her father, but to her for all of her life. Good riddance. They’d always made her feel like a second-class citizen. She was better off without them. She had two brothers and an aunt who welcomed her into their lives with open arms. They were worth far, far more to her than money.
There were those pesky bills to pay, though.
Ruby forced her mind back to the job at hand. The Black and Orange Ball was Nocturne Falls’s largest charity fundraiser of the year. Supposedly, everyone from town attended.Everyone.This was as good a place to start her hunt as any. This unexpected job would fund her for quite some time, if—no,when—she found the tattooed man.
“Say,” a familiar voice behind her said, “are you old enough to attend this party? You don’t even look like you’re eighteen years old yet.”
Ruby turned to see her half-brother Viktor, grin wide, fangs out, dressed in a mid-last-century version of a vampire’s outfit, complete with large collared cape.
