by Angela Foxxe
They were looking at things that should not be real. They were looking at things that were monsters brought to life out of legends and myth.
They didn’t question her long. It was a long time until they finally came to her, ready to ask questions. There were three sheriffs from neighboring towns who t showed up for the questioning, talking to her about things that she didn’t understand, or at least, she played the part of not understanding.
She looked at them with frightened doe eyes, looking at her answers that weren’t even there. They were more than willing to accept that the beautiful woman in front of them wasn’t responsible or aware of what was going on. Truthfully, Tasha milked their assumptions and their preconceived notions for all that they were worth.
She fortified their thoughts about her and their unwillingness to believe that she could be a role-playing member in all of this. They wanted her to be as innocent and clean as she looked to them. It was only for her benefit that they didn’t notice that she was covered in blood and that all the shotgun shells had come from her.
As far as they were concerned, she’d gotten caught up in something that was beyond her. When they were done questioning her, they simply put down that she was an innocent woman who had been out here with her fiancé when strange, horrible things started to attacked them.
She knew about her grandfather’s bunker and she had taken shelter from the abominations in the bunker while her fiancé had attempted to fight them off. When they asked her for a description of her fiancé, she told them what Dane looked like and what he had been wearing. She knew that they were going to find him naked out there if he was alive. She hoped that he had flown off and transformed in safety away from all of these people. She closed her eyes and prayed that they would find him safe or at least alive.
He had been the one that had gone charging out into the open to fight those horrors one on one. He had done everything he could to help her and to save her from the majority of those creatures. It wasn’t until she was escorted out of the cabin by the police officers that she saw the full extent of what he had been willing to do for her.
She saw the carnage of the battles he had fought and the destroyed bodies of those who had fought him. There were dozens of burned bodies and then there were the bodies of bears that were ripped to pieces, and the enormous bird creatures. He must have fought a strong battle against them and as she saw more and more of what was around her, she knew that he was dead. There was no way that he could have survived this.
The police officers put the car seat in the back of one of their squad cars. She buckled Addy in, who was awake, looking around at the world with bright, shining eyes that were silently curious. She didn’t make a sound, but she was taking all of it in. Nestled into her car seat, Addy looked at Tasha with her dark eyes and opened her mouth in a large yawn that made Tasha want to hug her close to her chest and never let her go.
“We’re going to take you to the hospital,” the officer informed Tasha as she got in on the other side of the squad car. “The paramedics have their hands full and you’re in a stable enough condition that you’re safe to transport.”
“Thank you officer,” She said softly, looking out at all of the mayhem and carnage that had been wrought on her grandfather’s property. She was lucky to survive this. She knew that she was beyond lucky. She took it all in one last time and tried to remember everything. This was going to be a story that she wanted to lock in and internalize.
People were going to come. They were going to hunt her down and they were going to want to ask her about what had happened out on her grandfather’s property, but she wasn’t going to share this story.
She wasn’t going to tell a soul. This was a story that she was going to take to the grave. As the police officer pulled out over the grass, turning down the lane that wrapped around the hill, she looked out at the tree line, how many bitter and terrified eyes might be watching her from the safety of the trees. How many of them were grateful to be alive? How many of them were out there vowing for revenge?
The Final Chapter
The hospital was silent. This wasn’t the kind of hospital that she had been in during her brief stay in New York City’s finest. No, here things were different. Here she was in a room that was silent. There was no noise to be filtered out through the walls of a mad world beyond the building.
Here, it was quiet and tranquil, the kind of place that you would expect to stop and find some actual rest and relaxation. It was the kind of place where you would happily stay and heal your body and mind. It’s what a hospital is supposed to be like.
She looked at the wallpaper and realized that there was something fundamentally gross and blasé about the appearance of wallpaper in hospitals. Every one of them across the country tended to have such abominable wallpaper that it made her want to flee. It was a mixture of the smell of a hospital, the look of the wallpaper, and the hushed voices that constantly put her on edge in hospitals. She was ready to be done with this place.
It had been months since she’d left her grandfather’s cabin, carrying Addy to safety in the back of a police squad car. The battle was over, but the biggest question in her mind was whether or not the war was actually over. Were she and her daughter actually safe? Where they going to be safe now that all of this had passed, or were they going to have to live their lives with a constant fear of being hunted and hounded at every turn? She wasn’t sure if she would ever have an answer for that. Perhaps the answer to that question was going to come in a form that she didn’t want to actually have answered.
What kept her in the hospital was the simple fact that when she was getting discharged, the officer who had brought her to the hospital hunted her down and told her that they were bringing back the survivors at the incident. From everything that they had found, only three people were alive. He wanted to know if she would be able to identify any of the survivors.
