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    Lonely Streets
    Lonely Streets
    Lonely Streets
    Ebook153 pages2 hours

    Lonely Streets

    By Zoe Cannon

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A hunter always walks alone…

     

    A reluctant werewolf forced to choose between a cure and the life of an innocent girl. A retired vampire hunter whose vampire husband may not be as defanged as she thought. A monster who finds a reason to be human in a scared child's eyes.

     

    From the author of the Hound of Hades series comes a collection of six standalone urban fantasy stories about women who protect the innocent from the creatures that stalk the night… no matter the price. All of them hunt monsters. Some are monsters themselves. And all face a choice between their duty and the people they love.

     

    If you like the strong heroines of Patricia Briggs and Ilona Andrews, and the solitary world-weary heroes of Jim Butcher and Mike Carey, you'll love the women of Lonely Streets.

     

    This collection contains the following stories:

    Once a Predator

    Lone Wolf Moon

    The First Anniversary

    The Boy and What He Made Me

    Prodigal Daughter

    The Right Kind of Monster

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZoe Cannon
    Release dateApr 27, 2021
    ISBN9798201633653
    Lonely Streets

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      Book preview

      Lonely Streets - Zoe Cannon

      Lonely Streets

      An Urban Fantasy Collection

      Zoe Cannon

      © 2021 Zoe Cannon

      http://www.zoecannon.com

      All rights reserved

      This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

      Introduction

      Ever since the first urban fantasy heroine appeared on a book cover with a dark city street behind her, wielding a stake and wearing stilettos and tight leather pants, urban fantasy has had a major part to play in the evolution of the Strong Female Character.

      Once upon a time, female characters who dared to do unfeminine things—having adventures! swinging a sword around!—paid for it by being cut off from everything traditionally feminine. Love? Family? Nope, not for you. Want to look good while slaying monsters? Not unless you feel like getting demoted to love interest. As soon as they opened the door to adventure, another door slammed shut behind them. And while these heroines always triumphed over their enemies, it was the rare character who didn’t regret what she had lost along the way.

      Some characters chose to pry the door to femininity back open. I remember several books from my childhood that I turned the last page on with a sense of betrayal, as the main character abandoned her adventures as the cost of growing up, and got on with her real work of raising children and running a household. Some books handled this a lot better—Tamora Pierce’s Alanna comes to mind. She was able to reclaim everything she originally turned her back on, from makeup and dresses to relationships and family, and without giving up her life of adventure to do it… although the two were always in conflict for her.

      But whether or not these early heroines were able to get back what they had lost, and whether or not they abandoned their adventures in the process, they could never turn their back forever on the world’s ideas of what a woman should be, and what she should care about. With rare exceptions, no heroine heard that door slam shut behind her without at least rattling the knob a bit.

      Then a new type of heroine came along, and blasted that door right off its hinges. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a perfect example—in fact, that was pretty much the whole conceit of the original movie. A popular cheerleader who also knows how to kick some vampire ass? She could do both? It felt strange, back then—and it felt right. And because Buffy exemplified this shift so well, it only makes sense that urban fantasy became a natural home for these heroines.

      This was, needless to say, a major step forward. Heroines were no longer being penalized for wanting to have adventures. And in storytelling, as in life, femininity was no longer incompatible with being an active force in the world. Instead of losing the ability to fit a narrow definition of womanhood, these characters chose to expand the definition.

      I loved seeing all these amazing women rewrite their own narrative and decide for themselves what a heroine could be. But my rebellious heart, still smarting from the betrayal of those childhood books, wasn’t satisfied.

      See, when those early characters heard that door slam shut behind them, they were never the ones closing it. The loss of the feminine world—of family, love, the chance to be vulnerable every once in a while—was something that was forced on them. It was a tragedy. It was, in a way, a punishment. Even if, on balance, they were happy with the path they had taken.

      The proof of that is that whenever they were given the opportunity to open that door again, they took it. Sometimes they did that by walking away from their lives of heroism and rebellion, like the books that offended my childhood sensibilities so deeply. Sometimes they found a way to live with one foot in each world, like Alanna the Lioness. And more and more often, they said, Why is this door even here? and did a little remodeling.

      But there was one constant. They always chose to open the door. And the ones who couldn’t still tried, and had regrets.

      All these stories, I slowly realized, operated under the assumption that no woman, no matter where her journey takes her, can ever turn her back on the feminine world forever.

      So that made me wonder: what if the heroine was the one to pull the door closed, rather than hearing it slam shut behind her? What if she couldn’t find a balance, and really did have to choose—and the choice she made was to walk away from the things the world told her she could never truly leave behind, and keep going without a backward glance? What if, when the narrative offered her a way to keep on being what a woman was supposed to be, she said, Thanks but no thanks, and jumped clear over onto an entirely different path, the traditionally masculine narrative of the lone protector?

      Those are the heroines of these six stories.

      Some start off inside a familiar narrative—the vampire hunter in love with a vampire, the teenage loner whose brush with the supernatural gains her a tight circle of friends and a chance at romance—but say, Nope, this story can’t get me what I need. Others find themselves in uncharted territory, like the young monster who doesn’t even have a name for what she is before she gets a chance at love and connection… or is it actually a chance to be a strong-but-distant protector? But they all have their own ideas about what kind of story they want to live out, and they’re not afraid to shatter the world’s expectations in order to make that happen.

