Urban Fantasy Investigations

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Guest Blog + Giveaway: Devil’s Playground by Helena Shaw

UFI welcomes Author Helena Shaw. Thanks for Joining us!!

“It’s finished!”

Those were words that I thought I’d scream with glee, but when the moment came, it was more of a whimper.

I’ve been working on the four book Night Hunters series for over just over a year, and with Devil’s Playground, the series has come to an end. I thought the moment I hit publish on the final book would be a time to celebrate, and while it was, I couldn’t help but notice the melancholy that filled me.

For a year, I was on an adventure right alongside with Dawn and Jase. While they traveled, fought monsters, and made love, I was right there with them and held their hands through every step. Finishing their story was letting go of those hands and seeing them off into the world.

It’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing. Being able to share four novels of the Night Hunters series with readers is the best feeling I’ve ever known. Hearing from people that they enjoyed the story as much as I do is a great feeling and is what keeps me sitting down at my keyboard each and every day.

And with every end comes new beginnings. With Night Hunters finished, I have time to focus on my new novel, a lion-shifter romance I’ve entitled Pride, which will be out in early autumn. Starting a new story is just about as scary as ending an old one, but with that fear comes the most intoxicating excitement. It’s different from anything I’ve put out so far, and yet I’ve already grown so close to the hero and heroine the upcoming book. There’s a lot more of me in Rori than there is in Dawn, and with that comes its own set of opportunities and challenges.

But the biggest thing I’ve learned in finishing the Night Hunters series is that just because you’ve said it’s the end doesn’t mean that has to be a hard and fast rule. Dawn and Jase hold a special place in my heart, and with that means that there will always be an opportunity to tell more of their story one day.

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Helena Shaw has been writing ever since she was a child. Always with a book in her hands, she started crafting her own stories at a young age. She has always loved the world of the paranormal and inspired by her favorite stories, she set out to create a world of her own.

Her first full length novel, Harvest Moon, was released in November, 2014 and she is currently hard at work on the sequel. She hopes to keep Dawn and Jase's story going for many years to come.

Helena Shaw resides in a small town in western Ontario. When she is not writing, she is taking care of her two boys and her husband.

Find Helena and her books

Website / Goodreads / Twitter / Facebook

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Devil's Playground
Night Hunters #4
Amazon

She finally thought she was free.

Dawn Garrett has been on the run from her past since the day she turned eighteen. A new name, a new life, and a new love have kept her safe from the one man who will stop at nothing to get her back.

Together with Jase Byrnes, Dawn has stood up against werewolves, witches, vampires, and so much more. She’s learned to be a hunter and with Jase by her side, she’s finally found the strength she’s been looking for.

But the man she’s spent so long running from is hot on her trail and Dawn is out of places to hide. She’ll need to stand and face him, but she’s trapped in his playground and he’s got more tricks up his sleeve than she ever thought possible.

Excerpt:

The snow showed no signs of slowing down as it whipped and whirled through Dawn’s hair. All her sweaters were gone, her makeshift scarf, her boots, everything.

And yet she wasn’t cold.

When she and Jase had gone out earlier, the snow had been so cold that it hurt, and it had been even worse when they got back to the hotel and her toes and fingers started to warm up again. The pain and itch had combined into pure agony and part of her wanted to bury them in the hotel’s ice bucket just to alleviate the pain, but in time it had begun to subside on its own.

Maybe I’m going numb, she wondered to herself as she marched through the snow. She’d read that was a sign of hypothermia. The body numbs itself to the cold and eventually you just go to sleep, but never wake up.

But she wasn’t tired. She was looking for something, and she couldn’t sleep until she found it.

She had no choice but to keep moving forward through the blowing wind. Each step was a struggle against the constant pressure of the gale, but she couldn’t stop.

It wasn’t until she reached the park that she realized that she was completely alone.

“Jase!” Dawn called. He’d been with her a moment ago, she could have sworn it, but now she was alone.

Entirely alone.

“Anyone?” Dawn screamed. No one was out in the freezing weather. The snow was too much, too wet and cold, and it just kept falling.

