Broken Glass: An Alicia Jacobs Novel (The Alicia Jacobs Chronicle Book 1)

by Amanda Thurston

  She didn't need to gobble down humans, she was not blood thirsty and did not run around howling at the moon. That was a funny myth, anyone who knew Jen would laugh at that. She was sweet, and kind and hated even seeing or hurting an animal. She could change at will and generally only killed animals. It was so hard on her each time she killed an animal, but she did it out of necessity.

  Yes, there were bad werewolves and other supernatural beasties out there but she was not one of them. In fact, it was her job to find them and report them to the governing supernatural body. Jen worked really hard at her job under the guise of being a reporter. While she did indeed do actual articles for the newspaper that she worked for, they were only a front. The cases that Jen picked out to investigate usually occurred near a supernatural that she needed to look into. Like the current case she was on.

  The supernatural government functioned very much like our own, there were even lawyers who specialized in supernatural law. They held trials, and had prison sentences, it was very rare for a supernatural creature to be executed unless their crimes were heinous in nature. To my knowledge the only way a supernatural was executed was if they killed another supernatural without viable reason.

  To kill one of your own kind, so to speak was akin to matricide. There were so few supernaturals that there was a real case for extinction if they were not careful. If you looked at the entire population of the earth at seven billion and some change, the supernatural population made up about one hundred thousand of that.

  While one hundred thousand is still a lot of people, they could not reproduce as easily as human beings. Therefore, it was more than frowned on to kill other supernaturals with no excuse, like self-defense or the other supernatural risking exposure, you were sure to face execution.

  The government was interesting for sure, each race had their own representatives that covered topics of their specific genre. Representatives of the supernatural bodies had to run for office to represent their race, and they held elections just like humans do. I had to at least give them credit for governing and policing themselves, they did a good enough job that most of humanity thought their kind were myths.

  Supernatural law was complicated and I had actually been studying it the past few years. Jen was of course the reason I got into law in the first place. I had been convinced by her drunken smile, what could I say she was cute. When I met Jen she had just gone through her first change. Of course at the time I was not aware of it, I did not find out she was a werewolf until we had decided that we wanted to take our relationship to a more permanent standing.

  Jen was a reporter for a small gossip rag, she did a good job and she was hard working. She got into a scuffle in a local store that I just happened to be shopping at. She was following a dirty politician that liked to get his jollies with people much younger than him. It was her big story that would make her career, one of his bodyguards got in her face and punched her. He broke her nose and I was witness to it.

  She had been pretty brave, she stood up and dusted herself off. She was a tiny girl about 110 pounds and maybe 5 foot tall even. She had blonde hair styled in a short pixie cut, little curls and tendrils weaving around her face. It was hard to picture her mad, but damn was she. She got in the bodyguard's face and told him where to go and how to get there...professionally of course. She handed the bodyguard a card and informed him that she was going to take him to court, and to call her lawyer.

  Her lawyer had bailed on her at the last minute. He had taken one look at who she was up against and told her thanks but no thanks. Jen had found a lawyer off the yellow pages that was just out of law school. Hell, I am pretty sure he had just barely passed the bar exam, and definitely not with flying colors.

  She lost the case and ended up with a hefty fine. I was at the trial and had even gone on the stand for her telling the events just as I saw it. However, it did no good because her lawyer was useless. Seeing this happen to her genuinely pissed me off. We went out for drinks after the trial and I pointed out a few things I had noticed. She had laughed and twirled a curl around her finger. Despite the fact that she had lost, she still found it in her to smile. I really admired her for that. Jen could smile through just about anything, it was one of the things I loved about her.

  She had stared at me over her glass of vodka lifting it and swirling the ice around in the glass. I was pretty sure that she was flirting with me, but it was hard to tell in this day and age. I had never had much luck dating, not men or women for that matter. She was different. I could tell that from the start, she was something special. She had looked down, having noticed that I had caught her staring and blushed. She tossed back her drink and reached over and patted my hand. It was a casual touch, but it had meant much more to me than I was willing to admit, at least on the first date. If that is what you could call this.

  She had looked up told me with a drunken giggle “You should totally be a lawyer; you would be good at it... plus you'd look hot in a girl suit...” I had laughed then.

  When I woke up the next day and really thought about it, I applied that very day to law school. After putting in my application, I called her and asked her out for dinner, she had happily accepted. We went out that day for lunch and she had smiled and flirted. I smiled and clumsily attempted to flirt in return which she found hilarious. As she put it, I was as skilled at flirting as she was knowledgeable about the law. She knew nothing about law, I knew nothing about flirting. It worked for us. We had been together ever since, that was about five years ago.

