Wicked Bone E-Book

Kari Kilgore

• Herausgeber: Spiral Publishing, Ltd.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Katie fell in love with Pashmina at first sight. 
Luminous green eyes. Silken black fur. A purr like a belly full of bumblebees. 
Pashmina, of course, knows which humans to trust. She shows her trust like all cats. With offerings from her hunts.
And like all cats, Pashmina keeps her secrets to herself. 
Find out what happens when Katie learns Pashmina’s favorite secret.

An excerpt from Wicked Bone:
Katie groaned. “Whycan’t you wait until Ken gets home?”
Pashmina blinked her seductive, languorous blink and purred even louder.
Katie put the vicious, murderous feline on the dark red loveseat. Appropriate match for such horrifying bloodlust.
“Good kitty,” Katie said under her breath. Ken said she had to praise Pashmina for her excellent hunting feats, no matter how messy or how often. “Brave kitty. Clever girl.”
Pashmina rolled onto her back, but Katie had finally learned not to fall for that trap. Cat requests for a belly rub came with claws and sometimes teeth right behind.
The ways of the tiny house panther’s hunts were still foreign and mysterious to Katie, and she thought they always would be.

Leseprobe

For Loretta

My very own Pashmina.

Wicked Bone

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Chapter 1

The bright white ceramic tiles in the glorious, airy sunroom were one of Katie’s favorite things about the vacation house high in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains. Light flooded in from three glass walls and the ceiling, making this one of the few places she felt truly warm so far north in the deep wintertime.

The angular, Art Deco lounge chairs and loveseat had matching white steel frames contrasted with deep, thick cushions in luscious, cheerful shades of every hue she loved. Blue, red, green, purple, and especially pink transformed the room from a beautiful if sterile white box into her little slice of personal heaven.

Even on painfully, unreasonably frigid days, the intense sunlight let Katie pursue her lifelong art and passion of gardening. Rich, earthy scents of jasmine and patchouli brought a welcome touch of her pride and joy, her sprawling prize-winning garden in Miami, to their frozen northern retreat.

The peppery bite of nasturtium lingered on her tongue. She couldn’t resist munching on at least one of the gorgeous orange flowers every time she set foot in her Garden of Eden North. Thanks to Nora, their neighbor and caretaker while they were out of town, Katie’s plants were always thriving.

Brilliant, marriage-saving compromises with her long-time husband Ken stretched far past her beloved white tile and rainbow of cushions in one spectacular room. Ken was out here as often as she was, enjoying the endless sea of mountains, blue and green and brown rolling and swelling as far as the eye could see in warmer weather.

Today crashing waves of brilliant white set off a soaring winter sky so blue it made Katie’s eyes water. Well-planned and expensive construction paid off as the high altitude wind picked up. Glittering veils of ice diamonds danced across her view and over the transparent roof, bringing whispery sounds like sand skittering across the beach. Not the slightest trace of chilly air intruded no matter how hard that bitter wind tried to force its way in.

The house itself was a grand compromise, one Katie was thankful they’d come to the year she’d turned forty-five and Ken forty-three. She would have preferred a house further south than their home in Miami, maybe even the hedonistic, rum-soaked paradise of Key West. She still held out hope for that cozy, exclusive bungalow where the ghost of Hemmingway roamed free as the chickens.

Ken longed for the mountains of his childhood, though, and she had to admit he was right about the song and beauty of the rugged land. At the height of smothery, muggy summer in Florida, the cool breezes and chorus of frogs and insects up here were a symphony for her senses.

A soft, tickly caress across her bare feet, warmed by the fabulous radiant floor heating, reminded Katie of another much-loved compromise. She picked up a delicate, soft as cashmere, absolutely stunning solid black cat. Pashmina rumbled like she had a belly full of bumblebees, and she blinked her gorgeous deep green eyes slow as sweat rolling down a huge glass of summer afternoon iced tea.

Katie had never been a pet person until those emerald beauties claimed ownership of her heart as surely as Ken had.

“Glad to be back in the mountains, my Pashmina love?”

She held the dainty creature up to her ear, grinning as the purrs vibrated through her own skull. Pashmina batted at Katie’s brown curls, then tried to pull her reading glasses from the top of her head.

“You’re right, gorgeous girl. Mommy did come out here to do a little reading.”

Katie headed toward her escapist and adventure corner, a huge purple beanbag piled high with rainbow pillows, and the delightful fantasy adventure novel she’d been dying to get back to. She loved anything but legal thrillers. Her real life job as an attorney made it far too clear that courtrooms were much more hurry up and wait than anything thrilling.

Before she took three steps, she froze.

There. Right there on her perfect, clean white tile.

Once in a great while, deep down inside her own mind, Katie remembered why she’d never wanted pets in the first place.

A smear of blood. A tiny fluff of grey fur.

A stomach no bigger than a dime.

Katie groaned. “Why can’t you wait until Ken gets home?”

Pashmina blinked her seductive, languorous blink and purred even louder.

Katie put the vicious, murderous feline on the dark red loveseat. Appropriate match for such horrifying bloodlust.

“Good kitty,” Katie said under her breath. Ken said she had to praise Pashmina for her excellent hunting feats, no matter how messy or how often. “Brave kitty. Clever girl.”

Pashmina rolled onto her back, but Katie had finally learned not to fall for that trap. Cat requests for a belly rub came with claws and sometimes teeth right behind.

The ways of the tiny house panther’s hunts were still foreign and mysterious to Katie, and she thought they always would be. One day a delicate, pathetic foot lingered to announce the kill.

Another day, the tail. A head without a body. A body without a head.

In Florida Pashmina added lizards, huge insects, and an occasional scorpion to her menu, but continued her rejection of some random body part. Always proudly displayed where Katie would be sure to notice. No rhyme or reason to any of it.

Only bleach and gloves and scrubbing.

Chapter 2

Just as Katie stepped out into the gusting wind cutting through her indoor clothes like a hand through still water, she heard the jangling approach of Ken’s Jeep. He’d bought a second-hand dark blue boxy monstrosity, outfitted with four wheel drive and pulleys and winches and everything else he could think up.

That was another idea of his that seemed strange to her at first, but it shifted into perfect sense and clarity after the first snowstorm up here.

The Jeep still looked horrid to Katie, and her ears recoiled from the irritating noise of the chains on the quiet winter day. And she was consistently amazed at how well that sturdy tank made it through the worst that winter or spring storms could throw at it. So far no creek was too flooded, no road too muddy, and no snow drift too high to stop Ken and his favorite mountain toy retrieved from his childhood.