Twin
Flames
Katoom
Series
Book
One
Cassandra
L Shaw
Genre:
Paranormal Romance / Suspense
Publisher:
Black Opal Books
Date
of Publication: 25th July, 2015
ASIN:
B011CN2YM0
Number
of pages: 316
Word
Count: 100 000
About
the Book:
She’s
in grave danger, but she doesn’t want his protection…
After
a long and bitter world-war for pure human supremacy, humans and two
sub-species the Eli and Crea reside on Earth in an uneasy harmony.
One morning on a jog, Bliss Jacobs finds a murdered fellow Eli. She
scents the killer on the body, but other evidence is washed away by a
savage storm, leaving Bliss as the sole witness and the target of an
assassin—and forcing her back into the world of the man who
shattered her heart.
He
believes she is his destined mate, but he knows there are no second
chances…
Kaid
Sinclair is chasing more than his best friend’s murderer. He wants
Bliss in his bed and in his life, but after their relationship went
south several years ago, he knows he has to tread carefully. So how
can he keep her safe, while still proving to her that they are
destined to be mates, and he doesn’t just want to control her? All
he wants is for her to be safe—but with a killer who sees her as
Kaid bait, Kaid may have to choose…his life or hers?
Chapter
1
Train
Tracks
The
assassin grunted, dropped the body, and then watched it roll and
sprawl on its back. Empty eyes stared at the dark and cold Montana
spring night sky. The assassin laughed.
He’d
killed him.
He
scratched at the chemical reactive burning inside his robotic chest.
Hissed at the scald of the toxins pulsing in his neck and right arm
veins. Silver and the metals that only resided in Eli—a race of
humans who, along with the Crea, had taken refuge on Earth five
hundred years ago when their own planet Ecreal died—merged with the
contaminants in his body with caustic results.
At
his veins, the silver he should see as a fine bright line, pulsed
dull bronze—aged, corroded, diseased. The toxins tasted of rusted
steel and burned his mucus membranes.
He
kicked the body. “F******.”
Retribution
was sweet, even if it had taken him fourteen years. He’d removed
the male’s clothes so the trains and wildlife could more easily
eliminate his father’s killer. No remains, no ritual burial.
Sinclair deserved no such honor.
Here
the body would be hacked into easy to eat pieces for the animals to
feast on and, since nobody ever came near these tracks, Sinclair’s
remains would never be found.
Bliss
skidded to a halt on the clearing’s spring grass, tipped her face
to the sky, and gulped air. Clouds, in an oppressive charcoal
blanket, smothered most of dawn’s light. She grimaced. Ah damn, a
storm. No wonder it’d been so gloomy in the forest. Time to cut her
run short and take the train tracks home.
To
add speed, Bliss edged out her Eli genetics. Many times the speed of
an Earth human, she dashed through a wind whipped meadow. At the
train embankment, she lunged up the steep gravel siding to the top
then adjusted her stride so each step fell on a recycled cement and
plastic cemeplas sleeper. A flash of blue light, a clash of thunder’s
deepest bass exploded, vibrating the surrounding air. Eek, come on
legs, go faster. She rounded Death Bend. What the hey?
Bliss
stumbled over the dismembered body of a dead man. A scream ripping
free, she spun and fell to her knees. Eli metal thundered in her
veins, silver bloomed on her skin and swirled in her eyes.
Gene—oh
my fates, Gene cut into slices as if laid out in macabre banquet
portions.
At
three hundred miles an hour, freight trains with six carbide wheels
per axle tore along this trio of tracks. Crusted blood and the
starkness of bones exposed by the severing suggested multiple trains
travelling on differing tracks had sliced through his corpse in
gruesome precision.
Bile
seared the back of her throat as her metals formed a light
exoskeleton over her human skin. Bliss flung herself sideways and
vomited down the embankment.
She
forced down her remaining stomach contents, calmed her Eli, and did
what she didn’t want to do—turned back.
A
neon blue flash highlighted the gore. She jumped as the clap of
thunder thickened into a rue of pine and ions. With their blood ten
percent liquid metal, lightening liked to strike Eli and Crea dumb
enough to remain exposed. Being fried wasn’t high on her list of
ways to die. She had to get home, out of the storm, and phone the
sheriff.
She
looked at Gene’s body. God, this was…dang—she couldn’t think
of a word bad enough. Death Bend was so sharp, animals didn’t
always have time to jump to safety. But an Eli with his enhanced
senses—it made no sense.
