Twice Bitten (Love, Lust & Magic #1)

Pruitt

?My beauties … ?

That haunting feminine voice was now permanently embedded in memory.

The perspiration shining across ’s forehead made it clear he wasn’t fully comfortable with this idea.

“Are we really doing this?” he asked, his hands now tucked into his letterman jacket as the headlights of his car illuminated a nearby sign that read Lovers’ Lane Lake - No Littering - Closes at 10 p.m.

At first, the only response was nature: the end of August meant crickets chirped merrily and woodland critters were not shy about their midnight adventures. He remained in the front seat of his white Porsche 911—door open—as his words seemed to trail off into the dark. A motorcycle, Uriah’s black BMW Motorrad, was sitting just ahead of him.

Stepping out of his car and closing the door behind him, ’s attention focused on the only source of light reflecting off the nearby lake. The moon, though not full, was bright, beautiful, and no doubt entrancing to him of all people. Maybe people isn’t the right word , he thought to himself.

“Quit thinking about humans, it’s making me hungry,” Uriah chuckled as he engaged his motorcycle’s kickstand. “Come on. Follow me. Not a single victim— I mean, you know, person —has ever regretted joining Uriah Black for a midnight romp at Lovers' Lane Lake.”

rolled his eyes, sighing hard before following behind the vampire. “What is it we’re doing here, anyway?”

Shirtless again—as made him return the stolen V-neck—Uriah wore a large black trench coat and fumbled through its pockets.

“She’s looking big and pretty, ain’t she?” Uriah asked, tilting his head up to the moon. “Figured since you already have a boner for the moon, I could just get you out here alone and make my move.”

“Please,” huffed . “First, you think I’m flirting with a gay guy. Now, you actually believe I’d hook up with you at Lovers’ Lane Lake. Maybe you’re under a different spell than me.”

“Oh, take a joke, Wolf Man,” Uriah chuckled. “I’m not the one playing games with your head.”

“Right. The one doing that is the witch we just had a shared flashback of.”

Uriah fiddled with a flask he produced from one of his pockets. “At least according to whatever memory I had of my life until tonight, the only witches I’ve ever encountered are dead and gone now. I was sure that magic was all but extinct. And a quick Dark Web search suggests that my inkling is—or should be—correct.”

“What about the bartender tonight?”

Uriah took a swig of whatever was in the narrow-necked metal container and gritted his teeth in discomfort. “Fuck, you think Grandma Time is a witch? I mean, do you know how many times I’ve left that place without paying my tab? Can’t be.”

“I mean, she did start chanting some little spell before things went all old timey,” replied . “Guess that means at least some are still around. Maybe in hiding like us.”

“I mean, I guess the place is called Witch’s Brew. Maybe we walked into that one.”

God, I forgot how much he annoys me, thought to himself as he rolled his eyes.

?You know I can hear you in here, too, right?? Uriah’s voice echoed in his head.

?Fuck . ? “Forget a witch,” said aloud. “Get me whoever can get you the hell out of my head for good .”

It was Uriah’s turn to roll his eyes. “Probably a witch.”

As the two approached the edge of Lovers' Lane Lake, the campus of Mystic Hollow University came into full view just below. A small rock formation jutted out from the sea of grass covering most of the nearby ledge, the graffiti markings sprayed across it reading Mystic Ridge . From here, they could see the whole of the city.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Uriah asked as the two looked down. “I mean, that we have some kind of telepathic connection. But we’ve never been able to figure that one out, have we?”

shook his head. “Before tonight, I had a memory of what I thought was my first time meeting you.”

“Oh, please,” Uriah scoffed as he nursed his flask. “Let’s not get into anything that happened in Europe before 1950, please.”

“Makes you wonder why we’ve remembered certain things, but forgotten most others,” said , turning away from the bluff and focusing his attention on the lake. “I mean, who could forget walking in on you and Rasputin himself feeding on an entire town hall of village people?”

“ Hey! That was Rasputin’s idea,” Uriah added defensively. “And if this has to do with you calling into question the people I hang around, then clearly you haven’t seen the animated classic that is Anastasia .”

By now, had all but tuned Uriah’s rambling out. Instead, he was concentrating on a growing ripple in the water.

“Oh, and Bartok, the talking bat? Man, that movie was genius,” Uriah mused to himself. “I want a talking bat. Even just a regular bat.”

“Do you see that?” was ’s only response.

Enough alcohol in him now to be listing off his favorite animated films of the nineties by date of release, it took Uriah a few moments to see it, too. His response? Grabbing up a nearby stone and shooting it across the water’s surface.

