A Dead Man’s Favor, book five in The Many Travails of John Smith, launches September 26th! As usual, I’m counting down to its release by sharing sample chapters, book stats, content warnings, and whatever else seems fun. On to Chapter 1!

 

Chapter 1

IN WHICH VOWS ARE JUST THE BEGINNING

 

 

It was a pretty great wedding until the zombie showed up. September in San Diego meant different things than in the rest of the country. It was warm, but not too warm, the skies were the sort of blue you usually only saw with painted movie sets, and the breeze coming in off the ocean was content with merely rustling the decorations instead of tossing them about like confetti. Even my rented tux fit almost perfectly, rescued by a second round of last-minute alterations.

The post-ceremony photos were finally done, with the bride and, well, bride now off getting their solo pictures taken. The rest of us were milling about under the giant, open-sided tent that had been erected over the reception tables; seventy-four-degree weather in San Diego didn’t mean the sun couldn’t still boil you like a lobster if you weren’t paying attention.

In a few minutes, those of us in the wedding party would have to form back up again to escort and announce the newly married couple to their own reception, but for now, we were scattered about and mixed in with the guests. I had an icy cold beer in one hand and a plateful of cookies in the other, because I’d very nearly overslept for our 8 a.m. rendezvous at the wedding site, and I’d had to skip my usual breakfast on the way.

The cookies were amazing. Not breakfast burrito with extra chorizo amazing, obviously, but I wasn’t complaining. And the beer was, as always, the perfect post-wedding treat.

It had been a season of weddings. Mike and Susan had been the first to start things off back in May, and if Susan had spent the entire rehearsal dinner staring me down over what she’d been told about my best friend’s bachelor’s party, she’d been nothing but smiles during the wedding itself. June, July, and August had then had two weddings apiece, all for old high school classmates who had caught the marriage bug and rightly assumed I still lived in San Diego and would show up with gifts if invited.

And now this, the final wedding of the season, and the third of those eight where I’d found myself going stag. Thankfully, this time, I knew almost everyone else at the reception. Even better, none of them had tried to kill me in more than a year.

“How’s it hanging, son?”

“Hey Jason.” I tapped his beer bottle with mine and tried not to shake my head. “New look?”

“Yeah, what do you think?”

For all that he was still only twenty-two, the werewolf was looking almost professorial in a blazer with honest-to-God leather patches on the elbows. He had tried to complete the ensemble with wire-framed glasses, but the lack of lenses kind of stood out, as did the sheer amount of product he’d worked into his hair.

Not to mention that he’d used that product to give himself a fauxhawk.

“It’s different.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Got to be all respectable and stuff at events like these, you know? Plus, the chicks dig distinguished these days.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s true. I may be off the market now, but I’m not gonna deny the honeys their eye candy.”

“Where is Caroline anyway?”

“She’s at home,” he said. “Was feeling under the weather, so I came to represent the Pack instead.” He gave the phrase under the weather special significance, and then looked at me expectantly.

“Uhm… I’m sorry to hear that?”

For a second, he just looked at me. Finally, he shook his head and took another swig of beer.

“Son, speaking as one grown-ass adult to another, you can sometimes be really dense. Even for a human.”

“Let’s pretend I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “Because I don’t. Also, why are you calling me son now? What happened to bro?”

He rolled his eyes, looking very much like the teenager he’d so recently been. “It’s obvious. I’m going to be a dad soon. So, I’m trying it out to see how it feels.”

“You’re what?”

“Gonna be a dad? Cara’s got a couple pups on the way.”

“Damn, that’s—” I ran through a handful of adjectives, some of them less appropriate than others, before finally settling on something safe. “Amazing! Congratulations, dude!”

“Yeah.” He adjusted his lensless glasses and preened. “It’s pretty sweet, no lie. We’re both young enough still that we’ve got a good chance of seeing them grow up and have kids of their own.”

I managed to hide my wince behind my third-best mediator’s smile, recently dubbed The Encourager™. Weres personified the phrase live fast and die young, with life expectancies that rarely reached the fifties. It was weird—and sobering—to think that both Jason and his ex-wife, current girlfriend, and soon-to-be baby mama would likely pass around the same time as my vastly older parents.

“Don’t expect me to hand out cigars or any of that shit though,” Jason was saying. “I’m a soon-to-be dad now. I’ve got to watch my finances.”

“No more Wednesday night bar crawls?”

“I’m a dad, not dead.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, what’s new?” He snagged another beer from the nearby table and popped the cap off with his thumb.

