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Jaz Primo's Novels
Category:
Romance
Publisher: Rutherford Literary Group
ISBN-10: 0982861362
Type: Fiction
Pages: 202
Copyright: September 1, 2012
ISBN-13: 9780982861363
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
Gwen Reaper: As the trust of painfully shy Gwen is earned, secrets are shared, and powers revealed, until Scott is drawn into a love, and a world, he couldn't have imagined.
Winner of the Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Young Adult Novel of 2012 (Paranormal Romance Guild)
Taking a detour from his beloved "Sunset Vampire" series, author Jaz Primo offers up a fast-paced, award-winning story for young adults of all ages.
Scott's sure he'll lose everything he's worked for when his family suddenly decides to move after a family tragedy. But he soon realizes that there are some surprising benefits; and a mystery.
A girl, painfully shy, with a dangerous pet, and a dark past.
As trust is earned, secrets are shared, and powers revealed, until Scott is drawn into a love, and a world, he couldn't have imagined.
Excerpt
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness." John Keats, English romantic poet
I never thought that my first exposure to real beauty would be tinged with the threat of oblivion…
* * *
“This is just perfect!” I complained. “I finally have a steady girlfriend and I’m finally eligible for a starting spot as a safety on our football team.”
If my girlfriend, Kelli, got half as upset as I was about it, then she was going to throw a fit. She wasn’t very fond of surprises. Kelli liked predictability so much that she had already been talking to her friends about what to wear to prom; and that was next spring, almost a year away.
“Listen, son,” Dad said. “Life is just fickle sometimes, so you have to roll with the punches. Besides, we’re going to a smaller town that just might need a talented big-city safety on their team. Think of this as an opportunity.”
I immediately turned to mom, hoping against fate that she might side with me.
“Life isn’t always perfect, Scott,” Mom said. “We’re all making sacrifices with this move, you know.”
Thanks a lot, Mom.
Somehow, I knew it; Dad had already gotten to her.
It was ironic how life occasionally felt like it was destined for perfection. It was in those fleeting moments that I thought that my life was close to being complete. In fact, I wanted the world to freeze in place so that such moments would last forever.
Sometimes those feelings of near perfection lasted for a few hours. Other times they lasted for a few days. On rare occasions, they continued for a couple of weeks. But eventually, something happened to upset the balance, and those sensational feelings, like life, returned to being unfair, unbearable…or worse.
Life was definitely fickle.
My late paternal grandmother, Edna Blackstone, used to say that both things and people were fickle. Not long after grandmother passed away, my dad mysteriously began using that same word.
I wondered if that was destined to happen to me. I hoped not. It was a lame word, in actuality.
Fickle was an old word; one that I had to Google. It meant changeable, or likely to change, especially in affections. By the time I’d turned sixteen, I had determined that fickle was an excellent word to summarize the truth about life. Though not long after that declaration, Mom had chastised me that I was too young to come to that conclusion.
However, I knew better.
My grandmother had died in March, leaving her hometown business, a grocery store and a convenience store gas station, to her only son; my dad. As if that hadn’t been bad enough, Dad said that he didn’t have the heart to sell the businesses outright, and instead, he wanted Mom and me to consider the idea of relocating. At first, I was confident that my mother shared the same level of abhorrence that I had.
Then over the period of a couple of months, I could feel the wind shift in the opposite direction, accompanied by a dire sense of inevitability.
In the end, less than a month from starting my junior year in high school, we moved from bustling Springfield, Illinois to the exponentially smaller town of Custer, South Dakota.
Craptastic.
Custer was located 40 miles southwest of Rapid City, the state’s second largest city. I liked large cities. Unfortunately, Custer was thirty-fourth on the list with a population of less than three thousand people, not counting the tourists who passed through on their way to see Mount Rushmore.
The town was so small that it seemed like I could throw a rock from the ‘Entering Custer’ sign at one end of town, and hit the ‘Leaving Custer’ sign at the other. I had spent only brief periods of time visiting Grandma Blackstone when I was a lot younger; at most, a week during the summers when Dad insisted that we visit. As I got older, I spent more time visiting my mother’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Rogers, who lived just outside Springfield.
After the movers unloaded our furniture and countless boxes and containers, two weeks passed as we unpacked. One of those mornings, I went to enroll for my junior year at Custer High School. I also had to take a computer-based placement test to gauge my aptitude in math and English.
Some people I knew liked tests. I wasn’t one of them.
At least the results were immediate, and I did well enough that the school processed my concurrent enrollment in advanced geometry and American Literature courses at Black Hills State University. It was northwest of Rapid City, and was quite a drive from Custer. Fortunately, I was able to attend the courses online.
Given the placement tests, it took most of the day to enroll in school. But by evening, everything had been taken care of.
Great, I thought. Now I’m a fighting Wildcat.
Not that they had a large athletics program to speak of. At least Custer actually had a football team, though there were only six teams in the league! The league was merely two-thirds the size of my old high school team, the Springfield Senators, which had been a nine-team league. Add to that, it appeared from last season’s standings that the team’s performance was erratic, often winning by four touchdowns one week only to lose by that same amount or more the next. The smaller league seemed to lack much parity.
Once my initial surprise over the diminished league size had worn off, I was left with the hopeful notion that at least my football career hadn’t abruptly ended before it’d even gotten started. I only hoped that I’d have a chance to try out for the team.
