Amaranth: The Preterhumans Book 1

Amaranth:

The Preterhumans Book 1

by Katherine Bell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Katherine Bell on Smashwords

All persons portrayed in this work of fiction are not real. Any similarity to real persons is unintentional. All rights reserved. No part of material covered by this copyright may be reproduced in any manner.

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Copyright © 2008, First Printing, by Katherine Bell. Cacoethes Publishing House, LLC.

Copyright © 2010, Second Printing, by Katherine Bell. Lulu.com Publishing. E-Book Publication, by Katherine Bell, Smashwords.com.

All books published by Katherine Bell can be found on her website:

http://www.katherinebell.net

or through select book retailers.

Chapter One

—and I’m getting four TVs put in it: one on the dash, one angled like this, and two on the back of the headrests. It’s going to be full surround-sound.

And somehow that would be my older brother. The irony astounded me sometimes. What had Daddy been thinking?

"I thought you bought the Hummer to drive, not to use as a, a mobile entertainment device, Rafe. And don’t you have a TV in your house, a big-screen?"

I think I’ve turned it on once to make sure it worked. No one goes in my bedroom anyway. It sees no action.

And that’s more information about your personal life than I ever wanted. What does Amanda have to say about this? I shuddered. That raised entirely too many questions I definitely did not want answers to, not the least of which being how much action his Hummer saw. Way, way too much information for me. There were things I just didn’t want to know about my brother.

She’s quit trying. So what are you doing slumming here, little sis? Oh good, a change of subject, though not one I really wanted breached any time soon.

‘Slumming’ is such a harsh word, I hedged, rather than answer directly immediately. It’s not like I’ve never been here before. It’s not like I’ve never met you here before. Completely unable to resist it, I kicked him under the high-top table. I barely got a reaction, so either I missed him completely and only managed to kick the table or he was going to save one little kick up for serious future repayment.

Yeah, but one of the first times we were here, you said you’d never be back if they didn’t start serving sushi. We’ve been back three times since then, two in the last week. What’s the deal?

May the gods save me from nosy older brothers who don’t know when to mind their own business.

Just doing a favor for a friend, if you have to know. Whoops, I just had to open my mouth. Silly me. That was just asking for a world of trouble with the kind of over-curious family I was cursed with.

A favor for a friend? he repeated, pulling a sneer. Tell me it isn’t that Murdock bastard again, Elizabeth.

It isn’t Mister Murdock. It was easy to fire that right back. Lying to my family had gotten to be a lot easier the longer I did it. It used to be hard when I was younger, but not too much anymore. I used to stutter every time. Thankfully that nervous tic was long gone.

Besides, technically, it wasn’t exactly a lie: In helping out Mister Murdock and keeping him at home, or at least at his so-called office, I was doing the world a huge favor, especially since he had woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning—and most every morning since I first met him at the beginning of my freshman year.

Still, the witch I was watching was at the counter and next in line to pay out, so it was about time for me to get out of there. I hopped off my stool and turned my sure-kill smile on Rafe.

You’ve got dinner, right, big bro? Thanks. See you!

Sometimes giving the other person no opportunity to protest—and stiffing them with the bill—just had to be the way to go, especially when dealing with pesky older siblings, I reflected as I stepped out into the fading remnants of the day. It wasn’t like Mister Murdock paid me, after all, and while my allowance from Daddy was generous by almost any standards, my brother was a bit more self-sufficient, the lucky bastard. Besides, I had always been told that being the baby of the family, especially by quite a few years, like I was, meant I get to be spoiled by everyone. Why not take advantage of it?

And besides, if Mister Murdock paid me, then it wouldn’t be community service—or at least, that was my theory. I don’t think that what I was doing was quite what my professor had in mind when he told us to do some volunteer work around the community, though. If they knew Mister Murdock, however, I would probably get extra credit. In all my classes, even the ones that didn’t require outside work. After all, Ebenezer Scrooge had nothing on my sort of boss; he looked downright sociable and spendthrift next to him, in point of fact.

Despite the attitude (and the surliness and the bad temper and the less than honest career and everything else), I really liked Mister Murdock. In a weird way, he sort of reminded me of Daddy. Not in a creepy Jerry Springer way, though, because that would just be gross—and really not my cup of tea. I mean, Daddy was plenty cool—like in the history books cool—but no way was I going to be a Daddy fetishist. Gross. Just gross. Besides, Mister Murdock happened to be a lot less homicidal than Daddy could be at times. Nope, piss Mister Murdock off and you might end up with a tail, but at least you would still be alive, if it was any consolation to be alive with a tail. My understanding was that tails on humans killed popularity pretty quickly.

