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Walk on the Wild Side
By
Christine Warren
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Epilogue
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PRAISE FOR USA Today BESTSELLING AUTHOR
CHRISTINE WARREN
HOWL AT THE MOON
"Warren delivers a rapidly paced tale that pits duty against honor and love. Populated with intriguing characters who continue to grow and develop, it is fun to see familiar faces in new scenarios. This is a world that is always worth visiting."
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
"A fantastic addition to the world of The Others… grab a copy as soon as possible. Christine Warren does a wonderful job of writing a book that meshes perfectly with the storylines of the others in the series, yet stands alone perfectly."
—Lori Ann, Romance Reviews Today
"Warren weaves a paranormal world of werewolves, shifters, witches, humans, demons, and a whole lot more with a unique hand for combining all the paranormal classes."
—Night Owl Romance
"Howl at the Moon will tug at a wide range of emotions from beginning to end… Engaging banter, a strong emotional connection, and steamy love scenes. This talented author delivers real emotion which results in delightful interactions… and the realistic dialogue is stimulating. Christine Warren knows how to write a winner!"
—Romance Junkies
THE DEMON YOU KNOW
"Explodes with sexy, devilish fun, exploring the further adventures of The Others. With a number of the gang from previous books back, there's an immediate familiarity about this world that makes it easy to dive right into Warren's storytelling style makes these books remarkably entertaining."
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews (4 1/2 stars)
SHE'S NO FAERIE PRINCESS
"Warren has fast become one of the premier authors of rich paranormal thrillers elaborately laced with scorching passion. When you want your adventure hot, Warren is the one for you!"
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
"The dialogue is outrageous, funny and clever. The characters are so engaging and well-scripted… and the plot… is as scary as it is delicious!"
—Romance Reader at Heart
"Christine Warren has penned a story rich in fantastic characters and spellbinding plots."
—Fallen Angel Reviews
WOLF AT THE DOOR
"A great start to a unique paranormal series."
—Fresh Fiction
"This book is a fire-starter… a fast-paced, adrenaline-and hormonally-charged tale. The writing is fluid and fun, and makes the characters all take on life-like characteristics."
—Romance Reader at Heart
"Intrigue, adventure, and red-hot sexual tension."
—USA Today bestselling author Julie Kenner
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ST. MARTIN'S PAPERBACKS TITLES BY
CHRISTINE WARREN
Walk on the Wild Side
Howl at the Moon
The Demon You Know
She's No Faerie Princess
Wolf at the Door
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
Copyright © 2008 by Christine Warren.
ISBN: 0-312-94791-1
EAN: 978-0-312-94791-0
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / June 2008
St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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For my daddy. For teaching me to shoot a bolt-action .22 rifle. And because I think he'd be proud of me even if the only thing I could write was my own name. I love you, Daddums.
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Prologue
DEAR GOD, IT HURT. EVERYTHING HURT.
Kitty lay in the darkness, struggling to tear her mind from the biting pain long enough to figure out where it was coming from. Her hip, she thought, the right one, and her right leg, too, but that made no sense, because she was lying on them. Why would she lie on her hip when it hurt so bad?
The whole right side of her body felt like someone had put it in a vice and tightened it until she began to come apart. The splintering went all the way up to her head, making it hard to think, and it felt like a herd of elephants had recently danced across her chest. Just breathing made her wonder if a few of them hadn't returned for an encore. If she wanted to find out, she would have to open her eyes.
She didn't want to.
The dark was full of pain, but something told her the light would be worse. If there was any light. Frowning into the blackness, she realized she couldn't quite remember where she was, or how she had gotten there, or why everything hurt. Maybe there was no light.
Instead of opening her eyes, she listened as hard as her aching head would allow. She heard a rough, hard rasping sound first, close by and erratic. For a moment she concentrated, listening for a pattern, a clue, a source. It was when she tried to inhale and heard the sound stutter into a ragged moan that she recognized her own breathing.
She listened harder.
Crickets, tree frogs, cicadas. The nighttime chorus seemed eerily close, almost on top of her. She heard a rustling, intermittent and uneven, and realized that the wind was shaking the branches of a nearby tree. Was she outdoors? No, she couldn't smell grass or earth or the autumn night sky, and she remembered it was autumn. All she could smell was stale cigarette smoke and the pungent slap of gasoline.
Gasoline.
Car.
Driving.
Driving with Misty.
Driving with Misty the back way from Dalton.
Driving fast. Too fast. Fighting.
