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Chapter One

“S o, tell me what’s going on, man.” Orion sat across from his buddy Yarrow at a cafe down in Pagosa Springs, his plate full of croissant French toast, Yarrow’s bearing fancy-ass avocado toast. Yarrow had called for a meet yesterday, and he’d hustled to get into town as fast as he could, because Y rarely had an urgent worry.

“Well, you know I come up here every year to build a dam.”

Orion nodded. Yarrow was a beaver shifter, and he was from this area originally. So he was like, constitutionally bound to come around once a year and stake his claim by damming up some stream or other.

“So I was up by that 1950s A-frame. You know the one I mean. Sits back in the mountain a ways, hidden at the back?”

“Yeah. You drove me by there once.” Yarrow loved an A-frame. Said the silly things were the perfect house.

“Well, and there was a family, you know? Several male couples. Lots of kids.”

“Yeah. Gay commune type thing.” To guys like him and Yarrow, sexuality was so…fluid. But humans tended to narrow it down.

“Yeah. Well now I don’t see anyone coming and going, and the house has…morphed.”

“What the hell does that mean?” He poured more syrup on his French toast, then dipped a veggie sausage in it.

“Do you mean literally or figuratively?”

“What?” He didn’t follow.

“Like, you know what morphed means, right?”

“All right.” Orion arched an eyebrow. “Do you want me to bite you now or later?”

“Yeah, you’re not very scary, buddy. My teeth are way bigger.” Yarrow snorted, and then kind of made this weird chuffing noise.

Honestly, he was going to get him one of those trucker hats with a Buc-ee’s beaver on it.

“I’m serious, though. It’s not the same. There’s an A-frame involved in it, sure. In fact, it does seem as though it’s the most solid bit, but then things get a little misty, and if you look really hard, there’s this Victorian place and then this other place that really reads like thatched roof ren faire shit. I have to say, it’s very odd. Like a greenhouse, but not. And you know it’s cold here for a thatched roof. Anyway, I’m disturbed.”

“No shit on that.” It didn’t seem reasonable, but Orion was basically an expert in the unreasonable, and this was quite intriguing.

“What about the guys—the ones with the kids. Maybe they’re just doing renovations?”

“I don’t think so.” Now Yarrow’s voice dropped, and his eyes, which were usually sort of distant and glazed and not particularly there, were suddenly sharp as whittled sticks. “Bloodsuckers came through, and there was a lot of blood, man. A lot.”

Fuck. Vampires. “And then?”

“Let’s be honest, no one can fight a swarm. Then they were gone.”

“The gay guys and the kids?”

Yarrow nodded. “ And the large mosquitoes.”

All right, that was a little bit alarming. Every one of them—any decent being—was fighting to keep those plague bringers away.

“So how long has all this been going on?” he asked, and Yarrow shrugged.

“Well, I haven’t seen the guys and the kids in a good long while. Since the spring after the incident, there hasn’t been any sort of activity at all. It’s been just sitting there, kind of slowly getting dusty. I hadn’t wanted to bother it because it’s in pretty good shape, and you know it is always a situation if I happen to need wood and there isn’t any, so I like a reliable source.” Yarrow shrugged. “But it’s in good shape, one way or the other. And then suddenly the lights are on again, but you never see anybody go in or go out. That’s kind of weird. Then the next spring, I notice this other house, and it’s a bit more solid. Not tons, always in the clouds, and that’s weird too. Really weird in my mountains.”

Orion did manage not to mention that Yarrow was a beaver shifter in the mountains, and that was pretty special when it came down to brass tacks. Orion knew from special.

“I need to make sure that that’s not some sort of a portal. The last thing we need is for vamps to start pouring in like fire ant swarms. They’re already problematic enough.”

“I believe you. That’s why I called you. I have a weird feeling. Not bad. I don’t feel like this black cloud coming over me when I look at it and I’ve never heard any voices saying, Get Out. But, well, let’s be honest, I’ve never gotten in. There’s a gate, and I really don’t want to get arrested for trespassing. I don’t like the idea of being caged up.”

“Who does?” Still, Yarrow had a point. He might have to go and look this whole thing over. Just to be on the safe side. He had a few more tricks up his sleeve than a beaver shifter, even one as resourceful as Yarrow.

If there were vampires in the area, they needed to be removed. Period.

“So, will you look into it?” Yarrow asked. “It would ease my mind. It’s still my family territory. I have to be able to get up there and build dams.”

“We can’t have anything interfering with that.” He winked, then polished off his toast. Did he need a cinnamon roll?

Yarrow snarfed down his last bite of avo toast. “Want to split a big side of hash browns and some churro waffles?”

“Goddess yes.” Being a vegetarian and a magical creature simultaneously was tough. It took a lot of energy to maintain the glamour he had to put on to look human, even in a human form. If he didn’t put on gray hair and gray eyes, then he had silvery hair and eyes and iridescent skin.

That could be a little off-putting to humans. And get a guy caged to be studied…

They polished off two more plates of food, and he raised an eyebrow at Yarrow. “I’ll meet you here in say, three days? Same time? I’ll make my report.”

“Sounds good.” They both left money on the table. Magical guys like them tended to go off the grid, especially when traveling all the time like him and Yarrow did. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“In the meantime, be careful,” Orion admonished.

“I will.” Yarrow clicked his teeth and headed off. He could almost see that big paddle of a tail in the shadow Yarrow cast. Someone really needed to get his beave on.

Orion hit the little local department store to outfit himself for camping for three or four days, then grabbed some groceries before heading up the mountain toward Wolf Creek Pass.

He didn’t want to have to deal with any magical fucking weirdness.

Hopefully, this was all just because Yarrow had gotten into some wormy wood and was having hallucinations.

A guy never knew with a beaver, did they?