First Bite: Sweet & Sour Mystery, Book 1 E-Book

Mac Flynn

• Herausgeber: Crescent Moon Studios, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Trixie Lyal stumbles upon the scoop of a lifetime when her move to a new town takes a detour into the paranormal world of Apple Hollow. She winds up at the local diner where she meets a handsome local by the name of Orion. Cupid stings her heart but not the headlines as strange happenings stir her curiosity.

A quick investigation leads to a long road where she becomes her own headline, and a werewolf. Mob-rule forces her to join the ranks of the town’s residents and her babysitter turns out to be her own handsome Orion. Unfortunately for him, she has plans to escape her scoop and fly the coop. To do that, though, she’ll have to survive the coming wild days of were-people, and her own insatiable lust for a certain devilishly handsome wolf.

Leseprobe

FirstBite

Sweet & Sour Mystery, Book1

Mac Flynn

Copyright © 2017 by Mac Flynn

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Want to get an email when a new book is released? Sign up here to join the Wolf Den, the online newsletter with abite!

Wanting to find the rest of the series and check out some of my other books? Hop over to my website for apeek!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Continue the adventure

Other series by Mac Flynn

1

I never wanted, or expected, to be a part of the news, especially in a story I couldn’t publish. But such was my life as a small-town newspaper reporter with seriously badluck.

But first, I had to do a little bitching about my old job as I stumbled upon my new job, and newlife.

“I hate snow. I hate snow. I hatesnow.”

That was my mantra as I eased down the wintry county road. I was alone in my small, beat-up old sedan. It was fifty-thousand miles overdue for a checkup, but the wealth of a newspaper reporter wasn’t exactly counted in dollar amounts. It was more like a calling. An urge to know the truth. A longing to shed light on the facts.

Or that’s the bullshit I kept telling myself as I inched past the two-foot high snowdrifts that stood as sentinels along either side of theroad.

“Why couldn’t they have waited to lay me off some other time? Like July?” I muttered to myself.

It was true. I was unemployed, or rather, in-between jobs. The old job was two-hundred miles behind me, and the new one was a hundred miles and a mountain pass in front ofme.

I glanced out the windshield and sighed. The freak weather storm had been predicted, but I never thought I’d see such weather for early October. The only excuse was the road I found myself on sat somewhere around oxygen-tank elevation.

A flurry of thick, white snowflakes fell from the dark gray sky above me. The whiteness stretched forever, as did the rest of the scenery. I was in a stretch of the country that had few houses and even fewer cities. The hamlets and valleys I’d passed through could have been missed if I blinked. Clumps of small forests and rolling hills pocketed the land to my left. On my right was the constant companion of an ice-filled river with its banks peppered with tall, bare-bone trees occupied by the occasional unfriendly predator bird. Above me the sky showed that there was only an hour left untildark.

“Why couldn’t you have asked them for a little more time?” I scolded myself as I rounded another corner in the countryroad.

‘Them’ was my soon-to-be employer, a newspaper in a far-off city. I would be at the bottom of the totem-pole, a novice reporter in an unfamiliar metropolis. The city I left behind was my hometown, but it had done me wrong by not offering me any job opportunities. My flight from the unemployment line hadn’t been well-received by my mother.

“What do you mean you’re moving?” she’d shrieked after I told her the good news that I’d found ajob.

“They’re the only ones who offered me a job,” I’d pointedout.

“Well, maybe you didn’t look hard enough.”

“Mom, I contacted two dozen. Only three even got back tome.”

“But why that far?” my mom persisted.

“I don’t have much of a choice.”

“Wish I-ah!”

A hulking shadow jumped into the road ten yards in front of me. I slammed on the brake and the car decided to do a dance across the slick surface of the road. Its rear slid left and right as IT skidded to a stop a few feet from the shadow. My headlights glistened off a bunch of brown, wet fur that covered something that stood on two legs. Yellow eyes glared at me from an elongated face before it turned away and loped across the road to my left. The thing jumped the growing snowdrift and disappeared into the white wilderness.

I leaned back in my seat and clutched at my heart. “Easy there, girl, easy. It’s gone. You’resafe.”

My heart was somewhat soothed. I turned the steering wheel so the car faced forward and inched my way into a straight path. The snowflakes fell faster and the day grew darker as night threatened to scare me silly. It’d have to really try after that terrifying creature scare.

“Stop letting your imagination get the best of you. There’s nothing out here but snow and crazy old miners. . .” I mumbled to myself. My eyes flickered to the side of the road where the creature had disappeared. “Wish I’d find one of those crazy old miners so they could tell me where the heck Iam.”

My prayers were answered by the sight of a road block on my side of the road. Two vehicles with state trooper markings were parked in front and behind the road block, and the drivers stood together on my end of the block. They both wore the large-brimmed hats and uniforms of old. One of them held up his hand and walked towards me. I slowed to a stop, this time without the dance moves, and stuck my head out my open window.

“Something wrong, officer?” I askedhim.

He walked up to me and smiled. “Sorry to tell you this, miss, but the road’s closed ahead.”

“Closed? Why?” I askedhim.

“This storm might not look like much here, but there’s winds on the top and the snow’s coming down too fast to see,” he explained.

I leaned back and threw up my hands. “Perfect. Just perfect.” A fitting end to a two-thirds completed hellish white roadtrip.

“If you need some place to stay there’s the last town you passed. Apple Hollow,” he suggested. “They’ve got a good motel with clean rooms and you won’t meet a friendlier bunch of people. Tomorrow you might be able to get through. The weather’s a little funny up here. One day we’ll have a blizzard and the next it’ll be all melted.”

I furrowed my brow. “I didn’t see anytown.”

“That’s because it’s set a ways back from the state highway and they don’t really advertise themselves,” he explained. He pointed at the road behind me. “You go back about a mile and take the first plowed road on the right. Go for about ten miles around two corners and you should find the hollow it’sin.”

I sighed and shrugged. “Why not? I’ve got time.” I raised an eyebrow and my eyes flickered to the trooper. “How much time do Ihave?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t say, but it won’t be today. This is one of the last roads the state plows,” he warnedme.

“Well, thanks for the tip,” I told him. I went to roll up my window, but he put his hand on thesill.

“Just a friendly warning, though, miss. The people in the town are suspicious of gossip hounds, so you might not want to tell them you’re a reporter,” he advisedme.

I frowned and my eyes narrowed. “How’d you know I was a reporter?”

He grinned and pointed at my rear view mirror. A press pass hung from the neck. “It doesn’t take a reporter to see that,” he teased.

I sheepishly smiled and pulled down the pass. “Thanks.”

“Anyway, good luck,” he called to me as he steppedback.

“Thanks.”

I had no idea how badly I’d needit.

2

I turned my car around and crept back the mile he advised. My short, light-weight car slipped and slid in the increasingly tall snow drifts that littered the road. The wind picked up and threw the white fluffy stuff across the narrow highway so that I couldn’t see the yellow center-line. The lines on the sides were covered by the drifts from plowingspast.

I crept along the road and was relieved to see the turnoff. The country road was well-plowed compared to the highway, and I steered onto the road with a sigh. The road was barely wide enough for two cars of my size to pass, but I didn’t have any opposing traffic. The road wound as the trooper said. Civilization was left behind and replaced by scattered farmhouses and open fields dotted with the occasional bunch of trees. To my left and some five miles off was a large forest that stretched into a group of peeked mountains. To my far right was another group of craggy mountains. Those were part of the mountain range over which I was unable to pass. That meant the town I headed was cradled between a rock and a hard .