Near
the decapitated head she noted a sweet scent. Great now she’d have
to see what that scent was. Feeling as if someone had wedged a shoe
in her throat, she peeled her lips back, braced herself for what she
was about to do to, leaned forward, and sniffed near the decapitated
head.
Bourbon
fumes wrinkled her nose. She turned into the cold wind to cleanse her
nostrils of booze and death. Crap cakes. Had he come for a run,
fallen, and been too drunk to get up? Fallen and knocked himself out
then the train came? Drunk or not, why was he out here? His lodge on
Eli Clan reserve was on the other side of Katoom, an easy twenty
miles from this bend.
She
blinked back more tears. “What happened?”
Yeah,
she didn’t expect an answer.
She
went to close the dead eyes, so unlike the laughing ones she
remembered, and stopped an inch from contact. Oops, she better not
contaminate him with her scent. Peter, the sheriff, would give birth
to a bear if she touched the body before he’d processed the scene
and gone through all the correct procedures.
Katoom’s
small population was a mix of Earth humans and the alien Eli and
Crea. This Subspecies cohabitation was rare. Even in large cities,
the species tended to live in separate suburbs but, usually, the Eli
and Crea preferred to live on large tracts of land.
All
regions of coexistence were constantly scrutinized by the ever
vigilant feds, the sensation hungry media, and the alien haters who
wanted the return to old world wars and Subspecies genocide. They
prayed for infractions and spied on all alien clans.
To
keep focus on Katoom minimal, Peter crossed his T’s with precision
to all laws. She hadn’t taken her personal link on her run so she
had to wait till she was home to contact him.
She
ran her palms along her cooling thighs and stared at the body. She
went to stand to head home. Hang on. She half crouched and peered
closer at Gene’s neck. Two inches above where his head had been
severed from the rest of him, a jagged cut gaped and a large portion
of flesh hung, joined to the whole by a thread of pale bloodless
skin. She glanced at the other body pieces, and her chest ratcheted
from tense to tenser.
The
torso slices had been cut with almost laser precision. No torn flesh.
No ragged edges. No chunks cleaved from the whole.
But
the throat had been hacked and didn’t come near to separating that
section of neck in two.
She
gusted out a horrified gasp and dry heaved, flung her hand to her
mouth and kept it there. She would not vomit on Gene. She peered
closer and saw a windpipe and carotid artery. She flicked her gaze to
the gravel to calm herself. That was odd. Gene was big,
six-feet-seven tall, and two-eighty pounds of muscle. Yet, she
couldn’t see much blood and barely any metal dust. Not much blood
at all. Even little rabbits bled more than these few trickles.
Where
the hell could all his blood have gone?
She
rocked back onto her heels. A squall whipped her hip length hair
around her body. Heart ricocheting around her chest like a well hit
racquetball, she shot to her feet.
Shit,
shit, shit. Gene hadn’t died here.
She
swallowed hard and surveyed the surrounding tree line, flinched when
a dark shadow moved, when the light shifted with the clouds.
Someone
sliced his throat, bled him out, then moved and dumped his body.
Her
metal rose so high, she tasted its metallic sourness on her tongue.
She had to scent the murderer, to know who did this. She dropped to
her knees again. Head close to the ragged wound, she inhaled deeply.
From deep within Gene’s massacred throat, the faintest waft of a
foreign scent bit at the back of her throat.
The
killer? Of course, it’s the killer, stupid. What other scent would
be inside Gene’s flesh? But why was it so weak? It hadn’t rained
to wash it away. She shook her head, took another draw of air, rolled
the aromatic molecules of the alien scent over her tongue and scent
receptors, and sifted through the data of stored scents in her brain.
Please
don’t be someone I know, please. No buzzing and no internal
recognition. No one she knew, thank the gods. But now she’d be able
to identify the scent’s owner if they came near. Forensics would
use a scent collector to gather the killer’s scent then load it
into the national database and seek a match.
She
turned, ran for home, and prayed a killer didn’t watch or know
she’d scented him.
About
the Author:
Cassandra
L Shaw writes Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Romantic Suspense, &
Contemporary Romance. She lives in a small farm on the Sunshine Coast
of Australia. Her eclectic past includes fashion design,
environmental science and years of drudgery as an office worker where
she dreamed of NOT being an office worker. She discovered writing a
few years ago and has decided that with its mix of art, writing
craft, and study she’s at last found the career that suits her arty
and academic mind.
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