THE MORPH
THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES
BOOK ONE
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2013 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Jennifer Munswami at
J.M. Rising Horse Creations
www.facebook.com/RisingHorseCreations
2015
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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Synopsis of The Morph
“I, meaning me, Dakota Mayumi Reyes, was running, full-out, for my life…”
Dakota Reyes, a PI who specializes in “hard-to-prosecute” cases, finds herself in a dark alley one night, about to end up dead at the hands of a young Ted Bundy in training... when a lost, shape-shifting alien named Nihkil rescues her.
Then he accidentally takes her home with him.
The problem is, Nik’s home is in a different dimension, and Dakota has no clue how to get back to Seattle, or even Earth.
THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES is an unusual shifter romance centering on shifters from another world altogether, called morph. Part detective series, part science fiction romance, the Gate Shifter series explores crime solving, interstellar warfare and alien romance with the least likely candidates imaginable.
Dedicated to my Mom and Dad,
who always suspected I was an alien
1
A SCREAM IN AN ALLEY
I, MEANING ME, Dakota Mayumi Reyes, was running, full-out, for my life.
It hadn’t happened often in my twenty-six-odd years, so yeah, I wasn’t loving it.
I ran down the fog-wet street, controlling my breaths the way my boxing coach, Becks, taught me. I knew it might be helping me a little, but I also knew I was distracting myself from the fact that I was pretty much screwed regardless, since the psycho was catching up to me.
Bastard was faster than I'd planned for.
That meant he was faster than Irene told me he'd be, too.
In fact, even as I tore down the alleyway in my super-grip boots, I found myself thinking I’d need to have a few words with that girl, as soon as I got back to the office... assuming I got back to the office at all, and didn't get stabbed or shot when this guy finally caught up with me. That stunt I'd pulled back in his car had been carefully designed to enrage him, of course.
I mean, I needed him to go there, right? Otherwise, how would I get him to show his true colors? So we worked it all out, me and Irene and with input from the client... coming up with a carefully crafted routine guaranteed to push all of his little, sociopathic buttons.
Unfortunately, I’d gotten a little too good at that part of my job.
So yeah, it worked.
I further compounded the problem by hitting the guy in the chest when he tried to pull his trademark “date-rape after multiple, anti-female threats” maneuver... not a real hit, of course, but a regular-old, “hands off me, buddy, or I’ll scream” hit, like any normal girl might do.
The client specifically warned me, more than once, that this douche really didn't like it when we chicas fought back.
So, yeah, I made a point of breaking that little rule, too.
And then, when he don’t look quite pissed off enough, and kept trying with the bully me into sex bit, I made a point of breaking it again, that time hitting him a little harder.
Oh, yeah... and in the face.
He really didn’t like that. But again, yeah, that was kind of the point.
Anyway, I was on the clock by then, since the whole bar thing took longer than I’d hoped. Hitting him (rather than screaming or begging for mercy or whatever else might eventually annoy him) seemed like the most efficient way to provoke the guy.
Well, at the time.
That part worked like a charm, really... better than I'd expected, even after scoping this dude for a solid three weeks. I’d watched him long enough to have his basic M.O. down pat. Thinking back on it, I probably should have used the car itself as the hot zone... but I knew the cops could be unreliable with any situation that might be construed as a date gone wrong, or worse, a girl tease who changed her mind at the last minute.
Frankly, I hadn’t wanted to take that chance.
Most of the cops I’d worked with in this town were pretty cool, and some even respected what I did for a living. One guy, Frankie, even bought me drinks after a few of my cases panned out with the jerkoffs behind bars.
But yeah, there was a range of sensitivity with the men in blue, just like with all people. Some of them liked to give their girlfriends or wives a good smack now and then, too, so thought I was one of those feminazi dykes for even giving those women an alternative.
And yeah, okay... some thought what I did bordered on illegal.
Some maybe thought it was illegal, in the spirit sense, maybe, since I was pretty careful to toe the line in terms of the letter. After all, I wasn’t a cop. I wasn’t colluding with the cops, either. So while what I did could be construed as a kind of entrapment... it wasn’t actually entrapment, in terms of the kind that could get a case thrown out of court.
But yeah, some of those cops knew me, sure.
Some of the judges in town knew me, too.
Some liked me fine, even approved of what I did, like I said.
Another group, however, would gladly look the other way if they saw me running down a blind alley in the middle of the night... even with a psycho three times my size panting after me, screaming he was going to kill me.
So yeah, I knew if I skirted too close to that line, they might not play ball at all.
Worse, they might refuse to take the guy in.
Because of that and a lot of other reasons, I was careful to only do things any regular girl might do, when trying to get the guy to let me go. I’d never been a cop myself, so I figured I didn’t have to follow every single one of their little rules, especially since I didn’t wear a gun.
