Far Too Young To Die: An Astraea Renata Novel

by Wayne, Douglas

  I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing inches from my head. I lifted it up and sighed. It was Greg, probably calling to make sure I was OK. I’d hoped to have this conversation after going to the hospital, on the off chance he might feel sorry for me enough not to give me too much trouble over Aiden.

  But I wasn’t going to leave him hanging. As much as he’d done wrong over the years, he didn’t deserve that.

  Nobody did.

  “Hey, Greg.” I said, trying not to sound like I was in pure agony.

  “Everything OK?” he asked. “Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “Yeah. Everything is fine.”

  “You find the people trying to kill Aiden?”

  I went into the story from the start, telling him about the collar and how we’d had it modified to throw off the signal. Then how it backfired, and they were able to track it anyway. I kept going, not leaving out anything important to my condition.

  Anything that didn’t include Aiden, anyways. I wasn’t quite ready to cross that bridge just yet.

  “You coming to work tonight, or are we going to just put Molly on payroll?”

  “I want to. I really do. After the last few weeks I just want everything to return to normal.”

  “But?”

  I sighed. “I need more time off. At least another day or two to recover.” I explained my ribs, even though I knew it would bring a rash of questions starting with ‘why aren’t you in the hospital then?’ “I wanted a few hours of sleep before I let doctors run my body through a ringer.”

  “I guess we’ll survive another night. Just call me once you get out of there.”

  “I will, Greg. Take care.”

  I hung up the phone before he could say anything else. He had good intentions, but I knew what would come next. I glanced down at the mound of blankets on the floor and knew I didn’t want to hear it.

  Aiden sat up now that the call was over. The swelling on his face had gone down while he’d slept, but it would be a week or two before he looked anywhere close to normal.

  “Everything OK?” he asked with a yawn.

  “Yeah. Greg was just worried about me.”

  Aiden stood up, stretched, then carefully sat down on the bed next to me, careful not to disturb the cushion barricade around me. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  He leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “This.”

  “I’m not sure what ‘this’ is, but I’d kinda like to explore it.”

  He smiled. “Me too. But now, we need to get you to the hospital to get those ribs looked at.”

  “You just want to see me with my shirt off,” I said, playfully punching him in the arm.

  “Boys will be boys.”

  He helped me move the cushions, get out of bed, and led me to the shower. He handed me a towel and closed the door while he strolled off to find me some clothes to wear. He wasn’t exactly swimming in women’s clothes, but he had some sweat pants and a baggy shirt I could wear.

  The shower felt amazing and agonizing at the same time. My left arm, while mobile, didn’t move like it should. I wondered if I’d hurt my shoulder too, but decided it wasn’t when I pulled it above my head with my other hand.

  I stood under the hot water and let last night’s filth, blood, and dead vampire dust wash off me and down the drain.

  Tears filled my eyes for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain. There was a mix of emotions swirling inside me, all fighting for supremacy like I had fought just the night before. By all rights I should be dead. Aiden too. We were alive because they’d been sloppy. They were so focused on revenge they didn’t realize the danger they were in.

  Even beyond last night’s fights, I thought about what Julian had said. He knew about Tuscaloosa. If he knew what happened there, who else knew? I’d avoided going anywhere close to Alabama ever since.

  It’s amazing how one incident like that could change your life forever.

  Throughout it all, I couldn’t help but to think about Aiden and the world of shit he was about to be brought into. Did I really want to put his life in danger again? If I’m a wanted witch, he will also be wanted just because of the association. He had nothing to do with anything, but that wouldn’t stop them from using it against me.

  Once I was nice and clean, I stepped out of the shower and toweled up. On the sink I noticed a pair of boxer shorts, a blue pair of sweat pants, and a Panic! At the Disco shirt folded nicely. I got dressed and stepped outside where Aiden greeted me with a hug.

  While I was in the shower he’d taken one too. With the blood and dirt off his face, he didn’t look half as bad as he did the night before. But now instead of smelling like he’d spent a week in a sweat shop, he smelled wonderful. The blend of shaving gel, aftershave, and soap drew me into him like a magnet. If it wasn’t for the pain that shot through my chest when he wrapped his arms around me, I’d be all for just canceling our plans and hanging here. But at this point I’d had enough of the pain to put that off for a while longer.

  “You ready for this?” he asked once he realized what he’d done.

  I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, more to let him know I wasn’t upset than anything else. He smiled and even blushed a bit as I pulled away. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The fiasco with the doctor was as painful as expected. They had me lifting my arm in odd positions just so they could ‘get a better look at my ribs.’ I would’ve thought technology would’ve been at a point where they could get a good x-ray without needing you to contort your body in all sorts of odd ways.

  In any case, the end result of last night’s rescue mission was four fractured ribs, six more of them bruised along with two-thirds of my left side. There was a slight tear in my rotator cuff though they didn’t believe it was anything too serious. Nothing that wouldn’t heal on its own while I recovered from the ribs, anyways.

  Aiden stepped into the room when the nurses were leaving after having wrapped my chest with layer after layer of ace bandages which put an insane amount of pressure on my chest, but after a pain pill or two the pain wasn’t as bad as I expected. His face had a half-dozen small bandages covering the cuts along his cheek. If it wasn’t for that, you’d never know they looked at him at all.

