by A. M Martin
FADER
Fader Clans Book One
slow burn reverse harem
A.M MARTIN
First published by A.M Martin in 2018
Copyright © A.M Martin, 2018
Cover Design by Infinity Book Covers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
First Edition
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
BLURB
FADER CLANS
One
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
Seven
Eight
Nine
TEN
acknowledgements
About the Author
MORE BOOK BY THE AUTHOR
BLURB
A QUEEN. A HAREM OF Kings. Can Shay really do this? Does she even have a choice in the matter?
Warning: This book is a Slow Burn Reverse Harem with a Cliffhanger ending.
My name is Shay. I'm nineteen years old. Every Fader in the country is after me.
I know what you’re thinking. That I either did something horrible or that I'm a criminal. None of those things are true. No. The only crime I committed was to be born a female with the wolf's god symbol on my skin.
We've been running. Running for nineteen years. They knew, my parents knew, and my mother's last dying wish was for my father to protect me. To run.
So, my father packed up his newborn twins, kissed his dying wife on the cheek and ran.
We've been running for nineteen years because of me. My brother hasn't had a normal life, because of me. My father took his last breath of air five days ago because of me. Because we've been running for nineteen years. No more.
FADER CLANS
WOLF: Come in all shapes and colors. When on the verge of Fading or tapping into their wolf side, their iris’ turn liquid gold and their canine teeth lengthen. When they Fader they turn into a wolf the size of a black bear.
Meal of Choice: Animal Meat.
Vampir: Come in all shapes and colors. Fading traits: their skin turns a slight violet hue. Their eyes turn to a deep purple. Double incisors descend from their gums. Meal of Choice: Blood, but they prefer other Faders to humans.
Breather: Their eyes give them away. A bright indigo blue at all times.
Fading traits- Their skin color is only two shades – porcelain white or onyx black. The indigo blue takes up their whole eyeball – not just the iris.
Meal of Choice: They prefer to breathe in other Faders, but will dine on humans when needed.
Nymph: They stay hidden. Come in the colors of their clans. Colors can range from blue, brown, grey, green, red. They stay Faded. Meal of Choice: Energy from anything. They can suck their meal dry, turn them into a husk if they want to. They can manipulate the elements to a small degree.
One
SHAY
SOME WOULD SAY IT'S a perfect day. A beautiful spring day. The sky is blue as can be, a few white fluffy clouds are rolling lazily across it. The sun is high, shining bright and proud, warming the Earth with its warm rays. The wind is a gentle flutter, flirting with the trees and grass. The birds are out in all their splendor, adding their spring song to the skies, and the flowers are blooming adding their own sweet smell to the wind. And it is all wrong. Absolutely, horribly, wrong.
The sky should be dark and menacing, with thunder booming its rage. No sun shining at all, instead lightning should be striking the ground for all it's worth. The birds and flowers should be in hiding. The wind should be resilient and formidable, smothering all sound with its howling. And the clouds should be pouring skin-cutting rain down upon everything, while her soul screams out in pain. Splintering more and more by the minute, the second.
No this is not a perfect spring day. It should be as Shay is, filled with all-consuming grief and rage that robs you of your breath and steals your very soul.
She digs her fingers deeper into the soft dirt where her father, her protector, her best friend, lays never to retake a breath. Never to feel the warm sun’s heat upon his skin. Never to know the simple pleasures of life again.
Shay closes her eyes as a lone tear falls slowly down her pale white cheek. After all these years. All these years of running, fights, and battles. A car. A damn vehicle is what steals his life from them. From her.
She can still smell his peppermint scent as if he's right beside her, kneeling in the freshly turned dirt with her.
"PUT YOUR SEATBELT ON, buttercup." My dad smiles, glancing over at me out of the corner of his dark, ocean blue eyes.
"Dad," I groan, still looking up out of the windshield, at the sky.
I don't put my seatbelt on. I hate seatbelts. It feels like it tries to strangle the very life out of me.
"It's getting really dark out," I say, watching the dark clouds roll over the dusky sky.
"Hmm," Dad says absentmindedly.
I look out the passenger side window again. I'm always watching, looking for those glowing eyes that never seem to be too far behind us. Forever biting at our heels.
A tan, muscular arm slams across my chest, knocking the air from my lungs, causing me to jerk, looking towards my dad. He looks at me with all the love in the world, and I just know this is it. This is it. The beginning of the end.
The old beat up truck slams into something hard. There's crunching and screams of pain. I'm thrown through the windshield, busting the glass into millions of tiny pieces. I grunt as the many shards cut up my face, arms, and torso. It seems like forever that I am flying through the sky only to slam into a tree.
