Summary:
Psycop #3
Thanksgiving can't end too soon for Victor Bayne, who's finding Jacob's family hard to swallow. Luckily, he's called back to work to track down a high-profile missing person.
Meanwhile, Jacob tries to find a home they can move into that's not infested1with either cockroaches, or ghosts. As if the house-hunting isn't stressful enough, Vic's new partner Bob Zigler doesn't seem to think he can do anything right. A deceased junkie with a bone to pick leads Vic and Zig on a wild chase that ends in a basement full of horrors.
Meanwhile, Jacob tries to find a home they can move into that's not infested1with either cockroaches, or ghosts. As if the house-hunting isn't stressful enough, Vic's new partner Bob Zigler doesn't seem to think he can do anything right. A deceased junkie with a bone to pick leads Vic and Zig on a wild chase that ends in a basement full of horrors.
Original Audiobook Review October 2020:
I don't think I can add anything to my original review. Once again, the blending of mystery, humor, paranormal, heat, creepy, romance . . . well it's just absolutely brilliant! Vic and Jacob just keep getting better and better. As for Gomez Pugh's narration? That too keeps getting better and more fitting with each adventure.
Original ebook Review March 2020:
Another new partner for Victor Bayne and let's hope this one is a keeper. I think this one is even creepier than the previous entries. Where the case leads Vic and Zig(his new partner Bob Zigler) is so not what I was expecting but HOLY HANNAH BATMAN! I couldn't put Body & Soul down. That's it, that's all you're getting from me about the mystery side of PsyCop #3.
As for Vic and Jacob? Who knew there was so much to think about when it came to househunting when you see dead people? Another element of ghost & spirit stories that I've never thought about before, and Jordan Castillo Price's world building and character development is pretty amazing when it comes to Vic's "talent". Jacob is still incredibly supportive especially about finding properties that didn't have any kind of history that could lead to spirit roommates. The scene where he rips into their estate agent over just such a thing, well if I didn't already believe in his love for Vic and his passion for standing up for his love than that scene cemented it for me.
I don't think I'll say much more because I'm off to start book 4, Secrets. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those series that if the author chooses to write only a 5 sentence coda or 100 full length novels, I'll be first in line(once I get caught up) to gobble it up. Victor Bayne, Jacob Marks, and the whole PsyCop universe is incredible storytelling at it's finest that leaves me smiling, cringing, laughing, "awwing", and a dozen other emotions on the feelings spectrum. A definite keeper from start to finish.
RATING:
As for Vic and Jacob? Who knew there was so much to think about when it came to househunting when you see dead people? Another element of ghost & spirit stories that I've never thought about before, and Jordan Castillo Price's world building and character development is pretty amazing when it comes to Vic's "talent". Jacob is still incredibly supportive especially about finding properties that didn't have any kind of history that could lead to spirit roommates. The scene where he rips into their estate agent over just such a thing, well if I didn't already believe in his love for Vic and his passion for standing up for his love than that scene cemented it for me.
I don't think I'll say much more because I'm off to start book 4, Secrets. I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those series that if the author chooses to write only a 5 sentence coda or 100 full length novels, I'll be first in line(once I get caught up) to gobble it up. Victor Bayne, Jacob Marks, and the whole PsyCop universe is incredible storytelling at it's finest that leaves me smiling, cringing, laughing, "awwing", and a dozen other emotions on the feelings spectrum. A definite keeper from start to finish.
Summary:
Demon Magic #1
Smart men never dabble with demons. I never claimed to be smart, but at least I’m powerful enough to control them. When I bound Havoc to me nearly three hundred years ago, I never realized how difficult he’d make my life, although “accidentally” lighting him on fire every now and then does bring a smile to my face.
Havoc is handsome, mysterious, and somehow my closest companion, even if we don’t always get along. He’s more interested in bedding attractive women than protecting my life, which defeats the main reason a mage like me would have a demon. I even had to fight off swordsmen alone once because he was too busy betting on who’d survive.
When fifteen people are found dead with messages from a long-extinct cult, Havoc and I are forced to face our past and sort through our differences. We start to realize that there’s something more to this relationship, something that has kept us by each other’s sides for so long. Maybe it took three hundred years to finally understand my feelings for Havoc and realize that I can’t imagine being with anyone but him. Havoc and I will do everything we can to stop the evil that is threatening the lives of the people I care about. Or destroy everything—we haven’t quite figured that out yet.
Happy Endings is a 73k word novel that has an immensely powerful mage, a shapeshifting demon with a strong libido, a dark mage that just won’t stay dead, a spray bottle put to unusual uses, armor that is most definitely not made of dragon skin, blackmail involving an unfortunate slow-mo video, a detective being pursued by a determined minotaur, unprofessional use of illusions, and an epic walk into battle.
*Revised and edited.
Summary:
Terrible things are happening in the tiny town of Spangle, California. Creatures never before seen explode from the shadows. Hunter becomes prey. Man becomes food.
After seeing his lover torn apart before his eyes, Terry Jones sets out with his little pug, Bruce, to escape the mayhem. Secluding himself in a mountain cabin, he lies low, expecting death at every moment. So lonely he almost welcomes it.
From the dreadful emptiness of this terrifying new world where every breath might be his last, a stranger appears. And beyond all imagining, love enters the picture yet again.
With someone at last to hold, Terry rediscovers his zest for life--and his fear of death.
Finally, with Jonas James at his side, he finds the courage to fight back.
Summary:
Royal Alphas #3
An alpha claim. A possible heir. A Selkie prince whose mistake might just be what the fates intended.
Zale, the third alpha-born son of King Solomon, is concerned. His youngest brother, Caol, has been spending time with an unbonded omega. Being a responsible alpha, Zale feels it’s his duty to warn the omega Finn before he and Caol get into trouble. Especially since Finn had only been brought to the colony by their father in case his oldest brother’s fated mate couldn’t conceive. However, when Zale goes to Finn’s quarters to have a word with him, he isn’t expecting to discover what he does: the omega in the throes of oestrus and begging for an alpha’s assistance.
Finn has nowhere else to go. Not only unwanted by his own family, his previous alpha perished in a tragic accident. So for the past two years, the omega has relied on the King of the North’s generosity, even if it means he may end up as a surrogate for one of the alpha-born princes. Or even worse, the king’s sixth mate. But when the Prince Zale comes upon him during his heat, Finn demands relief from the alpha. Although afterward, has to live with the guilt. Now, he might not only be carrying the prince’s son, he may have very well ruined Zale’s chance to find his true fated mate...
Note: A 58k-plus word m/m shifter mpreg story, this is the third book in the Royal Alpha series. Due to the “knotty” times in this book, it is recommended for mature readers only. While it can be read as a standalone, it’s recommended to read the series in order. And, like all of my books, it has an HEA.
Zale, the third alpha-born son of King Solomon, is concerned. His youngest brother, Caol, has been spending time with an unbonded omega. Being a responsible alpha, Zale feels it’s his duty to warn the omega Finn before he and Caol get into trouble. Especially since Finn had only been brought to the colony by their father in case his oldest brother’s fated mate couldn’t conceive. However, when Zale goes to Finn’s quarters to have a word with him, he isn’t expecting to discover what he does: the omega in the throes of oestrus and begging for an alpha’s assistance.
Finn has nowhere else to go. Not only unwanted by his own family, his previous alpha perished in a tragic accident. So for the past two years, the omega has relied on the King of the North’s generosity, even if it means he may end up as a surrogate for one of the alpha-born princes. Or even worse, the king’s sixth mate. But when the Prince Zale comes upon him during his heat, Finn demands relief from the alpha. Although afterward, has to live with the guilt. Now, he might not only be carrying the prince’s son, he may have very well ruined Zale’s chance to find his true fated mate...
Note: A 58k-plus word m/m shifter mpreg story, this is the third book in the Royal Alpha series. Due to the “knotty” times in this book, it is recommended for mature readers only. While it can be read as a standalone, it’s recommended to read the series in order. And, like all of my books, it has an HEA.
Summary:
Gay Fairytale #1
Cursed as an infant with a lack of physical and emotional gravity, Prince Efrosin can’t keep his feet on the ground or his head out of the clouds.
Laughing his way through life, he’s never been weighed down by love and lust.
Then one fateful day, his tenuous tie to the earth is severed and he blows away on the wind. He’s rescued by Dmitri, a handsome young woodsman who suffers from a mysterious curse of his own, and the two strangers are irresistibly drawn together. Experiencing sex and love for the first time, they dive into a delightfully sensual and passionate affair.
But the evil witch who cursed them is planning her ultimate revenge. Efrosin and Dmitri must fight to find their fairy tale ending and live happily ever after.
This is a retold fairy tale with an erotic twist. Previously published as Earthly Desires.
Inspired by the Scottish tale The Light Princess.
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Random Paranormal Tales of 2020
Body and Soul by Jordan Castillo Price
"Uncle Jacob? Did you get to shoot anybody since last summer?"
Jacob’s nephew, Clayton, asked this with the eagerness and joy of a kid who’d just learned that school was cancelled. Clayton was in fifth grade. I have no idea how old that would make him.
"You shot someone last summer?" I muttered, smoothing my napkin on my lap to the point where I probably looked like I was playing with myself. Not exactly the impression I’d wanted to make on Jacob’s family on our first Thanksgiving together.
The muttering? Not usually my style, but I was feeling uncharacteristically mouthy. It seemed like the moment I had a thought, it made its way through my vocal cords and out my mouth before I had a chance to pat it down and make sure it wasn’t going to jab anyone. I’d been this way since I’d stopped taking Auracel and Seconal over a month ago. Here I thought I’d been mellowing all these years, when really, it had just been the drugs.