The flip side of that, of course, was that I was pretty much risking my ass every time I took on one of these nutjob cases.
Anyway, everything seemed to be going according to plan at first.
Nothing like a good foot chase through dark streets to evoke that whole “serial killer” motif, especially when the guy is built like a linebacker and already has a few wrist slaps for aggravated assault, all of them filed by women.
Then the guy turns out to be some kind of amateur track enthusiast, even after four shots of tequila, and I start to get worried. Truthfully, I’d expected my biggest problem to be keeping him interested long enough to chase me the full five or six blocks.
Turns out, I needn't have worried.
On the plus side, the street cameras Irene and I scoped along the route that morning should be getting pretty authentic shots of terror on my face as I ran.
All of my sequencing was off now, too, even if I managed to stay ahead of him.
Meaning, at this rate, we’d both arrive early.
If that happened, I’d have to improvise to keep from getting beat up for real... or, better yet, maybe strangled or raped.
I’d estimated a good five or six minutes of chase time, maybe longer if I managed to work a few breathers into the mix before we hit the target area. Instead, only about two minutes had ticked by according to my me
ntal clock, and I had less than one block to go. Really, I'd be lucky to get him there at all before he dragged me to the pavement like a wolf on a lame deer.
So yeah, Plan B was seeming pretty likely.
It might make me look significantly less like a victim, especially if I got too creative with the self-defense moves, but I wasn't about to take one for the team, either, no matter how much this chick was paying me.
I heard the mark’s breathing growing louder behind me. His footfalls seemed to drum in my head, too, making a sharper, higher noise in the dampness of the concrete. My super-tread boots generally treated me right in these close-quarter gigs, but I hadn't banked on him running like he wore track shoes, even in his thousand dollar loafers. I’d expected a lot of things to slow him down that hadn’t, though, not only his taste in the douche-y range of footwear, one pair of which probably cost more than most people’s monthly paychecks and got shined every Thursday by some golf cabana boy... if not this guy's train-wreck of a wife.
Grabbing the edge of the brick wall to fling myself faster around the corner, I let out a short gasp when the guy grabbed at my jacket and almost caught me for real.
Unsurprisingly, I guess, I wore a mini-skirt and tights, and while the material was super stretchy, it might be slowing me down more than I'd really let myself think about when I shimmied into it earlier that evening. But hey, I had to look the part, and this guy didn't like women in pants, figuratively or literally.
As it was, he'd given a good, hard stare at my boots when I first hopped off that barstool, as if he thought those were a bit too dyke-y even with the pancake makeup and coiffed hair over my sheer and uncomfortably low-cut blouse.
Digging my toes into the concrete at the bottom of the narrow street, I forced out an extra burst of speed to put some distance between us.
Lungs burning in my chest, I fought to pump my arms and legs harder, pounding my way down the street and still counting steps in my head, even though I'd walked the whole route just that morning and knew exactly how far I had yet to go. Feeling him right behind me again, I realized he'd closed the gap a second time and sprinted faster, feeling the first edges of honest to God panic as he paced me.
Hell, he was going to catch me.
I could see the hot zone by then... but it almost didn't matter.
I had to be a good few minutes ahead of the planned drop, so improvisation was now definitely in the playbook. I didn't hold back any reserves that time when I pumped my arms, trying to get just that little extra distance ahead so I could get there a second or two before him. I'd played this card before, sure, but it had been a few months, and this guy had a good eighty pounds and six inches of height on the tattoo-covered Mexican kid high on crystal meth who'd last forced me off the regular game-plan and into the uncharted.
In that case, I had the whole racism thing playing on my side, for once... and while I didn’t feel good about it, it definitely sped things along. The cops saw the doped-up gang-looking kid picking on a hot chick in a leather skirt and they immediately descended with sirens blaring.
So yeah, I might not be fully white bread, with my half-Japanese mom and half-Cuban dad, but I was pretty enough and dressed conservatively enough that they rushed to my defense anyway.
This time, the guy was full-on white bread, wearing a suit, and handsome in that boring, Ken doll on steroids kind of way. He looked the part of a young stockbroker, so I'd have to make the victim thing a lot more convincing.
Even so, when I got him in the alley, I didn't hesitate to skid sideways once I'd gone past the circle of orange light from the streetlamp. The mark, who'd been so intent on chasing me it hadn't occurred to him that I might stop running, couldn't compensate.
He nearly fell over as he darted sideways to follow me, grasping at my arm and back with long arms and thick fingers. He lost his balance just enough to buy me time... smashing sideways into a row of garbage cans near a squat, green dumpster. I heard the smack of his shoulder and chest against the dumpster, but barely registered either as I repositioned myself on his other side.
I didn't give him the time to recover.
Frankly, I didn't intend to wait and see if he might have some crazy, kick-ass ninja skills that Irene had also somehow missed in her background check before we went live.