I have to find him, Dawn’s mind raced as she moved through the park. Panic surged through her and she kicked through the snow while it planted wet kisses with every flake that landed on her cheeks.

But the further she went, the less the snow behaved like normal. It changed, mutated, and when she looked up at the trees she saw they were no longer bowed and bent, but easily carrying the weight of their loads.

“No...” Dawn muttered as she spun. The wet snow turned to dry speckles of white ash and the wind was no longer cool on her face, but a hot blast of air.

The ash in the trees spread and grew, and without warning, it burst into red hot flames. Smoke filled the air and Dawn knew she had no choice but to run or risk getting swallowed by the fire.

It’s not real, she told herself as she ran. It can’t be real. It’s just a dream.

But it didn’t feel like a dream. The heat was real, the smoke in her lungs too. The hot blasts of air stung her eyes and everything was too clear.

Ahead, she saw what just might be her salvation. A subway entrance beckoned to her and she ran right for it.

Like the rest of the New York in her dream, she was alone when she got down the long flight of stone stairs. She’d hoped a train would be waiting, a train that would take her out of her dream and keep her safe, but she wouldn’t be so lucky.

As a teen, she’d loved the subway. The freedom it had given her that she hadn’t had in her small home in New Jersey. Without the need for a car, she could just get on the train and go anywhere she wanted to without a moment’s notice.

It would be her eighteenth birthday present to herself, or at least, that’s what she had decided. The moment she was legally an adult, she’d be gone and she’d keep running until he could never find her again.

Her plan had been to get some cash, get on the subway, and catch a train. With cash in hand, she’d be able to do it all easily enough. No one could trace the cash and she’d be out of the city before the sun rose.

It had all been worth it. The freedom she’d had on the road was better than the subway had ever offered her. It couldn’t even compare, and now she could only hope that this time, the train would actually lead her somewhere safe, rather than just looping around the city.

She knew she couldn’t stand there and wait for the train, not for long. Something was outside and it was coming for her. She couldn’t risk standing still and she needed to get moving or risk being caught.

With no train in sight, Dawn jumped down on the tracks. Even knowing it was a dream, she avoided the third rail and debated whether to go left or right.

Right, she decided. An old bit of trivia was what kept her from going left. Sinister, that was the old word for left, or at least that’s what she had heard. She couldn’t go the sinister way, it was just asking for trouble.

She hadn’t made it far when behind her she heard something. Even without turning around, she knew she was no longer alone. The soft sounds of scraping claws and heavy breath filled her ears and when she turned, all she saw were glowing yellow eyes.

Run, her mind screamed, and she did just that. There was no hesitation, no paralysis, only instinct as she began to run down the tunnel.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Promo + Guest Blog: Bookburners Serial + Margaret Dunlap

This September, new publisher Serial Box is bursting onto the scene and bringing the TV model of media production and delivery to the book world with Bookburners, an urban fantasy adventure following a black-ops anti-magic squad backed by the Vatican. Wandering from police procedural to New Weird and dabbling in most genres in between, Bookburners will keep you hungry for more, week after week.

Written by a team of authors including Margaret Dunlap (Eureka), Mur Lafferty (The Shambling Guide to New York City) and Brian Francis Slattery (Lost Everything), the group is led by rising genre star Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead and the Craft Sequence).

Bookburners

Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Abruptly thrust into the battle between nefarious forces trying to unleash this power onto the world and those trying to stop them, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them Bookburners. They don’t like the label.

Bookburners and all future Serial Box serials will be available on the site, in the app, and on iTunes, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, and B&N.

Chapter 1: Badge, Book, and Candle

NYPD Detective Sal Brooks is no rookie—but even the most hardened cop would think twice when they see their brother open a book and become…well…something entirely not their brother. When her attempts to solve the case cross paths with a mysterious team led by a priest, she starts to realize that the world is far more than what is seems, and, just maybe, magic is real—and hungry.

Thus begins the 16-part serial, Bookburners, presented by Serial Box. From a team of writers, this collaborative effort will unfold an epic urban fantasy narrative across an entire season in weekly installments.

Follow along as Sal learns the life changing lesson: some books have teeth.