  She was the driving force for me ever since, sure we had our hard times and misunderstandings. She was a werewolf, born that way, I was a human. Honestly, when she told me, I did not believe her at first. When she showed me, I almost left, but she was worth more than that to me. I could honestly say that I loved the woman. She had her own little flaws and so did I, but we made it work. To my knowledge this was the first time she had killed someone and I had to assume it was another supernatural. I could only trust her, and I did.

  Hell, I would have never thought to go up and strike up a conversation with Ross Pale in the middle of a crowded café if it hadn’t been for Jen. I owed her a lot, now I was about to be her legal representative, there was no way I was going to let someone else do it. No matter what Jen said.

  Jen was definitely stubborn, she was going to fight me on this and I knew it. It was not just Jen I was going to have to worry about though. The supernatural government had issues with humans knowing about their existence. When Jen had told me about what she was, she had to go through an entire bureaucratic process. They ended up running background checks on me, they checked my family lineage, my job history, my living relatives. It was a huge process. In the end I am guessing that I was approved since no one came and wiped my memories, killed me, or anything like that. Did they actually do that? I didn’t know but I didn’t want to find out either.

  Chapter Two

  I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself, I needed to look at this as a lawyer not her girlfriend. “Okay Jen, tell me step by step what happened. I need to know if it was a human or another supernatural.”

  She hiccupped back a sob and tried to calm her breathing, did I mention she had asthma, yes a werewolf with asthma, the whole no health problems... also a myth. Werewolves, and supernaturals weren’t that much different than humans. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. They were just not as amazing as humans made them out to be. They were prone to illnesses, genetic deformities, diseases just like human beings. Jen cleared her throat and gave a husky cough, having composed herself she began to tell me what had happened.

  Jen had been following a supernatural that had been killing small children. At the time she had no idea what race of supernatural it was. Bad guys come in all shapes and races after all. She had been researching the places that the guy seemed to hit on a regular basis and one of the places he seemed particularly drawn to was a playground in the warehouse district. So she had staked it out, and noticed a pa
ttern. He did not grab a kid every day. She continued following him around every day, keeping just out of his sight until she had figured out his pattern.

  It seemed to be that he hit this particular playground once every two weeks. Tonight the two weeks was up, so she had been camping out in her car watching the playground all week. Sure enough he had showed, he watched for a while before he made his move. Come mid evening he had moved forward snagging a little boy, the kids mother had been too busy on her cell phone arguing with someone to notice that her kid was taken. Jen had seen the entire scene unfold.

  The guy had put the child in his car and had taken off slowly so as to not draw suspicion, from what Jen had seen the kid went willingly probably drawn in by offers of candy or something. The kid willingly got into the guy’s car and they had taken off. Kids and candy, sheesh. Once he had left the playground he had gone down the center of the warehouse district until he turned into one of the local abandoned factories. He had taken the child from the car in the back of the building.

  This side of the building had no public exposure, there was no way for anyone to see what he was doing unless they had followed him like Jen. Jen parked her car on the front side of the building and had changed into her wolf form. In her wolf form she was about the size of a German Shepherd, her fur was a dark red brown color, a match to her hair color. She looked very dog like so most people seeing her would assume she was a stray. She was hoping that this guy was the same.

  She crept into the building through one of the busted open windows. The walls were covered in graffiti and there were sharps all over the floor from drug users. She carefully stepped around them not wanting to get stabbed by one. While werewolves are harder to hurt, they are still subject to diseases and Jen was very conscious and careful of accidental infection. After all, with some diseases there was a potential to pass it to others and Jen wanted no part of that.

  The building was dim due to the fact that the sun was setting and there was no electricity. Jen relied on her better sense of vision and scent to find the man and the child. She quietly crept through the building, pausing to sniff and look around to make sure that there were no others in the building besides the three of them. At one point she had come across a man in one of the rooms, he appeared to be sleeping under a pile of papers. Jen had walked up to him quietly, upon closer inspection she found that he was dead. He had died of natural causes, well man-made natural, but not due to a supernatural. Probably a drug overdose, disease, starvation or cold. It was hard to tell just by smelling and looking at him what had caused his demise.

  She had followed the scent of the man and the kid until she ended up by one of the upper office rooms. Creeping along the wall her body pressed tight against it until she had found the room that the child and the man were in. The door was partially cracked open as if the man had not been concerned about being disturbed, which was probably the case. After all, the only other resident of the building was the dead man on the floor below them.

