by Aidy Award
Text copyright ©2017 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by S.E. Smith. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Magic, New Mexico remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of S.E. Smith, or their affiliates or licensors.
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A Touch of Fate
A Fated for Curves Novel
Aidy Award
Magic, New Mexico
Kindle Worlds
Copyright © 2017 by Aidy Award.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at the address below.
Aidy Award
www.AidyAward.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com
Book Title/ Aidy Award. -- 1st ed.
ASIN
Dedication
For my mom, who I learned about love and romance from in the first place.
Happy Birthday.
A Touch of Fate
Kady Ayininkizi, your anything but average curvy geek girl, has isolated herself in her brand new tiny house in the mountains because she’s tired of being bullied by the alphaholes of the world.
The spaceship that crashes in her backyard brings the first alien she’s ever encountered, make that the sexiest alien, ever.
When he insists she help him get to some weird place called Magic, New Mexico, she is determined to outwit the men in black in spite of the growing attraction that she knows will never come to fruition.
Black Barrett can’t lead his elite team of shape-shifting Star Rangers on their mission to stop the scourge that is the spectral soul stealers if he can’t get to Magic, New Mexico.
His best bet is the luscious witch who doesn’t seem to know how to use her powers, but has earth’s lawmen running in circles with her sexy-as-hell smarts.
But, when her powers surface and bring the spectrals down around them in force, he must choose.
Save his one true love that the Fates have brought him, or save the universe.
Save the geek girl, save the world.
―Aidy Award, A Touch of Fate
Contents
One: Crash Into Me
Two: First Contact
Three: A Bear in the Woods
Four: Don’t Kiss Me Like That
Five: Escape from Witch Mountain
Six: In the Garden of Gnomes
Seven: Thunder, Lightening and Snow
Eight: Baby, You’re a Firework
Nine: Spectral Storm
Ten: Warrior Witch
Eleven: Sex Magic
Twelve: Key to Victory
Thirteen: Welcome to New Mexico
Fourteen: Soul Magic
Fifteen: Bring It On
Sixteen: Dark Warrior
Seventeen: Fates Forsaken
Eighteen: Unforgiven
Nineteen: The Power is in You
Twenty: Marked Forever
Chapter
One: Crash Into Me
Too many systems in Black’s shuttle were failing. The computer screamed his falling altitude until he couldn't take its whining voice any longer and smashed the interface to bits with his fist. Fates be damned he was going to crash on the little blue planet.
If he drowned before finding the spectral soldiers that had been plaguing the galaxy on this water-logged planet, he was going to beat back any Fate who even tried to take him to the afterlife with a stick.
He jabbed at the short-range communicator attached to his arm.
“Listen up, team. I’m going to attempt an emergency landing in the forested area ahead. Continue to Magic, New Mexico. Make contact with Frost. Finding the spectrals is still the key mission. I’ll catch up as soon as I can.”
He got two yes, sirs from his brothers, a got it from Fed, and a grumble from Titian. That Fates-forsaken fox. “Titian, you copy?”
“Nope.”
He didn’t have time for Titian’s bullshit. “Good. My long range comms is out. Contact Passion and let her know I’m going down.
“Aw, fuck me.”
The ship bucked and took a steep dive. Black punched at the keyboard of the flight control panel praying for a response, but what he got was the ship jerking him around, literally. A new warning siren blared, indicating the tailspin, but Black didn't have the time to care. He was too busy trying not to die.
Fucking hell. Join the Star Rangers Elite Corps they said, it'll be epic they said.
He didn't need epic, he needed a damned lead on the spectrals and a way to defeat them. If one more family had to come to the Star Rangers pleading for his help… No, he wouldn't think of those who grieved their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers now. If he survived this day he’d vow to rescue as many as he could and avenge those he couldn't.
First, he had to survive, the bear inside of him taunted.
“Impact in fifteen seconds.”
Black slammed his fist all the way through the console and could die happy knowing this particular computer voice would never again tell anyone else about their own impending doom.
Earth’s enormous white clouds engulfed the ship bouncing and bumping him until his teeth rattled. It was only a few seconds until he broke through the cloud cover and saw the land below growing in the forward screen.
The miles of green trees and snow tipped mountains were so like his native PLANET. If the Fates ordained that he had to die anywhere but home, this would be where his soul would most be at rest.
Not that he was giving up. No way. Never. If he could just level the ship out to an angle that wasn't quite so steep he might be able to skim across the land and stop upright and alive. That is if no large structures or natural formations blocked his path. Like the side of that mountain.
