The Amber Lee Boxed Set

by Katerina Martinez

  It was about two PM when I made the roundabout turn, stopped at the fork which would have taken me to the freeway, and found Aaron waiting for me. He was leaning on the side of his car. It was a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner, all gray save for a black stripe which went from the hood to the boot; a long, sleek, wide car; the kind that growled even at low speeds and guzzled gas like an eighteen wheeler. It had been so long since I had seen Aaron's muscle car I had almost forgotten he had it.

  I stepped outside after a breath. Aaron pushed off from his car and turned to me, and we stared at each other for a moment. My heart sped up, racing at the mere sight of him, healthy and alive. He was wearing a gray shirt beneath a black jacket with the sleeves pulled up to his forearms. His face seemed pale against the backdrop of black, white and brown, but his cheeks were flushed red and vibrant. And his eyes. They sparkled like little arctic oceans, catching the sun's rays and throwing them all around like they were meant to.

  I took a step to him and, following my movements, he took a step toward me. We each took another step, and another, and before I knew it I was running to him. Running. My long black cardigan was like a cape at my back, my copper hair wild and untamed, and when I reached him he opened his arms and scooped me up into a lip-locked embrace which felt like a burst of light and warmth.

  Aaron smiled as I wrapped my legs around his torso and gazed into his eyes. He was so strong, now. I didn't think I was heavy, but he spun me around and carried me to the hood of his car with no trouble at all. And then I was there, in that moment, staring at Aaron and running my fingers through his short, golden hair, something about him sang to me. Maybe it was his smell or the bond we shared. Or maybe it was the power I felt running up to him and kissing him the way I just had.

  I didn't question how this had happened so fast or how it felt so right.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Nothing," I said. "Just this."

  "This."

  "How... are you?"

  "Hungry."

  "Hungry for food, or for... people?"

  "Aren't people food?" Aaron grinned. His teeth were so white and perfect. He had always had nice teeth, though.

  "Is it me, or are your canines pointier?"

  Aaron felt them with his tongue. "Maybe. I don't know."

  I brushed crazy hair out of my face and tucked over my ear. "So," I said, "You said it was urgent."

  "Yeah, that's because it is."

  "Tell me, then."

  He sighed and his smile dropped. "I have to leave town," he said.

  I tucked my chin into my neck and pulled away from him, surprised. "What? Why?"

  "I have to go and talk to my father. Everything that's happened to me, this... transformation... I have no idea how or why it happened, but I feel like maybe he might."

  "You're just gonna go up to him and tell him you're a werewolf?"

  I didn't even know werewolves existed a few days ago and now here I was, using the word in a sentence referring to a fact. What else lurked in the shadows of our world, tiptoeing the boundaries of human civilization? What other terrors lived, grew, and even thrived, unchecked, in our world?

  Acheris.

  "I don't know,” Aaron said, “I'm hoping he'll see me and just... know."

  "And if he doesn't?"

  "I'll have to figure it out."

  A car came rolling past and took the turn for the freeway. In a moment, Aaron's car would be doing the same thing, and a great pain hit me. He was leaving with so much left unsaid. Unexplained. Unfelt.

  "So, you're leaving... now?" I asked.

  Aaron nodded. "I have to. I can't wait. I wouldn't want to be around here with no clue when the full moon comes."

  "Yeah. That's... serious business."

  "I wanted to ask you to come, but… I didn't think you would want to come with me."

  I shook my head. "I can't. I have things to do here."

  "I know."

  "No. Aaron, this... this whole thing isn't over. These people who came for me, they're gonna come again. I can feel it."

  Acheris. The name came to me again, this time as hard as a thud. A reminder that there was, at least, one other party involved, that everything comes round in threes. The Sheriff, the cult, and now Acheris; those were the rules.

  "We'll be ready for them," Aaron said.

  "We?" I asked.

  He nodded again. "We. I'm coming back, Amber. I won't be gone long."

  "Okay. And I'll be here."

  "Waiting for me?"

  I smiled and kissed him on the forehead, but I didn't answer. Instead I slid down from the hood of the car, smiled at him, and kissed him on the cheek. "Get out of here," I said. "And hurry back."

  Aaron's lip curled into a sly smile. He got into his car and revved the engine. Our eyes met, and without using words we gave each other a promise. He promised to come back, and I promised to be waiting. Neither of us knew how long we would have to wait, but we both had some answers to find and—at least for now—I was safe in Raven's Glen.

  I took a step back and Aaron pulled the car off the side of the road, spun it around, and went rumbling down the freeway. As I watched, my cardigan and hair flailing from the back-draft caused by the car as it passed, I wondered why I didn't tell him about what Frank had read in the book. About what the priest had said. And about the strange sick feeling I had woken up to every morning since I came into contact with the Demon.

  The gray wolf, the red witch, and the devil; their child spells doom.

  I'll just have to be careful around him.

  To be continued...

