New Chapter From UNDEAD AND UNDERWATER

Thought I'd post the first chapter from the novella INLANDER from my upcoming paranormal anthology.  This is Lara Wyndham's first Change (she's a werewolf we've seen as a child in a couple of the UNDEAD books) where she meets Jack Gardner (Derik and Sara's son from DERIK'S BANE).  It takes place 25 years in the future, after the horror of the Kardashian riots.  This story was especially fun because we not only see Lara as an adult, we get to see what Betsy and Fred the mermaid are up to a quarter of a century from now.  Enjoy!  Or, you know.  Not.

     She was happy she’d been born during the worst winter Massachusetts had seen in decades—since 1994, the old-timers claimed.  It wasn’t an absolute, but a cub’s first Change usually happened around their birthday.  Which meant that in the thrill and passion and danger and chaos of her first Change, she didn’t have to worry about running into any of the 3.3 million tourists who flocked to Cape Cod in the summer and fall.  Tourists didn’t have much interest in Massachusetts in mid-January, even the ferociously rude ones.

     More clams for meeeeeee, she thought gleefully, digging so hard the sand flew ten feet and hit hard enough to scratch glass (if there had been a glass sheet in the middle of the beach in the middle of January).  The moon was full and soared above her, fat and white.  The wind whistled off the Atlantic and chilled her, but not as much as it would have if she was down there in her tender pink skin and her pale hairless hands and her pale hairless feet. 

     She wasn’t!  So that was good!  There was a time for hairless hands and a time for efficient strong paws and this was paw time.

     Excited beyond words (literally), Lara dug and dug for her dinner, the hole already so big if she wasn’t careful she’d slip on shifting sand and topple into it.  She was not known for her grace, on four feet or two.  Wouldn’t that be a funny thing for her Pack mates to see!  Here is your future alpha-leader, the one whose hairy-butt is sticking out of that hole. 

Ha!

Even if she didn’t get her teeth on the clams, in the clams, the act of hunting for her dinner was intoxicating.  She would decide when and what to eat!  Not Mother!  She would decide if it was clams or rabbit or both or neither!  Not Mother!  She would blow off erosion concerns and decide how many holes to dig on the beach!  Not the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution!  She was thirteen; she wasn’t a baby-cub anymore.  Those decisions should be hers, but her mother was sooooo stubborn.  She was even stubborn about being stubborn.  Double-stubborn!

She can’t even Change she’ll never Change but Mother decides?  It’s wrong-bad.

But that was awful; worse, it was disloyal and mean.  Her mother hadn’t been born to the Pack, but that was okay.  She and Lara’s father had met on an elevator, and conceived Lara on that elevator, and that was okay; that was life in the big city.  Her mother was the alpha female and thus the full fat moon of Lara’s days, if not her nights, and that was...sorta okay. Lara would owe Mother respect all the days she was the alpha female, and all the days after, when Lara herself was.  And she wouldn’t be for years and years and years and years and years and it would be years-long it would be years-forever before she would lose her.

Thoughts for thinking later.  So many smells.  Salt and wet and grass and rot and fish and cold and wood and a thousand others, each one begging to be followed to its source, each one calling her like chimes bringing her to church.  She would keep digging for supper.  No, she would run down the dead fish up the beach.  No, she would dig.  No, she would flush rabbits from the deep green lake of grass.  No, she would dig.  Why was she digging again?  Oh.  Supper-food.

     A seagull who thought he had dibs swooped above her and dove, then pulled up at the last instant.  He soared above her and dove again, all the time scolding, scolding.  Lara lunged straight up and her teeth snapped shut a bare inch from the gull’s left leg, startling it in mid call:  Khee-khee-kheeaa—kheeaaaawwwwppp! 

     Almost got you, gull-bird!  More of that if you get too close!  Might get you next time, might!  Why was I digging—oh.  Right.

     There had never been a more wonderful night in the history of forever.

She was a lucky, lucky cub.  She lived in a magnificent stone castle with a red roof, a castle with a mile of grass in front and a bazillion miles of the Atlantic behind.  There were hundreds of windows she could peek out of, windows so big and wide that no matter how little she was, she could stretch up and peek out:  at two, at four, at five, at seven, at ten, at twelve, now.

It had many outdoor rooms where she and her Pack could eat or rest or eat, and even cook in the rooms and then eat in them, outdoor rooms protected from all but the yuckiest elements, outdoor rooms—

She knew that was wrong; groped for the right word.  She remembered almost everything on four legs that she’d experienced on two, but interpreted the events differently.  So it took her a few seconds for the association to—porch!  The castle had many porches.  And three little oceans inside.  Pools!

