February 4

Wolf Heart Excerpt

(It has come to my attention that my links are off, so I am reposting some book excerpts I can’t find on my site anymore.)

1

The world puts demands on us. Endure this, it says. Survive this, it dares. However, the higher powers, if there are any, have no understanding of who we are. They arbitrarily deal out trauma, pain, and despair. With each survival, the stakes grow. Survive this.

It wasn’t enough that a freak twist of genetics gave me the painful ability to shift into a wolf. Life had to deal hand after hand at me, giving me little time to adjust or realize where the game would end. There had to be a catch. After years of finding a solitary solace in the velvet of the night, my peace shattered with the appearance of one of my own kind.

He was gray, darker over his snout and across his eyes. The tip of his tail, too, was darker. A raccoon in a lupine shape. He caught me by surprise while I was stalking a rabbit into the brush of the woods.

Wolves are native to parts of Tennessee, but the mountain parts, the wooded parts. Not the muddy, scrubby piece of land next to my parents’ neighborhood that the home builders had cleared, but hadn’t built on yet. He smelled different than the dogs from the neighborhood and the wolves from the zoo. Deep and musky, like only a carnivore can smell, with an accent of the woods. But he smelled like cheeseburgers, too. And lemonade.

He was definitely trouble. The life-changing kind of trouble. My hackles rose, and I crept around him stiff-legged, fur puffed out. He stood between me and my home, on land I’d considered my territory since before I grew fur for the first time. And he wouldn’t leave.

The wolf stood regally, fur slick in the glimmer of the moonlight coming through the trees. Tail high. Dominant, I thought, though before that moment, I’d never put the stance and the idea together. He let me stalk around him and slip into the cover of the few remaining trees. The wolf didn’t move. He just stood, making sure I knew he was there. He wanted to be seen. I never wanted to see another of my own kind. I wanted to hold onto the freedom of being alone and wild a few nights each month.

Which, of course, meant I’d see him again.

I loped across the red mud and over the swollen creek that separated the developed and razed sections of the same neighborhood. I dodged the pools of light under the street lamps because the neighborhood association had rules about loose dogs. Or wolves.

My father had left the garage door open just enough for me to roll under it, into the cool dark of his oversized workshop. I changed back into a human, or as human as I’d ever get, gritting my teeth against the discomfort and ache of my body popping joint from joint, reshaping my frame then healing it back into place. I dug spare jeans and a shirt from a cabinet that once held rags and, ignoring the streaks of red mud that somehow made it all the way past the fur to my skin, I slipped the clothes on before I ventured inside.

There was a time before I started turning into a wolf on the nights of the full moon. As far as my mother and sister knew that’s all there was–an endless, routine-filled life of normalcy. My brother? Well, the first time I shape shifted, three years ago, when I was almost sixteen, it was to save him from drowning in the creek, when he’d fallen from a tree. I’d certainly remember if someone had turned into a big man-wolf, or in my case, woman-wolf, and pulled me from a current that was trying to drown me. But if he did remember, he never said anything. Those moments of sibling sympathy and understanding we used to have ended that spring afternoon. Since then, when he looked at me, his eyes filled with a coldness that I couldn’t melt.

My dad was washing dishes in the kitchen when I entered. Mom was probably putting my little sister, Erin, to bed. Daniel would be hidden in his room, watching television and pretending to do homework. Dad greeted me with a grin and a silly, soap-covered wave. My dad is like an excitable little boy when it’s just him and me, when he wasn’t an overruled shadow of my mother.

“How did it go? What did you do tonight?”

I got my looks from him: tall, a shapeless sort of skinny that my mother finds particularly annoying on a daughter, and dark hair and eyes. I got the wolf blood from him too. He was my only confidant, sometimes my only friend, in the half life I live. Because he was the only one who knew. Still, I didn’t want to tell him about the other wolf. Not yet.

“Nothing really. I just ran around in the field. I found a rabbit, but it got away.”

“You’re muddy. You should try to sneak into the bath before your mom realizes you’re home.”

He was a little jealous, I think. He couldn’t slip skins. His grandfather did. But I’m the first in the family since then. He seemed to hold onto the hope that he might become a wolf one night. Out of everything I’d done, being a wolf–the thing I was born with, not something I had achieved–garnered the most attention and the most pride from him.

He gave me a kiss on the head, because he was still tall enough to do that, before I slipped into the cavernous house. Avoiding my mother came naturally after nineteen years. Daniel and I used to band together to support each other under her implacable attitude, but these days he seems like a ghost in the family. My little sister on the other hand, was Mom’s mirror.