  FORGED IN MOONFIRE

  Amber Lee Series

  A Spinoff Novella

  By Katerina Martinez

  FORGED IN MOONFIRE

  Amber Lee Series

  A Spinoff Novella

  Copyright © 2017 by Lee Dignam & Katerina Martinez. All rights reserved. Cover uses images © 2016 Shutterstock.

  Published by Supernal Publishing

  ***

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read my work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or tell your friends about this serial to help spread the word!

  Thank you for supporting my work.

  Chapter One

  Leaving her was one of the hardest things he had ever had to do. Amber had saved his life in more ways than she knew, but Aaron’s hand was forced. He had to leave. There was something crawling beneath his skin, something primal and raw and angry. A monster? Maybe. Aaron had felt its terrible power coursing through him and for a while didn’t believe it was a part of him, or didn’t want to believe.

  He had forgotten most of what had happened out in the woods on the night when he turned. Whenever he reached into his mind to find the memory he found a place he couldn’t enter. He would try to visualize the moment when the bullets struck and what came after, but his thoughts always drifted to the entrance of a strange cave; a cave guarded by a hulking, snarling presence with shining blue eyes and claws dripping with blood. It was as if the animal inside his heart didn’t want him to remember the things he did when it was in control.

  But why would it do that? Where did it come from? And how long before it took control again?

  As much as he may have not wanted to leave, Aaron had no choice. The thing inside of him posed questions Aaron had no answers to, and what was worse was that he was now being pulled toward seeing his father by some kind of strange imperative that hadn’t been there before the moment of his transformation.

  He remembered his father’s old Harley. It was a red and black beast of metal and rubber and it had a beautiful grey wolf painted onto the fuel tank. His mother had painted the wolf while he and his father worked on the mechanics and made sure t
he bike would run. And when it ran, it roared. They had built it together as a family. It had taken months, but those months were among the best that Aaron could remember of his young life.

  But that was before his father left.

  In the days since Aaron’s transformation he had thought about his father more times than he had in the last half a decade. He didn’t want to think about him, but the memories came all the same as had the same imperative to go and see him. Unwanted. Unbidden. But there, and strong enough to pull Aaron away from Amber.

  And now here he was, idling in the parking lot of a tattoo parlor in a suburbs of Las Vegas. The banner that went across the front of the building read Wolf Skin Tattoos and it had a picture of a muscle-clad wolf with a shoulder tattoo on it. Somehow, without any help, Aaron had found his way to the right place.

  All day and all night he had driven through the Nevada desert to get to the glittering city, and when the highway turned into streets all he had to do was follow his nose. He didn’t ask for directions, didn’t stop or hesitate; didn’t even think. He simply acted, following that same unwanted imperative to its source, confident in the knowledge that it had taken him away from where he wanted to be, so it would lead him to where he needed to go.

  Aaron pulled the car into a spot on the wide lot, and when he stepped outside and his feet touched Nevada earth for the first time, it was like stepping into a different planet. The sun was a shining ball of light in the clear noon sky, but although it was beating down hard on the ground its heat was negligible. Aaron and his family were from Southern California and he had only ever visited Las Vegas a few times in his life and always in the summer, so as the winter chill caressed his skin and puffs of steam formed around his breaths it struck him a little hard. This heat-less Vegas wasn’t the one he knew.

  But the cold didn’t truly bother him much and so, armed with nothing but his opened leather jacket, the shirt beneath it, and a pair of dark Levis, Aaron crossed the length of the parking lot toward the door to the tattoo parlor. He was about to jerk the door open when someone pushed it out from inside and stepped into the cold.

  She was slight, short, and she was wearing a black tank top that clung to her body like film. Hair the color of blood hung straight down her shoulders and back; she wore it parted to the side to frame her angular, face. Her lips were full and painted plum, her eyes were as clear as the summer sky and cut through him like a winter chill, but it was the scent coming off her tanned skin that slapped Aaron hard; sweet and subtle and yet also heavy and inescapable.

  Aaron felt himself swallow, then, and that single instant, that single look they shared, was lightning.

  But the lightning was unfamiliar to Aaron. His heart roared like thunder and angry clouds rose up through his chest, rumbling and roiling.

  He lunged at her, grabbed her by the neck and swung her around and into the side of the building, pinning her against the concrete wall with a single hand. Something had gripped him then, something primal and wild; a feeling that jarred him away from reality, from civility and décor, and triggered the animal within him to act.

  But when the animal inside of him looked into the girl’s eyes it saw not fear, but anger and surprise. She wrangled herself free, slipping out of Aaron’s grasp and slamming him square in the gut with her knee. The blow took the air out of Aaron’s lungs and he doubled over and then staggered back a few paces. Her smell was all around him now, on him, deep in his nostrils. Stranger. Enemy.

  He couldn’t process the feelings, but the girl didn’t care. She launched herself at him firing blow after blow of well-trained fists into his chest and abs. Aaron could barely defend against them all—she was so quick!—let alone hit her back, but he reacted to her blows with his body well, tensing his muscles instinctively at just the right time to absorb most of her hits.

