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Twin
Flames
- By Cassandra L. Shaw
(Katoom
Series #1)
Genre:
Paranormal Romance / Suspense
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Date of Publication: 25th July, 2015
She’s in grave danger, but she doesn’t want his
protection…
After a long and bitter world-war for
pure human supremacy, humans and two sub-species the Eli and Crea reside on
Earth in an uneasy harmony. One morning on a jog, Bliss Jacobs finds a murdered
fellow Eli. She scents the killer on the body, but other evidence is washed
away by a savage storm, leaving Bliss as the sole witness and the target of an
assassin—and forcing her back into the world of the man who shattered her
heart.
He believes she is his destined mate, but he
knows there are no second chances…
Kaid Sinclair is chasing more than his
best friend’s murderer. He wants Bliss in his bed and in his life, but after
their relationship went south several years ago, he knows he has to tread
carefully. So how can he keep her safe, while still proving to her that they
are destined to be mates, and he doesn’t just want to control her? All he wants
is for her to be safe—but with a killer who sees her as Kaid bait, Kaid may
have to choose…his life or hers?
===========================
Excerpt ~ Chapter 1
Train
Tracks
The assassin grunted,
dropped the body, and then watched it roll and sprawl on its back. Empty eyes
stared at the dark and cold Montana
He’d killed him
He scratched at the
chemical reactive burning inside his robotic chest. Hissed at the scald of the
toxins pulsing in his neck and right arm veins. Silver and the metals that only
resided in Eli—a race of humans who, along with the Crea, had taken refuge on
Earth five hundred years ago when their own planet Ecreal died—merged with the
contaminants in his body with caustic results.
At his veins, the silver
he should see as a fine bright line, pulsed dull bronze—aged, corroded,
diseased. The toxins tasted of rusted steel and burned his mucus membranes.
He kicked the body.
“Fucker.”
Retribution was sweet,
even if it had taken him fourteen years. He’d removed the male’s clothes so the
trains and wildlife could more easily eliminate his father’s killer. No
remains, no ritual burial. Sinclair deserved no such honor.
Here the body would be
hacked into easy to eat pieces for the animals to feast on and, since nobody
ever came near these tracks, Sinclair’s remains would never be found.
Bliss skidded to a halt
on the clearing’s spring grass, tipped her face to the sky, and gulped air.
Clouds, in an oppressive charcoal blanket, smothered most of dawn’s light. She
grimaced. Ah damn, a storm. No wonder it’d been so gloomy in the forest. Time
to cut her run short and take the train tracks home.
To add speed, Bliss
edged out her Eli genetics. Many times the speed of an Earth human, she dashed
through a wind whipped meadow. At the train embankment, she lunged up the steep
gravel siding to the top then adjusted her stride so each step fell on a
recycled cement and plastic cemeplas sleeper. A flash of blue light, a clash of
thunder’s deepest bass exploded, vibrating the surrounding air. Eek, come on
legs, go faster. She rounded Death Bend. What the hey?
Bliss stumbled over the
dismembered body of a dead man. A scream ripping free, she spun and fell to her
knees. Eli metal thundered in her veins, silver bloomed on her skin and swirled
in her eyes.
Gene—oh my fates, Gene
cut into slices as if laid out in macabre banquet portions.
At three hundred miles
an hour, freight trains with six carbide wheels per axle tore along this trio
of tracks. Crusted blood and the starkness of bones exposed by the severing
suggested multiple trains travelling on differing tracks had sliced through his
corpse in gruesome precision.
Bile seared the back of
her throat as her metals formed a light exoskeleton over her human skin. Bliss
flung herself sideways and vomited down the embankment.
She forced down her
remaining stomach contents, calmed her Eli, and did what she didn’t want to
do—turned back.
A neon blue flash
highlighted the gore. She jumped as the clap of thunder thickened into a rue of
pine and ions. With their blood ten percent liquid metal, lightening liked to strike
Eli and Crea dumb enough to remain exposed. Being fried wasn’t high on her list
of ways to die. She had to get home, out of the storm, and phone the sheriff.
She looked at Gene’s
body. God, this was…dang—she couldn’t think of a word bad enough. Death Bend
Near the decapitated
head she noted a sweet scent. Great now she’d have to see what that scent was.
