Chapter 1
Brawley drove north on 75 then west on 10, Texas bound.
Remi rode shotgun, grinning fiercely. Her bare feet were pressed into the dashboard. She had showered away the gore and borrowed sweatpants from Nina and one of Brawley’s white T-shirts, the excess fabric of which she had lifted over her midriff, gathered behind her, and tied off, creating a hammock for her tremendous breasts.
Nina generated a telekinetic barrier that kept the RV’s damaged windshield from buckling. She spent the drive machine-gunning tangled curses and pacing back and forth, all jacked up about the albino tiger and the steaming carnage they had fled in Miami.
Sage lay upon the Murphy bed, blond and beautiful and stark naked, pale as a shaft of moonlight with a tiny calico cat curled up against her tummy.
Now the sun was up, and they were passing through the Panhandle, nearing their first stop.
“Here,” Remi said, pointing to the peeling billboard half lost to roadside foliage.
Redneck Riviera RV Park and Fun Center.
Beneath the faded letters, a smiling cartoon alligator in sunglasses held a volleyball. Across the alligator’s midsection, a black-and-white sign announced Closed Forever.
Across the whole billboard, glowing psi script warned, Scar turf. Stay the fuck out or suffer the consequences.
“Scar turf,” Nina read aloud, standing between Brawley and Remi, who filled the front seats. “Your gang must’ve missed the memo on Southern hospitality.”
“It’s all or nothing with the Scars,” Remi said. “No better friend, no worse enemy. Love or hate. Hope I’m still on the happy side of the fence.”
“Wait,” Nina said, her mismatched eyes swelling with apprehension. “We’re about to enter the turf of a Carnal biker gang, and there’s a chance you’re not on good terms?”
Remi shrugged her toned shoulders, bringing the tattooed murals to life. “I haven’t visited since becoming a bounty hunter. A lot of Scars are ex-cons. We’ll see.”
“Great,” Nina said, and gave Brawley’s shoulder a squeeze. The bullet wound there was completely healed, as were his broken bones and all the internal damage he had suffered in Heaven and Hell. Opening his Carnal strand had even healed the career-ending neck injury he’d received getting stomped by Aftershock.
“Why don’t you just drop me off here,” Nina said, “and I’ll sleep in the weeds.”
Remi grinned. “Those weeds are full of gators and copperheads.”
“Don’t worry, darlin,” Brawley said, reaching back to rub Nina’s lower back. Then he hit the blinker.
It would be good to get off the road. He wasn’t stiff or sore or tired. Those days were behind him now. But eight hours on the road was a long damn time any way you cut it, and he was ready to stretch his legs.
“Yeah,” Remi said, and ran a hand up Nina’s thigh. “We’ll take care of you.”
Nina wriggled away and slipped behind Brawley’s seat. His first wife was in a strange place, he knew. She was still frightened of Remi, who had hauled her off to jail in the past. But the two were bonded now. Nina was twitchy with fear and desire.
“The Scars have a dozen spots like this,” Remi said, as they pulled down a narrow lane that tunneled through the heavy roadside foliage. “Old campgrounds, safe houses, motor lodges. They’re always on the move. We probably won’t even see them.”
“Ugh,” Nina groaned. “I hate that word.”
“What word?”
“Probably,” Nina said, gripping Brawley’s shoulder and the RV jounced over a large mud puddle. “Anytime someone tells me not to worry because something probably won’t happen, it’s guaran-fuckin-teed gonna happen.”
The thick forest gave way to a wide clearing dominated by a small lake over which a mantle of dissipating fog sparkled in the early morning light. Cabins dotted the shoreline.
To the right, a block building with boarded-up windows stood before a cracked and faded parking lot. Weeds bristled from the cracked macadam. Huddled close to the abandoned building were courts for volleyball and basketball, a tot lot playground, and an oval swimming pool.
“Look,” Nina said, sounding excited, “a pool.” But as they drove past, she groaned again.
Beyond a sagging chain-link fence, the pool was empty save for a shallow puddle of green water dotted with litter.
Brawley headed toward the cabins. The plan was to crash here for a couple of days while a Gearhead Remi knew fixed the RV.
Red-winged blackbirds cried from atop swaying weeds that towered above the overgrown lawns surrounding the cabins. Out of this weedy field, vines had slithered like snakes to scale the cabins, the trash cans, the trees, everything.
“See?” Remi said. “The place is empty.”
They parked beside a large, lakeside cabin. Sage woke and stretched, making Brawley ache with desire. The little calico blinked her big, amber eyes, stretched, dropped lightly to the ground, and slunk away into the back of the RV.
An outsider would have no way of determining that the skinny feline was actually a deadly young Beastie whose only possession in the world was the Desert Eagle .50 AE she’d taken from the corpse of an infamous psi mob hitman whom she’d killed.