If she couldn’t be in her wolf form all the time, it was nice to have a castle to run amok in the rest of the month.  And the castle was stuffed with people, generations of relatives and friends and friends of friends; the Pack always tried to live together if territory would tolerate the numbers.  Solitary living was death-pain for them.

Then she saw him, and was glad. 

     She wasn’t sure why watching the Inlander watch her made the night even better.  They weren’t friends; they didn’t know each other except to nod hello.  They couldn’t:  his litter was made up of people who chose to live far from the bulk of the Pack; she didn’t know how they bore it.

He’d know who she was, of course, but the poor cub couldn’t Change.  Horrid legacy from the witch.  Not his fault, but the other cubs disagreed.  On wonderful wonderful nights like this he could only watch; never join.  It was a sad, unlucky thing.

     She was sorry for him, but glad for herself.  All her good luck—the castle, the rank, the Change—made his bad luck—his Inlander luck—seem worse.  She was selfish enough to be glad it wasn’t her, and sorry enough that it was him.

She was glad he was there now.  She thought she’d want to go through her first Change alone, and until that moment she had.  But being able to share the experience, even for a few moments, made it better.  Did you see I almost got that noisy-stupid-smelly gull?  Do you see how wide and wonderful-deep my hole is?  She felt they knew each other, she and this neighbor she rarely saw and did not know. 

     They stared at each other across the beach for a second-hour-year-eternity, and then he raised a hand to her and continued on his way, and she went back to digging for her supper. 

     The clam was so sweet and delicious she didn’t mind the sand in her teeth. 

     

I Force Crime Upon My Readers

It's been weeks since I blogged; I apologize.  It's been pretty quiet around here:  Hammock hasn't been lurking behind the bear box, waiting to whisk me away to his lair, or eat me.  Or whisk me then kill me.  King Al and his consort visited for a few days, but my passive-aggressive campaign to drive him insane failed (I should have  put it into action while he was actually sane), my little sister turned 40 (which was pretty inconsiderate of her, frankly) and I've been on deadline with UNDEAD AND UNDERWATER, my upcoming paranormal anthology.  Below is the prologue for my novella about an aggravated super hero who fights crime by night, and by afternoon, and by lunch break, and sometimes by morning commute:  SUPER, GIRL!


UNDEAD AND UNDERWATER will be unleashed in the spring, 2013.  Never say you weren't warned.


* * *

As John Doe dived out of the bullet path—or where a bullet would go if he lingered—he had time to wonder:  when did my life turn into a John Woo movie?  Or a Road Runner cartoon?  When my burglar parents named me John Doe so I’d have an automatic alias?  This is all their fault: yes.

It really did start out simply.  Crime ran in his family, and marijuana is a gateway drug.  How else to explain how he’d gone from amiable sleepy pot user to emaciated stressed pseudo-ruthless cokehead dealer?  It was once again trendy to blame the parents for everything from bleeding ulcers to a life of crime, but he never had a chance.

Dad:  “There’s no point in trying to have a normal life.  Rather than work hard and then throw it all away with reckless behavior, throw it all away while you’re still young.  It’s the American dream!”

Mom:  “Also, we don’t think you’re smart enough for college.”

High school guidance counselor:  “Smart’s not the issue.  You seem to have been genetically programmed for a life of crime.  I wash my hands of you.  And also any prospects I once had of making a name for myself in this field.”

Okay, maybe going from occasional pot use to dealing coke was inevitable, but bullets flying past my nose?  Sirens shrilling in the background?  What is this, the 80s?  How am I a cocaine dealer running from the St. Paul police?    The only way this could get more terrible is if SHE shows up.  He groaned silently, then began to wriggle further around the corner for more cover.  And me without my pastel blazer and artfully mussed hair.  Oh, the humanity! 

He sulked while he wormed his way to safety; as if all this wasn’t bad enough, most of the building was under construction, which meant traffic had been a bitch.  He’d been told there was only one security guy at that hour, which was true.  He was told the guard in question was a retired cop too pudgy and Minnesota-nice to pull his weapon, which was the opposite of true.  He’d barely crossed the threshold into the coffee shop when the guy reached. 

I just have that kind of face, he acknowledged in despair.  His gaze was naturally shifty.  He had a tendency to pull in his shoulders when talking, as if awaiting a bullet, which happened a lot.  Everybody had bullets.  He didn’t walk, he scuttled.  And, completing the genetic treason of his criminally-minded family, he had beady eyes:  small, dark, squinty.  He had looked like he was up to something in the crib, for God’s sake.