"No," Jacob answered patiently. "I try to avoid shooting people." And then he looked at me. "Carolyn and I walked in on an armed robbery in progress at the convenience store on California and Irving. It was a clean shot to the leg."
Departmental policy allows us cops to decide whether to go for a lethal or a non-lethal shot when a criminal’s got an unarmed civilian at gunpoint. If Jacob had shot someone’s leg, I had no doubt it was exactly where he’d been aiming. Jacob is a Stiff, the non-psychic half of a PsyCop team, and not only are Stiffs impossible to influence by sixth-sensory means and impervious to possession, but they’re usually crack shots. The Stiffs who I know, anyway.
I’m the other half of a PsyCop team, the Psych half. Not Jacob’s team; Carolyn Brinkman was Jacob’s better half, on the job at least. I didn’t currently have a Stiff of my very own. Maurice, my first partner, retired, although I still lean on him way too much. Lisa, my second partner, was kicked off the force when they discovered that she was as psychic as Jean Dixon. She’s off being trained for the psy end of the whole PsyCop business now, out in California. Technically she's just a phone call away, and yet sometimes it feels like she’s on an entirely different planet. Even when she gets back, I won’t get to partner with her, since they only pair up Psychs with Stiffs.
And then there was my third partner, Roger. The bastard kidnapped me for some under-the-table drug testing, and I’d been so gullible I’d practically given him a key to my apartment. Roger was rotting in a jail cell, last I’d heard. The whole affair was pretty hush-hush. Maybe I could’ve gleaned a few more details, if I was the type to obsess about the little things, like where one’s arch-enemy is incarcerated, and whether or not he’s shown up for roll call recently. But, frankly, I’ve never found details very comforting. I think about them, and I just get overwhelmed. Roger went bye-bye, and I came out of our encounter intact. That’s all I really need to know.
Six weeks later and I was still on medical leave. I felt fine, probably due to the amount of actual blood cells coursing through my system in lieu of the drug cocktail I was accustomed to.
"Did you ever shoot anyone?" Clayton asked me, eyes sparkling.
"Sure."
"Wow. Did you kill ‘em?"
Clayton had Jacob’s phenomenal dark eyes. Or Jacob’s younger sister Barbara’s eyes. Which were Jacob’s father’s eyes, as well as the eyes of the wizened old lady at the head of the table who was about a hundred and five. She’d been giving me a look that could probably kill an elephant ever since we’d gotten there and Jacob had introduced me as his boyfriend.
I think he’d primed his family over the phone. But still. He had to go and say it out loud and rub it in. Because that’s the way Jacob is. Not that he’d be bringing a man home for Thanksgiving for any other reason. But that’s beside the point.
"Clayton Joseph," snapped Barbara. She might have had Jacob’s eyes, but she certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his cool composure. "That is not an appropriate question for the dinner table."
Grandma Marks glowered at me from the head of the table, her dark eyes, half-hidden in folds of wrinkled skin, threatening to pierce me right through. I’d figured she hated me because I was doing the nasty with her grandson. Maybe she had a thing against psychics. Hell, maybe both. I’m usually just lucky that way.
"Bob Martinez retired down at the mill," Jacob’s father, Jerry, announced in a blatant attempt to change the subject. If we’d been in Chicago, where I grew up, Jerry would have been talking about a steel mill. But we were in Wisconsin, an alien land of rolling hills and cows with signs advertising something called "fresh cheese curds" every few miles. I gathered that the mills made paper in this alien, wholesome land where Jacob had been born and bred.
"And when are you going to think about retiring, dad?" Barbara asked. She had a trace of an accent that sounded Minnesotan to my untrained ear. I wondered if Jacob had ever had that same funny lilt. Probably once, but it’d been erased by him living over half his life in Chicago.
"Your father’s got another ten years in him, at least," said Jacob’s mom, Shirley. Shirley wore her hair in a white, poofy halo. I suspected she’d been a blonde in her younger days. "What’s he going to do around here but get in my way?"
"Your mother plays Euchre on Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Jerry, as if his retirement hinged around a card game.
"You have hobbies," said Barbara. "You could fix up your woodshop and actually finish a few things."
"Ah, I’d rather earn an honest wage than stay home and make birdhouses."
"And you could teach Clayton all about woodworking."
"He’s too young," said Jerry. "He’d cut his finger off."
"Wood is stupid," Clayton added.
I wondered if calling wood stupid was heresy in this land of trees and paper. But Grandma didn’t fall out of her chair clutching her heart, so I figured that kids were allowed to say the first thing that popped into their minds these days. Or maybe they always had been. I must have been on my third foster home by the time I was Clayton’s age. I was probably in fourth grade, held back for being thick, stubborn, and socially retarded. But that would’ve put me at just about the age where I’d learned that my opinion was neither desired nor appreciated.
Jingle bells announced the opening of the front door -- that and a massive blast of arctic air, complete with a whorl of snowflakes.
"Uncle Leon!" Clayton leapt up from the table and thundered toward the door.
I looked at the empty place setting across from me and heaved an inward sigh of relief. I’d been hoping that an actual person would fill it, that it wasn’t left open as a tribute to Grandpa Marks, or some other long lost family member.
Leon rounded the corner of the dining room and Shirley stood up to greet him. I glanced around at the rest of the table to see if I was supposed to stand up, too. But Jacob and Jerry were still sitting. Jerry was even packing away mashed potatoes like he was trying to beat everyone else to the punch.
Uncle Leon was in his mid to late sixties and had the same white hair and rounded snub nose as Jacob’s mom. Shirley kissed him on the cheek and unbuttoned his thick corduroy jacket. "Jacob brought his friend with him," she said, gesturing toward me. "This is Victor."
She peeled Leon’s coat off him and whisked away with it just as Leon turned to shake my hand. He led with his left hand, which confused me. His bare right arm flapped at his side, with his right sleeve rolled up to his shoulder.
I shook his left hand in a daze.
Leon nodded his head toward his right shoulder. "Lost it at the mill in seventy-eight. Damn thing still hurts."
I blinked. Leon’s right sleeve wasn’t rolled up. It was pinned to the shoulder of his shirt. He didn’t have a right arm -- not one made out of real flesh and blood, anyway. And I could still see his missing arm. The party’d finally gotten started. Hooray.
"Oh," I said. "That sucks."
"Shirley tells me you’re a PsyCop."
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That’s some kind of program they got going on down there," he said. His ghost arm joined his corporeal arm in pulling out the chair across from mine. "What kind of talent you got?"
I sank back into my seat and swallowed a mouthful of dryish turkey meat I’d been talking around for the last several minutes. "Medium."
"No shit?"
Grandma frowned harder, but Leon didn’t seem to notice. "Can I get you anything to drink?" Shirley asked me, but I mumbled that I was okay.
"That girl Jacob works with, she’s a telepath, isn’t she? Wow, a medium. How ‘bout that?" Leon’s ghost hand caressed the silverware as he spoke. I wondered if I looked like a freak for staring at his salad fork while he talked to me. "So how strong are they, your impressions?"
I drained my glass of soda to wash down the turkey and wished I’d taken Shirley up on her offer of a refill. "Pretty strong."
"What, do you hear ‘em talking to you? In their own words?"
"Uh huh."
"Holy cow, now that’s what you call a psychic. We got ourselves a Marie Saint Savon right here at the table."
Good old Marie had died right around the time I’d been shoehorned into the police academy. She’d been the world’s most powerful medium, and no one could touch her talent. Not that I could figure why anyone would want to. I was surprised that Leon actually knew her name. Maybe it was a generational thing. She’d been big news maybe fifteen years ago, and then was quickly forgotten by almost everyone but the psychic community.
"That’s got to make your police work a little easier," said Leon. "Huh?"
I nodded and swallowed some mashed potatoes. They were salty enough to stimulate my flagging salivary glands. A little.
"Only if you work homicide," Jerry piped in. The whole family had been skirting around my psychic ability, but since Leon had started the ball rolling and I didn’t seem too tender about the topic, it’d become fair game.
"I do."
"Holy shit. I didn’t know they used mediums in homicide."
Grandma glared at Leon.
"You mean medium, like a psychic medium?" Clayton asked.
"Uh huh."
"Wow, you see dead people?"
"That’s just in the movies," Barbara said. "Like the telekinetics who can shoot bullets with their minds." Metal was incredibly resistant to telekinesis, but I’d trained with one guy who could fling a mean stone. He got these splitting headaches afterward, though, so he was never one to show off with party tricks.
"I can see them," I said.
The table went quiet. "Whoa," said Clayton. "Like, right now?"
I avoided looking at the spot where Leon’s arm was flopping around on the table. "There aren’t any spirits here for Victor to see," Jacob explained. We knew that to be the case because we’d called Lisa Gutierrez in Santa Barbara and asked her if there were any ghosts in Jerry and Shirley’s house, and she’d said no. Lisa’s precognitive, and if she says no, the answer is unequivocally no.
I guess she couldn’t have known about Leon’s arm. Not without us asking specifically.
"And when you see ‘em," Clayton went on, "are they all scary and gross?"
"Sometimes."
Everyone at the table seemed to lean forward just a little. Even Jacob.
"Can you see right through them?"
"Sometimes. Or sometimes they look like regular people."