Shit.
“Impact in ten—”
“Shut up you bag of dung.” Hadn’t he already killed the bitch? How was it that the computer voice had redundant systems but the flight control didn’t?
Black flipped the switch for his last-ditch effort, the manual steering column. He hadn’t used one since he’d learned to fly as a cub and even then, he hadn’t been good at it. But crashing a training shuttle ten feet above the ground and smashing a forty-ton piece of metal built for interspace travel were two different things. He unlocked the column from its position under the console and clicked it into place.
“Seven—”
He cursed the computer one last time and pulled up on the manual steering column with all his might. Years of battle and many more working the land he loved had given him more strength than most soldiers, man, bear, or anything else. He called upon the Fates to imbue him with more.
“Six—”
&n
bsp; The ship continued in its downward spiral. His muscles strained and he heard metal grinding against metal. A small explosion shook the back of the ship and he lost a chunk of one wing.
“Come on, baby. Come on.” Maybe if he sweet talked her instead of cursing her she’d do his bidding.
“Five seconds to impact.”
Sweat beaded on his brow and upper lip. “I’m giving you all I’ve got, baby. Gimme just a little back.”
“Four—”
She leveled out by the tiniest degree. Black’s muscles tremored and shook under the absolute exertion. “That’s a good girl.”
“Three—”
The ship skimmed the tops of a clump of dark evergreen trees, then dipped into them. The sound of breaking branches and the trunks clanging on the sides of the ship were louder than open laser fire in battle.
“Two—”
The last thought that flashed though his mind before impact wasn't that of his friends, family, or his life playing before his eyes. It was the fact that the medallion hanging over his heart glowed with the light of a whole damn galaxy worth of stars.
“One.
Fuck the Fates. His life was his own, and this was not how it would end.
Impact, impact, iiiimmmpaaaaccct.”
CHAPTER
Two: First Contact
Kady ran back into her tiny house on wheels and rummaged through the storage space under her bench seat. Damn it, she really needed to get more organized. There was barely any room to move in this two-hundred and fifty-five square foot place as it was. She and her big butt squeezed through spaces smaller than she ever expected she could. This clutter didn’t help.
“Where is it, where is it?” She shoved aside a pair of jeans she thought she’d lost, a shoe box without a top filled with old Pokémon cards, a spare set of keys to her old apartment, and a half-eaten bag of hedgehog snacks, before she found what she was looking for.
“Aha.” She pulled out the $19.99 telescope along with a chipped Death Star coffee mug tied to it with yarn and rushed back outside.
The view of the night sky continually awed her from up here in the outskirts of the mountain town of Estes Park. For the first time in her adult life she could see the creamy haze of the Milky Way. But that wasn’t what had drawn her attention away from her Netflix marathon of STNG tonight.
She set up the tiny tri-pod on top of a nearby boulder and pointed the lens skyward. She bumped her glasses into the lens trying to get a good look. “Where did you go, little alien?”
A few minutes ago, she’d seen what she thought was a simple shooting star. But, the longer she looked, the more it moved, and not in a straight path. She searched the sky through the little eye-sight until she found the blob, burning through the sky.
“Holy guacamole.”
She couldn’t make out a shape, the power of the telescope simply wasn’t strong enough, but whatever it was bucked like a bronco. The horse, not the football players.
“No way that’s an asteroid or a comet or a weather balloon.”
Something man-made…or not made by humans at all, but by aliens was falling straight to Earth and headed for her backyard.
“Sweet.” She was going to make first contact. Did the Prime Directive apply to her as a pre-warp society?
She glanced back up and the bronco ball of light was a heck of a lot closer.
“Oh, shitbuckets.” It was headed for her backyard. It was going to crash into the one piece of the world she owned and destroy everything.
Where were Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi with their drilling machines and atomic bombs when a girl needed them?
The not a shooting star quickly turned into a fiery ball. A spaceship shaped one, with wings, make that wing, and a hull, and giant laser gun-missile weapons array.
Great. Awesome. Alien spaceships were real. Hell, yeah.
But, they were going to kill her, or destroy everything she’d worked so hard for, so same thing.
Hell, no.
She had to do something and fast, or her tiny house and her beloved bath house were both going up in flames, not to mention Percy and herself.
No light-sabers, no magical spells, no prayers or affirmations to the universe were going to change the path of destruction aimed at her. What could she do but run? Nothing.
