Short Stories

Eye Of The Storm

In Cara's home town with her eight sisters it ran like any other - except she had to deal with fenriswolves, draugar and shamans; creatures you'd only see in mythology books.

She's a living legend but grew up like anyone else.

Cara was kicked out of her home and forced into being a bounty hunter for the town council - after all, she was the only thing that could kill her fellow monsters.
She waited for three years before she got word that she could come home. Home, to her sisters she missed so much and the town that was her safe haven.
But when she arrives her home is in flames. Three of her sisters are dead, one is comatose, and the other four are missing.
Her town's in panic. The keeper of the wards is dead, leaving their home open to human eyes, and thieves and murderers hid among them - the only one they can trust is Cara, because her magic is the only thing that could help.
Cara's not interested in helping finding the spell that keeps the wards in place and restoring the town to its former glory.
She's a Valkyrie.
She's hunting down her sisters' killer and destroying anyone who gets in her way. Cara will play the council's games if it means getting her vengeance - but she'll uncover life-changing secrets and unexpected relationships along the way.
And her greatest foe yet.~

Cara was used to the bitter smell of death and coffee, the two scents often going hand in hand for her these days. It reminded her of a normal misty morning when she cleared out her car boot of the bodies she'd piled up.

They tend to reek once you've hidden them for so long.

There was no one around, as Cara planned, when she burned the bones and buried the ashes to cover her tracks. Humans had a tendency to panic when they beheld mythic or abnormal things - deep blue bones would cause world-wide hysteria.

But Cara hunted the draugar. They were often mistaken as vampires and she was the only thing that could kill them.

She didn't remember the place she originally grew up, but the town where she was raised by her sisters was home and unlike any other. It held trapped within myths direct from Scandinavian history - tales of vikings and their gods and monsters.

She was one of those monsters, on a task to hunt down all the others who had escaped her town three years ago when the wards failed for no more than three seconds.

Three seconds - and over twenty creatures had escaped, including herself.

Draugar were easy to hunt; they couldn't blend easily into human society when they craved blood every once in a while, not to mention their naturally bluish hue they gave off in natural light. Their magic, those that were gifted in it anyway, didn't work on creatures like Cara so bringing them down was easier.

The shamans were a little tougher. They were pesky witches who thought the world revolved around them, thought themselves so high and mighty. A little harder to spot in a human crowd when they didn't give off any non-human habits, unless you called smuggling organic products non-human. Cara learned quickly that snapping their wands paralysed them in shock long enough to bring them down.

It was the fenriswolves, the shape-shifting ones, that were the most difficult and the most deadly. They could shift into full wolves ranging from the size of a puppy to the size of horse. The more powerful the wolf, the bigger.

It was one of those creatures she hunted now.

She'd been hunting this one for a few weeks but this one was craftier than the other three Cara had hunted. They, for one, were a lot smaller. One was able to get through a dog flap with no trouble, the other two slipping between cracks in windows and doors to rob people of food, or shred someone apart when they were caught.