Leon’s facial expression was open and eager, but his phantom limb was clenching and unclenching its fist, and bright red droplets had appeared all over it as if it was sweating blood. I buried my face in my glass, tilting a final droplet of soda onto my tongue.
"Can you touch ‘em?" Clayton asked, his voice dropping down into a reverential whisper.
I swallowed around a hunk of turkey that’d lodged in my esophagus. Jacob slid his glass over to me, and I took it and drank it down. He’d been drinking milk. I just barely kept myself from gagging.
"You don’t want to touch ghosts," I said.
The house around us, the very air, went quiet. Everyone strained forward to catch whatever crumbs of information I might care to scatter. Because we’re a nation that grew up on Lovecraft and Sleepy Hollow and Friday the Thirteenth, and people are dying to know if all that shit’s really real.
"They’re creepy," I added. And I swallowed some more milk.
"Why don’t you tell Uncle Jacob and Uncle Leon about the report you did on salamanders?" Barbara suggested to Clayton.
"Creepy how?" Clayton asked.
"Clayton got an A minus," said Barbara.
"Creepy how?"
"I don’t know," I said. I’d started spreading my food around my plate, mixing my corn and my potatoes, ruining both. "The way they look in scary movies? Pretty much like that."
"How can you say that?" Barbara demanded, suddenly so vehement that I wondered how I’d ever pegged her as a sheepish single mom in her pale yellow cardigan and perfectly creased khaki pants. "When people die, they go to heaven."
Oh. Christian. Or had Jacob said Catholic -- or was that the same difference? I didn’t remember, must not have been paying close enough attention when Jacob had tried to prepare me.
"Barbara," said Jerry. Her father didn’t have a follow up ready. Just her name, sounding like a warning.
"If he says he sees spirits, then he does," Leon said, hopping to my defense despite the fact that he made me squirm in my seat. Or, more accurately, his right arm did. "They have tests." He looked to me for affirmation. "Don’t they have tests?"
"All kinds of tests," I said, burying the last of my corn.
"And being able to see them, you’re what, a level three? Four?"
"Five," I said. Level five was a couple of steps down from good old Marie. But Marie was only a step lower than God. Or maybe Satan.
The table went quiet again.
"Are you a millionaire?" asked Clayton.
"It is not polite to ask people how much money they make," said Barbara. She was the same age as me, thirty-eight. She had Jacob’s flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, but she looked just as worn out as I always felt. Even more so, now that we were attempting civil dinner conversation.
"It’s okay," I said. "No, I’m not a millionaire. I make more money than a regular detective, but not as much as my supervisor."
"And you spend as much money as someone who’s lived through the Great Depression," Jacob added, sotto voice.
Clayton scrunched his face up. I saw mashed potatoes lurking behind his teeth. "You should find Al Capone and make him tell you where his vault is."
Jerry and Leon laughed, but the way they kept their eyes trained on me, I could tell they were hoping that maybe I’d think that dredging up Al Capone was a grand idea. And I just so happened to need a couple of assistants over the age of sixty-five.
"He’s probably not around," I said. "He’d be a little old by now."
Everyone chuckled, except for Barbara, who evidently thought I was a devil-worshipper. And Grandma, who was possibly giving me the evil eye. And Clayton, who couldn’t make sense out of my lack of financial savvy.
Leon smacked the table with his left hand as he laughed. His spectral right hand followed suit, only it pummeled the table with much greater force than its counterpart. Spectral blood flew, spattering the white tablecloth covered in cross-stitched cornucopia, doe-eyed pilgrims, and smiling Indians.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a protective white bubble around Leon’s arm.
"Are you warm, honey?" asked Shirley. "You want me to open a window?"
I was about to tell her not to bother, when I realized that I felt the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. "Yeah, okay," I said, as I shrugged out of my flannel shirt and let it bunch on the seat of my chair. I was glad I’d taken the time to find a T-shirt without any holes or stains on it.
I took a deep breath and looked at Leon’s ghost hand. It quivered like it was hooked up to an electrical wire. Like that frog in the biology class whose legs kick when you give it a shock. No, I hadn’t been absent that day. And yeah, I’d puked. Me and Janet Neiderman.
"I’ll be right back," I said, knocking my chair into Jacob’s as I scrambled to make my way toward the upstairs bathroom. There was a half-bath on the first floor, but I figured that everyone at the dinner table really didn’t need to hear me retching if I couldn’t bring my gag reflex under control.
Why did I have to go and think of that goddamn frog?
I dodged past Jacob’s old bedroom--now Shirley’s very own sewing room--and nearly skateboarded down the upstairs hallway on a pink and blue rag rug. Darting into the bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. It had a hook and eye lock on it, which might keep Grandma out, or maybe Clayton, if he didn’t lean on the door too hard.
I breathed, and I looked around. It was a normal enough bathroom, more colorful than mine, with blue and yellow sunflowers on the shower curtain that kind of matched a border going around the top of the painted walls, but not quite. I pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding a nice bottle of cold medicine, or maybe some valium. Neither one would make Leon’s nasty ghost arm go away completely, but they’d sure make me care about it a whole lot less.
The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob’s parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock. Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I’d missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I’d attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I’d just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn’t gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn’t a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center -- the institution that’d housed me from seventeen to twenty-three -- who’d shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn’t enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn’t going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone’s a stinky chemical, and I’d end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon’s damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn’t need to know I was huffing his mother’s nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it’d been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It’s...um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn’t so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I’d disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn’t been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I’d just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they’d get all red and I’d look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But...I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I’m trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it’s true. I don’t know how to have a family. And evidently, I can’t function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don’t. What’s going on?"
God damn. I’d started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren’t screwed on right. "I just wanted to...you know...be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that’s what we’re doing. If you need to leave, I’m trusting you to tell me so."
"I don’t want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon’s arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don’t want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I’d rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can’t say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon’s face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it’s got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible -- or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it...until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I’d conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we’d have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He’s got a special grin that’s all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he’ll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I’ve got to tell you: I’m relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You’re prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That’s creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I’d done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You’re gonna decide I’m too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob’s hot mouth grazing my skin.
"Stop it," I said. "I’m not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."
"So you want me to suck you off in my parents’ bathroom?"
Dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Jacob talks dirty so well, and I always love it. My cock stirred a little. The promise of the Auracel high made me sluggish, though, and I had enough self-control, even with a sexy hunk of manmeat going down on my thumb, to save it for later. "After dinner."
Jacob let go of my hand and pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. He pressed a kiss into my solar plexus. "Dessert," he said, breathing the word against my bare skin and pulling a long shiver up my spine. "I’m looking forward to it."
And here I’d been expecting pumpkin pie.
Jacob went downstairs first, promising to tell his family that I reacted to my medications sometimes. Which was technically true. He wasn’t saying that I’d had such a reaction at the table, after all. Jacob knows all about being technically truthful. His partner, Carolyn, is a telepathic lie detector.
All eyes landed on me as I tried to low-key it back to the table. Jacob refilled my glass with orange soda and his mother pulled my plate out of the microwave and set it back down in front of me. "Everything all right?" asked Jerry.
"It’s fine," I said. "I’m good."
"Nothing wrong with taking a pill when you need one. Y’know, I need to take pain pills for this arm," said Leon. "Crazy, isn’t it? Arm’s not even there, and it hurts."
"You never told me that," said Shirley.
"It’s true." Leon dug a capsule out of his pocket with his corporeal hand, while his ghostly hand twitched on the tablecloth. "Arm’s acting up today," he said. "I think I’ll take one right now."
"You don’t need to do that to make me feel better," I said.
The ghost arm waved a "pshaw" at me.
"Bob down the street lost a foot in Korea," said Jerry. "He still feels it, too."
"What about skeletons?" Clayton asked me. Do you see skeletons?"
"Skeletons are nothing supernatural," Barbara told him. "They’re inside everyone’s body. Everybody has one."
"But I seen this movie."
"Saw," Barbara corrected him.
"Or zombies," said Clayton, ignoring her. "Are zombies real?"
"No," I said. "When bodies die, they’re dead."
"But what about in the hospital, when they take that electrical shock thing with the paddles, and they yell, ‘Clear!’ and they shock you...." he jumped in his seat as if he’d been hit with a thousand volts. "And you were a flatline, and then your heart starts beating again?"
I thought about it. Not that I was worried about giving a fifth-grader a scientifically accurate answer; I was thinking about electricity, and how the most knowledgeable paranormal expert I knew said that ghosts were made of electrons. "I don’t know," I said. "Maybe those people aren’t all the way dead, and the machines aren’t accurate enough to tell."
"You should see how it works the next time you’re at a hospital," said Clayton. "Then you’d know."
"I don’t go to hospitals," I said.
"Never? What if someone shot you while you were being a cop? Then where would you go?"
"I have a special...um, doctor."
Everyone had craned to the edges of their seats again. You could hear a pin drop.
I sighed to myself and decided I might as well talk about it, since everyone seemed so eager to know. Even Grandma. "Actually, now I see this panel of two doctors and a psychiatrist, and they all have to be in the room at the same time to make sure that nobody’s doing anything they shouldn’t be doing...."
Jacob’s nephew, Clayton, asked this with the eagerness and joy of a kid who’d just learned that school was cancelled. Clayton was in fifth grade. I have no idea how old that would make him.
"You shot someone last summer?" I muttered, smoothing my napkin on my lap to the point where I probably looked like I was playing with myself. Not exactly the impression I’d wanted to make on Jacob’s family on our first Thanksgiving together.