“Not a ton. Juliette’s holding down the fort on the P.I. side of things while I deal with the goblins.” I couldn’t see my business partner, but I knew she was swanning around the reception somewhere with her plus-one. At some point, she’d probably swing by to make fun of my tux again.

“Think the current ceasefire has a better chance of lasting than the last two?”

The Encourager™ cracked under the weight of a question it wasn’t qualified to answer, and I shrugged. “We’ll see, I guess. The only thing worse than a land war in Asia is a land war with goblins. The Mer are sponsoring the newest round of negotiations, and they want me on hand to work some mediator magic. I guess I should just be grateful they didn’t invite Caleb Van Stahl instead.” My rival—sort of—mediator usually covered the coastal territories while I handled the rest, but that arrangement hadn’t kept him from bogarting mediation cases in the past.

Jason whistled. “I don’t care what everyone else says about you, bro; you’ve got balls of solid steel. I mean, mad respect and all, but that was seriously cold.”

Now I was back to being bro. “What are you talking about?”

“Come on; it’s not like you left them much choice. They needed a mediator and you’re the only one around not pushing up daisies.”

“Caleb Van Stahl is dead?”

Jason just looked at me for a while, and for the first time in our strange relationship, I saw something like respect in his gaze. “Bro, you’re gonna have to teach me how to do that. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were surprised to hear it.”

“Because I am surprised.”

“This is me you’re talking to. J-Money, dawg of dawgs, and your bro before all hoes. There’s no need to front like you didn’t do it!”

I was still grappling with the loss of my long-assumed-if-slow-to-develop bromance with the other mediator, so Jason’s words didn’t sink in until well after the fact. When they did, I nearly choked on my latest sip of beer.

“You think I killed him?” We were in the middle of a wedding, and not all of the attendees were supernatural, so I kept my voice quiet. There were only so many times you could laugh off awkward conversations as jokes or movie quotes.

“Of course not.” Jason dropped his voice to match mine. “Everyone knows you had your girlfriend do it.”

My girlfriend—and it still made me giddy to even think the word—was none other than Lady Anastasia Dumenyova, a four-hundred-some-old-year vampire who, through the grace of the Demigod of Unexpected Romantic Pairings, had for some reason taken a liking to me. And yeah, for most of her centuries-old existence, she’d been her queen’s Secundus, both fixer and assassin, but that wasn’t who she was anymore. She didn’t kill on anyone’s command, and if she’d decided to off Caleb on her own, I was sure she’d have told me.

Mostly sure.

“Jason—” I began.

“Say no more, son.” He straightened his glasses and took a long glance around us. “This is neither the time nor the place, ya feel me? Emilio’s throwing a barbecue two Wednesdays from now after the Pack meeting. You can drop on by and give us the word then.”

Before I could reply, or even ask if Emilio was still the owner of the world’s greatest mustache, Jason was gone, making a beeline for the last plate of cookies and what I suspected would be his fourth or even fifth beer of the wedding. I went to follow him, but was intercepted by a red-headed, blue-eyed, mediator-seeking missile in a tux of her own.

“John!”

“Darlene.” I hugged her back and saluted her with my mostly empty beer bottle. “Mazeltov. How did you like your surprise?”

She turned to regard the two people standing on the far side of the tent, talking to a woman who looked even taller and more beautiful than usual in her white silk wedding dress. While Kayla was a vampire, the people she was entertaining were human: a middle-aged woman with Darlene’s eyes and a radiant smile, and a gawky red-headed teenage boy whose resemblance to his newly married sister was almost uncanny.

“I still can’t believe it,” Darlene told me. “How did you get Mom and Josh to come?”

“Hey, I’m the best man. Or… maid of honor—?”

“Best Man of Honor.”

“Right. That. Miracles are kind of what we do.” I turned back from the sight of Darlene’s mom and brother to regard the woman herself. “Honestly, it didn’t take much convincing. I’m just sorry I couldn’t talk your dad into joining them.”

“I’m not. He had his chance and made his choice, twice over.” Darlene shook her head, and her smile made a reappearance, so wide on her small, freckled face that it almost looked crazed. “I’m just so grateful that my old family gets to meet my new one. I swear they’re both halfway in love with K already. Thank you.”

“Consider it my apology for not being able to attend the festivities in Australia. And for Ana’s absence today.”

Kayla’s former House—and her entire extended family—was in Australia; rather than force either the San Diegans or the Australians to travel, the pair had elected to have weddings in both locations. And if it hadn’t been for my role in hopefully helping to end a goblin war—not to mention my thoroughly mixed feelings on airplanes—I’d have been going Down Under to celebrate the second one too.