“See? I told you that they had a football team that might benefit from your experience,” Dad replied simply, after I shared the news with him.
Mom, on the other hand, was more encouraging, and said, “Trust me, Scott. Your father and I have both seen you play, and I just know that you’re going to impress the coach.”
Then she gave my dad a hard look.
“Your mother’s absolutely right, Scott,” he said. “Show them your moves, and you’re headed for greatness.”
I caught a glimpse of Mom rolling her eyes at him.
“What, Jean?” Dad innocently asked.
Of small consolation, though more likely as a result of my continued disappointment regarding leaving Springfield, was a tidbit of encouragement that I’d been granted. A week after our arrival, Dad surprised me by buying me a relatively new red Chevrolet Blazer at one of the town’s used car dealerships. We’d decided to sell my old Ford truck before we moved from Springfield, and I was happy to have a set of wheels again.
“This isn’t a bribe, Scott,” Dad cautioned me. “Consider this as an inheritance gift from your grandmother.”
Either way, it was really kind of Dad to do that for me, and I gave him a hug with my thanks.
The Blazer’s body was in pretty good shape, it had a relatively new set of tires, and the engine appeared well-maintained. Best of all, the Blazer’s stereo was already equipped with a port so that I could plug my iPod into it.
Cruising with tunes went hand-in-hand for me.
The day after we bought my SUV, I changed the oil in it and gave it a good cleaning, including wiping down the engine with some grease removal solution from the town’s only auto part store. Afterward, Dad complimented me on my work and recommended that I take a ride out east to check out the two closest lakes, Bismark and Stockade.
“Hey, if you’ll scope out some good fishing spots for us, we’ll go this weekend,” Dad had said. “And find out where we need to pick up fishing licenses, too.”
Within the hour, I was driving along Stockade Lake Drive listening to GROUPLOVE’s Colours album and appreciating the warm sunshine. Granted, Custer was way too small for my tastes, but the area was scenic beyond belief. Campgrounds and lodges were all over the place, and you could barely look in any direction without laying eyes on a vacationer.
Tourism was the town’s lifeblood.
Stockade Lake was breathtaking to behold. Its waters looked clear and blue against the cloudless sky. A seemingly endless blanket of green trees covered the area around the lake. I pulled onto a small dirt road that led from the main road and preceded further back into the trees so that I could get closer to the lake.
A small clearing appeared. I got out of the Blazer to walk to the shoreline. The cool breeze felt refreshing as I surveyed the lake. The shoreline proceeded into a small inlet that led back into the trees; likely a great spot for bass and crappie.
I was convinced that I’d found the first fishing spot for my dad and me to try.
As I walked along the shoreline to get a better look back into the inlet, I saw a girl standing on a small section of beach on the other side of the inlet. She appeared to be about my age, and had long, dark hair and a cute body. It appeared that she was looking at a huge log lying partially out of the water.
Then I realized that the ‘huge log’ had stubby legs and a snout!
The beast was easily twice her size and weight, and the hulking creature opened its mouth, revealing a long row of teeth. I was fairly sure that it was an alligator or crocodile. But instead of running away, the girl just stood before it, pointing her arm at it like a rod.
“Get away from it!” I called out in warning.
I grabbed a nearby piece of driftwood and started running toward her. Before I made it ten yards, the creature had thrashed its head and backed away from her, darting backward and disappearing into the water. The girl looked up with surprise to stare at me, and then disappeared into the trees at a dead run.
“Wait!” I yelled, running down the shoreline toward her.
When I got to where she’d been standing, all that I saw were tracks in the sand; both hers and the animal’s footprints. I grabbed my cell phone to take photos of the creature’s prints, but the lapping water had already partially obscured them, rendering the images relatively useless.
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked incredulously while scanning the trees, hoping that the girl might just be hiding nearby.
Unfortunately, she was gone.
And while I was hardly a reptile expert, I was sure that there weren’t supposed to be wild alligators skulking around South Dakota.
* * *
I barely remembered the drive back to town as my mind kept replaying the scene from the lake. What I had seen made no sense for a number of reasons.
When I got home, there was a note on the refrigerator from mom saying that she and dad had gone to the grocery store to look in on things and would return soon. It was still odd to consider that my dad owned a grocery store…and a convenience store, no less.
Life was strange sometimes.
I ran upstairs and started Googling alligators. What I quickly confirmed was that alligators, or crocodiles for that matter, weren’t native to South Dakota. However, according to the information I found, there was an extinct species of alligator called alligator prenasalis, of which some fossils had been found in the Oligocene Chadron and Brule Formations in South Dakota.
Based upon what I could recall, and after comparing a host of online photos, I was convinced that the creature that I’d seen certainly appeared to be an alligator. Further searching also revealed that there was a local host of alligators at a place called Reptile Gardens that was located in the Black Hills of South Dakota, just a few miles south of Rapid City. That was less than an hour’s drive away from Custer.
Okay, so there were some live alligators not far from Custer, though they were technically supposed to be in a controlled habitat. So, maybe what I’d seen was nothing more than an escaped alligator. That still didn’t explain how that girl had somehow influenced the beast.
Why hadn’t it attacked her?
Maybe it was a trained pet or something. That might make sense, I suppose.
But what kind of girl would own a pet alligator?
Maybe her parents were wildlife experts or circus freaks.
That prospect seemed pretty cool, actually.
There was no doubt that I was as captivated by the strange girl as much as the alligator.
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