  “Enough!” a voice roared from the door to the tattoo parlor.

  The aggressor’s fist halted in midair, and she turned to face the man by the door. He was tall, broad, with strong shoulders, a thick neck, several days’ worth of stubble growing from his face, and long locks of dirty blond hair. Creeping from out of the sleeves of his Guns n Roses shirt were tattoos, so many of them so packed together that from where Aaron was standing he couldn’t make sense of any of them. And at six feet tall, with eyes like ice, there was no mistaking this man for who he was.

  “Jackal, inside,” said the man, hard and stern.

  The girl turned her piercing blues at Aaron, grinned, and made the short walk back to the shop. “I would say your son hits like a girl, but that would be doing me a disservice,” she said to the man as she disappeared behind the tinted door.

  Aaron breathed through the anger clawing its way up his throat and tried to fight it back into its cage. It wasn’t so much anger at being hit—he could barely feel the pain now as his body quickly dulled the sting of the woman’s fists—but his pride had been hurt. Once, when he wasn’t able to defend himself against Jackal’s attacks, and then again when she mocked him.

  He wasn’t used to being mocked.

  And then there was the sudden urge to hurt her. Where did that come from?

  The older man approached the spot where Aaron was standing, slow and careful, but he stopped short of arm’s length. He stared, motionless and expressionless. With his dirty gold hair gently wafting in the breeze, his biker vest, and wolf’s head belt buckle and dark jeans he could have passed for a classic rock god. He looked like he belonged on a poster with a guitar in his hands, shredding the chords while screaming into a microphone.

  “I knew you’d come one day,” he said, his voice as cold as the blue of his eyes.

  “I didn’t need your help,” Aaron snapped.

  “Didn’t you? Jackal would have left you bleeding on the sidewalk if she’d carried on.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that. I’ve seen Jackal drop men twice your size. You’d better not underestimate her nor overestimate your own skill. That kind of thing will get you killed.”

  “I don’t need you to lecture me.”

  “No, you need me to teach you. So why don’t you come on inside and we can get started?”

  Chapter Two

  Aaron stepped into Wolf Skin Tattoo ahead of his father and crossed paths once more with Jackal, who was sitting behind a desk with her eyes on her phone—that is, until Aaron walked in. At that she perked up, placed her phone face down on the desk, and smiled honey at him.

  “No hard feelings?” she asked.

  Strangely there were none, so Aaron shook his head and then took in his surroundings.

  The tattoo parlor was a long building with two booths right up at the front, next to the front desk, and a room round the back, hidden behind a thick curtain. Motley Crue was playing Helter Skelter on the sound system, there were posters of heavy metal bands propped up on the walls alongside pictures of people with tattoos and different kinds of wolves, and shelves covered in little pots of multi-colored ink. The air in here was heavy with disinfectant and other sterile odors Aaron couldn’t recognize and his nose didn’t agree with. He wondered how anyone could breathe in here, let alone work.

  Then he noticed the woman sitting down on one of the benches laid out along the window to the outside. She hadn’t seen, nor heard, anything that had just taken place outside thanks to the earbuds in her ears. Aaron’s body relaxed, until his father patted him on the shoulder.

  “Jackal, you don’t have any more clients today, do you?” Aaron’s father asked Jackal.

  “Not ‘till tomorrow.”

  “Then we’re gonna close early today. As soon as I’m done with her.”

  Jackal nodded and didn’t question what Aaron’s father had said. Instead she bobbed her head to the music and went back to her phone.

  “Listen,” Aaron’s father said, talking to Aaron now, “I know this wasn’t easy for you but I’m glad you’ve come here.”

  Aaron was a little wary of Jackal listen
ing, however passively, to his conversation with his father, a conversation he assumed would be shared in private, but he nodded. “I felt like I had to come.”

  “When did it happen?” his father asked, the expression on his face taking a turn for the serious.

  “A few nights ago.”

  “Full moon,” Jackal offered.

  Aaron’s father nodded. “You did right to come. Your instincts are strong, like mine.”

  Damn right my instincts are strong, Aaron thought, remembering the way his body reacted to Jackal’s blows out in the parking lot.

  “Do you know anything about what’s happened to you?”

  “Little. Only that I—” Aaron glanced at the woman sitting across from them. She was bobbing her head and deep in her phone, oblivious to the conversation. “I’m stronger, tougher, I can change shape, and I can smell… everything.”

  “Have you done much of the shape changing?”

  “I didn’t want to. The last—the first—time I did it I… killed a bunch of people.”

  Jackal’s eyes widened and she glanced at Aaron’s dad, whose face was as hard as an iron anvil. “Innocents?” he asked.

  “No,” Aaron said, shaking his head. “They were trying to kill me.”

  Aaron had dreamed about his first transformation every night since it happened. Always the images came in bursts; blood, fur, snow, silver fire. The time he spent wearing the beast’s skin was all but lost to his conscious mind, but his subconscious remembered. Somewhere, deep inside, he could still taste the blood in his mouth from where he ripped a man’s collar bone right off.