The Devil rose to his feet, smirked, and grabbed hold of my waist and tossed me over his shoulder. I squealed his name and grabbed hold of his suit jacket. My wings did an admirable job of getting in the way without doing anything useful, like batting Lucifer in the head.
Once he had a good grip on my legs, he bounced me onto his shoulder, gave a dark chuckle, and carted me across his great hall while a bunch of stunned demons and devils stared at us.
“Lucifer, you wretch!” Struggling did no good, as he had a firm hold on me and my wings served as effective shackles, weighing enough I couldn’t wiggle upright even if I wanted to. “How is this making it worth my while?”
“You’ll find out as soon as I get you to my bed where you belong. When I’m done with you, you won’t even be able to purr.”
Hallelujah and amen.
Dear readers,
I hope you enjoyed A Chip on Her Shoulder! This was one hell of a fun ride.
Keep reading for a list of my upcoming releases and a rough sample of Outfoxed. Please forgive the clutter, as the furred portion of the management opted to steal imperfect words for your amusement.
~R.J. Blain
Upcoming R.J. Blain releases
The Flame Game: a Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) (featuring Bailey and Quinn) releases on October 27, 2020.
* * *
Outfoxed, Book One of the Fox Witch trilogy, releases on November 3, 2020.
* * *
License to Kill, the concluding novel in the Balancing the Scales duet, releases on December 22, 2020.
* * *
Wild Wolf, the second novel of the Wolf Hunt trilogy, releases on December 22, 2020. (That’s correct; December 22 is a double feature.)
* * *
Murder Mittens: a Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) releases on December 25, 2020.
* * *
Dirty Deeds: an Urban Fantasy Collection (featuring a Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count) novella, releases on January 12, 2021.
Sample from Outfoxed
Friday, May 1, 2043.
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Alley.
* * *
I’d been in the Alley long enough to understand only one thing mattered when faced with yet another twister: survival. The swarm of them headed for Tulsa roared, warning all of their impending arrival. The incessant crash of thunder accompanied the lightning, which struck with such frequency the dark clouds glowed white. I decided to stopped counting after five funnels; one, five, ten—it didn’t matter how many of them snaked down from the sky. If one of them got a hold of me, I’d just be another corpse strewn over the Alley. A day didn’t go by when I didn’t cross a new skeleton in the outskirts.
Death was a way of life outside of the safety of Inner Tulsa.
Another twister joined the party, bringing a cascade of hail with it.
Great. Just great. What was one more? Hadn’t Mother Nature figured out she didn’t need to fling everything she had at Tulsa? A single tornado would’ve done the job just fine.
A few minutes too late to do me any good, the lightning-lit clouds turned a putrid shade of green, a promise that Mother Nature wasn’t screwing around this time. Green meant go, and if I’d had any sense in my head at all, I wouldn’t have left shelter at sunrise; I would’ve stayed in hiding until right before work. Everything would’ve been different if I’d just slept in rather than explore the ruins of Tulsa’s outskirts for salvage.
If I hadn’t been looking for salvage, I wouldn’t have been spotted by the tall, dark, and handsome hot on my heels and determined to ruin my day if he caught up with me.
The swarm would cause me enough problems, but if the bounty hunter caught me, I’d be in worse shape.
Some choices in life were tough, and I hated myself for even contemplating taking my chances with the bounty hunter. Losing my freedom for profit could be reversed. Nothing could reverse death.
I flattened my ears, and I lashed my tail back and forth, the rain whipping off it. While I was part fox, I’d adopted more feline tendencies than canine ones. And I, according the tail and ears I couldn’t banish with any amount of magic, I was definitely a cat trapped in a partly canine body.
I could shift into a full fox, a secret I held close to my chest. The instant anyone learned the truth, I’d go from a common annoyance to a desirable. Nobody cared about powerless hybrids.
Everybody wanted full shapeshifters in their bloodlines, and I had trouble without every wealthy single man on the planet wanting to claim me as his wife.
Since six twisters wasn’t enough, the churning clouds spawned two more, and with unerring accuracy, they surged towards the city in a wall of churning wind, rain, and hail.
Tornado season had come, and it looked like it was going to open with a bang.
I skidded around a corner of a former house, a victim of a twister a few months back before the sky had opted to give us a break for a change. Shacks had sprouted like persistent little weeds, but I expected none of them would survive the storm. I worried for their inhabitants, but if they had half a brain, they’d take shelter in a cellar.
If they didn’t, they’d add to the bodies littering the dying suburban streets.
While I had the advantage of knowledge, the bounty hunter had me beat everywhere else, and he snagged the back of my shirt, yanked hard enough to cut off my breath, and slammed me into the broken brick of the trashed house. “Are you insane?” he screamed over the wind. “You’re not supposed to run towards tornadoes, you little idiot!”
I blinked, checked where I’d been running, and sure enough, Mother Nature had truly tired of my shit, opting to dump another handful of twisters directly into my path. When the twisters converged, probably where we were standing, it’d puree the neighborhood and leave matchsticks in their wake.
Stuck between a rock, a hard place, and a bounty hunter, I had few options if I wanted to keep my head long enough to figure out if death beat being picked up by a bounty hunter. Fortunately, the sensible had left the area anticipating the weather to sour, leaving their storm cellars open for my use—our use, as I wouldn’t leave him behind despite wishing I could ditch him without losing my freedom.
Sometimes, I really questioned why I tried to meet society’s standards of being a good person. Being a good person was a pain in the ass.
As Mother Nature was a bitch on a mission of destruction, the twisters barreled our way. I cursed myself, cursed the hunk of a bounty hunter making a mess of my morning, and cursed my choice of moving to the Alley in the first place. “There’s a cellar nearby.” I pointed down the street in the general direction of my favorite bolt hole, which I’d have to abandon once I shared it with the man out to profit from my head—living head, at least.
The bounty hunters wanting my living head in their possession was looking to be the bright part of my morning.
Outfoxed releases on November 3, 2020 at all major retailers.
About R.J. Blain