So I had been working for Mister Murdock for nearly a year and a half, and I had yet to make one red cent. Between Metro fares, cab fares, dinners, and one memorable police citation, I figured I had probably put in enough money to be considered an equal partner, not that Mister Murdock saw it that way—or likely would see it that way if I ever broached the subject with him. Sure he was fun to work for, but I liked getting to work for him. If I started mentioning money and how I would like to start receiving some, I would probably never see hide or hair of the man again.

So, we (and by we, I meant Mister Murdock) had been hired to follow this witch and find out what she was up to. Apparently one of the other covens in town was a bit suspicious of her goings-on. Busybodies, the lot of them. It wasn’t our usual type of job, but it was the typical kind from this particular coven. I had to assume they paid well, since Mister Murdock kept taking their business, even with all the headaches they caused, but that was all I could do: assume. Or it could have something to do with the fact his sister Gisella was a member of it. At least, I was pretty sure it was Gisella; it could have been Aimee or Esperanza. It definitely wasn’t Hannah, Rose, or Tatiana. It was the one that didn’t like me—that much I knew for certain. Just as well, since the feeling was mutual.

And Mister Murdock had too many sisters. It was hard for me to keep all of them straight in my mind, except Hannah, the one that was a surgeon. That was easy to remember. The rest, well, they were varying shades of the same person: some innocuous day job for spending money, member of one of the five covens in town the rest of the time, all generally boring copies of each other.

They were nowhere near as interesting as my own family, but a lot bigger. I used to have two other brothers besides Rafe, but one died well before I was born and the other died when I was fourteen, leaving me stuck with Daddy (not so bad) and Rafe (annoying, overprotective busybody that he was).

It wasn’t Mister Murdock’s sister, whichever one it was in that particular coven, that I was supposed to be keeping an eye on, at least. I was pretty sure the woman’s name was Adena—or something like that: Athena or Amelia, maybe. I had never been the best with names until I met the person a few times, sometimes not even then. Mister Murdock’s sisters, for example, I had had the misfortune (mostly) to meet more than once, more times than I really wanted to think about, really.

Adena-Athena-Amelia didn’t really seem to realize someone was watching her. I wish I could say I’d learned that kind of stealth working for Mister Murdock, but in all honesty, it was a talent I had had to learn to excel at from an early age. Adena-Athena-Amelia wasn’t even acting suspiciously: She was strolling down the sidewalk several steps ahead of me, window-shopping at stores along the way. I couldn’t say I agreed with her tastes. Most of what she stopped to take a closer look at, I wouldn’t have even considered if it were free. That last dress I wouldn’t have considered if they were paying me to take it.

Still, there was no accounting for taste—or lack thereof, I suppose. And I wasn’t supposed to be critiquing her utter void of fashion savvy. What exactly Coven Nosy Nellies wanted to know, I wasn’t entirely certain, but Adena-Athena-Amelia was apparently mixed in with whatever was going down somehow. In theory, whoever was giving her marching orders was at the head of whatever big, bad thing was going on. We had to find out who the head honcho was and what they were up to. It wasn’t exactly the least we’d had to begin a case on, but it certainly wasn’t our best starting point to date.

Call me crazy, but my favorite case of ours yet remained when we had to find out if that one pretty little blond girl was cheating on her half-troll boyfriend with the Sidhe who had just become attached to her office. Mister Murdock still hated that I tended to call it the Beauty and Beast case. The troll, Morock, thought it was hilarious, and I would have to say that would be what counts. Right?

Adena-Athena-Amelia (Or was it Amanda or Alice? This was just starting to get too confusing, and confusion tended to lead to me getting a bit peeved with myself) made a sharp right turn into what should have been a blind alley. Obviously it had missed that memo, I thought to myself in annoyance, leaning against the wall just outside it and staring down its empty depths. How the hell had she disappeared?

Better still, how the hell was I going to explain this to Mister Murdock? This was not going to go well at all.

*****

Not going well was the understatement of the decade, especially when it came to my attempting to explain the situation. She just vanished was quite possibly among the worst explanations ever invented, right up there with the hellhound ate my homework, the butler did it, and someone must have hexed my alarm clock to make me late for this meeting.

(And those only worked once, twice if you could pull a truly pitiful and pathetic face for whoever was tapping their foot in annoyance at you.)

