Shadows of Colesbrooke
Brandy I. Timmons
Copyright © 2019 Brandy I. Timmons.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy or copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s and publisher’s rights.
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This book is a book of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-946987-00-6
Cover art by Austin Beckstrom
First Edition, 2019
Part One of the Children of Kaespars Book Series
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To those who live in the shadows, your efforts are known and appreciated.
Table of Contents
Shadows of Colesbrooke
By Brandy I. Timmons
1 Hospitals and Houses
2 Pink Sunglasses
3 Humans
4 Secret Revealed
5 Ernest
6 The Broken Wine Bottle
7 Julia
8 Sharp Message
9 Taking up Arms
10 First Attack
11 Stalker
12 Under One Roof
13 Awkward Moments
14 Almost Like Normal
15 Dinner During Danger
16 The Final Battle
17 Moving Forward
To My Readers
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Book Summary
Children of Kaespars
Don’t Miss The Rest of The Series
1 Hospitals and Houses
“Female. Mid-twenties. Multiple harsh contusions, abrasions, and punctures all over the body. Broken femur, fractured wrist, broken nose. Extreme bloodlo—”
“Are those bite marks?” Thomas asked incredulously.
“Yes,” the nurse replied. He shoved his clipboard into Thomas’ chest and began assisting the multiple surgeons in the OR.
Stained gauze partially covered large, red bruises along the young woman’s body. A few various-sized puncture wounds along her arms were uncovered, swabbed clean, and dried. Something still bled profusely on her leg.
“Thomas Spencer—stop standing there and get a move on. This girl doesn’t have time for you to be in shock.” Dr. West glared at Thomas, waiting for the surgeon-in-training to obey orders.
Thomas shook his head, blinking rapidly, and took his place among the medical team.
The surgery was messy, but not more than the young surgeon could handle. He quickly sutured the girl’s nasty gashes and open wounds with the precise skill he’d mastered back in medical school.
“Faster, Spencer,” Gary said. “No uneven stitches.”
His attending always had brisk comments for the residents, even after they had repeatedly proved themselves as competent and exceptional. Thomas grit his teeth and continued. He was almost done, needing only to place these stitches then close one last puncture wound.
As he tightened the suture and trimmed it, closing the end of another large incision, he and the team finished attending the last of the young woman’s injuries. They’d been careful but efficient, pulling damaged skin back together, flesh uniting over damaged muscle and setting broken bones. Thomas would have had more pride in his work if the young woman didn’t have such a long, painful recovery ahead of her.
Even after stitches and cleaned wounds, the young woman looked battered. Her pale skin was a deep red mess of fresh, blotched contusions, massive abrasions, and stitches holding together deep lacerations and puncture wounds. A hip spica cast encased her hips and the top of her right leg, and her arm and nose were bandaged. A saline and blood drip hung at her bedside, the needle taped firm in her unbandaged wrist. She was alive, but she looked terrible. The puncture wounds on her arm were the worst—the small ones were easily recognizable as heroin track marks, but some larger puncture wounds were more unusual, as if something had bitten her then been ripped away.
She was among the growing list of extreme and usual physical assault injuries in Colesbrooke. Emergency personnel and doctors swapped descriptions of strange wounds they’d encountered during night shifts. Thomas had never come across any such victims during the day shift—until now.
The cleanest bite mark on the young woman looked human, the incisor punctures matching a regular human bite. Although the canine puncture wounds were too large and deep. He’d never seen a bite or puncture wound like it.
Gary cleared his throat. “How much longer ‘til you finish that last stitch?”
Thomas rolled his eyes at Gary’s incessant sass and with a few quick stitches, he closed the last bite mark. He pulled his hands away, cut the string, and examined his work.
It looked good—even if the rest of her didn’t.
Thomas sighed in relief. “And that, my friend, is how it’s done.” Holding out his fist toward Gary, he grinned and leaned against the cold, steel cabinet holding the operating room supplies.
Gary shook his head, a hint of a small smile playing under his trademark gray mustache, and took off his gloves.
“You need more practice. You were getting shaky at the end,” he said, winking as he left the OR and leaving Thomas’ fist bump hanging.
Thomas sputtered a retort as he removed his gloves and his operating gown. Practice was for med school students. There had been nothing wrong with his stitch work.
With gloves and gown properly disposed, he slipped his phone from his pocket. He followed Gary into the corridor to finish his retort but was interrupted by a loud beep.
“Dr. West?” Gary asked, staring at the ceiling as if willing the page to be from anyone else.
“Cell phone.” Thomas chuckled and waved his phone at his supervisor.
Gary’s chuckle finished with a sigh as he leaned back against the counter. “I will never understand why you have that God-awful text tone for your phone. It sounds exactly like the hospital watches.”
Thomas and Gary were interrupted as the orderlies removed the patient from the OR. Frowning, Gary watched the unconscious girl.
“Did anything look odd about her injuries?” Gary asked as her bed disappeared from view. A rigidness crossed the veteran surgeon’s features, hardening his generally flippant attitude.