The muttering? Not usually my style, but I was feeling uncharacteristically mouthy. It seemed like the moment I had a thought, it made its way through my vocal cords and out my mouth before I had a chance to pat it down and make sure it wasn’t going to jab anyone. I’d been this way since I’d stopped taking Auracel and Seconal over a month ago. Here I thought I’d been mellowing all these years, when really, it had just been the drugs.
"No," Jacob answered patiently. "I try to avoid shooting people." And then he looked at me. "Carolyn and I walked in on an armed robbery in progress at the convenience store on California and Irving. It was a clean shot to the leg."
Departmental policy allows us cops to decide whether to go for a lethal or a non-lethal shot when a criminal’s got an unarmed civilian at gunpoint. If Jacob had shot someone’s leg, I had no doubt it was exactly where he’d been aiming. Jacob is a Stiff, the non-psychic half of a PsyCop team, and not only are Stiffs impossible to influence by sixth-sensory means and impervious to possession, but they’re usually crack shots. The Stiffs who I know, anyway.
I’m the other half of a PsyCop team, the Psych half. Not Jacob’s team; Carolyn Brinkman was Jacob’s better half, on the job at least. I didn’t currently have a Stiff of my very own. Maurice, my first partner, retired, although I still lean on him way too much. Lisa, my second partner, was kicked off the force when they discovered that she was as psychic as Jean Dixon. She’s off being trained for the psy end of the whole PsyCop business now, out in California. Technically she's just a phone call away, and yet sometimes it feels like she’s on an entirely different planet. Even when she gets back, I won’t get to partner with her, since they only pair up Psychs with Stiffs.
And then there was my third partner, Roger. The bastard kidnapped me for some under-the-table drug testing, and I’d been so gullible I’d practically given him a key to my apartment. Roger was rotting in a jail cell, last I’d heard. The whole affair was pretty hush-hush. Maybe I could’ve gleaned a few more details, if I was the type to obsess about the little things, like where one’s arch-enemy is incarcerated, and whether or not he’s shown up for roll call recently. But, frankly, I’ve never found details very comforting. I think about them, and I just get overwhelmed. Roger went bye-bye, and I came out of our encounter intact. That’s all I really need to know.
Six weeks later and I was still on medical leave. I felt fine, probably due to the amount of actual blood cells coursing through my system in lieu of the drug cocktail I was accustomed to.
"Did you ever shoot anyone?" Clayton asked me, eyes sparkling.
"Sure."
"Wow. Did you kill ‘em?"
Clayton had Jacob’s phenomenal dark eyes. Or Jacob’s younger sister Barbara’s eyes. Which were Jacob’s father’s eyes, as well as the eyes of the wizened old lady at the head of the table who was about a hundred and five. She’d been giving me a look that could probably kill an elephant ever since we’d gotten there and Jacob had introduced me as his boyfriend.
I think he’d primed his family over the phone. But still. He had to go and say it out loud and rub it in. Because that’s the way Jacob is. Not that he’d be bringing a man home for Thanksgiving for any other reason. But that’s beside the point.
"Clayton Joseph," snapped Barbara. She might have had Jacob’s eyes, but she certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his cool composure. "That is not an appropriate question for the dinner table."
Grandma Marks glowered at me from the head of the table, her dark eyes, half-hidden in folds of wrinkled skin, threatening to pierce me right through. I’d figured she hated me because I was doing the nasty with her grandson. Maybe she had a thing against psychics. Hell, maybe both. I’m usually just lucky that way.
"Bob Martinez retired down at the mill," Jacob’s father, Jerry, announced in a blatant attempt to change the subject. If we’d been in Chicago, where I grew up, Jerry would have been talking about a steel mill. But we were in Wisconsin, an alien land of rolling hills and cows with signs advertising something called "fresh cheese curds" every few miles. I gathered that the mills made paper in this alien, wholesome land where Jacob had been born and bred.
"And when are you going to think about retiring, dad?" Barbara asked. She had a trace of an accent that sounded Minnesotan to my untrained ear. I wondered if Jacob had ever had that same funny lilt. Probably once, but it’d been erased by him living over half his life in Chicago.
"Your father’s got another ten years in him, at least," said Jacob’s mom, Shirley. Shirley wore her hair in a white, poofy halo. I suspected she’d been a blonde in her younger days. "What’s he going to do around here but get in my way?"
"Your mother plays Euchre on Tuesdays and Thursdays," said Jerry, as if his retirement hinged around a card game.
"You have hobbies," said Barbara. "You could fix up your woodshop and actually finish a few things."
"Ah, I’d rather earn an honest wage than stay home and make birdhouses."
"And you could teach Clayton all about woodworking."
"He’s too young," said Jerry. "He’d cut his finger off."
"Wood is stupid," Clayton added.
I wondered if calling wood stupid was heresy in this land of trees and paper. But Grandma didn’t fall out of her chair clutching her heart, so I figured that kids were allowed to say the first thing that popped into their minds these days. Or maybe they always had been. I must have been on my third foster home by the time I was Clayton’s age. I was probably in fourth grade, held back for being thick, stubborn, and socially retarded. But that would’ve put me at just about the age where I’d learned that my opinion was neither desired nor appreciated.
Jingle bells announced the opening of the front door -- that and a massive blast of arctic air, complete with a whorl of snowflakes.
"Uncle Leon!" Clayton leapt up from the table and thundered toward the door.
I looked at the empty place setting across from me and heaved an inward sigh of relief. I’d been hoping that an actual person would fill it, that it wasn’t left open as a tribute to Grandpa Marks, or some other long lost family member.
Leon rounded the corner of the dining room and Shirley stood up to greet him. I glanced around at the rest of the table to see if I was supposed to stand up, too. But Jacob and Jerry were still sitting. Jerry was even packing away mashed potatoes like he was trying to beat everyone else to the punch.
Uncle Leon was in his mid to late sixties and had the same white hair and rounded snub nose as Jacob’s mom. Shirley kissed him on the cheek and unbuttoned his thick corduroy jacket. "Jacob brought his friend with him," she said, gesturing toward me. "This is Victor."
She peeled Leon’s coat off him and whisked away with it just as Leon turned to shake my hand. He led with his left hand, which confused me. His bare right arm flapped at his side, with his right sleeve rolled up to his shoulder.
I shook his left hand in a daze.
Leon nodded his head toward his right shoulder. "Lost it at the mill in seventy-eight. Damn thing still hurts."
I blinked. Leon’s right sleeve wasn’t rolled up. It was pinned to the shoulder of his shirt. He didn’t have a right arm -- not one made out of real flesh and blood, anyway. And I could still see his missing arm. The party’d finally gotten started. Hooray.
"Oh," I said. "That sucks."
"Shirley tells me you’re a PsyCop."
I nodded. "Yeah."
"That’s some kind of program they got going on down there," he said. His ghost arm joined his corporeal arm in pulling out the chair across from mine. "What kind of talent you got?"
I sank back into my seat and swallowed a mouthful of dryish turkey meat I’d been talking around for the last several minutes. "Medium."
"No shit?"
Grandma frowned harder, but Leon didn’t seem to notice. "Can I get you anything to drink?" Shirley asked me, but I mumbled that I was okay.
"That girl Jacob works with, she’s a telepath, isn’t she? Wow, a medium. How ‘bout that?" Leon’s ghost hand caressed the silverware as he spoke. I wondered if I looked like a freak for staring at his salad fork while he talked to me. "So how strong are they, your impressions?"
I drained my glass of soda to wash down the turkey and wished I’d taken Shirley up on her offer of a refill. "Pretty strong."
"What, do you hear ‘em talking to you? In their own words?"
"Uh huh."
"Holy cow, now that’s what you call a psychic. We got ourselves a Marie Saint Savon right here at the table."
Good old Marie had died right around the time I’d been shoehorned into the police academy. She’d been the world’s most powerful medium, and no one could touch her talent. Not that I could figure why anyone would want to. I was surprised that Leon actually knew her name. Maybe it was a generational thing. She’d been big news maybe fifteen years ago, and then was quickly forgotten by almost everyone but the psychic community.
"That’s got to make your police work a little easier," said Leon. "Huh?"
I nodded and swallowed some mashed potatoes. They were salty enough to stimulate my flagging salivary glands. A little.
"Only if you work homicide," Jerry piped in. The whole family had been skirting around my psychic ability, but since Leon had started the ball rolling and I didn’t seem too tender about the topic, it’d become fair game.
"I do."
"Holy shit. I didn’t know they used mediums in homicide."
Grandma glared at Leon.
"You mean medium, like a psychic medium?" Clayton asked.
"Uh huh."
"Wow, you see dead people?"
"That’s just in the movies," Barbara said. "Like the telekinetics who can shoot bullets with their minds." Metal was incredibly resistant to telekinesis, but I’d trained with one guy who could fling a mean stone. He got these splitting headaches afterward, though, so he was never one to show off with party tricks.
"I can see them," I said.
The table went quiet. "Whoa," said Clayton. "Like, right now?"
I avoided looking at the spot where Leon’s arm was flopping around on the table. "There aren’t any spirits here for Victor to see," Jacob explained. We knew that to be the case because we’d called Lisa Gutierrez in Santa Barbara and asked her if there were any ghosts in Jerry and Shirley’s house, and she’d said no. Lisa’s precognitive, and if she says no, the answer is unequivocally no.
I guess she couldn’t have known about Leon’s arm. Not without us asking specifically.
"And when you see ‘em," Clayton went on, "are they all scary and gross?"
"Sometimes."
Everyone at the table seemed to lean forward just a little. Even Jacob.