Brawley went out into the morning.
It felt good to stretch his legs. The day was already hot and humid. The air was rich with a good, green smell, like a field of alfalfa after a soft rain.
The cabin was a crude, clapboard affair half-covered in a kudzu, but it would do. He liked the porch and figured it would be good to sit in the rockers that evening, drinking a beer and talking to his women and watching fish strike bugs out on the lake.
A picnic table robed in kudzu squatted a short distance from the cabin, half-hidden in the tall grass like a massive predator.
With this thought, his mind shifted again to the albino tiger. That son of a bitch was a genuine, grade A problem.
The albino tiger wasn’t just a Beastie. He barbecued those people with electrokinetic lightning. And according to Sage, only Cosmics could generate wormholes.
Which meant, despite what everybody said about the Culling, that the Order screwed up twenty-three years earlier. Because the albino tiger was clearly a power mage.
The bastard had even shown up in Brawley’s dreams.
He didn’t even know what that meant.
What he did know was the albino tiger had murdered his parents and now wanted to kill Brawley and his women.
Which meant the black-and-white son of a bitch had to die.
But not yet.
Throwing down with that cat right now wouldn’t be swagger. It would be suicide.
Brawley had formed a game plan on the long drive. It was time to lay low. Go to ground. Gather strength.
Head home to Texas, explore his new powers, master splicing, and maybe meet some new girls along the way.
Then, he’d go tiger hunting.
First, however, they would catch their breath in this overgrown campground. Everyone was cloaked now, so they could stay hidden easily enough.
And Remi knew a local Gearhead who could fix the RV’s windshield, seal the buckshot holes, and maybe even improve the Winnebago’s gas mileage, which would be nice, since filling the RV hit the wallet harder than funding an open bar at an Irish wedding.
Inside the cabin the air was stale and hot, but the place was in good shape. Dusty yet dry, with cobwebs in the corners but no sign of mice or snakes, which was nothing short of miraculous for an abandoned lakefront cabin in Florida.
He saw a kitchen, a living room with a big sectional couch, and a hallway that led to bedrooms and bathrooms.
Brawley started hauling shit inside, wanting to grab clothes and food and firearms before delivering the RV to Remi’s Gearhead friend. It would be a good idea to clean up the blood, too. There was a lot of it.
The girls started unpacking but soon stopped to argue over sleeping arrangements. Apparently, none of the cabin’s beds were big enough to fit Brawley and his three women.
He let them have at it but figured they’d give Callie one room and drag two king-size mattresses into the living room so he and other three girls could all sleep together.
Sleep. Heh.
This would be interesting.
“Fuck that,” Remi said. “You guys already had a go with him. He’s mine tonight.”
“Illogical,” Sage said. “Our husband’s most recently had sexual intercourse with you.”
“Yeah,” Remi said with a cocky grin, “and he loved it.”
Brawley set an armload of ammo on the kitchen table and headed back outside. He paused on the porch to watch a blur of hummingbirds zipping back and forth from a feeder hanging from the roof beam.
His intuition prickled. The red juice inside the feeder was running low, but it couldn’t have been filled too long ago. Surely not so long as it had taken for the campground to look like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Who had filled it?
But then Callie surprised him, emerging from the RV in one of his white t-shirts, which hung most of the way to her knees.
It was the first time he had seen her in human form.
Callie was a scrawny little thing, skinny arms and legs and seemingly no figure at all in the t-shirt, which hung from her narrow shoulders like a thin cotton smock. She had a cute face with big, amber-colored eyes and a tiny button nose.
Her most striking feature, however, was her straight, shimmering hair, which she had pulled back in a long, loose ponytail that spilled down her back like a multicolored waterfall. Her hair was nearly as mottled as her fur, a vaguely brunette cascade shot through with streaks of blond, red, and jet black. A line of pure white stretched from her forelock across the crown of her head and emerged, diminished, from the twisted scrunchy in a prism of white hairs that sparkled among the other colors like fresh snow in the morning light.
“Hey,” Callie said, offering a nervous half-smile.
“Morning,” Brawley said, and for the thousandth time had to stop his reflex to tip the hat he no longer wore. “Sleep good?”
Callie gave a little nod. She seemed to be having a hard time meeting his eyes. She would look at him and look away. Look, then look away. Long lashes fringed her big, nervous eyes.
“Hope you don’t mind. I borrowed one of your shirts,” Callie said with a self-conscious laugh. “It’s a little big.”
Looking down at herself, she smoothed her hands over the white fabric, flattening the thin cloth to her naked body and making her tiny nipples poke out. “Oh,” she said, turning bright red, and released her hands, which didn’t seem to know what to do then, fluttering in and out of each other like flustered butterflies before her lower abdomen.