The series officially launches on September 16th with the release of Episode 2, but the first episode is up for all to enjoy on SerialBox.com.

Excerpt:

Book, Badge, and Candle

Bookburners: Episode 1

By Max Gladstone, Brian Francis Slattery, Margaret Dunlap, and Mur Lafferty

Monitors illuminated the unmade bed, the bare bookshelves, the piled clothing. There should have been sunlight, but the Halloween-store spider hung outside Perry’s window blocked the sun.

And Perry himself sat in ripped jeans and bloodstained shirt, curled like a shrimp over his keyboard, unblinking eyes inches from his central monitor. Barefoot. Hair tousled. One-day growth of beard. Jaw muscles snaked, relaxed, snaked again as he rocked in his chair, typing.

“Perry!”

Except.

Detective Brooks, a lawyer might ask someday, how did you know the person sitting in the chair was not your brother?

And she’d open her mouth before the courtroom but no words would come out. An audience would stare at her. The judge would drum her fingers. The lawyer would lean forward. Any time, Detective Brooks.

The clothes were Perry’s, the body language ditto.

But still, when she said, “Perry?” the second time, her voice was uncertain.

He stopped typing, uncurled himself vertebra by vertebra from the keyboard, and turned to her. His eyes focused on the wall behind her. He smiled woodenly. “Sal. Sister. I’m sorry you had to come here.”

“Perry.” She’d imagined hugging him when she saw him again, imagined hitting him too. Neither seemed possible now. “Perry, you’re here.” As if saying that would make it true.

“I am. And you should go, Sal.” What a reasonable suggestion. “I have work to finish, if you don’t mind.”

She didn’t. But her not-minding was strange. Wasn’t it? “Perry, what happened last night?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I was pushed, you see. The Bookburners chased me, and I took help where I could find it. I’m perfectly fine. Better than I’ve been in a long, long while. You’re a . . . police officer,” he said, as if he’d just looked the fact up in a large and fine-print list. His words didn’t match the movements of his mouth. She focused through the fear—and why fear? He was her brother.

But maybe he wasn’t, right now.

His mouth was not moving in time with his words, because the words he spoke were not English, even though that was the language she heard. “It must feel like this when you solve a case. When the whole world makes sense at once. I’ve been working on a puzzle for a long time, and I just needed the right push.”

He reached for her.

There seemed to be a great deal of space between them all of a sudden, but his arm grew longer to bridge the gap. A finger of ice pressed against her skin above her heart, so cold it burned. As the hand approached it no longer looked like a hand at all, not like a hand of flesh. Torn corrugated tin twisted around paper and woven plastic bones, forming fingers. Black oil

dripped from ragged joints. The arm was a length of rebar wound with trashbags and shredded cloth. Bottleglass eyes reflected the monitors’ blue glow. Thin lips parted to reveal metal teeth, wet with more oil.

But some traitor impulse still insisted this was Perry, her brother, there was no reason to pull back from him, there was no reason to run, she should let this thing touch her, that the oil on its metal skin was not oil in fact but a whisper, a voice that might help her if it only got inside—

The cold fire against her chest was real. Her skin seared, froze, cracked. She followed the pain back to her body and retreated, unsteady, as if her legs belonged to someone else. She staggered out into the hall. The arm stretched toward her, impossibly long.

She slammed the door shut on the thing’s hand.

The Perry-thing didn’t seem to care. It kicked the door open. Mangled fingers clicked back into place. Its smile split as it widened. It didn’t need a face anymore. Just teeth.

Serial Box aims to bring book lovers everything they like about television:

- New episodes each week
- Series are produced by a team of writers collaborating to create the most exciting, dynamic stories
- Episodes are easily ingestible with a 40-minute average read-time
- Each episode is an exciting adventure but together they build into a complete narrative—just like your favorite shows

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UFI welcomes Margaret Dunlap. Thanks for Joining us!!

There are many reasons why I'm glad that what I write is fiction. Especially when I'm working on a serial like Bookburners about a group of top-secret operatives working for a black-budget department of the Vatican who try to prevent demons from using books (and other artifacts) as gateways to enter our world.