Still:  it took brass ones to turn one’s back on generations of family tradition.  John Doe’s were made of fool’s gold, not brass.  Ah, terrible analogy.  Fool’s gold?  Maybe you should stop thinking about your balls and find an exit.

“Ah, very nice,” someone said behind him.

John Doe flopped over on his back like a startled turtle.  A turtle in the middle of committing several misdemeanors and at least two felonies.  “Where’d you come from?”

“The coffee shop next door.”  The woman was looking down at him from a great height (at least to his perspective—he was five foot three) with an odd expression.  It took him a moment to figure it out, because he was expecting fear or shock to show in her eyes and on her face, and that wasn’t happening.  There were the crooks and there were the cops and there was everyone else.  Everyone else either a) never noticed something was wrong, b) did notice and didn’t care, or c) noticed and were scared.  The ones who noticed and didn’t care never engaged.

So he needed a few seconds to name the expression.  Annoyed, he decided.  Like nearly walking through a cross-fire between an angry Minnesota-nice security guard and a convicted felon was going to inconvenience her.  And let her coffee get cold; he saw she was holding a cardboard drink tray, with two steaming drinks in it.  Yep: she didn’t want her coffee to get cold. 

Well, he was sorry, but he was going to have to inconvenience her.  It wasn’t his fault.  His parents had willfully named him John Doe.  They never even apologized!

“Listen, I need a—“  Meat shield?  No; it wouldn’t do to freak her out more than she (probably) was.  “—a hostage.  Just to get off the block.”  And out of the city.  And then possibly the country.  It was summer in Australia, right?  He’d always wanted to see the Sydney Opera House.  “I won’t hurt you.  Unless the cops make me kill you.  Hurt you!  If the cops make me hurt you.  Is what I meant.”

“You are going to make me tardy, which I loathe.”  She sounded pissy, not afraid.  Which was...good?  Hysterical hostages made everything harder.  And noisier.  “Inconsiderate thieving asshole,” she added.

Asshole?

She was striking—perhaps that was throwing him off.  Tall, as he’d noted, with pale skin and small, close-set dark eyes.  Not a blemish on her face, because the beauty mark hardly counted as a defect.  Her hair was deep brown and a foil for the rest of her, like the color of the rich soil of a flower bed after it rained. 

“So, you know.”  He climbed to his feet, one hand brushing his knees (the John Woo-esque dive through the doorway had shredded his chinos, and why didn’t they ever put that in the movies?) and the other on the piece-of-shit .38 his Gram-gram had given him for his bar mitzvah.  “Oh I can’t believe my wittle baby is all growed up!  Give Grammy some yum-yum kisses and then we’ll go shoot your gunny-gun!”

Jeez, Gram, you couldn’t give me one of your ex husband’s decent guns?  I was thirteen!  I deserved a Desert Eagle at the least!

“So, I’m sure you’ve watched TV so you know the drill.”

“Stop now.  Surrender.  If your inept shenanigans do not make me much later I’ll try to refrain from beating you to death.”

“Try?”

“Try,” she repeated in a voice so icy he actually shivered despite the rivers of sweat in his armpits.  Then she added something that was stranger than this already strange chat:  “You haven’t left me a note, have you?”

So sad to run into a drunk, and at this time of the morning.  Society is the Titanic after the iceberg.

He took a breath.  “Listen, you’re not in charge here.  I’m the one with the gunny-gun.”  Ah, hell.  Even from the grave you humiliate me, Grammy.  “So you just get over here and then we’ll take a quick—what are you doing?”

She had popped the top of the first steaming drink with her thumb, upended the thing, and sucked it down in three monster swallows.  He winced and rubbed his throat in unconscious sympathy.  Then she did the same with the second drink.

“Hey, take it easy!  Look, there’s no need to give yourself third degree throat burns just to avoid me taking...you...hostage...buh...nnnnhh?” 

Words failed him.  Words had failed him because she was now eating the empty coffee cups—yes, she was biting off pieces of cup and chewing and gulping them down, and now she was—was she?—yes!  Now she was eating the cardboard drink holder.  And washing it down with the handful of nails she must have picked up at the construction site.  She was gulping them down—three inch nails!—like they were gummy worms. 

“Oh my God!  It’s you!  You’re—“

“Do not,” she warned with a mouthful of casing nails.

“—It Girl!”

“Never say I didn’t warn you,” she said, and launched herself at him.