"Can you see right through them?"
"Sometimes. Or sometimes they look like regular people."
Leon’s facial expression was open and eager, but his phantom limb was clenching and unclenching its fist, and bright red droplets had appeared all over it as if it was sweating blood. I buried my face in my glass, tilting a final droplet of soda onto my tongue.
"Can you touch ‘em?" Clayton asked, his voice dropping down into a reverential whisper.
I swallowed around a hunk of turkey that’d lodged in my esophagus. Jacob slid his glass over to me, and I took it and drank it down. He’d been drinking milk. I just barely kept myself from gagging.
"You don’t want to touch ghosts," I said.
The house around us, the very air, went quiet. Everyone strained forward to catch whatever crumbs of information I might care to scatter. Because we’re a nation that grew up on Lovecraft and Sleepy Hollow and Friday the Thirteenth, and people are dying to know if all that shit’s really real.
"They’re creepy," I added. And I swallowed some more milk.
"Why don’t you tell Uncle Jacob and Uncle Leon about the report you did on salamanders?" Barbara suggested to Clayton.
"Creepy how?" Clayton asked.
"Clayton got an A minus," said Barbara.
"Creepy how?"
"I don’t know," I said. I’d started spreading my food around my plate, mixing my corn and my potatoes, ruining both. "The way they look in scary movies? Pretty much like that."
"How can you say that?" Barbara demanded, suddenly so vehement that I wondered how I’d ever pegged her as a sheepish single mom in her pale yellow cardigan and perfectly creased khaki pants. "When people die, they go to heaven."
Oh. Christian. Or had Jacob said Catholic -- or was that the same difference? I didn’t remember, must not have been paying close enough attention when Jacob had tried to prepare me.
"Barbara," said Jerry. Her father didn’t have a follow up ready. Just her name, sounding like a warning.
"If he says he sees spirits, then he does," Leon said, hopping to my defense despite the fact that he made me squirm in my seat. Or, more accurately, his right arm did. "They have tests." He looked to me for affirmation. "Don’t they have tests?"
"All kinds of tests," I said, burying the last of my corn.
"And being able to see them, you’re what, a level three? Four?"
"Five," I said. Level five was a couple of steps down from good old Marie. But Marie was only a step lower than God. Or maybe Satan.
The table went quiet again.
"Are you a millionaire?" asked Clayton.
"It is not polite to ask people how much money they make," said Barbara. She was the same age as me, thirty-eight. She had Jacob’s flashing dark eyes and high cheekbones, but she looked just as worn out as I always felt. Even more so, now that we were attempting civil dinner conversation.
"It’s okay," I said. "No, I’m not a millionaire. I make more money than a regular detective, but not as much as my supervisor."
"And you spend as much money as someone who’s lived through the Great Depression," Jacob added, sotto voice.
Clayton scrunched his face up. I saw mashed potatoes lurking behind his teeth. "You should find Al Capone and make him tell you where his vault is."
Jerry and Leon laughed, but the way they kept their eyes trained on me, I could tell they were hoping that maybe I’d think that dredging up Al Capone was a grand idea. And I just so happened to need a couple of assistants over the age of sixty-five.
"He’s probably not around," I said. "He’d be a little old by now."
Everyone chuckled, except for Barbara, who evidently thought I was a devil-worshipper. And Grandma, who was possibly giving me the evil eye. And Clayton, who couldn’t make sense out of my lack of financial savvy.
Leon smacked the table with his left hand as he laughed. His spectral right hand followed suit, only it pummeled the table with much greater force than its counterpart. Spectral blood flew, spattering the white tablecloth covered in cross-stitched cornucopia, doe-eyed pilgrims, and smiling Indians.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a protective white bubble around Leon’s arm.
"Are you warm, honey?" asked Shirley. "You want me to open a window?"
I was about to tell her not to bother, when I realized that I felt the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck. "Yeah, okay," I said, as I shrugged out of my flannel shirt and let it bunch on the seat of my chair. I was glad I’d taken the time to find a T-shirt without any holes or stains on it.
I took a deep breath and looked at Leon’s ghost hand. It quivered like it was hooked up to an electrical wire. Like that frog in the biology class whose legs kick when you give it a shock. No, I hadn’t been absent that day. And yeah, I’d puked. Me and Janet Neiderman.
"I’ll be right back," I said, knocking my chair into Jacob’s as I scrambled to make my way toward the upstairs bathroom. There was a half-bath on the first floor, but I figured that everyone at the dinner table really didn’t need to hear me retching if I couldn’t bring my gag reflex under control.
Why did I have to go and think of that goddamn frog?
I dodged past Jacob’s old bedroom--now Shirley’s very own sewing room--and nearly skateboarded down the upstairs hallway on a pink and blue rag rug. Darting into the bathroom, I slammed the door shut behind me. It had a hook and eye lock on it, which might keep Grandma out, or maybe Clayton, if he didn’t lean on the door too hard.
I breathed, and I looked around. It was a normal enough bathroom, more colorful than mine, with blue and yellow sunflowers on the shower curtain that kind of matched a border going around the top of the painted walls, but not quite. I pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding a nice bottle of cold medicine, or maybe some valium. Neither one would make Leon’s nasty ghost arm go away completely, but they’d sure make me care about it a whole lot less.
The right side of the cabinet was filled entirely with old lady perfume, facial cream, nail polish, and hair mousse. The left held cheap plastic razors like I use, aspirin, foot spray, a stick of green deodorant, cotton swabs, and antihistamines.
Of every drug that had ever been invented, Jacob’s parents owned the only two types that affected my talent less than antibiotics.
I pawed through their drawers in hopes of finding a stray muscle relaxant or even an expired tube of motion-sickness pills. I found a bunch of washcloths and some sunblock. Sunblock. In a small rural Wisconsin town on the border of Minnesota that saw the sun maybe two hours each winter if it peered closely enough between the snowflakes.
I looked underneath the sink and found a pair of rubber gloves and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Damn it.
I tore the medicine cabinet doors open again, hoping to find something that I’d missed before. And then my eyes fell on the nail polish remover.
I turned the bottle around and read the back. Acetone was the first ingredient. And the seminar I’d attended fourteen years ago called Inhalants, the Silent Killer was as fresh in my mind as if I’d just taken it yesterday.
And here I thought I hadn’t gotten much out of the Police Academy.
I wasn’t a habitual huffer, not like the anorexic girl at the Cook County Mental Health Center -- the institution that’d housed me from seventeen to twenty-three -- who’d shown me how to get the most bang for my buck with a can of cooking spray or a plastic baggie and a jar of rubber cement. No, I didn’t enjoy killing my brain cells randomly, but I was a pragmatist. The arm wasn’t going to go away all by itself. And I really needed it to stop waving at me if I wanted to make it through dinner.
I could saturate a wad of toilet paper and hold it over my mouth and nose, but acetone’s a stinky chemical, and I’d end up reeking of it. Instead, I set the bottle on the rim of the sink and plugged one of my nostrils, sniffing it carefully in hopes of zapping the specific neurons that enabled me to see Leon’s damn spastic missing arm without leaving me stinking like a Chinese nail salon.
I felt a little floaty and had developed a sharp headache over the top of my skull by the time anyone came to check on me.
Luckily, it was Jacob.
Since he didn’t need to know I was huffing his mother’s nail polish remover, I put it away and washed my face before I answered the door.
He leaned in the doorjamb, looking incredibly sexy in a long-sleeved, chocolate brown silk knit that clung to every muscle like it’d been painted on him. He crossed his arms and gave me his most earnest you-can-trust-me face, pouty and a little doe-eyed.
"Everything all right?"
"It’s...um. I dunno."
"You went a little pale at the table."
It wasn’t so surprising that Jacob noticed it when I saw something. Maurice Taylor, my first partner, used to tell me sometimes that I’d disappear if I got any whiter, and he hadn’t been joking about my ethnicity.
My eyes stung from the acetone I’d just sniffed, and I pressed my fingertips into my tear ducts to try to relieve the itch. If I knuckled my eyes like I really wanted to, they’d get all red and I’d look totally high. "Your uncle Leon seems like a cool guy."
"He is."
"But...I can see his arm."
Jacob stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He sat down on the rim of the tub and took one of my hands between both of his, and he waited.
I avoided his eyes and stared at a tile on the floor that was set a little crooked. "I’m trying really hard to be a decent boyfriend," I said. "But I think I might not be cut out for it."
"Stop it."
"No, it’s true. I don’t know how to have a family. And evidently, I can’t function without having a buzz on."
"What are we talking about?" Jacob asked. "Are you breaking up with me or telling me you want to start going to Narcotics Anonymous?"
My heartbeat, already racing a little from the acetone, did an unpleasant stutter when Jacob said the words "breaking up" aloud.
"I mean, you know. Come on."
"No, I don’t. What’s going on?"
God damn. I’d started hugging myself without realizing I was doing it. Ugly habit. Ugly, ugly habit. I forced myself to try to stand normally, but I felt like my arms and legs weren’t screwed on right. "I just wanted to...you know...be with you and your family for the holiday."
Jacob nodded slowly. "Okay. And that’s what we’re doing. If you need to leave, I’m trusting you to tell me so."
"I don’t want to leave in the middle of dinner." I stared up into a painted-on sunflower. "I thought the house was clean," I said.
"And I had no idea that Leon’s arm would qualify as a ghost. If you don’t want to go, we can move you, say that you need to sit by the window."
"I’d rather sit across from Leon than Barbara, arm or no arm."