Hoping Gary would drop the subject, Thomas only shrugged. Talking about it would solidify a threat Thomas didn’t want to believe. Instead, he focused on his messages. Sean Butler, his best friend, who was often purposely obnoxious, was sending him a steadily growing list of crude messages. He didn’t stop until Thomas confirmed he would come to dinner with Sean and his sister Artemis.
Normally Thomas found Sean’s crass manner to be rather amusing, but the long surgery had dampened all of his general feelings of endearment for Sean’s usual immaturity. Sighing, Thomas slipped the phone back into the pocket of his scrubs.
Gary still stared down the hallway after the long-gone girl. Thomas almost asked Gary what he was thinking but stopped himself. Gary had lived in both the emergency room and operating room blood and gore for thirty years—Thomas trusted his instincts implicitly. If Gary was worried, Thomas didn’t want to know why.
Thomas cleared his throat and mumbled, “Well, we should probably get back to Dr. West. He’d have a fit if he knew we were just standing down here.”
Ga
ry slowly nodded as they walked down the hall.
The rest of Thomas’ shift passed at an agonizing pace. The adrenaline rush from the young woman’s injuries faded, leaving Thomas tired and counting the minutes on the wall clock.
As he finished changing at his locker, he checked his reflection in the small, rectangular mirror hanging on the locker door. There was no way to hide the exhaustion from his friends. Heavy bags drooped under his hazel eyes, and his face seemed thinner and longer. He always looked half-dead these days.
“You headed home?” Gary called as Thomas replaced a chart at the nurse’s station.
“Um, actually I’m meeting some friends for dinner.”
“Looking like that? Hope these friends aren’t girls.” Gary half-smirked.
Thomas glanced at the clock, smiling. “Hey, I changed. What more do you want from me? Besides, these friends won’t care. They’re into the tired look.”
Gary rolled his eyes, chuckling. “You don’t have to convince me. Have a good night and be careful walking on the streets. Something weird is going on. That girl today—that was too early in the day for this city. Something is attacking people around here, and I don’t envy the night shift.”
“Yeah, you think we have a serial killer?” Thomas asked. Some news stations had suggested it, but with a metroplex as large as Colesbrooke, most normal attacks weren’t connected. Gary stared down the hall again, and Thomas forced a laugh. “I’ll be fine. The streets are pretty well lit and busy. It’s Colesbrooke. And you’re always telling me about what an ugly mug I have. Maybe my face will scare whoever it is off.”
Gary chuckled and turned back to Thomas, his eyebrows still knit together. “That’s true. I just don’t want to see your face turning up on tomorrow night’s news, okay? It would probably break the glass of every television in Colesbrooke.”
Thomas snorted, and Gary slapped Thomas’ back in a friendly farewell.
As Thomas left the hospital and joined the throng of walking commuters, he pulled his winter coat closer against the brisk wind. Gary was right—Thomas should be more concerned about walking home. Even when other people were on the streets around Thomas, Colesbrooke contained a strained energy after sunset, like the air had been drawn as tight as a piano wire. It was suffocating. Not even the popular clubs, upscale business districts, and strange clashes of cultures from the millions of people living in the bustling metropolis could explain what made Thomas uneasy and check over his shoulder.
There were odd stories that made the news every once in a while, like six full-grown pit bull terriers vanishing from the junkyard they guarded and showing up two weeks later behind an old church, eviscerated and left for the crows.
Once, two blocks from Thomas’ apartment, a metal streetlamp had somehow been twisted and stretched into an unnatural spiral shape. The news had claimed a drunk driver hit the lamp and mentioned something about “malleable materials” and “an unusual resonance frequency.”
With Stoker Memorial several blocks behind him, Thomas left the bustling center of the city and crossed into the quieter conurbations of Colesbrooke. His heart quickened, and he chuckled despite himself. Working at Stoker Memorial Hospital made him more aware of Colesbrooke’s dark side—the crime, drug abuse, injuries, and strange occurrences that brought patient after patient through the emergency and operating rooms. He hummed to himself and walked faster, hoping dinner at Artemis’ would help him forget the injuries he’d seen.
◆◆◆
The last rays of the sinking sun peaked over a faded rooftop of a small brick house. Thomas squinted as he stepped around deep cracks and unrelenting ice patches in the cement driveway. Large patches of white paint were flaked along the house sides and piled on the porch under a couple of rocking chairs. Thomas passed the porch and patch of garden gnomes and followed a narrow cement path to the left and rounded the corner to a flight of stairs. His shoes clunked on the rusted steps as he descended down to Artemis’ studio apartment.
Artemis lived in a central location from everyone else’s apartments, which made it a natural meeting place for them to gather. The fact Artemis was passionate about cooking and always stocked snacks was a bonus.
Thomas knocked once and let himself in. The familiar scents of aroma therapy oils, wood glue, paint, and fresh seasonings enveloped his senses. He thought he could pick out peppermint this time, although it was faint amid tomato and basil.