And me, I was just the family werewolf.

_

2

When I wasn’t shape shifting, life was pretty ordinary. I lived with my parents in a large home in the rolling hills of Tennessee. I was the oldest of three kids, but I felt like I was just filling space in the family until my mother could think of a better use for it. Until then, I was a free baby sitter.

I graduated and sort of kept going without changing much at all. I had barely given high school a thought since I left, except for the occasional flashback dream where I plead with my teachers that I had already graduated, and didn’t need to take that test. I didn’t remember seeing any of my classmates since senior year, and to be honest, I didn’t really miss them.

I did have a job. I wasn’t just an adult child living at home. I worked at the Belle, Liberty’s local paper. I’m not sure it would even count as work experience if I tried to get a job at a larger paper because most of those places require degrees.

I was staff photographer. Yes, the staff photographer. It was a very small paper, and I’d been the assistant photographer for four years when my boss retired. I had been working there as long as I’d been shifting shapes.

As I was leaving work one night, walking toward my car, I saw a man watching me. I’d noticed him before, at lunch, when I sat on a stone bench in the shade of a little garden nestled in the curve of the paper’s building. He was sitting in a car, in the driver’s seat, but with the door open, long legs hanging out. The paper shares a parking lot with a mini mall plaza. There’s no security, not even a fence between the two, so I barely gave him a look then. My lunch was also delicious and a light breeze had risen, swooping along the brick and into the little garden, rustling the summer leaves and my hair.

And here he was again, hours later, leaning against the same metallic green sedan. The glare of the sun had bleached his hair nearly white, and the distance made it hard to make out his features, even with my glasses. He was tall, with broad-shoulders and richly tanned skin peeking out of his loose-fitting clothes.

For a moment, I froze again. I looked human, but the thoughts running through my head were much the same in flesh or fur. Did he pose a danger? Was I overreacting? Was I under-reacting? Did I really want him to see which car I climbed into? Was there another way out of the parking lot?

I scoffed at myself and climbed into my dirty white compact, keeping an eye on the blond man. Paranoia rising, I drove over to the shopping center and stopped at the bookstore instead of going home. I didn’t see if he followed me, but I couldn’t settle down. Plus, I didn’t want to go home, where my agitated mother would be making dinner. That would be setting myself up for a bad night.

I was sitting on the floor, my back against a shelf, reading the first chapter of a mystery when I saw him again. The same shock of blond hair, the same long legs and arms, the same tanned skin. He wore stringy cut-off jean shorts and a green T-shirt. This close, I could see it had a stain on it. Stubble speckled his chin. Sweat beaded on his skin from standing out in the sun all day. I took in the lean, well-defined wrap of muscle over his frame. In the cool circulation of the store’s air conditioner, I could smell him, the same carnivore musk and cheeseburger smell I’d scented the night before.

A very inhuman snarl escaped my lips before I could stop it. He gazed at me. I pulled myself into a half-defensive, half-furious crouch.

“Shush, I’m not here to hurt you.”

I didn’t believe him. I knew what I could do, whether the moon was full or not. I knew how strong I was and how fast. And, to be honest, I’d read a lot of books about werewolves and someone was always fighting or kidnapping–or mating with–someone else.

He slipped between the shelves and fell into an easy crouch. We were only a few inches apart in height. I couldn’t help sizing him up as he stared at me, probably doing the same thing. The wolf prickled under my skin. Pressure built on my muscles. I was only used to feeling this way in the hour or so before a monthly shift. My fingertips and gums hurt. They felt like sharpened edges–not just parts of my body.

He moved right up against me and embraced me as if I were a friend. “Don’t change here. There are rules against it, and if you break them I won’t be able to help you. I’ll have to enforce the law.”

Rules, laws. Of course there were rules and laws. I’d known that as soon as I saw him in the woods. Days of running wild and free in the forgotten bits of the human world were over. Already I mourned them.

An employee walked by, then paused and backpedaled. “Can I help you find anything?”

“No,” the man said, giving a smile to the blue-frocked woman. “I just spotted my friend here. I haven’t seen her in a while.”

The employee kept her cheerful, soliciting smile. “We have a reading area…”

“It was full,” I said with a polite smile. The man hung his hands on his bent knees and tossed his hair out of his eyes.

“As long as you’re all right…”

The man nodded. I waved the book in my hand. The employee walked on. I gave her two seconds then turned on my stalker. “Who the hell are you? Why are you following me?”

“My name is Rick. I’m the pack leader here.”

“The pack…?”

“Yes, and I’m rather curious why you didn’t show proper courtesy and introduce yourself when you came into my territory.”

