Free VoodooMoon by June Stevens

teamed up for a martial arts class, and according to my mother it was love at first punch. She never said who punched who, but I always figured she’d done the punching. They were inseparable. My mother had gotten into the Academy because both of her parents were City Guards. It was her dream to be a Guard, and maybe a Blade. My father’s family paid for his place at the Academy, but he applied for Guard training shortly after meeting my mother.
    They married shortly after graduating the Academy. To my father’s family’s dismay they applied for the City Guard together and were accepted. To please my paternal grandparents, they bought the little yellow house in New Nashville to be near them. My mother quit the Guard when she got pregnant with me.
    My mother’s eyes always got sad and her tone wistful whenever she told me about that time. For a while we were a family in the little yellow house. Then, just before my second birthday, my father didn’t come home for dinner. He and his partner had been tracking a smuggling ring and walked into a trap. They had been dead before they even knew the warehouse had been rigged with explosives. It always seemed a little strange to me that in a world with magic, my father had been killed by the most mundane of methods.
    His family blamed my mother for his death. They said he never would have joined the Guard if it hadn’t been for her. I think she agreed with them. She couldn’t stand the little yellow house without my father, so she bundled me up and went to the one place she knew she would always be welcome.
    Throughout generations of my mother’s family, Eric “Pinky” Pinkerton had been a constant. I sometimes wondered how sad it was for him to see the people he loves die every few decades and yet he stays eternally young. Most vampires move around a lot or avoid bonding with non-vampires for that very reason. Yet Pinky had been a member of my family as much as if he’d been born into it.
    Pinky had taken us in, letting my mother rent the top floor of the pub building and helping out with me when she joined the Blades.
    I never saw my Grandparents again until my mother died and they tried to make me come live with them. I didn’t cooperate. After a while they got tired of chasing me down at Pinky’s and dragging me back to the big house in New Nashville. Whatever the reason, they gave up trying to control me after three weeks and let me go back to Pinky who gladly took me in. Of course they never, not even once, contributed financially to my raising after that.
    I pulled myself out of the thoughts of the past and paid attention to the street as I strolled down the block towards home and bed. I let the sounds and smells, not all of them pleasant, sink into my skin. The enticing aroma of fresh baked sweet bread wafted out of the bakery across from Pinky’s pub and my growling stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten a bite since early the evening before. I stopped in and bought three sweet rolls. I ate one of the sticky buns as I crossed the street. There were a few people milling about in and out of shops and the few inns, but for the most part it was pretty quiet.
    Pinky’s Pub was located in one of only three four story buildings on the block. The pub catered mainly to vampires and unlike many of the bars on Broadway, the pub closed an hour before dawn and didn’t open until two hours after dusk. There had been a time when Pinky had kept the pub open 24 hours a day for any vampires who chose to risk the sunlight exposure to get to a dark, friendly place for a drink. But, when my sisters and I came along he’d changed the hours so he had time to spend with us. Though we were all grown up now, Pinky found he had a love of quite alone time, so he kept the night time only hours.
    Since it was almost mid-day the front doors were locked and barred from the inside. Knocking wouldn’t get me in because of the sound-proof spells that kept the upper floors quite enough to sleep