“You know you’re already forgiven for both.”

I did, but it was nice to hear anyway. “So, how does it feel? To be Mrs. and Mrs. finally?”

This time, her whole face glowed. “I think it’s still sinking in. Have you seen K in her wedding dress? How the hell did I get so lucky?”

“By being awesome enough to deserve it.”

That earned me a second hug, but before I could say anything more, the DJ was waving at us from across the room. On the far side of the tent, the rest of the wedding party was gathering in pairs, Kayla among them.

“Looks like it’s processional time again,” I told D, turning her about. “Shall we?”

○○○

I sat with the rest of the wedding party at the main table, which put me in a strange mix of company: a couple of Darlene’s fellow recent graduates from UCSD, a handful of vampires from the San Diego House, and one bark-skinned woman with dark, luxurious vines for hair who I was pretty sure was a dryad. Like many of the less human-looking attendants, that woman, Brooke, was no doubt wearing a glamour to let her pass as human amongst those ignorant to the existence of supernaturals. Thanks to me being me, I couldn’t actually see that glamour, but her bark skin went well with the off-the-shoulder, deep green wedding dresses that Kayla had picked out for her bridesmaids. And if flowers tended to bloom wherever she stood for any length of time, well, they just added to the décor.

Only two of us at the table were men, and I couldn’t help but sense that the second one had been trying to make eye contact with me throughout the meal, long after we’d all stumbled our way through our respective speeches. My relationship with Steve was… complicated… and not just because he was a manpire ninja who had probably never even heard of acne.

Part of me was simply bummed that he’d shaved the mohawk that had always been a close second to Emilio’s glorious mustache in the citywide hair and facial hair rankings, but our real issues were entirely political. Steve hadn’t directly taken part in the coup that overthrew their former House’s leader, Lucia Borghesi, femmepire queen and my supposed mistress, but he hadn’t joined in the small exodus that followed either.

Instead, he’d opted to support the new leader, Duke Barros… only to have Barros flee both House and country a year later, when Lucia’s vigilante accountant, Marcus, had gotten his revenge. It was all a mess, and the upshot was that Steve and I hadn’t shared more than a few words over the course of the last year, despite both being in K and D’s wedding party.

But, I decided, belly comfortably full with my second slice of wedding cake, enough is enough. Lucia’s back in Rome with the den of snakes—sometimes literal snakes—that she prefers, and I’m frankly sick of vampire politics getting in the way of friendship.

I washed down that last bite of cake with champagne that was far too expensive for me to properly appreciate, and looked across the table at Steve, raising my glass to him in a silent toast. He returned it with a smile, teeth gleaming against the darkness of his skin, and just like that, all was well.

Or so I thought.

A half-hour later, with the reception lunch over, and the party now in full swing, Steve sought me out where I was wallflowering to one side of the freshly assembled dance floor.

“John.”

“Steve!” To his evident shock, I took his outstretched hand and pulled him into a bro hug. “How are things? How’s Barry?”

He smiled, shoulders subtly relaxing. “He’s good. Lord Kala opened up the Bitter End again in July, and we’ve been meeting almost every night.”

“Sorry I was never able to do anything about his situation.” Barry was both the wereboar bouncer for San Diego’s preeminent supernatural bar and one of its sole permanent residents. At two hundred years old, he was only still alive because Kala, as a demigod of time and death, was able to control the passage of time for individuals within his domain. Barry leaving the bar, however, would remove him from Kala’s domain… with likely fatal consequences.

“It’s okay. After not being able to see each other at all for a month, being stuck in the bar doesn’t seem quite so bad anymore.”

I was pretty sure the Bitter End’s unexpected summer closure had been my fault, although I still wasn’t sure why or how. Even with the bar open again, Lord Kala had yet to make an appearance.

“Anyway,” continued Steve, once again looking uncomfortably nervous, “I was hoping we could talk.”

“Yeah, of course. But before you start,” I told him, “I just want to say this past year has been stupid, and I’m sorry for my part in it. Whatever happened, happened. Lucia’s gone, and I’d like to just get back to the way things were. A human and a manpire having a good time and not worrying about vampire politics.” I looked for the beer cooler, but someone had moved it aside to make room for the dancing. “So, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

Steve coughed. “The House and… uh… vampire politics.”

Well, shit.

 

 

A Dead Man’s Favor releases September 26th in print and digital formats, and is now available for pre-order in digital format!

Buy it on Amazon

On Wednesday, I’ll be back with Chapter 2. See you then!