Jacob smirked. "Can’t say I blame you."
I thought about that damn bloody limb performing acrobatics that were totally out of synch with what Leon’s face and body language were telling me. "This is gonna sound stupid," I said. Which I can pretty much use to preface anything that comes out of my mouth. "But I wonder if it knew I could see it and it was showing off."
Stupid or not, Jacob considered the idea. "Maybe it’s got a spiritual equivalent to a cellular intelligence. Who knows? But if amputated limbs can be present in the spirit world, it explains why they still cause pain for some people and not others just as much as the idea of a bunch of neurons misfiring."
Could people have their phantom limbs exorcised? It was possible -- or at least they could have them scrambled with electrical interference, once the technology of Psych science caught up with the psychology and biology of it.
"If I just had some Auracel, everything would be okay." I take prescription Auracel to block out the visions. Or I used to take it...until I stopped. Which was fine, inside my apartment. I guess I’d conveniently forgotten about the real world outside it. Only certain pharmacies in big metropolitan areas carried the drug, so even if I could call The Clinic and have them fax a prescription, chances were we’d have to go to Minneapolis to have it filled.
Jacob stood and pulled a little paper cup from a cutesy holder mounted on the wall beside the medicine cabinet, and filled it with tap water. "How many?"
"How many what?"
"How many Auracel?"
I realized he was digging in his pocket, and it was as if the clouds broke open and a beam of sunshine landed right on him.
"You have some?"
He smiled at me. He’s got a special grin that’s all mine. It somehow manages to be reassuring and to promise that he’ll fuck me halfway through the mattress later, all at once. "I’ve got to tell you: I’m relieved this is only about Auracel." He handed me the paper cup.
"How many do you have?"
"Ten."
"Wow. You’re prepared."
"I was a boy scout."
"That’s creepy. And hot. At the same time."
Jacob pressed a tablet of Auracel into my mouth, running his thumb back and forth over my lips after he did. I turned away to swallow some water. In fifteen minutes or so, the pill would start kicking in. My relief was greater than my disappointment, but just barely. "I really wanted to do this without the meds."
"Which was your idea, not mine."
That was so not fair. My life was perfectly fine until suddenly I had this live-in boyfriend who wanted to interact with me, and I realized that I was almost always high. Maybe it had been my idea to go cold turkey, but I’d done it because of Jacob.
"Talk to me," Jacob said.
"You’re gonna decide I’m too much trouble, someday."
"Uh huh," he said with absolutely zero conviction, flipping my hand over to press a kiss into my clammy palm. His goatee tickled at the base of my thumb.
I felt the first effects of the Auracel kicking in, a little dryness to my tongue, and a tingle in my fingertips that was only intensified by the feeling of Jacob’s hot mouth grazing my skin.
"Stop it," I said. "I’m not going back downstairs with a hard-on."
I felt Jacob grinning into my hand, and then his tongue traced my life line.
"I mean it."
"So you want me to suck you off in my parents’ bathroom?"
Dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty. Jacob talks dirty so well, and I always love it. My cock stirred a little. The promise of the Auracel high made me sluggish, though, and I had enough self-control, even with a sexy hunk of manmeat going down on my thumb, to save it for later. "After dinner."
Jacob let go of my hand and pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. He pressed a kiss into my solar plexus. "Dessert," he said, breathing the word against my bare skin and pulling a long shiver up my spine. "I’m looking forward to it."
And here I’d been expecting pumpkin pie.
Jacob went downstairs first, promising to tell his family that I reacted to my medications sometimes. Which was technically true. He wasn’t saying that I’d had such a reaction at the table, after all. Jacob knows all about being technically truthful. His partner, Carolyn, is a telepathic lie detector.
All eyes landed on me as I tried to low-key it back to the table. Jacob refilled my glass with orange soda and his mother pulled my plate out of the microwave and set it back down in front of me. "Everything all right?" asked Jerry.
"It’s fine," I said. "I’m good."
"Nothing wrong with taking a pill when you need one. Y’know, I need to take pain pills for this arm," said Leon. "Crazy, isn’t it? Arm’s not even there, and it hurts."
"You never told me that," said Shirley.
"It’s true." Leon dug a capsule out of his pocket with his corporeal hand, while his ghostly hand twitched on the tablecloth. "Arm’s acting up today," he said. "I think I’ll take one right now."
"You don’t need to do that to make me feel better," I said.
The ghost arm waved a "pshaw" at me.
"Bob down the street lost a foot in Korea," said Jerry. "He still feels it, too."
"What about skeletons?" Clayton asked me. Do you see skeletons?"
"Skeletons are nothing supernatural," Barbara told him. "They’re inside everyone’s body. Everybody has one."
"But I seen this movie."
"Saw," Barbara corrected him.
"Or zombies," said Clayton, ignoring her. "Are zombies real?"
"No," I said. "When bodies die, they’re dead."
"But what about in the hospital, when they take that electrical shock thing with the paddles, and they yell, ‘Clear!’ and they shock you...." he jumped in his seat as if he’d been hit with a thousand volts. "And you were a flatline, and then your heart starts beating again?"
I thought about it. Not that I was worried about giving a fifth-grader a scientifically accurate answer; I was thinking about electricity, and how the most knowledgeable paranormal expert I knew said that ghosts were made of electrons. "I don’t know," I said. "Maybe those people aren’t all the way dead, and the machines aren’t accurate enough to tell."
"You should see how it works the next time you’re at a hospital," said Clayton. "Then you’d know."
"I don’t go to hospitals," I said.
"Never? What if someone shot you while you were being a cop? Then where would you go?"
"I have a special...um, doctor."
Everyone had craned to the edges of their seats again. You could hear a pin drop.
I sighed to myself and decided I might as well talk about it, since everyone seemed so eager to know. Even Grandma. "Actually, now I see this panel of two doctors and a psychiatrist, and they all have to be in the room at the same time to make sure that nobody’s doing anything they shouldn’t be doing...."
Ravenous by John Inman
Chapter One
TERRY JONES opened his eyes to a bombardment of gentle crystal sounds, clearly orchestrated by Mother Nature herself. The noises were so musical, so unexpected and sweet, they yanked Terry upright in the bed and left him sitting there with an insipid grin on his face. He could sense his eyes bulging out as big as melon balls, and there was some sort of weird little shiver of pleasure crawling up his naked back, which made him wiggle around and damn near laugh out loud.
Holy crap! The sounds on the air were beautiful! No car horns, no wailing ambulances, no beeping garbage trucks warning toddlers on tricycles to get the hell out of the way before they got smashed flat. No earsplitting rumble of skateboards or atonal rap crap blasting from passing automobiles. Not even any kids screaming to high heaven on their way to school. Just the sweet cacophony of birds and the lazy rush and scrape of shifting tree limbs swaying merrily in the morning breeze, tickling the cabin walls. Above his head, a plunk and then a gentle rumble scrambling from left to right told him a pine cone had been knocked loose from the tree outside and sent bouncing across the cabin’s roof before tumbling over the edge in what was no doubt a graceful swan dive, to land with a muted thud in the dirt below.
Terry took a second to dig through the blankets to find his sleeping pug, Bruce. Named for Bruce Willis because the dog thought he was hot shit too—and like the real Bruce, sometimes actually was. Bruce was apparently immune to the glorious songs of nature. Terry pulled his limp body out into the morning light and held him up in front of his face to give him a smooch on the belly. Bruce wagged his tail, yawned, snorted a few times in bliss, as pugs are prone to do, then promptly fell fast asleep dangling there in midair.
“Pitiful old guy,” Terry crooned, tucking the dog carefully back under the covers.
He gazed around the room, and the second he took in where he was, Terry froze. Memories came flooding back, pelting him like hail. Sharp and icy cold. Horrible memories. Bloody memories.
His gaze shot up to the ceiling, and he thought back to the sound he had heard only moments before. The pine cone striking the roof and rolling to the ground. Or had it been a pine cone at all?
He shook the covers off his bare legs and stepped onto the cold floor. His cock, which had been standing at morning attention only moments before, was now shriveled and limp. Warily, holding his breath, Terry walked to the upstairs cabin window and pressed his nose against the glass.
The forest surrounding his acre of land was in a furious state of motion—tree branches large and small twitching and swaying in the wind. Tall weeds were bowing to one another on the banks of the ditch that bordered Terry’s property in the back. Most of the trees were pine and hickory, with a few towering bridges of honeysuckle draping from one tree to another. Their flowers had not blossomed yet, but the twining vines and leaves of the honeysuckle, as green and vibrant as in high summer, still trembled in the breeze and dripped with morning dew.
Terry stood stock-still at the window. The chilly air seeping through the glass in front of him laid icy fingers across his bare chest and belly. Someday he would have to put in storm windows, but not today. Or anytime soon more than likely. Not while his little neck of the woods was still under siege.
And not when every heartbeat might be his last. As that thought struck him, Terry gazed down at himself. At his long fuzzy legs, coated with ginger hair, neatly muscled from years of jogging. At the furry expanse of his chest and abdomen, as lean as his legs, with an added trail of red fuzz leaking down from his navel to lose itself in his nest of coppery pubic hair. His sleeping cock nestled there, one eye peering out at the world as if leery of facing the day.
That little stroke of whimsy almost made him smile. But the smile was short-lived.
Terry held his hands up and surveyed his arms and fingers. Checked around his fingernails for torn skin. He slid those same fingers across his face, up and over his beard to his cheekbones, down his neck, along toward the back of his head. Every couple of seconds, drawing his hands back and studying his fingertips for smears of blood in case he might have scratched himself while he slept.
