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LENGTH: Mid Novel
SENSUALITY: Sensual/Spicy

Cover art (c) Eliza Black 2007
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Trade Paperback ISBN 1-58608-022-1
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Breaking pack rules, Mark goes AWOL to find his missing physic, certain she's in trouble--and she is--deep trouble.

Rating: sensual/spicy-some graphic violence

MAKING TRACKS

By

Buffi BeCraft-Woodall

© copyright July 2007, Buffi BeCraft-Woodall

Cover art by Eliza Black, © copyright July 2007

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

Bailey Sparks gripped the bars of her cage and stared up at the man on the other side. She’d been pathetically easy to capture.

Her captor was out of place in the museum-quality study. Then again, the polished silver bars of her cage looked out of place, too. His dark hair was slicked back from a widow’s peak and close-trimmed beard and mustache. The yellow eyes were cold and steady.

Thoughts of snakes and other cold-blooded things slithered through her mind.

Bailey shivered. Senses, instincts that she should have been listening to all along, screamed a warning. Run. Not human. Run.

Not that she had anywhere to run, locked up in a huge silver cage.

“Now, little psychic.” He cocked his head in a smooth swivel. “What brings a tasty morsel like you to my lair?”

A blurp in her ethics? A desire to be more than a psychic compass? Fear of the supernatural?

“Ummm.”

She stalled, feeling incredibly small and stupid as he rested the ruby egg he’d been studying back on the stand. From its place among the other treasures on the mantle, a mysterious dark red fired from the depths of the ruby.

It would have been interesting to have been captured because of a magical artifact. Too bad the ruby’s glowing could be explained by a small light bulb hidden in the stand.

Bailey swallowed the taste of primal fear as her captor glided to the cage. Fear was bad. These things, supernatural things, preyed on fear. And one thing Bailey Sparks had learned in the last two years was that she didn’t like being prey.

Victim, prey, quarry, she refused to fall into that state of mind. Speaking of state of minds, what had made her think of doing something so dumb as appropriating lost treasures? She shied away from the word stealing. She wasn’t a thief.

Well, not a very good one, anyway.

Thinking that she could use her Finding abilities for more than locating lost car keys and people was turning out to be a big mistake. In hindsight, that nice boring office clerk job she quit back in Savannah was starting to look better and better.

But the one time in two years that she had caved to the lure of a chocolate mint Blizzard, she stumbled onto the local pack. Nothing killed a Blizzard craving faster than standing in the middle of a bunch of sweaty werewolves on their lunch break. Moving, and a stricter diet, were her only options. And fast.

Getting involved with werewolves again was definitely not on her list of things to do.

Lizard-man chuckled. The hissing sound sent more shudders skittering up her spine. She really wished her gifts included something to figure out what her captor was.

“Uh, look Mister. I usually don’t do stuff like this. You see ...”

He laughed again.

“You are cute, little psychic. All that curly hair and freckles.” His eyes gleamed yellow in the dim lamplight.

She heard him sniffing, sorting the scents in the air. Drat-it. It gave her the willies when they went all nonhuman like that.

The yellow eyes narrowed to slits.

“You smell like wolven, little psychic. Where is your pack? Who is in my territory?”

The growl wasn’t like anything she’d heard before. His blocky white teeth thinned to points. All of them, and not in the way the werewolves Changed.

Fear spiked through her. What had she gotten herself into this time?

The idea of moving to Alaska was looking better and better. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about vampires six months out of the year. But then, she’d never been bothered by vampires, just werewolves. Wolven. Uppity shapeshifters.

“I’m n-not part of a pack.” Bailey shrank back and pressed into the bars on the opposite side. Curse those werewolves and their super-healing blood for getting her into this mess. Mark especially. Tall, blond, and sexy, he was a complete pain in the rear. And a hound dog, to boot.

Dismissing her mind’s eye view of what she’d passed up two years ago, she tried to concentrate on the here and now. She didn’t need Mark’s protection. She needed protection from him. Before he got to Hinesville, Georgia to haul her back to Texas.

Her captor’s skin took on a different texture as he slithered around the cage faster than thought. Bailey gasped when the man’s, no, the creature’s hand shot out and snagged the messy knot atop her head.

He pressed close. There was none of the heat she associated with the wolven. He was cool. A vampire?

A fresh wave of terror spread through her.

“Not part of a pack?” he sneered. “Do not make me out a fool. There was a day that an innocent thing like you would have been tasty enough to appease my wrath.”

“I-Innocent?”

She’d just broken into his house and he thought she was innocent. There was that tasty comment again. “I’m not tasty. I didn’t even take a bath today.”

He did that horrible hissing laugh again.

The grip on her hair loosened and she pulled away to face him.

“Who are you? What are you?”

Devil-guy looked incredulous.

“You broke into my lair without knowing who I am? Did you not see the figures on my gate? The fanciful topiary?”

It was a testament to the last two years worth of weight training and aerobics that got her butt over the twelve-foot brick perimeter fence. She’d bumbled through the house, getting caught after she had the ornamental gem egg in hand.

“Decoration? It was pretty.” All that nifty Chinese dragon ironwork was sharp too. Though the bushes trimmed to portray various mythological creatures under dragon attack was eye-catching, if a bit gruesome.

His angled head shook side to side. Belief, then satisfaction, finally settled onto his sharp features. Spreading one arm wide, he dipped at the waist in a bow that was graceful in an oily used-car salesman way.

“Well then fair maiden, introductions are in order. I am Dracen Pyre Smith. And you are in my lair.”

Bailey blinked. She really was a dolt. She’d spent too much time trying to ignore a childhood where mythology and biology class were one and the same. Pretending to be a normal Homo sapiens.

The memory of the fifth grade bio/mythology lesson as clear as the B minus her parents had freaked out over. Classification, Draco sapiens, intelligent lizard.

The psychics’ creed was basic. Know thy enemy. Then kill it before it can get you. Draco sapiens was reputed to be smart, but not creative. This was good news for Hunters, making the world safer one monster at a time, but apparently not for naming the young.

“Uh. Can I ask you one question?”

He, it, inclined its head. The unnatural, eerie motion pushed some serious fight or flight instincts, heavy on the flight.

“What kind of dragon calls himself Smith?”