I feel and hear my bones crack and break. My shoulder, ribs, arms and even some bones in my legs. I scream out in pain, landing in a bloody lump at the bottom of a big oak tree.
Tears stream down my face, along with the blood bubbling out of my mouth.
Damn, that hurts.
My breathing is painful as my lungs try to expand around my broken ribs.
My brother’s voice slams into my head from our link.
I slowly look back behind me and see that I flew over a deep hillside, clear to the bottom.
I grunt as my ribs pull back into place, healing and letting me take a full breath of ashy air. It's like razor blades going down my throat.
I sit up once my shoulder heals and twist around looking up at the hill. I'm what? Maybe forty feet from the road.
I take in another breath, hiding my pain from the link.
The scent of smoke reaches my nose, and my heart starts to gallop in my chest.
I don't hide the pain nor the fear from my brother this time. It’s hammering at my soul, stealing everything from me at this moment.
I crawl on my hands and one good knee, dragging my right leg behind me. I don't have time to wait for it to heal.
I feel my nails lengthen into claws as I start to climb up the muddy hill.
Halfway up my leg finally heals, and I'm on two feet,
running up the incline as fast as I can.
Boom. Whoosh.
The night sky lights up with a fiery rage as I top the hill.
Tears pool down my face as I watch the old blue ford go up in flames, along with the tree we crashed into.
My fists curl and uncurl, I whine as my claws cut through my palms, eyes set on the driver’s side and my father's flaming form.
It takes only three things to kill us, or so I thought. Too much damage to our heart, brain, or snapping our necks. Now I can add fire to that list, I think bitterly as I feel the heating blaze from the truck.
"Miss." A hand waves in front of my eyes and I lash out, with my right arm knocking whoever it is on the ground.
My only concern is the truck, watching the flames die from the truck and my father's burnt body.
"Miss."
I flip around, my fist aiming for a face. I feel the bone break under my hit, and the painful scream knocks me out of my trance, and I see I am not alone.
I look down at the bald man in a white uniform groaning on the ground.
"Young lady." A deep smoker’s voice pulls me from the crying man.
A cop. A fat cop stands in front of me, hands on his hips, wide hips.
I turn back around watching the flames, not caring about the men behind me, only caring about the fire that blazes in front. The flames are slowly getting smaller.
Fresh rain fills my nose at the same time two arms wrap around me from behind. Jay’s scent.
"Shay, I'm here." My brother's deep voice, so like my father’s, is the last thing that reaches me as I watch the fire burn out, smoke clogging up the air and sky.
SHAY HEARS A LAUGH. A full belly laugh that has her grinding her sharp teeth together and her small hands curling into fists.
She's pulled from her thoughts and sees dark, newly unearthed dirt.
DAD.
Shay looks over her shoulder and sees her twin brother surrounded by a group of friends and some other people. She doesn't have a clue who they are nor does she care.
She feels her lips peel back in a silent snarl. They shouldn't be here. They don't know her or Jay. Why Jay makes friends in every new place, they come to is stupid. It's not like they would have been staying in this town for much longer. They were to leave in four days. That's it, four freaking days. Now, instead of three going, it's just the two of them. As much as she wanted to stay with her father, she knew that she couldn’t. He would not want her to stay, she had to keep running.
They never stay in one place too long. Three months tops. They always move on. Constantly running because of Shay. Because of what she is.
Shay looks back down at the dirt, and another laugh rings out in the air. A growl bubbles up in her chest.
"They shouldn't be here." She snarls at her brother. Her voice is a wild thing, full of menace and uncaged energy.
The laugh stop. The talking stops.
"Shay." Her brother has an edge to his voice, the one he always gets when Shay says something he doesn't like.
She climbs slowly onto her knees then to her feet, eyes locked onto the dirt. A car crash. She snorts turning around.
"They should not be here." Shay snarls out once again, snapping her sharp teeth together.
These people didn't know her father. They didn't know how he’d put his kids before everyone and everything. How his smiles lit up a room. How he still hugged them, kissed their scrapes, and tucked them in like they were still little ones. How he’d always told her to ‘toughen up buttercup’ or ‘quit being so serious.’
"Don't do this." Her brother pleads, his ocean blue eyes going wide. But she ignores him.
"Leave." Shay's voice is quiet with a sinister edge, but they heard her. Heard the underlining threat. Everyone here looks at her with wide eyes, and pity.
"LEAVE." She snarls and watches as they scatter like the little bugs they are.
Jay looks his younger twin sister in the eyes for the first time today.
She sees the moment his breath catches and his eyes shine with unrelenting fear.
"Don't do this, Shay. Not right now." He says as he walks towards her, “Get a hold of yourself, please?”
Her head snaps to the right, ignoring her twin completely.