Headlights. Cell phone. Empty road.
Deer.
Brakes. Screaming. Skidding. Flipping. Screaming. RollingFallingScreamingThudding—
Silence.
Panic grabbed her by the neck, shaking away the last fog of unconsciousness. Eyes flying open, Kitty whipped her head around to look at the driver's seat. She saw the limp wreckage of the air bag hanging down toward her. Saw the equally limp form of her mother, Misty, dangling in the air above her, held in place by her seat belt, her pale, freckled face the color of blackboard chalk. Saw the odd drop in one shoulder.
Smelled gasoline and the thick, charred scent of the end-of-the-season wildfires that still smoldered in the foothills of the Smokies.
Kitty's heart tripped, stumbled, then righted itself and bolted toward an invisible finish line. She had to
get out of here, had to get her mother out of here before a stray spark finished what the wreck had started.
The car had run off the road and down a hillside, landing on the passenger side with Kitty smashed up against the crumpled door. The driver's side pointed to the sky, the window smashed out and the door dented where it must have hit the guardrail or a tree or a boulder on the way down. The roof had partially collapsed, pressing her down against the seat. There wouldn't be much room to maneuver, and the only way out appeared to be through the driver's side window.
She didn't waste time looking for her cell phone. She remembered holding it, remembered it flying out of her hand just before the impact when she'd tried to brace herself against the seat. If it was still in the car, there was no telling where it had fallen. She'd have to get herself and Misty out, and if she managed that, she could worry about finding it afterward.
Waiting for a rescue down here would be a waste of time. Someone would come along eventually, but on the backcountry road they'd been traveling passersby were few and far between. Even if they noticed the skid marks on the dark asphalt, she had no way of knowing how far the truck tumbled from the road. They couldn't wait.
Gritting her teeth against the pain and the surge of it she expected moving to cause, she reached around for her seat belt and pressed the release button.
Nothing happened.
Cursing, staring at her mother's limp form, Kitty pressed again, jamming the button as hard as her trembling fingers could manage, but the belt held firm. The locking mechanism must have been damaged in the wreck. If the truck hadn't been nearly as old as she was, she might have wasted a few minutes trying to find an emergency release near where the shoulder belt connected to the frame behind the door, but it would be useless. She'd have to find another way to free herself.
With her left hand, she grasped the belt where it lay between her breasts, and pulled. The mechanism had locked in place, leaving her precious little wiggling room. She pulled as much slack as she could manage and ducked her head, unable to stop the whimper that escaped as her entire body protested the movement.
Forcing her shoulders forward and the belt up, she managed to free herself from the shoulder harness after what felt like slow, painful hours. Her fingers slipped off the hard fabric weave, and she heard the rapid-fire clicking of the belt retracting and a dull snap as it thudded against the back of the seat. She bent over her knees, fighting back simultaneous surges of nausea and dizziness. She couldn't afford to quit now.
Her lungs labored like some kind of power tool, loud and harsh and rasping in the unnatural stillness. She listened hard over the chaos in her head and finally heard Misty's breathing, uneven and much too weak.
As soon as the nausea faded, Kitty sucked in a breath, ignoring the sharp, stabbing pain in her side, and gripped the lap belt. She pulled and whimpered again when the restraint offered no give. She yanked harder, but the fabric stayed in place across her belly. God, this could not be happening.
Her brain scrambled for some alternate solution even as her hands clenched, and she poured all her strength into another pull. Misty moaned, the sound barely more than a painful exhalation, and Kitty felt the fear inside her rising. The smell of smoke and gas intensified, the air thickening, and she could have sworn she heard the faint, distant crackle of the flames.
God. If she didn't get them out of the wreck, they were going to die there, in a broken-down old truck on the side of a deserted backcountry road. It made a lousy end to her weeklong visit home, and all because of a damned stupid deer that hadn't had the sense to run at the first sign of headlights.
Kitty did not plan to go out that way.
Her heart, already racing, sped even faster, and the dizziness she'd felt before returned with a vengeance. This time, she didn't bother to put her head down and wait for it to pass. No time. She might pass out, but so long as she did it after she made it out of the truck, she could care less.
She heard Misty shift and gasp, heard the gasp turn into a cough. A series of coughs, breathless and much too quiet. Smoke was definitely blowing at them now, and if the wind was pushing the smoke toward them, the fire wouldn't be far behind.