“Introduce myself? I didn’t come into the area. I was born in Chattanooga. We’ve lived in Liberty since I was three.”

“And it never occurred to you…”

“Nika,” I said.

“Nika, it never occurred to you to look for other people like you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Hadn’t thought about it?” Rick looked like he didn’t believe me. But from the first time I changed, the only werewolf thoughts that came to me were hiding it from my mother, and surges of longing or excitement, depending on what time of the lunar month it was.

“No, I didn’t. Besides how do you go around asking people if they’re a werewolf or not?”

“You thought you were the only one?” He touched me then, as if he had permission, as if we’d touched often before. He ran a long-fingered hand down the side of my cheek and tucked my hair back behind my ear.

“Of course not. But…” But I wasn’t sure what it meant. The feeling I’d had when I first saw him in furry form peaked. My voice shook. “I think I rather liked being the only one of my kind.”

Rick smiled. He looked amused. “I think you’ll like having company better.”

Category: My Work, Shifters Series | Comments Off on Wolf Heart Excerpt
May 30

A snippet from the WIP

From my work in progress, Gone to the Dogs

Jax jogged restlessly through the pines, cedars, and naked oaks of the “tame woods”. It was technically on the human side of their territory. Some human, many years ago, had paved a trail through and culled diseased wood, even planted woodland flowers and erected a few bronze and stone statues. But then they let it grow wild again, save for occasionally mowing the grass in the play ground area or clearing storm debris from the trail.

The asphalt had aged badly, tree roots giving it ridges and peaks and distance markings fading into faint white spots here and there.

There were no laws banning natives from public human areas. There couldn’t be, it was part of the treaty. That hadn’t stopped them from seeking many ways around the treaty over the years. But this park had always been public property. So the wolves patrolled, because humans couldn’t be trusted to protect the borders.

To be honest, they couldn’t be trusted to do much. Even this new one, the one many were starting to call Alex’s pet human. She couldn’t be bothered to act in a way he understood.

His stomach itched where his stitches had been, though they’d come out a while ago. It was thinking about her that did it. Her hands had been inside him. She’d touched him in ways even his kin never would. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t sure he could complain. He didn’t even remember it, just knew what he’d been told after. But that knowledge made him uncomfortable, itchy under the skin.

There were plenty of other wolves with different views on humans. Outright hunting them for food or sport was banned, but there were other kinds of hunting. Some young males made a game of bedding them. It appeared to be easy, and the males enjoyed the attention of a warm female body or two. Where the wolf females could be demanding and picky, human females threw themselves at anything exotic that gave them a smoldering look, or bought them something pretty.

Jax never had any interest in such games. Humans were a thing best categorized with items like swamps, hurricanes, and crocodiles. Whatever good they had was out balanced by their irritation factor. They were better off as far away from him, his life, as he could keep them. Far enough to pretend they didn’t exist most of the time.

Now he felt intimately linked to one. Heather, his twin, felt it too, but she seemed more curious than repulsed. It would be easier if he could adopt her path. Or her, his. He felt…infected.

Still, when Curtis, one of Elliot’s litter mates, had sneered, made a crude comment and joked about “forgetting” to include the human woman in the manor’s security plan, there’d been a fight. The kind of fight where he still tasted Curtis’ blood in his mouth. Curtis backed down, but grudgingly. It also sat wrong with Jax.

They didn’t choose who was pack and who wasn’t, who lived at the manor, and who didn’t. They were just charged with protecting it. All of it, not just some of it. The elders had even approved of the human woman’s position. He didn’t like her, but neither could he say she deserved to have backs turned on her when it came to her safety. She’d done nothing to deserve that either.

But it made the taste of blood no less bitter in his mouth. His sister called him troubled. Afflicted was more like it, but what with he couldn’t determine. So he put all that uncertainty to good use and patrolled.

Only part of the border between human land and native was guarded by a wall. Well, a wall humans would recognize. Here it was a six foot chain link fence, decorated with warning signs. In other places it was woods too thick to cut through, or cliffs too steep to climb to trap you until area patrols conveniently wandered upon you.

Part of him missed the wilder places, where he didn’t smell the chemical tang of human. There were places that were greener, waters that were bluer in the world. Places with hundreds of thousands of miles of space to run. Where you could wander for years and still not see all the Mother had created.

Yet here he was.

There were reasons he stayed here. He liked running with four strong legs beneath him. He liked working with his hands too, and in this community something always needed to be built, repaired, or expanded. There was also the community itself. It was…more civilized. No, that wasn’t the right word. It was very wrong. It was a different kind of civilized.

