King of Beasts

Chapter 1

If you can see them, then you’re already dead.  If you can hear them, then you’re not far from it.  If you can smell them, like the forest they live in, then avoid danger at all conceivable costs.

Because they’re the monsters in the shadows of Harvey Hill’s forests, and their king needs his queen.

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.

In the deepest hours of night, when the moon is as powerful as it could be, the beasts lurk.  Crawling through the streets of the tiny, secluded town they pass the doors marked with their symbols and take the offerings at the edge of the town’s limits.  On all fours as they usually travel beneath the moon, they are lithe, and lethal, and the residents of Harvey’s Hill listen to their claws scraping over the tarmac while they pretend to be asleep.

No one wants to be the next Ann-Marie, or the next Jessica, or the girl from last week, Clair.  They want their windows closed and a red painted symbol on their door to ward against the evil.  They want ammonia on their doorsteps to hide their scents lest a beat find them . . . appetizing, and worth the effort of getting past the ward.  And most certainly, they don’t want to be the mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers who wake in the morning to find one bed empty within their house and footprints that seem like men’s feet, caked in dirt, leading to their loved ones bedroom.

Here in Harvey’s Hill, when the clock hits ten, you best be inside, under covers, and praying to the moon that the beasts will pretend you’re not even there.

And that’s what Charlotte has been doing for the past nineteen years.  She takes her online courses so she won’t risk a class running late at the community college three towns over.  She doesn’t party, because the other girls were usually taken from a risky gathering, past out drunk by a bomb fire.  Charlotte paints the symbol on her families door herself because she loves to draw, even if it means warding off the thing of her little towns nightmares, and she went through the exhausting training by the elders to learn the protective symbols, all of them, bested to only those capable of handling their magic.  It’s taken her years to learn them from her grandmother.

She got the best grades and was the best daughter and had the best little brother in the entire world.  Her dog Gilmore was an asshole, but she loved the ridiculous husky, and she swam in the local creek for hours.

But Charlotte lived in a small own with more woods than houses, and more wild animals than not.  And occasionally, because they didn’t know any better, a deer decides to cross the road just as Charlotte is coming back into town lines.

The sun had already descended, and the beasts were surly waiting for the clock to strike ten and to make their appearance.  She’d been driving fast, it was eight, sure, she still had two hours.  But she needed to pour ammonia on their driveway and front steps still, and draw the symbol on her door, and close the shades.  In her mind, it didn’t register that her family, realizing she was late, had already done all those things.  She was just speeding, because it was all she knew to do.

She’d been damning the stupid conference she as attending, even though the discussion on hybridized energy development had been fascinating to her.  And she was damning the speaker for giving her five minutes afterwards even though she’d practically begged to speak to the professor.  And she was damning the fact that he found her smart enough, interesting enough, to talk for the next hour and a half.

And when the deer come from nowhere as they usually did, she damned her breaks, and her tires, and the road, and the fact it was past sundown and no cars would be passing by until sunrise.  No one would see her and her car, no one would find her.

It was past dark, after all, and it was the beasts time to roam.

AN: So you guys stop tearing me apart, I'll warn you now. The last chapters have been removed due to the publication of this book. Read on if you'd like, but you've got to stop threatening me when you get to the end. I love you all, but your passion for reading has turned into outright aggression. It'll be okay guys. We'll get through this.
However, if you are reading this currently the chapters that had been removed have been posted at the beginning of the sequel, Midnight Shadows, to avoid a problem with my publishers, so you can still read the book in it's entirety.