From what Tasha had discovered through their investigation, the police were treating the few humans that were found alive at the scene as innocent victims. Whatever the creepy monstrosities were that had attacked the house that her grandfather owned, all the people were innocent bystanders. It didn’t say much to the fact that at least a hunting rifle had killed three of those human bodies. At that point in the investigation, Tasha realized that the three sheriffs were tired of asking questions and just wanted the massacre cleared up.
The first survivor was a man who had experienced severe burns and was almost beyond recognition. When he opened his eyes during her inspection of him, he thrashed against his restraints and screamed in agony. Whether he knew who she was or not, he was in pain and she seriously doubted that he was ever going to recover from the attack he’d received from Dane. He was as good as gone. She was thankful that it wasn’t Dane and moved on to the next survivor.
The second survivor turned out to be a man who had lost part of his arm and his other hand had been savagely mauled by something heavy. When he saw Tasha, the man was silent, breathing heavily and not uttering a word. Tasha informed the authorities that she didn’t know who this man was.
She told them that she didn’t think that he was involved. The severed paw in her grandfather’s apartment had never transitioned back to the hand of a man and thus left the survivor in the camp of unfortunate bystanders. She went back to him later when she was in the hospital and found him awake in the middle of the night. She went to him and told him that she was alive and that she was aware of everything that had happened between all of the Clans. She knew everything and most importantly, she knew that his Clan had all but died or abandoned him here in the hospital.
She used his fearful predicament to encourage him to ensure that she was safe from the attackers and the other Shifters that were inevitably going to come looking for her. With terrified eyes and a fearful soul, the wolf Shifter agreed to pass on the word.
There were several times when she thought about going back there and killing him in the middle of the night,
but she didn’t.
The first survivor ended up dying from his wounds and when he was taken away, she realized that there wasn’t anything to hold against the last shifter. He had chewed off his own arm in desperation and she had robbed him of his last good hand. He was no good to anyone anymore. Besides, there were far too many cameras in the hospital.
They would see her sneaking into his room and they would take her away. She didn’t need that. She had Addy to worry about. That was her only true reason.
Had she never had Addy, then she would have definitely gone in there and ended him.
The last survivor was a familiar face and Tasha burst into tears at the sight of Dane. He wasn’t in any condition that was promising. The doctors told her that they were going to have to take his left hand and that the gash across the left side of his face had also claimed his eye. He had serious internal bleeding and several severe lacerations across his body. There was also talk about the fact that he had taken a serious blow to the head and hadn’t responded yet. He was alive, but the fact was that Dane had slipped into a coma.
All things considered, Dane’s surgeries went well and Tasha was there for every one of them, waiting anxiously with her sweet little daughter. The doctors told her that having hope was a good thing, but that there really wasn’t a whole lot of room for her to have hope at this point. They told her that he was in no condition to make a full recovery, but Tasha didn’t give up on him. She knew that Dane was the kind of man to take to the air and fight the impossible odds. He hadn’t been taken at Matterhorn Tower and he hadn’t been taken by death at her grandfather’s home.
There was no way that he was going to die here. He wasn’t going to be captured in that coma for long and when he woke up, she was going to be there with him. Sure, he’d lost an eye and he’d lost a hand, but he still had her and he had a baby daughter that was eager to play with her Daddy.
That had been months ago and Tasha was not going to give up on him. She sat next to him, her bed nearby if she ever wanted to stay the night in his room. It was amazing how willing they were to accommodate the fiancé of a Matterhorn. They were practically bending over backwards for her to be comfortable.
Tasha was fine and every night, she went home to her little home nearby, picking up Addy from her mother’s home on the way. She would go back to Dane whenever she had a chance and she would stay with him, reading to him and praying that he would open his eyes. She closed her book and looked at Dane, her heart heavy. She just wanted him to come back to her. She just wanted him to open his beautiful eyes and to look at her with a smile on his lips.
He had so many scars on his perfect body now, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t care at all. She loved those scars. They were the badges of an honorable man and she loved running her fingers over them as she gave him a sponge bath every other day.
Closing her eyes, she reached out for his hand and felt the tear running down out of the corner of her eye. She was tired of being here alone. She was so terrified of being alone now without him that it almost felt childish and silly to her. She knew that the odds were slim, but she couldn’t give up hope. She needed him there with her and she couldn’t just give up on him.
His fingers squeezed her hand.
Looking up, Tasha stared into his one good eye and saw the smile that she had been praying for.
THE END
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BOOK FOUR
THE LION'S
SURROGATE
A PARANORMAL PREGNANCY ROMANCE
ANGELA FOXXE
Copyright ©2015 by Angela Foxxe
All rights reserved.
About This Book
Lion Alpha Torrance is in a precarious situation. Lion shifters are in danger of becoming extinct and he is struggling to find a way to solve the problem.
In this world, Lion shifters can not breed with other lions. They need a human woman with a particular gene to carry the baby for them.
And finding women with that gene is not easy...