Looking at my shelves, there are many books that I am very glad definitely do not secretly harbor demons. Here are five examples:

The Riddlemaster Trilogy by Patricia A. McKillip

Small paperbacks, so they probably don't contain very large demons, but this is a trilogy and three against one aren't great odds. I think my best chance of survival would be to trick the demons into challenging each other to a riddle game to determine who gets to eat my eyes out first. Then, while they're busy with that, I can make a run for it. The problem with that strategy is that they might try to rope me into the game as well. I might know who Thanet Ross was and why he played a harp with no strings, but I'm under no illusions that would get me very far against three demons who have the knowledge of all the masters of Caithnard at their disposal.

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

Thanks to these books, I know what happens to hapless humans when magical creatures decide to take an interest in their affairs. Next thing you know it's blood and roses everywhere and—if you're lucky—the Sea Witch wipes your memory and your only souvenir of the experience is a lifetime of unexplainable nightmares. I would not want anything from Toby's world coming through into mine. Unless it's a rose goblin. A rose goblin would be okay.

Goes to crack open the book to see if a little thorny cat will come out. No dice. Darn it.

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

If there were actually a demon living in a book about wizards who gain their power by taking fictional items out of books, I am pretty sure the universe would collapse under the weight of the meta-singularity. Which, on the bright side, would probably solve the demon problem. So, maybe not so bad? Well, except for the whole destruction of the universe thing. Probably better to steer clear, just in case.

Echoes by Joshua Hale Fialkov

This is a spectacular graphic novel about a man suffering from hereditary schizophrenia who learns that his father hasn't only gifted him with a brain disorder, he was also a serial killer. Or is that just his own paranoid delusions talking? This book is so creepy I don't like to read it after sunset. I certainly don't want to think of the tiny demon inside whispering sweet nothings to me as I sleep... Er, excuse me a moment. Gets up, moves book to living room.

Okay, where was I? Right, last but not least, the fifth book I own that I am grateful does not harbor demons is...

Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

A little off-topic for this blog, I know, but I've lived in the Los Angeles area for more than ten years now, and wrote my first produced episode of television in 2008. At this point, you would think that the dark arts of the entertainment industry would hold no fear for me. But all I can picture is an agent demon, oozing out of the memoirs of the great man who brought us The Princess Bride, and demanding his 10%...of everything.

How about you? Anything in your library that you suspect might be demon-infested? Comment below, or ping me on Twitter @spyscribe. Or you can find the Bookburners at www.serialbox.com

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Before joining the Bookburners, Margaret Dunlap wrote for Eureka (SyFy) as well as ABC Family’s cult-hit The Middleman. Most recently, she was a writer and co-executive producer of the Emmy-winning transmedia series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and co-created its sequel Welcome to Sanditon. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Shimmer Magazine. Margaret lives in Los Angeles where she taunts the rest of the team with local weather reports and waits for the earthquake that will finally turn Burbank into oceanfront property. She tweets as @spyscribe.

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Review: Dragons Will Fall by Susan Scott

Dragons Will Fall

Author: Susan Scott

Release Date: September 14, 2015

Publisher: Zannadu, LLC

Kingdom Come Book #1

ASIN: B014E2ESTS

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Review Copy Source: Author

An outcast magician with lousy control...

Kas is a half-light with the “gift” of invisibility and healing, but her sometimes deadly magic makes her distrusted by her own people. In an effort to prove her worth and save her people from execution, she infiltrates an enemy castle on a spy mission, but is kidnapped by a powerful intruder. When her only friend is taken hostage as well, Kas has no choice but to embrace her volatile magic and turn to her captor for help.

A dragon-shifter king with an island in revolt...

Cullen is the most powerful dragon of his generation, but strength and cunning won’t stop the mysterious scourge killing his kinsmen. After he steals Kas away to heal them, he’s incensed to find her magic is uncontrollable. Despite her unpredictable powers and non-existent fighting skills, he soon becomes convinced she holds the key to saving the dying dragon race. He’s willing to do anything to gain her cooperation. Even if it means breaking all taboos and seducing the crafty little magician.