Mister Murdock was not one of the sympathetic ones who were inclined to be lenient. In fact, rather than doing the foot-tapping thing that my teachers up at Crofton College tended to do, he was trying to pace a long hole in the carpet. Maybe if he built up a bit more speed, he might even become successful at it—but no way was I going to tell him that. I already was feeling like I’d been sent to the principal’s office, never mind that Murdock didn’t actually look that much older than me.

How could she just disappear? he was ranting. I had to say, I wished he were ranting a bit more loudly. It was when he ranted quietly that I worried. And yes, after a year and a half, I was well aware which volume of ranting to fear the most from Mister Murdock. It definitely was not the loud one.

I really don’t know. One minute, she was looking at the most horrible clothes known to modern man. The next, she turned a corner and—poof! She was gone. Just like magic—only not. As an explanation, it lacked. It lacked a lot, but there wasn’t a lot else I could offer. She turned off into an alley, but then she just wasn’t there.

He paced another tight lap, this time managing to lap around the card table that was supposed to be his desk so that he could collapse into his chair. (Gods help anyone else who might try to sit in it. Again with the hexed-with-a-tail thing.) If he was through pacing and was now flopped down in it, then he was working on the problem at hand.

After silence for a moment or so, long enough for me to drop down into the other chair at the card table, the one unofficially designated mine (unless you happened to flip it to see I had indeed written my name on it), he finally asked, You’re certain she didn’t teleport?

I shook my head. No way. There wasn’t even a hint of a brimstone smell. Now that was something I hadn’t been very familiar with before starting to work with Mister Murdock. Teleportation was a darker talent, something that drew on powers from the Dark Lands that no self-respecting witch would even so much as speak of, and as such it left the stench of brimstone and sulfur behind, strong enough that there was no covering it up for hours. As a method of stealthy escape, it lacked severely, but it was one hell of a quick getaway, if you didn’t mind shortcutting through areas of time and space best left untouched with the possibility you might not get back out again. And I don’t think she had long enough to cast that big of an illusion.

Speed spell?

No sonic boom. It wasn’t too far off from the sound a jet made when taking off when a speed spell was used, so the layman term for it was sonic boom. It worked pretty well, well enough for non-witches and people not teaching Magical Theory up at the only college in the greater D.C. area that covered such things, namely the one I went to, Crofton.

He rolled hazel eyes and ran a hand through his dark blond hair. I had to bite my lip to keep from grinning. That was a sure sign this whole thing was starting to make him as angry as it had me. He wouldn’t get over it as quickly, though. Mister Murdock could hold a grudge like nobody’s business.

They haven’t found a way to leech a vampire’s agility or a kin’s strength, have they? Weren’t they researching that up at Crofton?

Last I heard, they were still striking out. And wasn’t that a relief? Last thing the world needed was your everyday random witches figuring out how to use other so-called supernatural beings’ abilities. At least it wasn’t a normal finding out though: that could go really bad really fast. Still, the research into so-to-say preternatural abilities was why I picked this university out of the offers and how I ended up working for Mister Murdock, so I guess I shouldn’t slight it too much—and it was supposed to be for a good cause. That counts too, right?

Maybe it’s a permanent, free-standing illusion. And he’d made it to thinking his ideas out loud. That generally meant I was not being a lot of help and the card table would be a better listener and assistant than I was, but it was still interesting to stick around and hear him reason it all out. No way. That would take too much juice. They’d have to have a god on board.

I could chime in on that one, so of course, why bother trying to resist? None of my contacts have mentioned any gods helping Talking Brook out. I still had to say that that particular coven name was about the most apt description for that lot yet; they constituted the biggest gossips in the city. Just like Coven Nosy Nell tended to call itself Eagle Eye. Let it not be said they didn’t have someone very wise picking out the most appropriate names possible for their groups.

Your contacts aren’t privy on anything but the Greeks. How many other pantheons does that leave? Ouch—dripping sarcasm clean-up on aisle five. Guess I shouldn’t have interrupted his thinking, even if I had something almost resembling vaguely worthwhile to say.

This time I couldn’t help rolling my own eyes and laughing, quietly and quickly. Still, I’ll check with Auntie Seph and see if she hasn’t heard anything.

Cue a headshake on his part. That always came with any mention of my extended, non-blood-related family. What can I say? I happened to be so adorable, in my own ever so humble opinion, that no one could resist trying to adopt me, even the local visiting gods. Of course, my family happened to be a lot smaller than his (Seven sisters and no brothers, yeesh! Daddy was older than his parents, and I knew for a fact he couldn’t even boast those numbers with his own siblings!), and Rafe was nowhere nearly as cute as I was when Auntie Seph and her husband started coming around and hanging out for more than a few minutes at a time. Actually Auntie Seph was the reason the the hellhound ate my homework excuse worked more than one time for me. Not every growing girl had such a unique pet during her formative years. In fact, I could seem to recall being up for a puppy from Cerberus’s next litter. But that was neither here nor there and had absolutely no bearing on the case at hand.