She feels Faders. And not standard Faders either. They’re the best of the best. The ghost hunters.
"They’re here." Shay snarls, body tense ready to move.
She reaches for Jay's hand the same time he reaches for hers. With one last look at her father's grave, they take off into the woods bordering the left side of the graveyard. Running. Always running.
TWO
SHAY
THE TREES THICKEN THE deeper the twins run into the woods. With her adrenaline pumping, Shay could almost forget that they're running again.
As she and Jay dodge tree after tree, climb up and over hills, jumping the odd bush or two, she could almost forget that they're running because they need to, not because they wanted to have fun like they used too.
She glances over her shoulder and sees Jay is one step behind her, like always. Whenever they raced or ran through the woods for fun, Shay always won. She smiled at the memory of their younger selves. So carefree and innocent. Now, look at them. Look at what the world has turned them into.
Shay jolts as she feels them moving closer. The ghosts. Hunters are a different breed of wolf and Fader altogether. They can mask their scent, their power, and because of this seem like ghosts. As though nothing is there. But Shay is also a very different breed of Fader, where they can mask themselves, and make anyone think they are not right on their heels like they are with the twins. Shay can still feel them. She can feel the way their powers pulses across the earth towards the twins. Each one has a different power signature. The two right behind the twins are close, possible relatives, the other two further back are much stronger
They break through a small overgrown clearing, weeds up to Shays' knees, and she stops.
"What's going on?" Jay asks, looking at his twin, concern shining in his deep blue eyes.
Jay rears back as he hears the something other in Shay's voice. The thing that always seems to want to come out and play. The thing that is wild and doesn’t like to stay leashed.
"Lock it away, Shay." He says quietly.
She growls and snaps her teeth. Pure animal. On edge.
She nods and moves back to the edge of the clearing while Jay turns around to face their followers.
Shay shrinks in on herself. Her slim arms wrap around her tiny waist. Her eyes go wide and frightened. Like always, she hides in plain sight like a scared little human girl –someone that unsuspecting eyes will pass over and dismiss. It's the first thing her dad had taught her. Always seem like she's nothing when really, she's everything that people and monsters should be afraid of and more. After all, she’s marked.
Shay watches as two dusty red wolves leap through the trees, lips already peeled back, showing off sharp white fangs and black gums.
They stop at the edge of the tree line. Jay's in the middle and Shay, she’s hunkered down on the ground at the back of the meadow, small whines slipping passed her clenched lips. Look like nothing. A scared, weak, human girl.
She watches them under her long golden eyelashes as the two wolves pace back and forth in front of her brother, not even paying her any kind of attention. Jay jerks as they release their hold on their power and scent, no longer blocking it, now that they had found their prey.
Shay feels her nails lengthen into deadly sharp claws. Jay could take one but not two. They're too strong for him together.
Her eyes snap to the tree line once more as the other two stalk forward.
The one on the right grabs her attention first. He's enormous and bald, muscular, dressed in a dark blue suit that looks like it's going to bust at the seams any second.
/> Who wears a suit on a chase?
The next one holds her eyes longer, as his campfire scent fills her sensitive nose.
He's shorter than Jay, who stands at 6'1, maybe by a few inches. His hair is a shaggy dirty blond, falling over his forehead. Her eyes move down; meeting with black eyes, he is dressed in a simple black tee and plaid red and black shorts with bright green Converse on his feet. There's a tattoo wrapping around his calf and on his shoulder, sticking out of the top of his tee. He stands slightly behind suit guy and to the left.
They make an odd pair.
Shay feels Jay straighten out. Her eyes snap to him. What's he up to?
"Whoa, you guys scared me? I thought you were a bunch of mutts." Jay chuckles, moving closer to the two in human form, only to be stopped up short by the dusty red wolves warning growl that hover to the right of the twins and in front of the ones in human form.
"Hey man, what's the deal?" Jay questions, his hands held out to his sides, palms turned towards them, placating.
Shay doesn't even need to see her twin’s face to know he has a pout on his lips.
She looks back to Skater Boy and sees his head cocked to the side, eyes on her.
"We're looking for the Silverton twins." Suit dude says with a twang in his deep voice.
"Ah, yeah well, no twins here." Jay chuckles, arms spread wide.
She watches with a predatory gleam as skater boy wolf comes to the forefront. She sees him. Like a shadow hazing over the dude's head.
That's another thing about Shay. Not only is she the only known female Wolf Fader in existence in ten years, but she can also see the Faders’ inner selves, among many other things.
She watches as skater dude's eyes flash and his wolf, nothing but a dark shadow, paces back and forth over his head, snarling.
Shays' head tilts as she catches a flash of silver on the all black wolfs’ right paw, a half-moon
Shay has to force her eyes away from skater boy.