Shifting my weight on the laced up boots, I reached his side before he could recover, my weight balanced into a low fighting stance. When he whirled to face me, I aimed two sharp, fast kicks, using every ounce of weight and momentum I could muster in my five-foot-three frame... both of them at the joint of his right knee. Without letting that foot drop to the pavement, I swiveled my hip and round-housed the same knee from the side, that time pivoting my whole body.
I felt the crack. Hell, I almost heard it.
He went down. Hard.
I always thought it was pretty funny how in the movies these skinny chicks in lycra were always going for head kicks and upper body kicks with big “hi-yas!” in some close quarter fight with a mondo-buff dude who was a foot taller than them.
Way stupid.
High kicks left you all kinds of exposed.
And yeah, while getting kicked in the face wasn't exactly fun, unless you managed to dislocate the guy's jaw, it wouldn't necessarily drop your opponent, either.
Knees, on the other hand... knees were reliable.
No matter how big they are, you kick someone hard enough and at the right angle in the knee, and down they go. Getting a kneecap slammed out of joint by a steel-toed boot hurt like hell. In fact, it sort of felt like having your joint pulled apart with pliers.
This guy was no exception.
He dropped to the same knee I'd just bent in three different directions, all of that two-hundred-plus weight landing on a pretty small point of contact. I didn't hear a crunch that time, or anything remotely so dramatic, but when he hit that pavement, boy, he let out a scream.
He screamed so loud I flinched back in reflex, balling my hands into fists.
That was the other thing about knees. If you got them out of whack with the joint, the pain just went on and on without really getting much better.
That's when I kicked him in the face.
Way more effective at that point, in my personal experience.
Still, this guy didn't go all the way down.
He grunted, then fell sideways into the garbage cans with a lot of clanging and bother, but he knocked away my foot with one arm when I went to kick him again. He gripped the wall as soon as I gave him space, and then he seemed to be trying to get up, using his one good knee to lurch that muscular body upright.
I could almost feel the fury emanating off him by then.
It was like a tangible force. Like radiation coming off an old microwave oven.
It scrunched his face into a dark red, mottled shape, almost unrecognizable from the handsome smooth-talker who first approached me in that crappy, chrome-covered, eighties-themed club. The monster under that blond-and-dimple-headed mask reared its head, and, looking at it, I felt my nerves twanging a few octaves higher, in spite of myself.
This guy really did live in Bundy country.
Really, my instincts told me to knock him out and get the hell out of there... but if I did that, that would be the end of this gig.
No payday.
Worse, I was thinking at that point, this psycho would go free.
So, after a bare second of hesitation, I stepped back, watching him stagger to his feet.
Reminding myself I just needed to stall him, that I only needed a few minutes and this show would be over, I fought to keep my cool, and my head on straight.
If I freaked out, or got too scared, things could turn on me real quick.
Already, the guy would probably be screaming for his lawyer when the cops finally showed. If he managed to convince them that I was the one who went bezerk on him, I could very well be waving bye-bye to the sympathetic police and hello to aggravated assault charges. Worse, I'd lose my lucrativ
e fee and this dickhead would be back on the Seattle city streets, getting his kicks off beating up drunk ex-sorority chicks outside of clubs and raping them with kitchen appliances when they refused to service him to his satisfaction.
So yeah, against my better judgment, I held my ground.
I needed my Bundy up and fighting when the men in blue showed up... which should be happening sometime in the next, oh... two to three minutes.
About as long as your average round in a ring fight, as it happens.
Stockbroker guy stood over me now, his tie askew under his collar, his lip bleeding from the kick to the face. His knee already stretched his pants where the joint swelled under the material. He still looked pissed as hell, but the creep actually smiled at me as he glared into my eyes with that death-like stare, his fists balled up in a reasonable approximation of a fighting stance.
Yeah. Shit. He looked like he knew how to fight. Box, anyway.
Hopefully, he just went to a few lame, dancy, kickboxing classes at his nationally-franchised and overpriced McGym.
"You like it rough, huh, bitch?" he said, hunching his shoulders. "Well, come on then. Give it your best shot...”
I fought back a surprised chuckle, deciding it probably wouldn’t be wise.
Forcing my expression still, I measured his face, instead, trying to decide if I should risk getting near him. I knew I probably wouldn't be able to pull off the frightened bar girl bit at this juncture, not convincingly anyway. I opted to say nothing, thinking that enflaming him further might not be all that smart, either.
Still, I had to fight a bit to keep the roll out of my eyes.
Seriously. Didn't these guys ever learn any new lines? Why was it always bitch this, and whore that? And what was up with the lame clichés? “Give it your best shot?” Seriously? I mean, who actually talks like that?
The Morph (Gate Shifter Book One) Page 1