Kindle Edition
Amazon
Amazon
Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1975954327
Type: Fiction
Pages: 217
Copyright: September 2017
ISBN-13: 9781975954321
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Will Cat and her new friends (including an angel named George) be able to stop the vortex before it claims the entire planet? Cat’s life is definitely no longer humdrum and ordinary.
Cat Viggolone just can’t get a break. She'd gotten married, but that ended when the husband left her for his younger secretary. She'd wanted children. That flew out the window along with the cheating husband. There’s the career, but working a window at the Virginia DMV can’t really be classified as a great career choice. At thirty-three, her life had become positively dull. Then the vortex opened. Sucked up into a corridor just outside of Hell, she meets Connor, a werewolf, and Larry, a demon that looks like a blue-eyed eyeball. They escape back to earth, only to find that the vortex has opened up in downtown Richmond. The town is going to hell, literally. Besides a grayness seeping out and turning all living things into zombies, monsters and demons are invading Cat’s world. Will Cat and her new friends (including an angel named George) be able to stop the vortex before it claims the entire planet? Cat’s life is definitely no longer humdrum and ordinary.
Excerpt
Some days, a girl just can't get a break. I wanted to get married, have kids, and a career that I loved. Instead, I married Jeff, who had an affair with his secretary, and divorced me so he could marry the bimbo. As for the kids, he didn't want any. Of course, last week I got the news from his snide mother that his bimbo was pregnant. Of course, she'd always blamed me for us not having kids. As for that career—working a window at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles wasn't quite what I'd dreamed about.
At age thirty-three my life was boring. Then the vortex opened.
* * * * *
Friday at the DMV bulged with people. I took money for license renewals and fielded the same old questions I've always gotten about why some folks' licenses were revoked. "Next!" I called out, slumped over my counter, little devils jackhammering away at my brain into a growing tension headache.
My eye on the hands of the wall clock as they drew closer to five o'clock, I swore one more person who wanted to know why her little teenaged darling hadn't passed the road test, I would scream.
When five o'clock rolled around, I escaped to my car. I didn't know why I hurried; no doubt it would be another tedious weekend for me.
The cranky old junk heap did its usual old ritual of coughing and backfiring before finally the engine gave up and turned over. I just wanted to get home, soak in a hot bath, and order a chicken mushroom pizza from my favorite pizza delivery.
But just as I was about to turn into my driveway, a gigantic quadrilateral of swirling neon colors—reds, purples, and hot pinks—appeared out of nowhere right smack in the middle of the street. It created a gale that blasted the neighborhood. Trees uprooted and flew into it, along with a couple of cars, a bicycle, and one yodeling cat. People ducked into their homes. That's when my car decided right then and there to break down. My heart pounded so hard, I thought it might break through my chest. I tried to restart the engine, but it remained dead. I leaped out and bolted for my house. Unfortunately, that path happened to be in alignment with the destructive force. I never made it.
* * * * *
I opened my eyes. A dull pain pounded on the right side of my head. Reaching up, I found an egg-sized bump underneath my tangled hair. Dizziness assaulted me and my stomach lurched. I leaned over to my right and threw up what remained of my snack from my afternoon break. Chocolate doesn't taste good coming back up. I squeezed my eyes shut as the pain and wooziness went the next level of crazy amusement park ride vertigo. A few seconds later, I popped one eye, then the other open. I still had the dizzy spell, but it'd lowered to passable lightheadedness.
"Great," I muttered, wincing, "just really great. I must have banged my head on the steering wheel or something. Heck, maybe I had a nasty nightmare and fell out of bed and smacked my head."
I combed the matted locks out of my face, but it didn't work. That only made my sore head hurt worse. "I'd like to know how I tangled my hair from a clout on my head. I need my brush. Where's my purse?"
I looked around. "Wait a minute, this isn't my bedroom. Not my car either." To tell the truth, it didn't look like I was anywhere on Earth. Okay, maybe the Twilight Zone. That's what the whole scene reminded me of. I saw nothing except a place filled with gray mist. A creepy, cobwebby kind of mist. I expected Rod Serling to come out of hiding and start his spiel.
"Hello!" I called out as I crawled to my knees and from there tottered to my feet. My voice echoed back.
In the distance, I saw something. Indistinct because of the mist, it grew more and more distinguishable as it drew nearer. As it drew nearer, I saw it was two separate beings. One was a single eyeball with a dark blue iris about the size of a miniature poodle. It hovered in mid-air. The other, a gigantic black wolf with red eyes.
Wolves don't get that big, do they? And what is the other thing? I almost pissed my pants. "Stay back, whatever the hell the both of you are," I said, stepping back and holding my fingers out in the sign of the cross.
"That only works with vampires, and to tell you the truth, it doesn't work well with them either," said the wolf, its voice deeply male. “At least, so the movies claim.”
Oh God, the wolf talks.
"Wolves don't talk."
"Of course, they don't," snapped the wolf," because I'm not a wolf. I'm a shapeshifter." He cocked his head to one side. "I see you don't understand what shapeshifter means. Try werewolf. That's what you humans named us in all those stories."
Run, just run! The whole place full of thick mist made it hard to see more than a few inches in front of me. Who knew what else I might have stumbled into? Besides, I found that what they say about freezing in terror happened to be true. I stood there, staring at both the werewolf and the floating eyeball, my heart drumming at ninety miles a minute.
The eyeball drifted nearer to me until we almost touched nose to . . . iris?
"Jesus!" I stumbled backwards and tripped. "Owww." I landed on a harder surface then I thought.
The wolf sighed. "Larry, get away from the lady. I don't think she likes anything of a supernatural bent."
'Larry' levitated back over to the wolf and floated by his side. Its movement reminded me of a cork attached to a fishing line, bobbing in the water.
A nervous giggle escaped me. I clapped both hands over my mouth as I realized how that might be interpreted by the monsters.
When I felt more in control of not letting any more titters escape, I asked, "Why would something like that be called Larry?"
The werewolf snorted. "His parents named him, just like I'm sure your parents named you."
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