Swearing, she pulled and yanked and tugged, but the seat belt wouldn't give. It had locked in place over her hips, blocking her escape. If she couldn't make it move, she'd have to move around it. Holding it in her left hand, she began another slithering attempt to ease herself out of her seat. The pain clawed at her, but she ignored it. It wasn't going to go away any more than the fire, and unlike the fire, the pain wouldn't kill her. In fact, it reassured that she hadn't already died.
She braced her left foot against the floorboard and tried to lever herself up in the seat. The belt slipped an inch off her belly and onto the tops of her thighs, then stopped to grip even more tightly, trapping her. Damn it, she couldn't be trapped. She had to get them out of there.
The right side of her body screamed in protest every time she moved, and she'd seen enough on television to know she might be making whatever injuries she had that much worse. She would have worried about paralysis if it hadn't hurt so damned bad. But even if she could feel every inch of her right side from tip to toenails, she couldn't move it. No more than an inch or so, and that with concentrated, sweat-inducing effort. It wasn't going to lend her any power in escaping; more likely, she'd be dragging it behind her. If she managed to escape at all.
Misty coughed again, the sound even weaker, and Kitty redoubled her efforts to escape. God had gotten His chance to kill her in the initial wreck; if He hadn't done it then, she figured she'd been meant to get out of here. She didn't intend to give Him or the devil a second chance.
Determination, though, wasn't getting the job done. No matter how she wriggled and pulled and tore and pushed, the belt and her body refused to budge. She felt her heart speed up, racing, until the pounding echoed in her ears. Her breathing became rapid, shallow pants that barely drew in enough oxygen to keep her conscious. Or maybe she wasn't getting enough. Her vision had begun to blur.
Blinking against a darkening haze, she peered at the mangled interior of the truck and made a helpless sound of protest as it started to melt and twist around her.
Her body seemed to melt and twist as well. It didn't hurt, precisely, but it frightened her, the way she had suddenly become something out of a Dalí painting. She guessed that if she looked into a mirror, she would see her own features running down the surface of her face. See her limbs twisting in ways nature had never intended them to twist. See her insides and her outsides rearranging themselves into something she instinctively guessed she would never recognize.
She heard Misty cry out, but the sound came from a great distance. Everything seemed to be more distant than it had been a moment ago, as if Kitty had been plucked out of her skin and set back down in a slightly different place than she'd occupied before. Her mind had gone quiet and blank of all thoughts but those of escape.
She reached out one more time to push the belt away from her and blinked in shock when the thick fabric shredded in front of her eyes, as if a scalpel had sliced through the tough webbing. How the hell had that happened?
Did it really matter?
Resolving not to bother asking questions, Kitty tugged her legs out from under the confining lap belt, tumbling forward into the center console when the task seemed to take a good several inches of leg less than it should have. She bumped skull first into Misty and shook her head to clear it. Actually, it had felt like she'd gone nose first, nose and mouth at the same time, which was ridiculous. Her nose was perfectly average, not big enough to precede her into a room, and no one had ever accused her of having bee-stung model lips. Her forehead must have made contact first. She was just disoriented.
Her vision still hadn't cleared. She felt almost as if she were looking through a haze of smoke at an old black-and-white television set. Her color perception seemed off, probably from the smoke, but her depth perception was all screwed up, as we
ll. Nothing seemed quite where she thought it should be. She reached out for Misty and her hands caught nothing but air. She couldn't even seem to reach her mother, let alone grasp her under the arms like she had planned so she could haul them both to safety.
Misty cried out, an honest-to-God scream this time, and Kitty could read the terror clearly on her face. The older woman stared at her daughter as if she didn't even recognize her, and Kitty felt a stab of pain that had nothing to do with her battered right side. In fact, her right side felt a lot less battered now than it had just a couple of minutes ago. Getting free of that seat belt had been like a miracle cure. It must have been cutting into a nerve or something, preventing her from moving.
Dismissing the inconvenient curiosity, Kitty reached out again, and again missed her mother's body. Frustration welled up inside her, and she suppressed the need to roar her displeasure. The smoke was definitely thickening now. It obscured her vision and filled her lungs, and the need to get out of danger urged her on like a pair of razor-sharp spurs in her sides. She had no time left for mistakes. She had to do this now.
She reached for Misty one last time, completely unprepared for a small fist to come smashing down on the side of her face in an astonishingly forceful blow.
Kitty blinked, her mind reeling, her brain scrambling to make sense of an attack from the woman who had given birth to her, whom she was currently trying to save from a painful and undignified death beside a deserted country highway.
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