  She peeked her head into the room as he had not locked the door. The kid was sitting on the floor on a blanket with a few odd stuffed animals and a bag of chips. He was about four years old and he saw her before the guy did and called out to her “Doggy.” The man spun around and saw her, at first he mistook her for a dog until he saw her eyes. While a werewolf physically takes on the form of a wolf, their eyes do not change. That human intelligence, and understanding is still there.

  At first the man just stared at her, watching her as if to see what she was going to do. He could see the intelligence in her eyes, she had no doubt of that. Yet still, he just watched and waited, perhaps he thought she was no threat to him. There were some supernaturals that while they personally didn’t enjoy the act of killing. They liked to watch. Jen bared her teeth giving a low snarl and the man took action now realizing she was there to interfere.

  He lunged at her and she jumped snarling getting between him and the child saliva dripping from her thick powerful teeth... The little boy had reached out and grabbed her tail squealing in laughter not realizing the danger he was in. All that he saw was a big fluffy doggy to play with. The man turned and charged at her again his face cracking and snapping as the bones reformed horns sprouting from his head. A demon. She had seen one like him before at a supernatural news conference.

  She could not remember much about it, just that they were hard to kill. That could be said of any demon though, there was never a guarantee that the standard means of killing them would work. Unlike most supernatural races demons were broken up by genus. There was high ranking genus which were incredibly difficult to kill, or required certain objects or weapons to kill them. Then there was lower ranking genus, these were pretty easy to handle and could be killed by most of the ordinary means. Stabbing, removal of the heart, decapitation and the like. Jen hoped he was in the lower ranking genus, but there was no real way for her to tell.

  The vast majority of other supernatural races were pretty set in how you killed them. With vampires, a stake to the heart, fire, or decapitation. With werewolves, silver bullets, fire, decapitation. Generally, you could guarantee that decapitation would be the go all to killing a supernatural. Who can live without their head? Jen was pretty sure that demons were the same. She was about to find out.

  His brow had pushed out with hard ridges and points and he had various spikes sticking out from the sides of his cheek narrowing down to his mouth which was a mouth full of jagged fangs. His hands formed jagged claws, and there were leathery black wings jutting out from his shoulder blades. The little boy seeing around her saw the man and squealed again. This time, the squeal was of terror. The little boy clutched his face, tears streaking down his cheek as he wailed in despair. The kid was going to be scarred, thank god there were ways to fix that.

  Jen reeled backwards putting herself closer to the child and further away from the demon. She bared her fangs and snapped snarling at him hoping that it would deter him from his attack. No such luck there, she was standing between him, and his dinner. He was not going to let the child get away that easily, he had gone to the trouble to stalk, lure and capture the child. His dinner was not going to evade him. Whether or not he was the type to just wolf down his dinner, or the type to take his time and torture. Jen did not know and she would be damned if she was going to find out.

  To some demon races, human children were a delicacy, he of course had taken this too far. Jen would die before she let him hurt this child or any other child for that matter. Even if it meant she had to kill the demon, her hope was just to incapacitate him so that he could be taken in for proper processing.

  She crouched as he lunged forward his long clawed fingertips aiming for her eyes as he moved towards her.

  He made contact with her face and she turned her head so that he got the top of her head instead of her eyes. He ripped open one of her ears and she yelped in pain, snarling as she lashed out at him. She turned, sinking her teeth into his wrist and worrying at the skin biting and tearing at him to get him to let go of her ear and back off. He howled and brought his other hand to grab her head lifting her by her skull into the air. She used her legs to claw at his stomach tearing it open. A thick glob of intestines falling to the floor as she kept slashing and clawing with her paws.

  The man groaned letting go of her head to scoop up his intestines pushing them back into his stomach blood soaking his darker skinned hands soaking the floor at his feet. If he got away right now, he would be able to heal, granted it would take him a while. Jen was clouded with bloodlust; she went after him. Biting, tearing, rending his flesh from his bone, ripping his throat open and feasting on his flesh.

  The downfall of being a predator supernatural, was that there were times where you could lose control. Jen had lost control and all reason, fear and anger drove her now. It was like the wolf inside of her got tired of the human games and said to hell with you. His transformation began to fade, his spikes and horns receding back into his skin as he grew weaker and
weaker with each second. She stepped back between the man and the child blood matting her fur and dripping into her eyes from her torn ear.

  She crouched as the man staggered towards her lunging at her once more both hands reaching out to grab her throat. She jumped at him mouth open teeth sinking into his throat tearing it open with her powerful jaws. Blood filled her mouth in a hot coppery rush and he stumbled falling forward landing on her shoulder as the life drained from his eyes. She continued to bite and tear at him, lashing out with her claws over and over again blind in fear and rage. She did not stop until there was nothing left of the man but a steaming pile of meat.