Feeling as if someone had wedged a shoe in her throat, she peeled her lips
back, braced herself for what she was about to do to, leaned forward, and
sniffed near the decapitated head.
Bourbon fumes wrinkled
her nose. She turned into the cold wind to cleanse her nostrils of booze and
death. Crap cakes. Had he come for a run, fallen, and been too drunk to get up?
Fallen and knocked himself out then the train came? Drunk or not, why was he
out here? His lodge on Eli Clan reserve was on the other side of Katoom, an
easy twenty miles from this bend.
She blinked back more
tears. “What happened?”
Yeah, she didn’t expect
an answer.
She went to close the
dead eyes, so unlike the laughing ones she remembered, and stopped an inch from
contact. Oops, she better not contaminate him with her scent. Peter, the
sheriff, would give birth to a bear if she touched the body before he’d
processed the scene and gone through all the correct procedures.
Katoom’s small
population was a mix of Earth humans and the alien Eli and Crea. This
Subspecies cohabitation was rare. Even in large cities, the species tended to
live in separate suburbs but, usually, the Eli and Crea preferred to live on
large tracts of land.
All regions of
coexistence were constantly scrutinized by the ever vigilant feds, the
sensation hungry media, and the alien haters who wanted the return to old world
wars and Subspecies genocide. They prayed for infractions and spied on all
alien clans.
To keep focus on Katoom
minimal, Peter crossed his T’s with precision to all laws. She hadn’t taken her
personal link on her run so she had to wait till she was home to contact him.
She ran her palms along
her cooling thighs and stared at the body. She went to stand to head home. Hang
on. She half crouched and peered closer at Gene’s neck. Two inches above where
his head had been severed from the rest of him, a jagged cut gaped and a large
portion of flesh hung, joined to the whole by a thread of pale bloodless skin.
She glanced at the other body pieces, and her chest ratcheted from tense to
tenser.
The torso slices had
been cut with almost laser precision. No torn flesh. No ragged edges. No chunks
cleaved from the whole.
But the throat had been
hacked and didn’t come near to separating that section of neck in two.
She gusted out a
horrified gasp and dry heaved, flung her hand to her mouth and kept it there.
She would not vomit on Gene. She peered closer and saw a windpipe and carotid
artery. She flicked her gaze to the gravel to calm herself. That was odd. Gene
was big, six-feet-seven tall, and two-eighty pounds of muscle. Yet, she
couldn’t see much blood and barely any metal dust. Not much blood at all. Even
little rabbits bled more than these few trickles.
Where the hell could all
his blood have gone?
She rocked back onto her
heels. A squall whipped her hip length hair around her body. Heart ricocheting
around her chest like a well hit racquetball, she shot to her feet.
Shit, shit, shit. Gene
hadn’t died here.
She swallowed hard and
surveyed the surrounding tree line, flinched when a dark shadow moved, when the
light shifted with the clouds.
Someone sliced his
throat, bled him out, then moved and dumped his body.
Her metal rose so high,
she tasted its metallic sourness on her tongue. She had to scent the murderer,
to know who did this. She dropped to her knees again. Head close to the ragged
wound, she inhaled deeply. From deep within Gene’s massacred throat, the
faintest waft of a foreign scent bit at the back of her throat
The killer? Of course,
it’s the killer, stupid. What other scent would be inside Gene’s flesh? But why
was it so weak? It hadn’t rained to wash it away. She shook her head, took
another draw of air, rolled the aromatic molecules of the alien scent over her
tongue and scent receptors, and sifted through the data of stored scents in her
brain.
Please don’t be someone
I know, please. No buzzing and no internal recognition. No one she knew, thank
the gods. But now she’d be able to identify the scent’s owner if they came
near. Forensics would use a scent collector to gather the killer’s scent then load
it into the national database and seek a match.
She turned, ran for
home, and prayed a killer didn’t watch or know she’d scented him.
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About the Author:
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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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GIVEAWAY:
$50 amazon GC
3 comments:
thanks for having on today - I appreciate the support.
Just one clicked this book, excited to read it!
Just one clicked this book, excited to read it!
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