Nothing. He breathed a sigh of relief.
He gazed back at the bed, where Bruce had poked his nose out of the covers. He was watching Terry for any signs of movement. Preferably movement toward the kitchen where Bruce might find himself being served breakfast.
Terry chuckled watching him, made a motion for the dog to follow, then set off toward the staircase leading down from the cabin’s loft where he kept his bed. Bruce flew out from under the blankets in hot pursuit, bright-eyed now but still yawning. His stubby tail wagged in anticipatory bliss while the toenails on his four little feet tippy-tapped across the icy floor.
With a grunt as stiff muscles stretched, Terry poured a bowl of kibbles from the fifty-pound bag under the kitchen sink. He set the bowl on Bruce’s blue blankie by the kitchen stove, then refilled Bruce’s water dish while the pug burrowed his snout into his food and all but inhaled it to extinction.
With his roomie taken care of, Terry filled a teakettle for instant coffee and placed it on the gas stove, then set about preparing his own breakfast. Eggs over easy and bacon, fried in a skillet on the burner next to the teakettle. He would have liked a baked potato nuked in the microwave and smothered with butter, but he was too lazy to fix it. Instead he made do with cold cereal buried beneath half a cup of sugar for dessert. Terry had a sweet tooth, and donuts were a little hard to come by these days.
While he ate he listened to the mockingbirds who always perched on the chimney above his hearth, sending their voices spilling out across the grate to fill the cabin with song. Of course, the song was one step short of caterwauling, but Terry was used to it. Once in a while, Bruce growled at the racket coming through the flue, but on the whole, Terry figured he was used to it too.
His gaze wandered to the stack of galvanized fence posts piled clumsily against the cabin wall by the back kitchen door. The posts had been glommed from a now defunct home improvement store down the mountain, not too far from the city limits of Spangle, California. Terry’s hometown. Since the invasion came, since the beasts had spewed up from the guts of the earth or spilled out of the depths of somebody’s fucking nightmare—wherever the hell they came from—Spangle had become little more than a deathtrap. A deathtrap Terry Jones had been lucky to escape. So far.
But he wouldn’t think about that now.
He nibbled on bacon and soaked up the egg yolk from his plate with the last of the stale bread before returning his gaze to the fence posts in the corner.
The posts were metal, six feet long, perhaps three inches wide and a quarter inch thick. Strong and unbendable. They were pierced with countless holes, intended for the convenient attachment of fencing wire. But Terry wasn’t interested in fencing wire. Fencing wire wouldn’t fill his needs at all. No, Terry was in the process of using the heavy metal posts to reinforce the outside of the cabin. This included the windows and doors, where he placed the posts like security bars, nailing them two inches apart so he could still see outside but close enough that nothing outside could make its way in. When he was finished with the outside, he would line the walls and ceiling inside as well.
As a second line of defense should the first line fail, Terry was using the metal posts to reinforce the walls downstairs in what he had come to call the blood room. The blood room had once been a fruit cellar, but those days were long gone, Terry told himself with a nasty little smirk aimed at the fence posts in the corner. The blood room was there as a last retreat. A final chance at survival. Sort of like a last-ditch bomb shelter, except nuclear bombs were actually the least of his worries. His and everybody else’s in and around Spangle. These days they were more concerned with flying beasts with fangs and claws and an unquenchable thirst for human blood. And who could ever have seen that coming?
Terry checked the calendar on the wall beside his chair. He reached over and filled yesterday’s square—August 2—with a fat black X, using the Sharpie hanging beside it on a string. There. It was official. He had survived another day and night. Ruffling through the pages of past months, he counted back to May 3. Exactly three months ago. That was the day he hightailed it out of Spangle and entrenched himself here in his and Bobby’s vacation cabin on this measly little mountain in the backcountry, three miles out of town. It had always been a refuge before, this cabin. A place for them to relax. Where they could get away from work and spend quality time together, just the two of them. Plus Bruce.
Now, of course, Bobby was no more. He had been taken only hours after they fled the town, as so many fellow residents before them had been taken. On that day, when Bobby was wrenched from Terry’s side and swept away in the horror, Terry knew he would never go back to their house in town. Not as long as the horror kept escalating. He had no choice but to carry through with the plans he and Bobby had made to escape the slaughter. So with little more than a broken heart, the clothes on his back, and his beloved little dog, Terry slunk off into oblivion. And now, three months later, here he still was. Hiding out. Cowering, to be more precise. Aching not to be alone anymore, but unable to leave his tiny mountain, the only place he felt safe enough now to call home, and the last place in the world he should really be at all.
He had burglarized a few out-of-business clothing stores since leaving town, sneaking back to replenish his wardrobe. He had looted abandoned grocery stores for canned goods to keep himself alive. But there was little he could do about his broken heart. With time, it had healed a bit. But there were still days—and nights—when Terry all but crumbled under the grief, the weight of missing Bobby. There were so many things he missed. The sound of Bobby’s voice across the breakfast table. His gentle snores in the bed at night. The way Bobby inevitably rolled into Terry’s arms in the wee hours of each and every morning, his mouth and hands seeking comfort, his sleep-warm skin nestling close until Terry, his own hunger awakened, sought Bobby’s warmth as well.
They had been good for each other, him and Bobby. Their love had been real. As real as the creatures that tore Bobby away three months back on this very day. As real as the creatures that would tear Terry away today if he wasn’t careful. If he wasn’t diligent.
Once again, Terry searched his hands for any little cut or tear. Any seepage of blood, no matter how minute. He touched his face and checked his fingertips for smears of blood. His beard was getting long, he noticed, since he had stopped shaving. No sense asking for trouble if shaving wasn’t necessary. One slip of the razor and they would be on him in a flash. He didn’t doubt it for a minute.
Them. Terry shuddered, thinking back. Out of nowhere, filling Terry’s mind, was the sound of Bobby’s final scream as he was torn to pieces in front of him.
Terry’s fork clattered to the floor, and he closed his eyes, trying to squeeze the memory away, to head it off before it took hold of him completely.
It refused to budge, of course. It always did. The memory stayed lodged right behind his eyes, where it always lay in wait. Lurking. Hoping to catch him off guard.
As it just had.
God, Terry missed his old life. And oh sweet Jesus, how he hated that fucking memory!
So he plucked it from behind his eyes with trembling fingers and placed it on a dark shelf at the back of his mind. Tucking it away. Burying it among the flotsam, back where the shadows were deepest. It took every ounce of willpower he possessed, but he managed it.
For now.
Chapter Two
IT WASN’T that cold—this wasn’t the Sierras after all. It was only a small 2500-foot peak in the backcountry of San Diego County. But cold was the least of Terry’s worries anyway.
While he had only seen the creatures from great distances, swarming high in the sky, since he moved to the mountain three months earlier, it didn’t mean they weren’t a threat. So he took precautions, as he always did when going outside.
He donned leather gloves to protect his hands and pulled on a thick leather jacket, supple with age, to shield his arms and torso from any accidental scratch or skin tear. To go along with the biker’s jacket, he wore heavy blue jeans and boots below the belt. Despite the low temperature, he smeared bug repellant over his face and neck. For all he knew, it would take nothing more than a mosquito bite or a beesting to release into the air the scent of his pheromones or his DNA or whatever the hell the beasts were attracted to in human blood. The simple fact was this: once your scent was out there, once they whiffed your blood and zeroed in on your location, you were as good as dead.
Funny thing, though. Animal blood didn’t draw them. He learned that interesting fact on a day shortly after he came to the mountain when Bruce tore his side on a protruding nail. As soon as Terry noticed, he had rushed them both into the fruit cellar, now the blood room—or would be when he finished reinforcing it. He had cowered there waiting for the attack he was sure would come. He sat in the corner in the dark, cradling a terrified Bruce and aiming a shotgun at the stairway leading to the cabin above, hoping to at least blow a few of the fuckers to smithereens before they swarmed through the trapdoor and ripped them to shreds.
Strangely enough, the attack never came.
Terry tried other traps then, other baits, testing to see what blood the beasts found yummy. He shot a squirrel and left its bloody carcass in the yard. Nothing. Back in the days when he could still find fresh meat in the markets in town, he had thrown out raw hamburger to see if that attracted them. It didn’t. Once, when the weather was warmer, he ran across a rattlesnake and chopped its head off with a hoe. Nothing.
He thought back to all the attacks he had witnessed in Spangle before he fled. Horrible attacks. Mind-wrenching terror. Violent, bloody moments he knew he would never, ever forget. But not one of them involved any living creature other than a human being. Be it man, woman, or child.
The women between puberty and menopause had the worst of it. For it was those women whose very bodies betrayed them, their menstrual cycles acting like dinner bells.
The creatures had risen up almost six months earlier. As soon as it was understood what triggered the creatures’ hunger, women had stayed hidden, aided by their spouses or friends. Safely locked away in basements and windowless garrets, in cupboards, closets, or honest-to-God bomb shelters—what few there were. But now, months later, most of those women—the ones who had not already fled the area completely—had been snatched away. Snatched away because given enough time, the creatures always found a way in. Once they knew where you were, and once they smelled your blood, they never gave up. Ever.
They were large enough and determined enough to burst through glass windows. If swarming in great enough numbers, they could tear and claw and batter their way through doors or ceilings or even walls. If a structure had a weakness, they would sniff it out.
And their hunger never abated. Their fury never calmed. They were endlessly ravenous.
Yet with all their need to feed, with all their endless seeking of human blood, the creatures had their weaknesses too.