“I don’t mind,” Brawley said.
Callie bit her lip and grew even brighter red. “You don’t?”
“Nope,” Brawley said, grinning at her for a second before adding, “You can borrow my shirt.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked at the ground again, either disappointed or embarrassed. Or maybe both.
Brawley wasn’t going to waste time worrying about it. He wanted to crack his Beastie strand, but he didn’t know where this girl’s head was at. Until a couple of days ago, she’d been traveling from tourist trap to tourist trap, the star of her uncle’s Cat Wizard show.
Now her uncle was dead, and she was on the run with a band of fugitives, all of them—Callie included—with blood on their hands.
So no, he didn’t know where her head was and doubted she did, either. How could she?
Besides, Callie seemed young. Like really young.
Legal, he reckoned, but he wouldn’t go putting it to some lost little girl who didn’t know whether she was horny or horrified.
He would protect her. And yes, maybe more down the road. But for now, he would clothe and feed the poor girl and help her get her life back on track.
“Why don’t you head inside and listen to the girls argue,” he said. “It’s fixing to get downright interesting.”
Callie gave him half a smile. “Okay. Thanks, Brawley.”
He climbed back into the RV, got a load of food, and carried it inside, where he grinned to see Callie disappearing into the back bedroom and the other girls wrestling one of the king-sized mattresses into the hallway.
Sometimes, it’s best to just let people figure things out on their own.
He went back and forth, hauling stuff from the Winnebago into the cabin. The girls dragged out a second mattress, creating a gigantic futon, and started unboxing things from the RV.
Callie’s head popped into the hall, her tiny nose twitching. “I smell mice.”
“Time to earn your keep, cat girl,” Remi said. “You a good mouser?”
Callie cocked a hip and crossed her skinny arms over her chest. “I liked you better when you were hobbled.”
Remi smiled wolfishly. “Good luck getting one on me again, kitty cat.”
Callie shot her daggers and stomped back into her room, seeming like pretty much every teenage girl Brawley had ever known.
“We’re taking bets,” Nina said. “You want in, cowboy? Ten bucks.”
“What’s the bet?”
Nina beamed. “We’re guessing what kind of Beastie you’ll be.”
“I hypothesize that you are a bull,” Sage said, as she knelt on the floor to stretch a sheet across one mattress. “Bestials manifest in what one might call their spirit animals, and bulls have obviously played a significant role in your life.”
“You can say that again,” Brawley said, figuring the sexy librarian turned outlaw was probably right. It was a strange thought, having some wild animal locked up inside him, waiting to break free.
“Fuck that,” Remi said. “My man is all stallion. A wild mustang running free, huge cock and all.”
Brawley laughed.
Nina shook her head, grinning mischievously. “He’s a stork.”
“Stork?” they said in unified confusion.
“Sure,” the purple-haired telekinetic said. “He’s tall, quiet, and deadly.”
“Deadly? Lions and tigers and bears are deadly,” Remi said, “not storks.”
“Tell that to fish,” Nina said. “There used to be a stork that hunted the creek behind juvie, and he—”
Brawley slapped his tough little punker on the ass. “If I’m a stork, darlin, maybe I’ll bring you a baby soon.”
Nina scooted away from him. “Don’t look at me like that, cowboy. I’m down with having your kids but not for a while.”
Brawley shifted his eyes to his newest wife.
Remi shook her head. “Not me, handsome. Carnals are fertile for life, and we live a long, long time. We breed late.”
Brawley glanced toward Sage, who squinched her nose, inching her glasses up the bridge. “Husband,” she said, “you might recall Tammy’s reluctance to bring her children into this dangerous environment. That concern presently rings true. I do, however, look forward to bearing your children in the future. Until then, you will find it difficult to impregnate us.
“Psi mages are far healthier than fuggles. We are generally fit and disease free, highly resistant to viruses, and have practically no incidence of allergies or autoimmune conditions. We never contract sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy occurs only if both parties desire conception.”
Brawley nodded, taking it all in. So my parents wanted me. Even if they gave me up as a newborn, they wanted me.
“All right,” he said, looking from woman to woman, “but once things settle down, I want kids.”
“I would let you put a baby in me right now,” Callie said matter-of-factly, coming into the room with a bowl of cereal. She flopped down cross-legged on the couch and took a big spoonful of Fruit Loops.
The other girls just stared at her with dropped jaws.
“What?” Callie said, then froze, a little milk dribbling down her chin, which turned bright red along with the rest of her cute face. “I mean, if we… you know… if we were together is what I mean.”
“Skinny little thing like you?” Nina said. “Brawley would split you in half, girlfriend.”
Callie brightened deep scarlet.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