Curvy Amy is one of the few women left on the planet who has this gene and she could be the key to repopulating the Lion Shifter community.
Now she must become the Lion's Surrogate and take on the responsibility of carrying the first Lion cub for a generation.
This is a job that comes with huge risks but it also comes with a Lion that will do anything to protect her...
Strap yourself in, There are moments of tension, suspense and thrills galore in this paranormal romance novel!
CHAPTER ONE
I was tired. That much was wildly evident. I didn’t know what else to do about it. I was turning the pages of the paper, looking for something else, something better, as I sat on the old, worn-down couch that my two roommates and I had pitched in to buy from a local thrift store.
It’s not like I’ve been lying to myself. I’m not going to run off and do something too stupid. I still wanted my safety net. I still needed to feel safe. I still needed to be something important, but I worked some ridiculous call-center job at just over minimum wage. I supported myself. I liked that about myself. That’s great, but there was nothing worth continuing here. I was searching the classifieds for a major change in my life. Something different. Let’s face it, I live in a world that is defined by what I do for a living. Right now, I am a glorified telemarketer and that is no place for me to be.
“Whatcha doing?”Cyndi asked.
“I don’t know.” I sighed and looked up from the paper. “I’m just tired of this whole thing.”
“I know, those people think that we exist only for them to dump on.” Cyndi smiled at me. We had been roommates for almost three years and had worked at the same place for almost five. Neither of us had any interest in moving into management, so we worked well enough to do so, but never went out of our way to be promoted. It was a crap job anyway.
I couldn’t help but smile a bit. She always had a way to make me laugh about the crappy direction my life was going. “I’m about ready to quit.”
“You can’t do that.” Cyndi walked to the fridge and opened the top door. “Damn it.”
“What?”
“Somebody ate all the friggin’ ice cream.”
“That would be me.” I grinned. “I’m having an existential crisis. I needed it.”
“Exi-what?”
“Existential.”
“Whuzzat mean?”
“Ugh. I don’t know. I just heard people say it a lot.” I groaned.
She looked at me. I knew that she was studying me, trying to figure out what to say. I also know that she’s smarter than she seems. Cyndi was playing dumb, trying to get me to smile. “Ya know what?”
“What?” I was waiting for it. Something absolutely ridiculous was going to come out of her mouth. I just knew it.
“I gotta plan.”
“And what’s that?” I was still waiting and I was listening to her accent change and start to mix to a strange combination of southern and Hispanic. She was from New Mexico, a little town near the border that caused that strange pattern in her voice. It was a voice that made customers ask to speak to a white person. She’s white, but she passed the call to me, anyway. It was a personal joke between the two of us, because I’m black. I can sound pretty darn professional when I put my mind to it, though.
“Let’s put down our phones and go dancing. I know this really hot gay bar downtown that we can hit up.” She grinned. We were both straight, but it didn’t matter. I kind of liked the idea of not going to place with a bunch of guys just looking to hook up. It might be a nice change to have women hunting down sex just before closing time.
“I don’t even know where my phone is. I have to charge it.” I groaned and picked myself up, starting to search halfheartedly for my phone. I knew that I probably wasn’t going to find it easily.
&n
bsp; “Find your phone.” Cyndi shrugged.
“Where’s Rose?”
“Asleep.” Cyndi was eating something. I didn’t know what it was, but it really didn’t matter. We shared the food in the house, often cooking together and shopping together. Whatever we bought seemed to go to the group, but we did have some autonomy. We were casual. No one marked the food and while I think that Cyndi probably put the most money toward it, no one really paid attention to that. “She don’t work today.”
“Cool.” I didn’t really pay attention to what was being said as my search became a bit more frantic.
“We all got the day off today.”
“That’s pretty weird.” I made the comment, but the truth was, I was still thinking about my life. I struggled for some truth, some reason for my existence rather than to answer phones in some crappy call center for the rest of my life. It wasn’t easy to imagine what kind of change that I would need, but Cyndi seemed unbothered by the strange attitude that I was carrying around with me.
She walked over and picked up the paper. “What about this?” She pointed with a pinkie. She held an apple in one hand. “I might check this out.”
I looked over her shoulder. “Surrogate? Really?”
“You never know. It might be kind of nice.” She shrugged at me. “It’s a nice cushy job and you won’t have to do anything. You might even be able to get ahead of the game that way.”
“I don’t know.” I chewed on my lip and knew that I was going to end up calling the number. It was something different and I would be able to save up some money and get myself out from under this rock. Especially if I could keep the job that I was working now. A call center for flower delivery wasn’t exactly my plan for the end game of my life and I was almost twenty-five. The prime age to change my life. I thought about my dreams and wondered about what I was going to do in the future. I had no idea. I struggled with my own fears, trying desperately not to let them take control over me, but it wasn’t working. “Do you think that I should?”