1. Peel apples. (You don’t have to do it in one strip, just keep all of your fingertips and I’ll be happy.)
2. Core and slice apples.
3. Place apples in slow cooker and top with brown sugar and spices. Stir the mixture until the sugar forms a glaze over the fruit.
4. Heat fruit on low for three hours. Stir occasionally. The fruit should puff up and reach what I call the “perfume” stage, where you lift the lid and the scent of the bubbly apple liquid hits you right in the face. (In a good way. It will smell better than any fancy candle you could ever buy.)
5. Once the fruit has hit the puffy, perfume stage, it’s ready to eat. If you like chunky apple sauce, eat it as is. My kids don’t like chunky, so I attack it with a potato masher until it’s relatively smooth.

This is really good by itself, but I like to serve it over vanilla ice cream!

Excerpt from NICE WEREWOLVES DON’T BITE VAMPIRES

A Half-Moon Hollow Novel

“Find a way to honor the trappings of your youth without clinging to them. This is especially true if you grew up in an era of the ruff collar or parachute pants.”

—A Gentleman in Any Era: An Ancient Vampire’s Guide to Modern Relationships

CHAPTER ONE

People who said libraries were a useless and outdated relic of the pre-Internet age had never spent time around the McClaine pack.

The Half-Moon Hollow Public Library might have been a dinosaur. But it was a silent dinosaur. A “keep-me-from-losing-from-my-freaking-mind-due-to-my-loud-ass-family-osaurus.”

Maybe calling it a “dinosaur” was unfair. The place certainly hadn’t seen new public funding in a few years. The most recent addition was the Jane Jameson-Nightengale Youth Reading Room, which was marked with a rather showy brass plaque very close to the head librarian’s office. But the computers in the lab were less than five years old. The gray industrial carpet was worn, but not shabby, the dust pilling ever so slightly around the edges of the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelving. And I did recognize some of the titles from the last few years’ bestseller lists, probably also donated by Jane Jameson-Nightengale. Her name seemed to be on a lot of plaques around the building, most of them within the direct eyeline of the head librarian’s office.

Something about that seemed to be a little vindictive. But having met Mrs. Stubblefield, the head librarian with the inexplicably aggressive eyebrows, that made sense.

Mrs. Stubblefield seemed to think the library was her kingdom to rule. She’d reminded me multiple times that the library didn’t allow “loitering” at the private study carrels—despite the fact that I had a laptop with me and was very clearly working. As a werewolf, I respected her need to protect her territory. As someone who depended on the library for a quiet workspace to earn their living, it was deeply annoying.