“Hey, Artemis,” Thomas called.
“Thomas!”
Artemis emerged from the kitchen, dusting flour from her hands onto an apron with a picture of a cat holding a wooden spoon that said, “Not right meow, I’m cooking!” She adjusted the apron, and her out-of-season, daisy-patterned sundress swished around her legs.
“How are you, Tom?” Artemis asked.
“Tired, good, getting better.” Thomas replied as he slipped off his coat, barely noticing how Artemis had shortened his name. She was the only person who did that. “Nice to be done with work for the day and just relax. Sorry I couldn’t bring anything. I came straight from work.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Artemis said. “Have a seat. Everyone else should be here soon enough—it’s barely seven—and I still have some things to finish.”
She turned away from him, her curly brown hair bouncing to the spring in her step. Thomas smiled as she disappeared back into the kitchen. She’d walked with her adorable little bounce since she’d learned to walk. It paired well with her unruly curls, slender frame, and big blue eyes. Even with her somewhat odd habits, she made everyone smile when she was out and about.
Following Artemis’ instructions, Thomas took his usual seat in an enormous beanbag chair next to Artemis’ bed, which she’d made herself out of repurposed pallets. She’d made most of the furnishings around her apartment. Great with her hands, Artemis supported herself by selling her custom arts and crafts online. It was hard for Thomas to see the appeal, but she had quite a serious and devoted following.
A kaleidoscope of colors and patterns filled the majority of Artemis’ apartment in the form of art projects ranging from stitched-together wall hangings to garage sale oil paintings. Supplies and tools were scattered about around in-progress work—needles and thread, tissue paper, chalk, paint, and an electric buzz saw.
Veils and metaphysical memorabilia brought all the components of the chaotic collection together. She’d begun collecting them when she’d become a sort of spiritualist (Druid? Wiccan? He could never remember which) and traded her name, Thelma, for something more fitting for her new beliefs. It’d taken a little getting used to, but now her name and her gypsy den felt like home away from home.
“Sorry about all the texts earlier,” Artemis called as an old stove timer beeped. “Sean was being stupid. He was cracking up thinking about how annoyed you’d be.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Thomas said. “It’s not the first time it’s happened, and God knows it won’t be the last. Are you sure you don’t need help with anything?”
“Actually, could you come stir? I need to finish dessert.”
Their elbows bumped as Thomas took the ladle. Despite the chaos permeating the main apartment, Artemis kept her tiny kitchen well-organized. It made cooking with her relaxing, and he enjoyed helping her.
The saucepan he stirred bubbled sluggishly, chunks of tomato rolling over a mix of green seasonings.
“So . . . did you ever get that second date with Kate?” Artemis asked, tapping Thomas’ elbow. He stepped to the side so she could check something in the oven.
“Not yet. I don’t think I’ll ask though.”
“I thought you liked her?”
Thomas shrugged. “She was a bit intense for me, y’know? I don’t think I could keep up.”
“Tom, doctor extraordinaire, not being able to keep up? You’re underestimating yourself,” Artemis said, smiling as the oven door snapped shut.
“You forget, I’m only board certified. I still have to finish this residency.�
� Thomas smirked. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, I won’t date someone from work. That’s asking for trouble. It’s better to keep things as simple as possible.”
“Yeah.”
Artemis paused in the kitchen, her face turned away from Thomas. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking as she stood still, but he was curious. She didn’t often stand still.
The front door slammed open, making them both jump.
“Hey, hey, hey. What, the food’s still not done? Come on, Artemis. There’s a very important hungry person here.”
Artemis stuck her head out of the kitchen. “I’m sure you’re referring to Tom. If you don’t want to wait, you can leave. Or you could actually help for once.”
Thomas stepped back just enough to lean over Artemis’ shoulder and watch as Sean made a big show of being injured by her comment. Artemis smiled as her brother set a bottle of wine on the small table. He squeezed into the kitchen and punched Thomas on the arm.
Sean had been Thomas’ best friend since they were in diapers. Despite taking different paths as they grew older, their friendship had remained rock solid. Sean shared a lot of physical traits with his sister, such as his curly head of hair, but he was much stockier and more angular. He had none of Artemis’ softness and had a loud enough voice for the both of them.
“What’s up, man?” he asked. “Nice to see you in the land of the living. It’s been what, a week? How’s life in the sick bay?”
“Same old, same old,” Thomas grinned as he nursed his arm, the wooden spoon in his hand dripping red sauce on the floor. “And I hope I’m always in the land of the living. If I’m in the land of dying, I’m not doing my job right.”
“Well, unless there are hot nurses over there, I’m pretty sure that ain’t living, know what I mean?”
Artemis turned and smacked Sean with a hot pad before getting mad at Thomas for dripping sauce.
Thomas started to reply, but once again, the conversation was interrupted by the door. A fierce blonde head poked into the kitchen, cell phone held to her ear. She ended the call in French, and Thomas only recognized the words si’l vou plaît and au revoir.
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