      Writing these stories reminded me of how much I love the strong heroines of my childhood, and the ones I see every day now in books and on TV. And it made me realize why, as happy as those stories make me, I keep looking at them and thinking, But something is still missing. It also gave me a chance to have some fun exploring familiar stories—and then let these heroines take some good swings at the invisible boundaries of those stories, like the badass women they are. I hope you love these women and their stories as much as I do… and that, just maybe, they’ll give you something you’ve been looking for.

      Once a Predator

      The dark, throbbing music blasting through the club’s speakers pulsed in Quinn’s bones. Every drumbeat wiped her thoughts from her mind, and left her scrambling to recapture them. All around her, people twenty years younger than her shouted over the music. Judging by the amount of what? and huh? she heard, few of them could hear each other—or even themselves—over the beat.

      The smell of overpriced drinks, all of them too sweet and too strong, hung thickly in the air. The floor was sticky with the spilled remains of said drinks. Every step threatened to glue her sneakers to the floor—not proper club shoes, but it had been twenty years since she’d owned a pair of those. She kept trying to avoid the puddles, but the jostling crowds always pushed her in exactly the direction she didn’t want to go. She was no longer in practice at navigating through a loud and unruly crowd, and she was decades too old for this place, old enough that she was invisible to most of the people here.

      There was a time when this place—the music, the crowd, even the smell—would have brought her to life, instead of making her feel like she needed a nap. The beat would have resonated in her blood, until she had to resist the urge to dance. Once, she would have been holding one of those drinks, pretending to sip at it, savoring the sweet sharp smell of the hunt.

      And not all those instincts were gone. As much as she wished she were back home, curled up on her couch watching the news with a glass of wine in hand, she could already feel the old familiar adrenaline pumping through her veins. Her vision narrowed. The relentless beat faded as her hearing focused in on the snatches of conversation that might be important. Out of reflex, she scanned the crowd for any telltale signs of sharp teeth, or pointed ears, or hair in places where humans shouldn’t have any. Searching for predators. Searching for her prey.

      Once, she had been the apex predator. But not for a long time. She had always thought she didn’t miss it. Risking her life every night—if she could call it a life. Always hunting, always alone.

      But tonight, underneath the fatigue and the headache and the ache of her aging bones… tonight was the first time in twenty years she had truly felt alive.

      That feeling was almost enough to make her forget the sick fear that had driven her here. It was almost enough to make her forget who she had come here looking for.

      Almost.

      She did another quick scan of the crowd. In this surging mass of humanity, it was close to impossible to distinguish one person from another. Especially as out of practice as she was. These days, the only times she came anywhere near a crowd involved her standing off to the side, safe and invisible behind her camera. But even with her skills this rusty, it was easy to see that the throng didn’t include any men who stood a head taller than everyone else, with eyes so pale a gray they were almost white. And she didn’t see those familiar waves of dirty blond hair, curling over his ears just the way she liked it. She was the only reason he kept it that way, as he reminded her every morning when he ran a comb through it. Keeping it that long made him feel unkempt, he always said with that teasing smile of his, but if it made her happy, then he—

      She cut herself off midthought. This wasn’t the time. She could be his wife again when she got home. When she stumbled through the door at midnight, and found him at the kitchen table eating a late dinner, home from a long and boring night of working late rechecking numbers, just like he had said. When she had proved herself wrong, and her biggest problem was coming up with an excuse for where she had been… then she would start thinking about his smile again.

      Until then, she was only the hunter. There was no room for anything else.

      Back in her hunting days, there never had been.

      Quinn? Is that you? a voice screeched in her ear.

      She whirled, and was halfway to throwing the speaker to the ground before she recognized Ellie. She caught herself in time, and changed the motion to an awkward hug. She hadn’t realized how close to the surface her combat instincts were—even now, when she hadn’t fought or even trained in twenty years.

      Although that wasn’t entirely true, was it? She had done her old drills this morning, all two hours’ worth. And the morning before. And the morning before that.

      But not because she planned on fighting anyone. Just because she, like every woman her age, needed something to help fend off middle-aged spread. She had tried the yoga thing, but it had left her bored and restless and ready to punch her chirpy instructor in the face. Inner peace had never been her style. So she had abandoned the class and started up her old routines again. That had been five years ago. Since then, she had never missed a morning. She hadn’t realized, until she had started it up again, how much she had missed it. How much more at home it made her feel in her body.

      But it wasn’t training. It was just exercise. Despite what Julian would have said if he saw her, it wasn’t some sign of a desire to go back to her old life. That was why she got up at five in the morning to do it—so she could avoid his inevitable misinterpretation, and the weeklong sulk it would bring on.

      Ellie was staring. What are you doing here?

      She didn’t have an excuse ready. She had never needed one before. In the old days, she had never needed to answer anyone’s questions. She hadn’t had any family since she was twelve, and the Order had never asked questions as long as she got the job done. Which was why she had been able to get away with all those long dates with Julian in places like this, when she was supposed to be out hunting.

      And it was why, when she tried to answer Ellie, the best she could do was a

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