In the north west, where he came from, the clans had no shared spaces. They would never think to call another species’ community. Friend, that happened. Lover, also occasionally. The clans didn’t hesitate to come together for safety or trading. But to call someone from another clan brother, like Alex did with Dane and Cerulean? That never happened.

Jax shook out and let his fur settle back into place. The way the clans interacted here confused him sometimes. Throwing a human into the mix was just asking for trouble.

His face crinkled in a wolf-grimace. A tree had fallen on the fence here. One half of the forked branch had been impaled on the post. The other had pulled down the fence. And a long time ago, too, judging by the number of vines, brown and dried, twisting through the chain link.

This section of the fence bordered about a mile of wolf pack maintained woods before it let out at the pack homes. It wasn’t exactly close to the majority of the pack’s homes. But there wasn’t enough between it and the wolves for Jax’s comfort.

He sniffed over the area. Most of the scents were stale. A beer can, a soda bottle, half-decayed plastic wrap. A ground hog had been by. Someone had nailed short, weathered boards along the trunk of a nearby tree.

Jax widened his circle. The acrid scent of piss hit his nose. His lip pulled back automatically. It was part sneer, part instinctual reflex to taste the scent. Human, male, he decided. He sneezed to clear his nose. Then he looked around.

This wasn’t just some hiker relieving himself. He was half a mile from a trail on the human side of the fence. The space between here and there was thickets, young trees, and deer paths. A forester might explore, or a hunter. But not a casual passerby.

The way the scent arched too, Jax looked up. Someone had sat in the tree, probably using the boards to climb and had relieved himself while still in the limbs.

This time when his lip curled it was from disgust. The fence would have to be repaired. And soon. Someone could easily watch them from here.

The boom took him by surprise. Jax launched himself forward automatically, but when he landed his right fore leg screamed in protest and gave out. He rolled in the dirt, trying to shake off the confusion. The brush rattled. Moments later two noisy, would-be hunters thundered through the woods toward him.

“I know I hit something,” the first said.

“Yeah, probably someone’s dog,” the second voice chided.

“Shut up.”

They pushed through and caught sight of him at the same time. Jax’s hackles rose, a snarl rolling from his throat. Blood dripped from the wound in his shoulder, wetting the leg he tried to hide weakness in.

“Oh, fuck, you shot a wolf.”

Jax puffed himself up more but refrained from taking a step toward them, their scents already spiked with fear.

Chase, bite, tear, his wolf side snarled. Make them hurt like you hurt. But his man side was aware of the guns they held, and the danger of chasing humans into human lands where more humans and more guns were sure to be.

His front leg hurt enough to be useless, so the obvious choice was to shift up and use his rear legs. One of the humans screamed, only to cut himself off when Jax took to two legs.

“Oh shit, oh shit, you shot one of them!”

The men turned and ran, one throwing his long gun at Jax before he spun. The weapon skidded across the leaves. Jax jumped away automatically, though the urge to chase spiked when they ran. The scent of their fear was a heady thing, appealing in his current state.

Instead he turned away, to help fight the need to chase. He felt the grind of his shoulder and snarled again. When he was younger, twelve or so, another boy had attacked him with a crappy blade that snapped off inside his skin. Now he recognized the feeling of metal in a wound.

That meant a trip to Jai instead of even a tiny chase. Cursing, and still covered in fur, Jax snatched up the abandoned gun and began his trudge back to the compound.

That fence was definitely getting fixed, and immediately.

Category: Dogs series, My Work | Comments Off on A snippet from the WIP
September 14

Wild Heart Preview

**Coming Very Soon

 

wildheartcoversmall

 

The woods smelled perfect, like rain and rich, moist soil, and faintly, underneath the evergreens, like strange werewolf. Michael’s lip curled up in a smile.

Two months ago a pack war erupted over the fifty-odd square miles of prime territory where Michael had lived his whole life. Many people, even friends, died. But now the land was his, and nothing would take it away.

The Wolf burst through his skin. Between one stride and the next he landed on four feet, pushing himself off the ground and over a fallen log across the trail. Behind him four good warriors, male and female alike, shifted to wolf and began the chase.

Michael’s legs covered the trail in a ground-eating lope. Silence wasn’t as important as speed. Neither was as important as intelligence. Michael knew the land well enough to have two other teams coming from other directions.

No escape had become something of a motto of his.

An abandoned house loomed around the next curve. Most of the roof had fallen over, giving the appearance that some enthusiastic swordsperson had sheared off a corner. The faded wood siding hung from the facade in places and the whole building smelled strongly of wet and mold.