With a kingdom of enemies after them both, Kas and Cullen must learn to trust each other before their kingdoms are rendered extinct.

I wasn't quite sure how much I would like DRAGONS WILL FALL during the first couple of pages, but the book picked up nicely and the characters quickly start grabbing your attention.

In DRAGONS WILL FALL we meet Kasima, a half-light. She and the other half-lights are in hiding from those that wish to harm them, but she is currently using her gift of invisibility to spy in the castle because someone has infiltrated their camp and is putting them in even more danger. I won't go much more into the plot of the book, but she ends up meeting Cullen in the castle and finds out that Cullen is looking for her, but she isn't willing to tell him that she is who he is looking for and she refuses to take him to the half-light camp like he demands. The Dragons are dying and he is desperate to find Kasima in hopes that she can heal them. We find out very early on that Kas also has the gift of healing, but she is scared of her power because it has killed in the past and she doesn't have control of it. She goes through quite a bit in DRAGONS WILL FALL to try and get her powers under control so she can help cure the dragons of the illness that is killing them.

I found Kas to be very determined, a bit stubborn and willing to do just about anything to get the job done. She has a really hard time trusting people, but is very loyal once she does. Cullen came off as very hard in the beginning, but we quickly get to know how much he cares for his people. Cullen and Kas's romantic relationship was slow going, but kinda exploded when they finally gave into each other. The other dragons definitely don't approve of their relationship and I really loved how Cullen could care less about what they thought.

I had fun learning about and exploring the new world that Ms. Scott created in her new Kingdom Come series. The whole story flowed well and the characters were all very likable (or extremely unlikable where required lol). I enjoyed the way that Kas and Cullen worked together to defeat the dragon's foe and although I am a bit hesitant, because she seems a bit shady at the moment, I am excited to see what happens with Muriel in her book, which I am thinking will be next.

I gave it 4/5 stars

* This book was provided free of charge from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Guest Blog + Giveaway: Twin Flames by Cassandra L Shaw

UFI welcomes Author Cassandra L Shaw. Thanks for Joining us!!

Do aliens live on Earth? And I don’t mean people who you think look or act like aliens, I mean sentient species from other planets and or galaxies or maybe dimensions. Personally I haven’t met any or if I have they haven’t said, hi my name is X and I’m an alien from the planet 8 giving me a heads up.

I met a lady last year who told me she’d not only seen and met both aliens and vampires, she’d communicated with them—here on Earth. She’d seen them in the dimension between the one we reside in and in ours. That they co-existed on Earth in our time merely eking out their life in a different space but they could cross over as the dead can. She might have taken hallucinogens for this experience but she admitted nothing.

I met her at a cheese making workshop, a pretty good way of meeting diverse people that’s for sure, but then I love diverse and the weird. The woman is well-travelled, highly educated, and a humanitarian who runs a non-profit business helping communities who live in socio-economically challenged areas to understand, prepare and eat a balanced nutritious diet by making the most of what is available in each locale. So, a truly decent human.

With a completely straight face and without an ounce of laughter in her voice, she told me vampires cross over that dimensional threshold to suck our life force. Not blood, but our energy. So basically we are batteries and they are flashlights forever needing a recharge. And I thought life was draining enough or maybe my life force is tasty and they keep visiting.

Aliens eat different sources of sustenance but mostly things we would recognise as food.

Since I’ve not seen or met anyone or thing I would consider an alien or vampire I’ll keep my opinion of their existence in the, I’ll wait to till I see it, side of belief.

In Twin Flames I didn’t write about a race of people I’d met but imagined there are aliens that live on Earth and arrived here 500 years ago. They are worldwide, have a large population, and have in the past and continue to have their haters. Though they are a sub-species of human, eons ago they crossbred with a creature that wasn’t fully human. There was just enough to make them the offspring a genetically viable (able to bred) sub-species and so as time moved on the Eli and Crea evolved.

I love imaging not just another race but their world and how they would interact with ours and I wonder how would an alien race survive, thrive, and co-exist with ours in reality.