?That’s why you brought me out here? To skip stones?? could smack him, but he gritted his teeth instead.

“What?” asked Uriah.

“It was you who said you remembered being here.”

“I remember seeing you here. Right on the edge of this sorry excuse for a lake.”

“In the flash from Grandma Time?”

“Yes,” replied Uriah.

took a deep breath. “And?”

“Let me tell you something, ,” began Uriah. “I’ve spent—I don’t know—a couple hundred years trying to figure out who was my sire. I mean, obviously, he or she had great taste if they picked me to bless the earth with my presence for eternity. But you know what?”

shook his head in response. He wasn’t even sure he could fake an interest.

“Couldn’t find ‘em,” continued Uriah as he placed his flask on the ground. “Whoever did it up and left. Honestly, sometimes I have trouble remembering even crawling out of the ground. Before tonight, it was like you’d go back in your head to look for something?—”

“And it just wasn’t there,” finished Uriah’s sentence, overcome with a sudden wave of empathy. “Same.”

Uriah remained silent.

“I’ll bet there isn’t a werewolf who doesn’t remember the full moon of their first transformation,” added as he grabbed up the flask and took a swig for himself. “Not a single wolf, except me .”

“Well, until now,” said Uriah.

shrugged. “If what we saw was even true.”

“And then tonight, here I am getting a drink and giving the bartender a hard time, and bam . I literally feel myself dying. And see it, too. You think it was real?”

“Something about it seemed real,” said under his breath. Too real.

“Well, you’re looking at one part of it that, in fact, is ,” Uriah waved his arms and gestured dramatically toward the body of water. “An old favorite of mine, Lovers' Lane Lake.”

“What?” came a baffled , his arm extended to hand the flask back to Uriah.

“This spot, clearing, whatever you want to call it, is where we were in that bizarre Black Mirror episode the witch granny transported us to.”

looked at Uriah like he may, in fact, be crazy.

“Come on, Pru. You don’t believe me? If what we saw was real, it happened right?—”

As Uriah held out his hand, his fingers accidentally brushed against ’s own. They both howled in agony.

In retrospect, both men could describe what happened as they touched only as a torrential downpour of lost, yet somehow intensely physically painful memories. The flask shot out of ’s hands and into the water as a spark of magical electricity sent the men hurtling in different directions.

felt an overpowering heat in his face. It was almost like he could feel whatever was happening affecting both his human body and his wolf form. At the very least, the blinding white pain that filled his head made everything else feel like heaven.

Across the lake, Uriah fell face first into a dirt pathway.

“ H-h-here ,” he finally finished his interrupted sentence as he spit out a combination of dirt and sand. “I was going to say it happened here. You know, in case dark magic spark number two didn’t help drive that point home.”

found his footing first and instinctively moved over to check on his midnight acquaintance. Uriah was patting dirt out of his beard as deep purple veins slowly faded from beneath his skin. He looked disheveled, confused, and almost in pain—at least to —and despite Uriah’s bad boy demeanor and attitude, he looked pitiful.

“Everything okay, man?” reached his hand out for Uriah to grab. Uriah glared at him and kept his hands down. “On second thought, yeah , sorry. Maybe we should keep our hands to ourselves for the time being.”

Uriah groaned as he found his footing, pulling himself up on his own before turning his attention back to the lake. There was a long silence between the two of them as they studied the body of water before them.

?What did you see?? asked .

Uriah stepped forward, his eyes inclined toward his own reflection in the water. His boots dipped into the shallowest beginnings of the lake. “Beyond my medicine of choice disappearing into this sorry excuse for a body of water?”

nodded.

?Nothing. At least I don’t think so, anyway. It felt like I was experiencing some kind of temporary paralysis mixed with the pain of these vampire canines ripping through my mouth. Almost like a warning. Or even an omen.?

After getting no response to his disclosure, Uriah cleared his throat to ask the obvious. “And what did you see?” he asked aloud.

remained silent.

“Come on, Wolf Man.”

“I saw myself,” finally blurted out.

“And?” Uriah asked as he drew closer.

“And Odessa,” continued.

“Doing what?” asked Uriah.

shrugged. “ You , I guess.”

“Wait, what ?”

“You’re not gonna like me for this one, but I don’t think you’ll believe me otherwise,” said the werewolf. Just as he came into arm’s length, grabbed hold of Uriah.

The familiar white hot flash from before temporarily blinded both men as they trembled. In that same moment, it was as though they were living out a memory neither one of them fully remembered.