For one thing, sound did not attract them. No matter how loud or how strident the noise, it did not draw them. Perhaps they had no organs for hearing at all. Terry didn’t know. He had never had a dead specimen to examine, and even if he had, he wouldn’t know what to look for. He had no medical training. He wasn’t a veterinarian or a zoologist. He was a notary public and a substitute grade-school teacher, for pity’s sake. That was his area of expertise. What did he know about impossible creatures from God knows where? How could he be expected to understand what might turn out to be the key to the survival or the extinction of the human race?
Early on, the authorities had tried to force people to leave their homes. Many, including Terry and Bobby, had refused.
Now he supposed there were authorities or experts out there somewhere working on a solution, but he never heard about them. They did not make their studies known to the likes of him. While the power was still on, Terry had destroyed his cell phone, fearing the authorities would use the signal to track him and force him to leave. He didn’t have a landline at the cabin. Television reception on the mountain had always been sketchy, and the only radio he had was on his old Jeep, and it was pretty much worthless.
The roads and highways had been sealed off by the town police and by the highway patrol. Terry had seen people in hazmat suits too, but that was early in the game. He hadn’t seen any lately. People had been allowed to leave, but no one was allowed back in. Rumor was that Spangle had been quarantined. Cut off from the world entirely. Since they couldn’t correct the problem, those in authority seemed to have decided they would simply keep the menace penned up until they could devise a solution. The small backcountry town of Spangle had apparently been sacrificed for the greater good.
For Bobby and Terry, everything they owned or cared about was tied up in Spangle and on the slopes of the tiny mountain nestled next to town. The house on River Street. The cabin in the woods. That was it, their whole world. That was what made them stay. But most importantly, they also had each other. For them, that was enough.
For the second time that morning, while he stood dressing, staring through the cabin’s upstairs window, the memory of that day flooded back to swallow Terry whole. The day that Bobby died. The day three months earlier when Bobby was torn to bits. How the creatures swarmed around them both, but only Bobby had been attacked. While Terry sat there helpless and stunned, drenched in his husband’s blood. Untouched. And only inches away!
After those few fleeting seconds of unimaginable violence and mind-numbing terror, Bobby’s beautiful body had been reduced to little more than a shimmering red mist and a sliver or two of bone twirling through the air. In mere moments, even those were gone.
On that day. On that bloody, horrible day.
The Selkie Prince's Unexpected Omega by JJ Masters
Zale’s jaw was tight and his teeth gritted as he waited in the hall outside of Finn’s quarters.
He knocked again. This time more loudly using the heel of his fist, since, apparently, his knuckles weren’t getting the job done.
The alpha-born prince was losing his patience, which he usually had an abundance of. Just not today. Especially since the visiting omega, Finn, had been seen sneaking off with Zale’s youngest brother Caol.
Which was dangerous.
Particularly since Caol was considered a Selkie slut. What humans would call a man-ho. He loved to rut with anyone who would let him, be it Selkie, human or hybrid. Most likely any male with a cock swinging between his legs.
Hell, he probably rutted with other species of shifters.
But even so, it brought Zale back to the problem at hand. He and his brothers had told their father, the King of the North, that he should send Finn away. Return the omega to his own colony. That he was no longer needed here at the Northern colony. But his father hadn’t listened.
No surprise there.
They all suspected that King Solomon had considered taking the omega for himself.
But a whole two years had passed since the King first brought Finn to the castle, so it made no sense for the unbonded male to remain. His father needed to shit or get off the pot. Either take Finn as his own to bear more sons or send the poor omega home so he could find an alpha of his very own.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a fated mate waiting for Finn anywhere. His supposed alpha had been killed and eaten by an orca during their bonding swim from what Zale understood.
None of them had ever asked Finn about it because neither Zale or his brothers wanted to know those cringe-worthy details and they also were inclined to avoid him since he was an unbonded male. Again, being around an unbonded omega could be dangerous.
However, Caol tended to be reckless. If the omega came into heat, Caol would most likely be the proud father of a future pup. Zale could just imagine how the king’s head would spin at that news.
So, Zale needed to nip whatever was going on between Finn and Caol in the bud. For his youngest brother’s sake and also for Finn’s. If the omega had the urge to rut, he could do so with some of the betas the king kept on hand for that purpose. Nothing stopped Finn from taking a beta lover, especially since his corona membrane was no longer intact.
But an alpha? No. He could not rut with an alpha that was not his mate.
That was against Selkie law.
Caol knew that. As did Finn.
Therefore, Zale was being a good older brother and trying to head off a disaster.
Or that’s what he told himself.
Yes, he was protecting not only Caol but this omega... who continued to live among a castle-full of alphas even though that was unsafe.
He stared at the heavy wood door and cursed. Why wasn’t Finn answering?
He leaned closer and shouted, “Finn! Are you in there? Open your door.”
Zale listened carefully. Nothing.
He was done knocking. He had announced his presence and now it was time to take the next step...
Into the omega’s quarters.
He knocked again. This time more loudly using the heel of his fist, since, apparently, his knuckles weren’t getting the job done.
The alpha-born prince was losing his patience, which he usually had an abundance of. Just not today. Especially since the visiting omega, Finn, had been seen sneaking off with Zale’s youngest brother Caol.
Which was dangerous.
Particularly since Caol was considered a Selkie slut. What humans would call a man-ho. He loved to rut with anyone who would let him, be it Selkie, human or hybrid. Most likely any male with a cock swinging between his legs.
Hell, he probably rutted with other species of shifters.
But even so, it brought Zale back to the problem at hand. He and his brothers had told their father, the King of the North, that he should send Finn away. Return the omega to his own colony. That he was no longer needed here at the Northern colony. But his father hadn’t listened.
No surprise there.
But a whole two years had passed since the King first brought Finn to the castle, so it made no sense for the unbonded male to remain. His father needed to shit or get off the pot. Either take Finn as his own to bear more sons or send the poor omega home so he could find an alpha of his very own.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a fated mate waiting for Finn anywhere. His supposed alpha had been killed and eaten by an orca during their bonding swim from what Zale understood.
None of them had ever asked Finn about it because neither Zale or his brothers wanted to know those cringe-worthy details and they also were inclined to avoid him since he was an unbonded male. Again, being around an unbonded omega could be dangerous.
However, Caol tended to be reckless. If the omega came into heat, Caol would most likely be the proud father of a future pup. Zale could just imagine how the king’s head would spin at that news.
So, Zale needed to nip whatever was going on between Finn and Caol in the bud. For his youngest brother’s sake and also for Finn’s. If the omega had the urge to rut, he could do so with some of the betas the king kept on hand for that purpose. Nothing stopped Finn from taking a beta lover, especially since his corona membrane was no longer intact.
But an alpha? No. He could not rut with an alpha that was not his mate.
That was against Selkie law.
Caol knew that. As did Finn.
Or that’s what he told himself.
Yes, he was protecting not only Caol but this omega... who continued to live among a castle-full of alphas even though that was unsafe.
He stared at the heavy wood door and cursed. Why wasn’t Finn answering?
He leaned closer and shouted, “Finn! Are you in there? Open your door.”
Zale listened carefully. Nothing.
He was done knocking. He had announced his presence and now it was time to take the next step...
Into the omega’s quarters.
Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price is the owner of JCP Books LLC. Her paranormal thrillers are colored by her time in the midwest, from inner city Chicago, to small town Wisconsin, to liberal Madison.
Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations. Also check out her new series, Mnevermind, where memories are made...one client at a time.
With her education in fine arts and practical experience as a graphic designer, Jordan set out to create high quality ebooks with lavish cover art, quality editing and gripping content. The result is JCP Books, offering stories you'll want to read again and again.
Alice Winters started writing stories as soon as she was old enough to turn her ideas into written words. She loves writing a variety of things from romance and comedy to action. She also enjoys reading, horseback riding, and spending time with her pets.
John has been writing fiction for as long as he can remember. Born on a small farm in Indiana, he now resides in San Diego, California where he spends his time gardening, pampering his pets, hiking and biking the trails and canyons of San Diego, and of course, writing. He and his partner share a passion for theater, books, film, and the continuing fight for marriage equality. If you would like to know more about John, check out his website.
J.J. Masters is the alter-ego of a USA Today bestselling author who writes hot, gay romance filled with heart, humor and heat. J.J. became fascinated with mpreg romance as soon as she figured out what mpreg stood for. She loves to write about "knotty" men!
You can join JJ’s FB Group. And sign up to her newsletter to keep up with exclusive content and news.
Author of the bestselling book Smoky Mountain Dreams and the fan favorite Training Season, Leta Blake’s educational and professional background is in psychology and finance, respectively. However, her passion has always been for writing. She enjoys crafting romance stories and exploring the psyches of made up people. At home in the Southern U.S., Leta works hard at achieving balance between her day job, her writing, and her family.
After writing for years yet never really finding the right inspiration, Keira discovered her voice in gay romance, which has become a passion. She writes contemporary, historical, fantasy, and paranormal fiction and — although she loves delicious angst along the way — Keira firmly believes in happy endings. For as Oscar Wilde once said:
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
Jordan Castillo Price
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Alice Winters
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John Inman
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JJ Masters
Leta Blake
EMAIL: leta.blake.author@gmail.com
Keira Andrews
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Body and Soul by Jordan Castillo Price
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Happy Endings by Alice Winters
Ravenous by John Inman
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The Selkie Prince's Unexpected Omega by JJ Masters
Levity by Leta Blake & Keira Andrews