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Cassandra L Shaw writes Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Romantic Suspense, & Contemporary Romance. She lives in a small farm on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Her eclectic past includes fashion design, environmental science and years of drudgery as an office worker where she dreamed of NOT being an office worker. She discovered writing a few years ago and has decided that with its mix of art, writing craft, and study she’s at last found the career that suits her arty and academic mind.

Find Cassandra and her books

Website / Goodreads / Twitter / Facebook

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Twin Flames
Katoom #1
Amazon US Amazon UK iBooks
Smashwords Barnes and Noble Kobo

She’s in grave danger, but she doesn’t want his protection…

After a long and bitter world-war for pure human supremacy, humans and two sub-species the Eli and Crea reside on Earth in an uneasy harmony. One morning on a jog, Bliss Jacobs finds a murdered fellow Eli. She scents the killer on the body, but other evidence is washed away by a savage storm, leaving Bliss as the sole witness and the target of an assassin—and forcing her back into the world of the man who shattered her heart.

He believes she is his destined mate, but he knows there are no second chances…

Kaid Sinclair is chasing more than his best friend’s murderer. He wants Bliss in his bed and in his life, but after their relationship went south several years ago, he knows he has to tread carefully. So how can he keep her safe, while still proving to her that they are destined to be mates, and he doesn’t just want to control her? All he wants is for her to be safe—but with a killer who sees her as Kaid bait, Kaid may have to choose…his life or hers?

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

Train Tracks

The assassin grunted, dropped the body, and then watched it roll and sprawl on its back. Empty eyes stared at the dark and cold Montana spring night sky. The assassin laughed.

He’d killed him.

He scratched at the chemical reactive burning inside his robotic chest. Hissed at the scald of the toxins pulsing in his neck and right arm veins. Silver and the metals that only resided in Eli—a race of humans who, along with the Crea, had taken refuge on Earth five hundred years ago when their own planet Ecreal died—merged with the contaminants in his body with caustic results.

At his veins, the silver he should see as a fine bright line, pulsed dull bronze—aged, corroded, diseased. The toxins tasted of rusted steel and burned his mucus membranes.

He kicked the body. “Fucker.”

Retribution was sweet, even if it had taken him fourteen years. He’d removed the male’s clothes so the trains and wildlife could more easily eliminate his father’s killer. No remains, no ritual burial. Sinclair deserved no such honor.

Here the body would be hacked into easy to eat pieces for the animals to feast on and, since nobody ever came near these tracks, Sinclair’s remains would never be found.

Bliss skidded to a halt on the clearing’s spring grass, tipped her face to the sky, and gulped air. Clouds, in an oppressive charcoal blanket, smothered most of dawn’s light. She grimaced. Ah damn, a storm. No wonder it’d been so gloomy in the forest. Time to cut her run short and take the train tracks home.

To add speed, Bliss edged out her Eli genetics. Many times the speed of an Earth human, she dashed through a wind whipped meadow. At the train embankment, she lunged up the steep gravel siding to the top then adjusted her stride so each step fell on a recycled cement and plastic cemeplas sleeper. A flash of blue light, a clash of thunder’s deepest bass exploded, vibrating the surrounding air. Eek, come on legs, go faster. She rounded Death Bend. What the hey?

Bliss stumbled over the dismembered body of a dead man. A scream ripping free, she spun and fell to her knees. Eli metal thundered in her veins, silver bloomed on her skin and swirled in her eyes.

Gene—oh my fates, Gene cut into slices as if laid out in macabre banquet portions.

At three hundred miles an hour, freight trains with six carbide wheels per axle tore along this trio of tracks. Crusted blood and the starkness of bones exposed by the severing suggested multiple trains travelling on differing tracks had sliced through his corpse in gruesome precision.

Bile seared the back of her throat as her metals formed a light exoskeleton over her human skin. Bliss flung herself sideways and vomited down the embankment.

She forced down her remaining stomach contents, calmed her Eli, and did what she didn’t want to do—turned back.

A neon blue flash highlighted the gore. She jumped as the clap of thunder thickened into a rue of pine and ions. With their blood ten percent liquid metal, lightening liked to strike Eli and Crea dumb enough to remain exposed. Being fried wasn’t high on her list of ways to die. She had to get home, out of the storm, and phone the sheriff.