So Kady ran. For about a hundred yards. A stitch hit her in the side so deep if felt like an attack of the killer seamstresses slowed her down. She grabbed her side and tried to speed-walk. “I swear to you Universe, if you let me save my house, I’ll never ask for anything again.” She gasped. “This week…or next.”
The fire in the sky was getting closer. Side-stich be damned, she had to save her house. She’d worked too hard saving every penny she’d made since she was nine-years old and being shuffled to another foster family to lose everything she had now.
She jogged a few steps, walked a few, jogged a few until her tiny house on wheels came into view.
It sat in such a perfect spot. A copse of trees surrounded the back and the meadow opened up right out her front door. She had sun in the morning for the solar panels and shade in the afternoon to keep the house cool. It had taken a solid week to get the satellite dish for her internet connection just right.
If these aliens ruined her sanctuary, she was going to kick their butts. As soon as she learned how to use the Force, or some Krav Maga.
Although, that would require going to town and talking to people and that meant getting out of her pajamas and well, talking to people. People sucked.
People pretended to care, but didn’t. People abandoned her without even so much as a have a nice life in the foster care system.
Plus, also there was that whole working out thing she wasn’t really into. Still, as soon as she established first contact, she’d find out if the aliens had the technology to repair her little abode with the flick of their wrists.
She looked back up at the whizzing oncoming collision and gulped. That is if she or any of them survived.
Kady picked up her pace and gasped her way to the tiny house. She threw open the front door and scanned the room. “Percy? Where are the truck keys? Percy?”
No response and no keys. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She tossed throw pillows, her Xbox remote, and a R2-D2 quilt over her shoulder. Maybe they were in her comfy chair. A cheeto, two food pellets, and three swear words later, no keys.
“Why do I do this?” If she and her tiny house survived, she swore to finally get rid of everything that didn’t bring her joy and clean up her clutter once and for all. She pushed her glasses up her nose and spun around glancing at every flat surface and some bumpy ones hoping for a glimpse of her She-Ra keychain.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Time was running out. She really didn’t want to cut and run with or without Percy.
She glanced out the window, the spaceship was close enough to see with the naked eye and it lit up the meadow.
“Dear and sweet Universe. Where the fuck are my keys?”
There, on the window sill, in the plant. She-Ra, Princess of Power. “Yesss.”
Percy was going to have a rough ride.
She bolted out the door, slammed and locked it behind her and jumped into the old red pick-up truck. It took her three tries to reverse into the right position to get the trailer and the hitch lined up.
She’d only done this on her own twice. Once when she picked her tiny house up from the manufacturer in Colorado Springs and again when she’s hauled it up to her brand spanking new three point seven five acres of land in Larimer County.
She’d hadn’t planned to leave if she could help it, and up until tonight she hadn’t needed to. Damned space alien bastards.
This was not the way to start a friendly relationship.
The sound of the ship descending on her was a low rumble now. Hurry, hurry. The only thing she had to do was get this thing hitched and move out.
The rumble in the sky turned into a screech. She fidd
led with the ball, her hands fumbling in her hurry. “Come on, come on.”
She glanced up at the death ship hurtling toward her. It jerked up, to the side, took a steep dive, and then it’s nose aimed right for her.
The metal of the hitch clanked into place, jamming her fingers right smack dab in between. “Ouch, ow, owie, ow, ow, ow, ouch.”
She yanked her purpling fingers free and sprinted to the truck cab, ramming the keys into the ignition.
Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, rrrph. “Don’t do this to me, Herbie. Start, damn you.”
Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrph.
The ship jumped and then fell a hundred feet straight down, then screamed toward her.
Oh, crap. She wasn’t going to make it. The vessel was twenty yards in front of her.
She twisted the key one more time.
Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to die here and now.” Kady jumped from the truck seconds before the boom of the space ship passed over head, missing her by no more than half a foot, tossing her into the sky for an aerial cartwheel.
She landed hard ten feet away and rolled another five. For once she was glad for the extra padding on her ass. The sound of the tops of the trees breaking in the path of destruction crashed, making her curl into a ball, trying to protect her head and body from the debris.
Ka-BOOOOOOOOM.
Kady’s stomach imploded with a drop like a thousand cannons on the fourth of July and her ears rang with the squeal of the longest, meanest train whistle. She swallowed to keep from tossing her cookies, because that would be a waste of cookies.
When she was sure nothing was coming, up she pushed herself off the ground and stumbled, falling back down with a plop.
Great googly-mooglies, she might have blown an ear drum. She couldn’t hear anything but the ringing echoing off the mountains and inside her head.
