To stop a killer, would you become one?

 

Even for Me

© 2008 Taryn Blackthorne

 

An On the Prowl story.

Aislyn used to have a life, a family and a home until a witch on a mission shattered everything in one night with a spell. Now Aislyn is on the run, holed up in Denver, and fighting the Changes that ravage her body and mind while struggling to keep her humanity.

Jackson Havens is a ghost hunter short on cash. All he needs is quick proof that Aislyn is the Ghost Cat Killer, and he can get back to his day job. One pair of handcuffs and a double-crossing employer later, Jackson finds himself bound to the sexy Aislyn-and racing to catch the real killer before someone puts Aislyn down. For good.

 

Enjoy the following excerpt for Even for Me:

Whatever power the kid was calling up, the weather was helping. Ozone filled the air up quick. A flash of lightning hit just outside the barn doors, illuminating everything inside clear as day. The kid’s shadow looked like a scarecrow but the woman’s shadow looked like a cat. A second strike and the woman screamed as if the lightning had hit her nerves. As he watched, the reason for the woman’s ankle chains became clear. Her skin shivered, like an ocean wave, and tawny fur rode the top, up to her face. One more flash of lighting and her teeth became fangs, her snout stretched and her pupils elongated and became thin slits that cut through the blue iris of her eye.

She screamed, rage in her face, or at least she tried to. Cougars couldn’t roar, but she sure gave her version. Her body arched as the kid looked on, rapt, captured almost, the smoking cigar in her hand seemingly forgotten. The cougar looked at the kid and hissed in hatred. Her body fought and bucked and the wave rolled across her body again, but the fur retreated back down, the face became normal, save for her very cat-like eyes. She turned them on the kid and smiled around the gag.

“NO! You have to Change! Don’t you understand? YOU HAVE TO!” The kid lost it, stomping around, and the lightning outside hit the roof. He smelled smoke and knew the old barn had caught. He tried to yell around the gag, but the kid didn’t seem interested in him anymore. He tried to kick the stall he was chained to. He pulled and yanked until he couldn’t see for the sweat running down into his eyes. Blood dripped off his hands, making them slippery. A witch and a Shifter. He was in it up to his eyeballs this time.

The woman began to scream, clear and loud. He turned just in time to get smacked with a shovel aside the head, stunning him long enough for the kid to pull off his gag and wrap the woman’s around his left wrist. She then pulled the cigar up to her lips. He watched the end flare and blinked just before the smoke was blown into his eyes. He coughed and sputtered and gazed up at the kid through a haze that had blue edges to it. The girl smiled at him. She walked across the room to her other prisoner, seemingly unaware that there were now lit pieces of the barn falling all around her, and small fires burning in those stalls that had dried hay in them. She tied his gag to the woman’s left wrist and bent over the struggling, cursing woman.

The kid blew smoke into the woman’s face and chanted all the way back to the center of the circle. She picked up the bowl of liquid and offered it to the storm outside. A soft rain had begun to accompany the thunder and lightning but he had small hopes that it would put out the fire before at least two of them roasted. The kid put the cigar into the liquid in the bowl and whatever it was caught. The symbols flared and burned on their foreheads and both he and the woman couldn’t hold back screeching.

“Iallach a chur ar dhuine rud a dhéanamh,” the girl sang and lightning hit the center of the circle, then spread to hit both him and the woman. His body was raised off the ground two feet, every muscle stiff as a board. It felt like he was burning from the inside out, like his nerves were made of acid and caught on fire to boot. No sound could come out of his mouth. He felt, rather than saw that the woman, Aislyn, was in the same position. He had the sudden thought that she’d been running from this kid because this was the witch. He’d known that Aislyn was from the East Coast but now he knew she had loved swimming in the ocean, hiking along the rivers, had loved her small apartment in the old town boarding house. Aislyn had loved the smell of a bonfire on the beach with a guitar in her hand and friends gathered around her laughing. She had been so proud of her foster brother Mark when he had graduated and had made the whole family take the day off, closing the gas station/bus stop in their small town. She’d always been there for her foster mother, helping out in the small diner on her days off and in the evenings when she could. Felt how much she’d loved her small town. And it had been taken from her by the witch. He also knew she didn’t understand. She didn’t know what she was now, not truly. He felt something he never thought he would ever feel for a Shifter. Pity.

She hated pity more than anything else, and he knew that too. It made her feel weak, defeated, violated, and defenseless. She’d been stripped of her life for no reason and pity made it worse. He looked over at the Shifter. Their eyes locked. For once he understood what a woman felt because he felt it, truly felt it as if he had a second personality inside him.

“Damn.” He looked up at the witch, who smiled.

“Master of the Hunt.” The witch threw a handful of herbs at him. Naming him, she was naming him for God’s sake. The kid threw a fistful at the woman and whispered, “Mistress Hunter.” Then she collapsed, and a beam from the roof fell across her, blocking his view. Although that could have been the thickening smoke burning his eyes. Oh good, he wouldn’t die from roasting alive, but smoke inhalation. Yeah.

Looking up, he saw the stall he was cuffed to get licked once, twice, three times with flames from the fallen beam before it caught and started eating away. The heat was getting worse; he could feel the blisters starting on his skin. He started to cough and couldn’t stop. He pulled and shouted and yelled, but nothing seemed to be working and he was using up a lot of oxygen he didn’t seem to have anymore. He wondered if his family would be able to claim his body or if it would go into an unmarked grave, the same as his older brother’s had last year. It was his last thought.