She looked at Gene’s body. God, this was…dang—she couldn’t think of a word bad enough. Death Bend was so sharp, animals didn’t always have time to jump to safety. But an Eli with his enhanced senses—it made no sense.

Near the decapitated head she noted a sweet scent. Great now she’d have to see what that scent was. Feeling as if someone had wedged a shoe in her throat, she peeled her lips back, braced herself for what she was about to do to, leaned forward, and sniffed near the decapitated head.

Bourbon fumes wrinkled her nose. She turned into the cold wind to cleanse her nostrils of booze and death. Crap cakes. Had he come for a run, fallen, and been too drunk to get up? Fallen and knocked himself out then the train came? Drunk or not, why was he out here? His lodge on Eli Clan reserve was on the other side of Katoom, an easy twenty miles from this bend.

She blinked back more tears. “What happened?”

Yeah, she didn’t expect an answer.

She went to close the dead eyes, so unlike the laughing ones she remembered, and stopped an inch from contact. Oops, she better not contaminate him with her scent. Peter, the sheriff, would give birth to a bear if she touched the body before he’d processed the scene and gone through all the correct procedures.

Katoom’s small population was a mix of Earth humans and the alien Eli and Crea. This Subspecies cohabitation was rare. Even in large cities, the species tended to live in separate suburbs but, usually, the Eli and Crea preferred to live on large tracts of land.

All regions of coexistence were constantly scrutinized by the ever vigilant feds, the sensation hungry media, and the alien haters who wanted the return to old world wars and Subspecies genocide. They prayed for infractions and spied on all alien clans.

To keep focus on Katoom minimal, Peter crossed his T’s with precision to all laws. She hadn’t taken her personal link on her run so she had to wait till she was home to contact him.

She ran her palms along her cooling thighs and stared at the body. She went to stand to head home. Hang on. She half crouched and peered closer at Gene’s neck. Two inches above where his head had been severed from the rest of him, a jagged cut gaped and a large portion of flesh hung, joined to the whole by a thread of pale bloodless skin. She glanced at the other body pieces, and her chest ratcheted from tense to tenser.

The torso slices had been cut with almost laser precision. No torn flesh. No ragged edges. No chunks cleaved from the whole.

But the throat had been hacked and didn’t come near to separating that section of neck in two.

She gusted out a horrified gasp and dry heaved, flung her hand to her mouth and kept it there. She would not vomit on Gene. She peered closer and saw a windpipe and carotid artery. She flicked her gaze to the gravel to calm herself. That was odd. Gene was big, six-feet-seven tall, and two-eighty pounds of muscle. Yet, she couldn’t see much blood and barely any metal dust. Not much blood at all. Even little rabbits bled more than these few trickles.

Where the hell could all his blood have gone?

She rocked back onto her heels. A squall whipped her hip length hair around her body. Heart ricocheting around her chest like a well hit racquetball, she shot to her feet.

Shit, shit, shit. Gene hadn’t died here.

She swallowed hard and surveyed the surrounding tree line, flinched when a dark shadow moved, when the light shifted with the clouds.

Someone sliced his throat, bled him out, then moved and dumped his body.

Her metal rose so high, she tasted its metallic sourness on her tongue. She had to scent the murderer, to know who did this. She dropped to her knees again. Head close to the ragged wound, she inhaled deeply. From deep within Gene’s massacred throat, the faintest waft of a foreign scent bit at the back of her throat.

The killer? Of course, it’s the killer, stupid. What other scent would be inside Gene’s flesh? But why was it so weak? It hadn’t rained to wash it away. She shook her head, took another draw of air, rolled the aromatic molecules of the alien scent over her tongue and scent receptors, and sifted through the data of stored scents in her brain.

Please don’t be someone I know, please. No buzzing and no internal recognition. No one she knew, thank the gods. But now she’d be able to identify the scent’s owner if they came near. Forensics would use a scent collector to gather the killer’s scent then load it into the national database and seek a match.

She turned, ran for home, and prayed a killer didn’t watch or know she’d scented him.

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