A large shadow-blob darted from the veil of kudzu and bindweed, climbing the walls. It tried to flatten itself to the ground, as if it could slip past them unnoticed, but Michael and his lupercus had gotten very good at ferreting out the Wolves who came to Liberty looking to grab a piece of what they thought was a war-torn land.

Michael’s legs bunched and thrust, pushing him forward until he collided maw-first with the foreign wolf. Teeth sank through fur and met flesh. Michael felt the impact when one of his lupercus collided with the enemy from the other side. Michael tried for the throat, but the wolf twisted and he hit shoulder instead.

Blood was still blood.

One of the lupercus didn’t miss. More of the rich velvet smell hit the air as someone—probably Angie—tore the back of the foreign wolf’s leg open, hamstringing him.

Michael let the fight move a few steps away. She’d more than hamstrung him. His left rear leg was snapped, bone barely even attached to itself by tendon and gristle. Within a breath Michael was human again, a blond mass of a man towering over even the unusually-large wolves tussling before him.

Michael snatched up the invader by his scruff and held him up. “Human, now and we’ll talk. Or you can keep fighting and die.”

The wolf snarled and flailed. He tried to twist around and take a chunk from the arm Michael held him with. So Michael dropped him to the lupercus waiting below.

Ten minutes later he still stood nearby, leaning against a maple, finally starting to recover from a long, hard winter. It was hard to convince northern wolves, but in Tennessee, three weeks below freezing and five days subzero was a hard winter. Plus, somehow, the land knew when there were bad leaders on it. He firmly believed this and took heart in every sign of burgeoning spring.

Some of the other wolves laughed and called him superstitious. Maybe. But the land knew.

“Alpha?”

One of his transplants, Angie, stood before him, covering her chest with her arm. She was an oddball of a person. Short brown hair, cut in a bob, with chocolate brown eyes that developed gold sparks when she was pissed off. She was as modest as a werewolf who occasionally shifted in places without clothes could be. Plus, somewhere along the family line, someone had decided werewolf genes weren’t fun enough and bred in dwarfism.

The lycanthrope and dwarf genes battled it out through her adolescence, leaving her a solid five foot, shaped differently from a standard human, and thickly muscled. Her last pack had assumed a level of disability and forbidden her from holding a position. Michael made her his second when rebuilding the Liberty pack. He had yet to regret his decision.

“Angie?”

She blushed a little because he’d told her to stick to first names. Habits were hard to break. “They all three fought and we had to put them all down.”

He nodded in acknowledgment. He stopped feeling bad about killing people when one of his challengers tried to take his eye out of spite. He couldn’t take the land, so maiming others was apparently justified.

Assholes.

“I’m thinking about this shack, Angie. This is, what? The third time we’ve found a fight here?”

“Fourth,” Angie answered.

“I can’t decide if it would be better to torch it, or if it’s just damn convenient to let them keep hiding here.”

“I’d torch it, sire. Mark it with scent too. It’s like vermin: if you leave them an opening, they’ll think that it means they’re welcome here. Leave our scent and they’ll know we’re watching.”

Michael nodded. “Do it, but search the place thoroughly before. And have Ian help so we don’t start a forest fire.”

Michael’s third, Ian, was a seasoned werewolf and a seasoned firefighter.

“I want a ditch, three by three. Thom, Jennifer, search the place to make sure it’s useless first.”

Angie was back in wolf form before her words finished ringing through the air. Michael crouched down and grabbed a handful of soil. As the rich dark earth sifted between his fingers, he grinned. Annoying werewolf invaders or not, it was good to be home.

~

She watched the werewolves between the branches of the trees, unable to keep her lip from curling in disgust. This was supposed to be the middle of nowhere, dead space. Well, dead of civilization. Instead she’d found herself on the tail end of a werewolf war.

She’d curse, but she could barely breathe right now without them hearing.

This was bad. Real bad. But she still had time. She hoped.

Category: book news, My Work, Shifters Series | Comments Off on Wild Heart Preview
January 3

Onward to 2016

I know I don’t blog so much anymore. It just doesn’t seem like my day to day life is that important. “Hey, I got three pages written today” or “I took a day off and read a whole book today” don’t seem that exciting.

I am trying to get back into reviewing (and am starting to post my reviews here again, as well as managing MonsterLibrarian.com’ YA blog, Reading Bites.) I’m sure there will be weeks where reviews are all I get up here. But I hope, very much, to have real publishing news this year.

Category: My Work | Comments Off on Onward to 2016