Twin
Flames by Cassandra L Shaw
Katoom
Series
Book
One
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.
“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 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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