Yeah, fine, whatever. Get your aunt to look into what she can.

That was my Mister Murdock all right, a little grumpy ball of not-sunshine, the pissier and more tight-fisted version of Scrooge without the benefit of a few weird spirits playing pranks. (Threatening to hex spirits into growing strange new limbs didn’t work too well—I mean, growing limbs when they already didn’t technically have any—but the promise to send them to the Dark Lands if they misbehaved worked wonders. It certainly beat time out for two year olds any day of the week and twice on Saturdays.)

The card table wasn’t really because the business couldn’t afford better: It could bear the load, maybe with a little bit of scrounging and possibly a miniscule amount of help from Daddy. He just didn’t want to part ways with the funds. I couldn’t really blame him though. The business was still getting established, and most of our work came from the five local covens. Interestingly enough, one of Mister Murdock’s sisters was a member of each coven, excluding Hannah the surgeon and Nicola, who had apparently died. Did that mean his sisters were technically sending him work then? Even though he was one of two black sheep in this generation of his family, along with Hannah, it seemed possible. Whatever the answer was, I could live with it. We were starting to take off. Witness Morock and his surprisingly faithful girlfriend. (Nope, she hadn’t been sleeping with the Sidhe. None of us thought to credit Maria with amazing and utterly uncanny moral fortitude in the face of Seelie beauty. Morock was a very, very lucky—and happy—half-troll.)

I can’t promise Auntie Seph has heard anything, I had to admit quietly. She’s in a lot of the loops, but not all of them.

Whatever she can find. It’ll be more than we have now. He looked up and at the clock on the wall farthest from his card table desk. Witches couldn’t wear watches for the most part—some couldn’t even carry credit cards. Almost as a rule, they magnetized them to the point that they no longer worked, dependant on how powerful the witch was: The more so they were, the more likely and quicker their electronics were to tear up. For them, it was just a sad fact of life in the digital age. And, you know, I had always assumed that this was common knowledge, that everyone knew about it, but nope, there had been people trying to offer all kinds of electronics in lieu of payment. I mean, hey, taking off didn’t always mean we got the rich ones. Aren’t you supposed to be in class?

I half-glanced down at my own watch while it still was working. Sometimes it just up and died around him, and that was just nothing short of annoying with a capital A. Understandable, but most definitely annoying. Not for another hour. And it’s just World War II. I’ve got a free pass on most of the sections. If Professor Kasdaye remembered that he’d promised me a free pass, that was to say. Trusting a teacher to remember something like that shouldn’t have been a big deal, but, well, demons lied. He had to be good at restraining that urge if they let him teach, but promises outside of class might not be valid to whatever clause bound him to tell the truth in lecture hall. Let’s just say I tried never to take advantage of my so-called free pass. Want me to call in a pizza before I leave?

Samantha’s bringing sushi over.

Now if there were an ex-client I had to say I hated, it would be, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one Samantha Steiger. Not only did she manage to get a free (or mostly free—I made her buy all our meals while we were working her case) de-possession off us, but also now she just wouldn’t go away. I know, pot calling the kettle black and all that, but at least I was a contributing, if not paid, member of the team. I also didn’t bring someone else’s favorite food to the other half of the partnership or make that damned giggling noise. I would say it was demonic, but I’d happened to see demons cringe at it.

Personally, I was still confused how Mister Murdock had managed not to hex her yet. If anyone needed hexing, it was her. Somehow she set every bundle of nerves in my body off wrong and was quite possibly the best thing in the world for getting me out a door and away from somewhere fast, but she continued to remain unhexed. How the hell was that supposed to be fair, I ask you. And what was worse was I couldn’t help thinking she was starting to grow on Mister Murdock. Definitely not fair.

Then I’ll go ahead and get out of here. A little dinner before class wouldn’t be a bad idea. And never mind the fact I had just eaten with Rafe—no way was I going to stick around for any appearance by Samantha of the Royal Pain. Maybe I should get Auntie Seph to check just how human she actually was, I thought, already on my feet and a few steps closer to the door. Literally, there was nothing quite like the sound of that woman laughing to put me into a full-scale retreat. Daddy would be so ashamed if I ever got brave enough to tell him.

You just ate. Oh, of course he would have just