  “What they say?” Aiden said, taking a seat on the chair next to me.

  “Fractured and bruised, as expected.”

  “That sucks. Going to be able to work?”

  I shook my head. “They said I need to take a few weeks off. No sudden or drastic movements.”

  “That won’t make Greg happy.”

  “Honestly,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to spend every waking hour in there anymore. The money is nice, and all, but the freedom of the last few days has been nice too.”

  “Wow. I figured you’d be ready to run back to work after the last week.”

  I would’ve too. But after being away it felt great not to be there. If I was into that self-help bullshit, I’d almost say it was fulfilling to be away. It was like something deep inside of me had woken up in the last few weeks. A part of me that wanted to be free.

  “How about you?” I asked.

  “Not so lucky. Just a few cuts and bruises. No work excuse for me.”

  “Well, I guess it’s a good thing you don’t have a job.”

  He smiled. “For now.”

  I was about to ask him about finding a job. Mainly I wanted to know if he still planned on staying here in Atlanta or if he planned on hitting the road. While we’d taken the head off his old operation, there were plenty of others who could step in to take their spots. I still didn’t have any answers about the drug they had slipped into me. Something told me it was far more important to the operation than I could even begin to know.

  For now none of that mattered. After my wounds healed, there would be plenty of time to figure that all out. All that mattered was my newfound freedom. Time I planned on spending with Aiden, getting to know h
im a bit better without having Greg in the way. He may not be Mr. Right, but he was right for me now. Without the pressures of life threatening situations hovering over us, there was plenty of time to learn more about him.

  We were two broken souls amongst the sea of the wicked, simply looking to find our way through the crowd to find the good in life we knew existed under each of our shattered shells.

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  The Demontouched Saga

  Demontouched - The Complete Saga

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  Vampire for Hire

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  Astraea Renata Books

  Far Too Young to Die

  Echoes of Tomorrow

  Season One - January 2016

  The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Spread the Word

  Thank you for reading my book.

  You’ve already rocketed to the top of my Favorite People In The World List, currently populated by Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, the late Robert Jordan, J.A. Konrath, and Robert Kirkman amongst others.

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  If you enjoyed this story, or even if you kind of liked it, please LEAVE A REVIEW TODAY.

  WHY REVIEWS MATTER

  I hate begging you like an NPR pledge drive, but I’m a new writer, still making my name. In today’s publishing world, with so many great writers out there trying to get noticed, reviews are one of the primary ways writers free themselves from obscurity.

  I would write no matter what, even if my wife and kids were my only readers.

  I’m a writer. I have stories to tell, and want to tell them to you forever.

  My books are what I do when I get up to go to work each day. The better my books do, the better I do. The more I can write, the more ambitious I can be.

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  If you can’t leave a review for whatever reason, or even if you don’t want to, I totally understand. I am thrilled you’re reading, and appreciate the time you spend my worlds.

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  The biggest challenge for indie authors is finding an audience. Word-of-mouth and reviews on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Goodreads, and similar sites can make all the difference in the world between whether a new reader will find and buy my books.

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  Thank you for reading,

  Douglas Wayne

  Thank you again for reading my book. I spent countless hours writing and editing my book to make it the best I could. I then sent the book to an editor in order to catch the things that I may have missed.

  No matter how much time we spent making sure things were perfect, no doubt some errors have made it through. If you happen to catch any, feel free to email me at douglas@douglaswayne.com so I can get it fixed ASAP.

  Thank you for helping me make the books better for those who read it after you.

  Author’s Note

  Far Too Young to Die was an interesting book to write. The idea for the book all circled around the car crash and Ast’s attempts to get to the accident scene before emergency personnel to save him before they had a chance.

  The idea for the scene came to me out of the blue, but no doubt influenced by the movie Nightcrawler though I have yet to see it. The early commercials depicted a scene where a struggling news reporter put himself in positions to be at major crime scenes shortly after they happened, in order to get the early press on the story. While I didn’t have any interest in attacking the news side of the story, the concept still interested me.

  Immediately my mind was flooded with a scene where a beautiful woman and her friend rushed to the scene of an accident, racing against both the authorities surely heading to the scene as well as against death, who is looking to take the victim.

  Oddly enough, the scene came to me while writing the updated version of Vampire for Hire (Nephalem Files book 2) when Ast made her first appearance. In that book she initially showed up to help Raymond out of a sticky situation with the cops. While that scene was important, the ending is where her ambulance chasing pastime became clear. I won’t spoil the ending for those who have yet to read the book, but the need for her to have an ambulance driving friend was key.

  Ast’s name also happens to have a hidden meaning, which has yet to be fully explored as her history has only begun to surface. Her name, Astraea Renata, means simply, justice reborn. A meaning that will come into play in later books, when she goes on the offensive to right the wrongs in the world.

  In the end, I hope you enjoyed reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. I thank you for taking the time to explore her world and can’t wait to give you more to explore.

  Douglas Wayne

  Douglas Wayne is a web writer, construction worker, and father. He grew up reading best sellers like Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickmann as a child, upgrading to Brandon Sanderson and George R. R. Martin as an adult. His debut novel, Demontouched (Book 1 of The Demontouched Saga) was released in April 2015 along with the sequel Fallen.