Wild-Flower Wine
an excerpt

The night she found the bracelet – again – it was the last straw. I mean, really. This time it was in the back of her car. Yesterday morning it had been back on her nightstand. As it had the morning before. The day before that – well, eew. But today she was sure she’d gotten rid of it. Diamond bracelets don’t just disappear from pawn shops and reappear in the back seat of the seller’s car, now do they? Unless she’d had a lapse of memory and not actually sold the thing, instead walking out with it and…putting it in the back seat of her car? No, not possible. The receipt was still in her purse, right?

Sarah checked. Yep. The receipt was sitting right there in her purse.

But there, too, was the bracelet, sitting right in the middle of the back seat. The same. Damn. Bracelet. Sarah reached back to pick it up, and examined the thing. The same engraving on the inside? Check. The same 24 diamonds studding the outside? Check. Damn. How did it keep coming back, no matter how she tried to get rid of it? The first few times – well, dogs really do like to fetch things you throw (and he was smart, so he could have put it on her bedside table…both times), and toilets back up all the time, right? But showing up in the back of your car after you pawn it off? That’s just Not Normal.

Sarah sighed. “I guess that damn vampire will be able to find me, after all.” She thumped her head against the steering wheel. Why, oh why did she have to find the one vampire in all of San Jose who had been a magic-worker in life, and knew how to manipulate it after death? It just wasn’t fair.